Searchable Transcription
[00:00:08] What is up, everybody
[00:00:11] Welcome, welcome. Well, Neil from Sarasota.
[00:00:17] Yeah, Jackson Stoddard from San Diego.
[00:00:20] What’s up? What’s up, guys? Hey, Jackson. Jackie, been too long. Where you been? Oh, you did. I’ve been
[00:00:31] Here foolish when you talk, when you’re muted, but
[00:00:35] Still look kind of cute, right? Yeah, just working man behind the scenes.
[00:00:43] What’s that? I see you in front of the scene.
[00:00:45] Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes. Sometimes I like to switch it up. How are you guys, Neal? Jeff, I’m going to say it. We’re good.
[00:00:56] You good. Thank you. Thank you. It says we’d snap on the other side of it. We’re traveling. I took our RV and we were we didn’t want to deal with the cold weather, so we were down in South Florida right now. Ok. Thank you, Neal.
[00:01:16] We got snow like an hour east from us up in San Diego. Cold.
[00:01:20] Yeah, it’s no fun. It was eighty five degrees here. I went, I went jogging on the beach today. That was that was pretty awesome.
[00:01:27] Nice.
[00:01:29] Yeah, we’re staying in this. Like this, this this RV resort place that has we the Americans are the minority. Here is what I’ve learned, which is why they don’t speak English. What’s that near Miami? We’re we’re about an hour north of Miami, just kind of outside Boca Raton. So there’s a lot of French Canadians here which was like, Hey, how’s it going? And they’re like. I don’t see you. But I’m going to try I’m going to start trying out some bunkers and see if and see if that changes their attitude. I’ll speak their language. Cool. So who’s got some wins? Real quick highlights crickets.
[00:02:19] Real quick. We got you got, Neal. You know, and I’ve said this to other people, the best thing about living in Sarasota in the winter. All your friends and family come to visit you. The worst thing about living here is in the winter all your friends and family come to visit. But I’ve had some friends I haven’t seen in, like over 30 years come down and that camaraderie is still there. So it’s to me that was a big win. Seeing someone you haven’t seen in so long and it just clicked like you never missed a beat, you know?
[00:02:51] Yeah, yeah. I know the feeling that’s that’s always that’s always fun. Jackson, I think you had a win, right?
[00:02:57] I got to win, guys. I got to win. Feels good to win it. So I’ve been working on building a Facebook group in a niche landscaping and positioning myself as an authority, developing them content, whatever. I actually joined a group the other day and posted, I guess I’d call it a tripwire, just saying, Hey, I got some free value on how you can actually rank your Google. My business. We got clients doing about 10k a month in like whatever leads in in training for their Google my business and I got like one hundred and fifty people to comment. I got a bunch of likes and I’ve been prospecting and now talking to a lot of these people and hopefully going to close a few deals out of it. Got some more people in my group, so just got a lot of leads, right? About an hour and a half, I got so many comments that Facebook actually shut off automatically the comment section, because I got too many people commenting, Yeah, yeah,
[00:03:59] That’s cool, man. So tell us now that’s awesome. Is there anything you can share about the post? I think you had said something just now you said like. Anyone looking for strategies on how to rank at Google, my business, is that what you said?
[00:04:16] Yes. So obviously I was using like a lead gen type approach, but I said we got our Google, my business from zero. Or let me actually pull it up. I think I have a screenshot here. So I basically just posted in a Facebook group with my target market and I said this right here. I said we bring in well over ten thousand a month in jobs from our Google my business. So I made a guide on setting one up. Who wants it? I’ve got about 50 comments and you can see at the bottom here. Facebook automatically turned off, commenting just because everything was coming in so quickly. The bad news is I got kicked from the group because they don’t want marketers in there. And it went so viral that, like everyone was just blowing it up. But I was able to pull out about one hundred and forty people just from that post. But now I’ve got them all directly message. I’ve added as a friend, I’m pushing them into a Facebook group now where I’m going to market to them with new content, other free resources and eventually get them onto discovery calls and sales calls and turn them into the clients. What group did you
[00:05:24] Did you go into that you got kicked out of? Was it just like a general contracting group,
[00:05:28] Just like I think it was deck like deck repair and installation, like deck and docks or something like that. And then I did another one of these about a month ago. Similar results also got deleted, but I was able to scrape up about 50 leads from it. I just said, Hey, I created a PDF on the PDF and how to video on five tips. Landscaping companies can use to get more appointments. Want it? Comment below. I got about thirty one comments on that. Nine likes and a bunch of people. I’m still talking to this guy, Charles Miller. He’s actually potentially going to move forward tomorrow on a six hundred a month like SEO deal.
[00:06:08] And then you make they’ll they they approve the post, but then they kick you out of the group later or something.
[00:06:14] Yeah. So usually it’s like free to post, but I don’t get it in there and then they might see him be like, Oh, this guy’s just a marketer and kick me out.
[00:06:23] That’s the marketer. You make the wheels go round.
[00:06:27] Yeah, but they don’t like me spending, I guess. But yeah, like something like this. So I find I’ve got a spreadsheet of like hundreds of groups that I’ve joined. And this one’s like lawn care pro. So operators got seventeen thousand people in here. I mean, all I do is I hop on here, I type in, you know, free PDF. And then I hit this little button here on the bottom left, so I can, like make it look kind of pretty. And then I just like, write some copy in there, something kind of click baity, maybe say like, Hey, we just brought in one hundred and thirteen leads to last month for our tree care company. Comment below if you want to see how we did it right and I’ll get a bunch of people commenting. So it’s kind of tricky because sometimes we’ll get kicked out, so you just got to be careful and try to build relationships first. Comment in the group, bring value to people, kind of get a name for yourself. You’re going to have better allies doing that that way, then just like hopping into these groups and spamming it. So, you know, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been working on that for like three or four months here. Nice job.
[00:07:34] Thanks, guys. So what’s next, then? So now you’ve got all these people and what’s going to be your play to transition them just like kind of high, high level, broad strokes? How do you take them now from this like semi warm lead into being a paying client? And then once they’re paying client, what’s going to be your game plan for delivering them whatever you promised?
[00:08:02] Ok, so as far as it goes for like nurturing the lead into a close, I’m putting them all in a Facebook group that I own and I’m planning on creating content in there that has prompts them to get on a call with me. Right? That initial discovery call will tell me where they’re at with their business, if even worth following up with. I’ll put them into a CRM that I use to track them in the pipeline. I mean, you’ve got things like HubSpot Close Io Active campaign. All those different softwares lead generated obviously has one lead stat and. With that, I’m able to follow up with them later. How specific messaging that gets them onto calls gets them an email sequence and just kind of push case studies their way build trust, build value, build rapport with them and then figure out if they really have an issue that I can solve. If they do, then I’ll pitch them on my idea. If they don’t then know, obviously they can stay in the group, get the free value and hang around. And maybe six months down the road, they’ll see something posted and come back around and pay with me anyways.
[00:09:10] So as far as it goes for fulfillment, I have a fulfillment partner. He deals with all the SEO. We’ve got a white label company that we use. I think it’s invisible PPC that we do for our paid ads. We’re looking for something else, honestly, because it’s so freaking expensive. It’s like a minimum ad spend of a thousand. So it’s it’s kind of tough to do like the go fast look sexy method on like, Hey, we’re going to run ads for you guys so we can get you to those deliverables like right up front, make you enough money to cover the marketing costs that we’re going to be going to be collecting from them while they wait for the three six 12 months to get ranking on the SEO and make that money on the back end once that product’s fulfilled. So mainly just SEO pay per click. And then we’re also doing software as a service where we help them with like lead nurture campaigns, database reactivation and stuff like that. That’s super cool.
[00:10:01] So while you’re let’s say that you get one of these people in and you’re going to start running ads for them is the plan to run ads while you build out a legion and try to get things organic and then turn off the ads and rely on the Legion long term.
[00:10:15] Yeah, so I mean, I’ll shout out to Nic Wood here, I don’t know if you guys know him, but he’s got a really good sort of method on closing deals up front, collecting money up front before building out that legion, ideally. That’s why I’ve niche down. That’s why I’ve tried to brand myself more and start to become an authority in one niche. So when I’m talking to these people, they can see all the results that I’ve done in the past. For somebody that’s like them, collect that money up front, run a little bit of money into pay per click just to get them some leads right away and then put some of that money back towards a lead gen site. Get the Google my business set up and get that website and utterly genocide set up.
[00:10:57] Yeah. I mean, obviously, this method has been around for a while. I hope it goes better for you than it did for me because I invested a lot of time and money in trying to get good at Google ads. And, you know, we got our cost per click from like like our cost per conversion. I don’t know, spend it like a hundred and twenty dollars and I got it down to like eighteen dollars. And then it was still really it was a ton to manage. And that’s why we moved away from parts of that model where you could still kind of run the same model that we’re running. I would be interested to see how this plays out, but the tweak that we made, we started out doing it the way you are, where we could easily close people and get people in our world and then you’re on the clock. And it just felt like a lot of pressure where, OK, this person is probably going to pay for three months before they really get pissed off if they’re not really getting good results. And we were losing money on ads and they still weren’t happy. And then it hired like an ads company that I was spending like four or five thousand a month. I think at that point, we were spending about thirty thousand a month on ads, and then it was like an additional four to five tab. This company manage it. And I mean, we were just losing all kinds of money and the people still weren’t really thrilled with it. So then the change that we made is we pivoted to where we like, take a startup fee and then we’re like, You don’t pay anything until we bring leads in.
[00:12:21] So we take that startup fee, then start building the the Legion sites and then we would not start them out. I mean, we’d start them out at whatever it was producing, right? So if you’re doing like landscape and you say, Hey, this is worth like 40 bucks a weed and the site’s bringing in like 10 leads, then we’re going to start out at four hundred bucks. And then when it goes to like 20 weeds, it’s going to be eight hundred bucks and we paste it that way. But like, I wasn’t an ads master, but that was just my personal experience, and we kind of kind of felt like the relationship with the client was salty. A lot of the times when we were in that phase and then when when the like the the Legion stuff really started to kick in. Now they’re like my best friend, right? Yeah. So I would love to find a way if this if you can find a way to make this work. But man, I’ve spent a few hundred thousand dollars on ads trying to make it work the way you’re doing it. Yeah. Once again, I mean, there’s there’s a lot of ways to do it differently. You know, some of the groups that Jeff and I have been in, there’s some guys in there that are just like, unbelievable with the ads, and I’m sure somebody like that is going to have better results than we did. But but it is almost like a whole nother. It’s a whole nother world to get into. Right? It’s not. It’s it’s such a
[00:13:42] It’s such a best case scenario, like assuming that you can throw a thousand bucks at ads and guarantee a number of leads. I mean, you’ve got guys that pay like for me, I’m in San Diego and I work in automotive and these guys are cutthroat out here. I throw up a legion site in for months. I’ve got like 10 one star reviews from. I know the competitors. They’re not they’re not coming through my site. I know that for sure. My guy is really good at what he does. So competing with people like that, they’re going to be clicking on your ads. They’re going to be running up your cost per click stuff like that. My idea of a workaround right now is going to be using software, but creating a nurture campaign. Right? So a lot of guys already have this in my niche. They use apps like Jobber, which essentially like sends appointment notifications, helps them track leads on a calendar, will send text reminders, stuff like that, right? And then after the job, it’ll send like a reputation management type thing. So if I can build in stuff like this and have my CEO at a low of month to month price, maybe bump it up a little bit so I can afford a lead gen site just enough to make these guys happy.
[00:14:56] Help them increase their closing rate. And then also do things like a database reactivation campaign, which I’d be happy to show you guys that right now. What that is is if I if they have an existing list of contacts, say they have one hundred contacts, right, and a service like landscaping, right? Landscapers, lawn care guys. They do spring cleanups. Grass grows, obviously, if you didn’t know that, I’m sorry. It does. Like if we can reach back out to their contact list. We can get them to. Get back on the on the calendar with the landscaper and then close another deal, right? So I ran this for a landscaper the other day we sent out like a 10 percent off offer. You might get these on your texts every once in a while or in an email when it’s like, hey, 20 percent off spring clothing deal right from Kohl’s or something. Essentially, we did the same thing for a lawn care company and we just said, hey, 10 percent off yard maintenance for your first week. If you sign up for this this deal, just like respond with yes and we’ll get you in.
[00:16:04] So the strategy, I think, is what’s important here is like the nurturing part of it. If we can, if we can use our skill sets and then add in a nurturing component to to this stuff, this can be this can be really useful for our clients, right? One thing that I will caution you on with a database reactivation. I don’t know if you know, I think you know, this person is named Josh. He he’s out of Colorado and does like CBD type oil. Do you know what I’m talking about, Jackson? I don’t want to go to too deep into it.
[00:16:38] But yeah, yeah,
[00:16:40] You should reach out to him and talk to him a little bit because I think he got hit with a pretty big lawsuit for like advertising to people that that after the initial sale that having given X like explicit consent. Jeff, do you have any non legal? Obviously, Justin? Jeff, do you have any non legal advice that that you can speak to on this? I just I want to make sure that we don’t send people
[00:17:03] Down down the wrong.
[00:17:04] Yeah, down the wrong path. Yeah, definitely. Look at your CPA regulations and make sure that you’re in compliance because I do know somebody personally who got jammed up with that, and I think it can be a really a really bad place to end up if you do it.
[00:17:24] Wrong. Yeah, so Jackson, on yours, are you are you sending these out of text messages?
[00:17:32] They are SMS. Yes.
[00:17:34] Do you have that option in there to click to type and stop?
[00:17:38] Yes, yes, we do give them that option.
[00:17:41] Ok. And I would just double check that just.
[00:17:44] Yeah. So basically, you guys are saying like if they don’t opt in to agree to any sort of marketing messages that you technically are
[00:17:53] Breaking some, I’m not sure I’m not going to like, say, one. I believe that’s correct. I think that if you if they purchase something from you, that is not an opt in for like like eternal marketing, right? So like and just because they have their contact information. But you know, it’s probably a long shot that happens. But well,
[00:18:16] Just, you know, there’s a lot of people who are out there just chomping at the bit to litigate. So there’s there’s law firms who specialize in just taking these types of cases on because they can because they have a federal regulation behind them. So obviously, the law is on their side. And so it’s OK to my understanding, at least and not legal advice, is that it’s OK to reach back out to someone who’s purchased something from you and offer you ask them how it’s going, so to speak. How how’s your long, you know, but to be like, hey, 20 percent off, like, that’s that’s another matter, and they didn’t
[00:18:56] Want to rework the wording there, right?
[00:18:58] Yeah.
[00:18:59] And.
[00:19:01] Jackson, how long can you
[00:19:03] Help with it, give me a call. Something like that might be OK, I don’t know. I haven’t really dove that far, but that could be OK. We’re offering a specific deal is not.
[00:19:14] Yeah. So for me, I definitely had that idea, but I just I just sent it out. Anyways, I’ve only ran two of these, but that is something I am working on. So maybe if you guys want to check back in a couple of weeks shooting a DM and I’ll let you know if I find any workarounds for that.
[00:19:30] Jackson will throw you in a group chat with the person that had that. I know that had to deal with this situation. So like, really nice guy. I was talking to him a lot about it when we were setting up our phone system to make sure, like, what I found out is that like, let’s say that, that you were doing this with our phone system. My concern was that it would come back to me, but it’s actually like the person who initiates it, not the owner of the phone system. So it actually all the liability would be passed on to you, not the phone system provider. So that’s why I started to dig into it a little bit. I think one strategy you could do to get around this is you could send these people. Maybe you could send them like, Hey, here’s a guide. Or like if you can come up with some kind of value where they can download something and then you have a checkbox there that says, Hey, I agree to like marketing whatever, then like that might be the permission for it. You can also build it into your form submissions. We’re working towards having a checkbox that has kind of a TCP agreement, stuff that will that will be an option to add to our forms so that and you’ll have that kind of like proof that that you that this person, this person check that box for for future communications. That’s cool, though, man. I’m glad you’ve got a system here on this stuff, and it sounds like a pretty powerful pitch to get inside of these groups. It may make sense for some people have more than one Facebook account, and if you. I don’t mind getting like if you had a if if a person had a second Facebook account, they could potentially go into these groups and and get kicked out and get the leads. And maybe they maybe it’s not that big a deal because it’s on this like secondary account, right? So it could be a good strategy and you
[00:21:26] Could have your primary, your primary account could go in there and be like, Yeah, this dude is legit.
[00:21:32] Yeah, I use Jackie before and like, he killed it, right? Not that I’m advocating that. All right. Cool. So. All right. Awesome. Win, Jackson. Always good to see you, man. Who else? Any other wins? Well. All right, cool,
[00:21:54] Packer, yeah. There’s Greg Adam Scott to win. Well, I just I’ve been out for a couple of weeks, been traveling stuff. So Jeff, I’ll be living close to you. So we’ll get together here sometime next month. Yeah. Oh, wow. Where are you going to be living north of College Station over in Hearne? So I’ll be about an hour and a half from Austin. Ok, cool. Yeah. So yeah, this little town outside there. But so in my travels, I’m looking for another place back down road visiting family. I actually went and met with my, met with my customer that I just picked up kind of showed up at his place with my business coach kind of blew him away. You know, like, I actually showed up and we actually did a ride day together. So it was cool. I got to meet his whole crew and really make that bond. And of course, I was giving him all these guys doing video and marketing stuff. So we just spent, you know, a day together as a ride day. Obviously, everybody can’t do it all the time, but it really made for a good impression, and I think we got a lot of stuff that we’re going to build on from that. He really wants to scale his business out. He’s he’s young, he’s hungry. He’s telling me all these things he wants to do. And I’m I just want to turn on the fire hose. You, I don’t wanna give him too much, but I think we’re going to really start this out. It all started out with a heat map, you know, getting on there and the heat map. And I talked about the sky a while and now he’s wanting to. He’s wanted a franchise, this thing out, and there’s some other avenues that we’re working on right now to scale it. So yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah. Meeting up with
[00:23:24] Having the opportunity to meet up with a client like that and do a ride around or or whatever I think is really good for building the relationship and getting to see how they operate, what other opportunities that you have, what skills they have to create content as far as video and photos and make your life easier along the way. I’m sure the time you spent with them will probably come back to you one hundred fold over the course of their relationship.
[00:23:49] Sure. You know, and he keeps messaging. How quick can we get this? Can I fire these people out in New York? Not not anything in New York, but I’m just saying these people. He’s paying them all this money and he’s doing all the work he keeps telling me. Like, I don’t even know why I’m paying these guys until I’ve shot up, but I’m trying to do this stuff for him and I’m just giving value. I’m not. I’m nobody special. I’m just I’m just treating him like I want to be treated in a business and he’s blown away. You know, he’s just super excited about it. He’s, you know, he’s giddy like a little school kid. So yeah, you’re not special. Yeah, I know, right? Hey, that’s what that’s what the doctors told me. But hey, I don’t quite. Yeah, I’ve heard I’ve heard that
[00:24:25] Before from other other people who I’ve converted into clients that they they have somebody, they’re paying a decent chunk of money to and they’re I don’t even know why I’m paying these people. And it’s like, Whoa, why? Why are you paying? Because they don’t know what else to do, you know? So if you can get them in that conversation and you start providing value in the same guy, I’ve got him on like when I I think he was one of the first clients I got on board with with Patrick when I came into this business. But he he reached out to me the other day and just had a quick question. And he’s just go, he’s just bends over backwards. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. He’s just he’s so thrilled. He just he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize our relationship because he knows how much value we bring. Above and beyond. And he knows if he text me or calls me with some question that he’s going to get the straight answer and not some round of whatever trying to upsell him and every single time or whatever he can just call me any time.
[00:25:24] You know, Lynn Lynn, he asked the question If I own all the data, like the video content? No, not not for his. But I am building awesome verticals around him. It’s what I could say about it. He’s in home improvement, but I’ve got some other niches that that we’re going down right now. And as we’re building out his rebuilding his site, I’m also building some other related stuff, you know, niche and down in that, and I will own that those sites in that content with on those sites, and I’ll give him first right of refusal on that. And I know I could sell it off to somebody else. If he don’t want it, I’ll just go like here. Here’s here’s these leads. Here’s this vertical right here. Do you want it? He says no fine. And I’ve already told him that too. I didn’t tell him exactly what I’m doing, but I’ll give him first right at it. But answer the question. All the stuff that I’m building out. Yes, I’ll own. But for him, that’ll be his.
[00:26:18] Yeah, that’s the way to go. And, you know, I’m a big believer and like if you calculate your hourly wage for doing SEO work versus the stuff that you own, it’s it’s a it’s a massive, massive difference. And it seems like the better thing to do in the short term, to do to do this like SEO work for someone else. But I mean, it’s still like it’s still an hourly and hourly rate. You know, I built a my first site was a towing site. I didn’t know what I knew what I know now, then when I built it. So I built this towing site and I probably put like 60 hours into it. And I’ve been charging started out at like five hundred a month and it’s been a thousand a month and it’s been about six years of of this. And I’ve barely touched, barely touched the site since then, and it just collects every month. And we were also in SEO and we’ve done SEO, where we were charging a couple of thousand a month for a few clients and we lost those clients. And once we lost them, it’s like that hourly rate stopped. And, you know, we might have been getting paid like six times as much, but I’m still spending money to do the work for there. But but now I’m not doing any work on these legions and it’s like it’s still collecting. So if you’re on the fence about whether you should own it or not or like this is obviously this is a group that that that favors Legion.
[00:27:48] There’s a lot of different ways to be successful with that stuff. If that’s SEO works for you, then like, hey, by all means, go, go do it. It’s just my my personal opinion. And you know what my experience has shown me is like, try to own it as much as possible. And when you position yourself as being the best in the market and it doesn’t really matter that you own it to the client like I was, I’ve had this conversation a number of times with people where it’s like, Hey, I want you to do SEO for us. Blah blah blah. No, whatever is going to come to you and be like, Hey, can I pay you monthly? And then just be in this relationship where you own it. And like, I have to do this forever to get no one’s going to come and say that to you, right? But if you position things like, Hey, this is this is a partnership, what you’re good at, like for, like what you’re good at is artificial grass, right? Installing the artificial grass. And what I’m good at is this stuff and this stuff changes constantly. So what we’ve done is we’ve we’ve positioned things and we’ve set things up. So when you win, I win, right? Like, we don’t do contracts.
[00:28:52] So it’s just based on the value you can cancel any time. But if you want somebody that is going to be aggressively focused on this stuff and your bill goes up when we bring you more business, our goals are aligned and that’s why it’s a partnership. So that’s kind of how I positioned it, and we get very little kickback when we try to have that conversation. But if you don’t, if you’re not willing to have that conversation, you’re going to end up with a bunch of clients that are SEO. I just will tell them, no, essentially like, sorry, that’s not how we do business. So it’s kind of like they’re faced with, do you want to work with someone who is exceptional at this or do you want to like, go hire just another like every day SEO person? And like, if you say, if you kind of take it off the table and these people believe and trust in you, then they’ll kind of mold to your business model. That’s that’s what I found out. But that’s that’s a big if, right? You’ve got to be able to you’ve got to be able to position yourself and have the certainty in yourself and the confidence because that’s going to show through. If you guys are kind of like wavering and unsure, then they’re going to pick up on that and they’re not going to go with it.
[00:29:57] I definitely I definitely agree with that. I mean, I that’s how I win in those conversations. Even if they don’t get it it, they’re like, Wait a minute, you’re going to I just steamroll them with confidence. And by the end of the conversation, it’s exactly like Patrick saying, where they’re just like, I’ve established myself as somebody who is going to dominate for them and they’re willing to take a shot on that most of the time, if if they’re the right client, right?
[00:30:23] It’s also it’s also very low risk, too, right? If they’re just paying a startup fee. And then like like, I was meeting with the guy the other day and he was talking about his like, actually, in this park, I was I was on my way to the restroom and I ended up meeting a potential client. But he’s talking about how these seo people I promised him and like, they’re all the same. That was how it started. And I was like, Well, you know, we just we don’t we don’t do that. We charge a startup fee and then you don’t pay anything else until we bring you business. I was like, Hey, we don’t bring you business. I don’t even mind refunding you, but that’s never happened. That’s never happened with us. So this is how we do it. And you know, there was there was no doubt he was like, OK, what about expanding into these other markets? I want to do this niche, and I like that whole part of the conversation ended within like 15 or 20 minutes. And then it was more about like, like, Hey, what if I want to go into all these other markets? Can you help me like? Completely different tone. It was like it’s already been established, you need to hold your ground, though you need to.
[00:31:24] Don’t, don’t be like, you know, backing down. If they give you a little kickback, just like pretend, you can act as if if you guys have, there’s there’s a really good movie called Boiler Room with with Ben Affleck, where he brings in all these like junior brokers who don’t really know what they’re doing and they end up like defrauding people. That’s not that’s not what I’m saying to do, but there’s a lesson in that where it’s like you can kind of like act as if you’ve got this entire group to support you with people who have done big things in here that are willing to help you. So use the confidence from from these people like we can get on these calls on a weekly basis and we can walk you through the strategies of how to do this stuff right. You can use that as your confidence if you believe in us, if you believe in myself, you believe in Jeff. You’ve seen the success of so many other people in this group. Use that as your backbone and act as if you’re going to absolutely crush it for these people. And then we’ll figure out how we make that happen, right? We’ll give you we’ll give you the step by step instructions that that have worked for us over and over again.
[00:32:27] But the point is you act as if that you’re going to own this town like, like, you know, exactly what you’re doing, even if you’re kind of like, Hey, I don’t have all the results, but like I said, you’ve got a community of people that do. And at some point you’re going to start to you’re going to like, especially after you produce your first one and you really start to get leads coming in, you will become this person. It doesn’t mean that you’re a jerk or anything, but they’re going to test you. They don’t believe in you. They don’t know you. Just like if someone if I came to you and I said, Hey, I’ve got this, I’ve got this like special present for you in this box and you don’t really know me, and I’d like you to pay me two thousand a month for it. Like, how would you feel like you would be doubtful, right? And you’re going to want to kind of cross-examine these people, and that’s the same thing that they’re going through. So it makes perfect sense, which is kind of like this belief in yourself and like it makes all the difference in the world because I waffled all over the place when I first got started and I didn’t know, you know, I didn’t.
[00:33:27] I didn’t know how much of the difference it made. And then I got to the point where I couldn’t handle more business and I was like, Well, look, we’ll put you on a wait list. And it made these people even hungrier, and it really started to click in my head. The psychological difference that had happened, you guys have probably seen this in all different parts of your life, where maybe you’re playing basketball in a gym and somebody walks in and you’re like, You’ve never seen this person play and you’re just like, Man, that that guy’s probably going to like he just like, you just got that. He’s got he’s he’s got that, that X Factor before you even shoots the ball, you’re like, this. This person looks confident this person knows what they’re doing. I saw it all the time at the poker table. I could see people coming in and I’m like, This person is trying to act cocky or whatever this person like. This person immediately smells like they know what they’re doing, right? Everyone’s doing that. They can detect bullshit a mile away. They’ve heard this CEO pitch a dozen times, guys. So you have to differentiate yourself with something. Patrick, can you steal a I’m sorry. Go ahead, Jeff. Do you have a question or something?
[00:34:28] I think so. I was going to I was going to say something here. And that’s exactly what this this builder did the other day is that, you know, he’s been burned so many times, you know, and he was like, Greg, I’ve got to make this thing work. And I said, I said, exactly, and I have a lot of background in the building trade. I grew up as my stepfather was a building contractor, stuff like that, and I just put it back at him. I said, Look, I said, I know you’re taking a chance on me, but I’m taking a chance on you as well. I said I could be the best that could bring you as many as you want to, if I can’t. But if you can’t sell them, if you can’t close them, and if you don’t have a good reputation like you do, then it’s all for naught. So you know, we’re taking a risk. I’m taking a risk here too as well. And he said, Well, I got to have the site up and go, and I said, Look, I said I gave him a great analogy. I said, We’re going to we’re building this house over here, right? I said, we’ve got to put down a great foundation. I said, we’ve got to build the beans right. We’ve got to dig them deep enough. We’ve got to put enough rebar in them. We’ve got to make sure the psi is right on the poor. And then once we pour that concrete, we’ve got to make sure that it cures. If we don’t do all that, we can build a best house, most beautiful house on top of it, the most famous house. And what’s going to happen if you don’t? What’s going to happen? Royce, it’s going to crumble, right? Yes, Greg, I get it. And I just had to. I just had to not really put it in his face, but I just had to put it in terms that he understood, you know, and speak his language there.
[00:35:49] But that’s awesome. I feel that coming out of that confidence and passion coming out of you, that they’re going to feel that they’re going to feel that confidence that you know what you’re doing and the confidence that you’re going to want to do business with them. And that’s going to make them want to do business with you even more.
[00:36:05] Yeah. So, so, so so so I’ll finish here. So, you know, his defense kind of came down and it’s like what Patrick was saying awhile ago, you know, then his defense came down and then it’s like, OK. I won’t expand over here, and I want to I’m hiring, I’m hiring a project manager and we’ve got another guy over here and we want to expand here, here and here. So we’ve quickly shifted from I need us to work to like, how big can we expand this thing?
[00:36:31] Yeah, that’s that’s that shift where, you know, you kind of like like they’re in at that point. It goes from like a sales to negotiation. I think it’s also it’s it’s awesome if you can. If you can find a way to speak their language, then like like you did here with the construction stuff, then they start to put you in. They move you from this like marketing SEO specialist to like, Oh, this guy is like the builder SEO specialist, which is like, It’s the reason why heart surgeons get paid. Like, Hey, I’ve got a friend who is a heart surgeon and he specializes in this like, really uncommon defect for for like hearts. And he makes like. Way more money than a normal doctor would make, he makes more money than a heart surgeon would make in his schedule is always busy. It’s that specialist you can set yourself up as the specialist, just like Jackson was talking about how he’s kind of positioning himself as the authority on landscape marketing. We did the same thing. We have a niche that we’ve run all across the United States. And, you know, I told this story a few times. Niching down is really, really important. We had a lady that was in Montana, and she reached out to us and said that she was referred and I gave her our minimum startup cost. And she’s like, That’s way more expensive than I thought.
[00:37:53] And I’m like, Yeah, well, we sell Ferrari’s, not Honda Civics. Like, if you want to like, this isn’t for everyone. I’m constantly when you guys have doubt, when someone expresses doubt. I immediately kind of go to a takeaway. Like so, she said, that’s very expensive. And I said, Hey, what we do is not for everyone. Like, I’m not going to grovel with this person to try to convince her I’m going to let her know. And like, that’s not how she’s used. That’s not how most people are used. When you hear that, it’s like, OK, this person is like, immediately flips a switch. They’re not desperate. This person has a lot of value. So she went away for a month or so, and then she came back and said, You know, I asked nine people for referrals and you guys came up six times. This is across the United States. So like at that point, like it’s going to be really hard to not close this person when you’ve got that kind of reputation behind you. And we positioned ourselves as the specialists within that niche. We know their language. We can speak their language. The sites get easier to build. We know the types of leads. All all this stuff is really beneficial. I see your question here, Patrick. I’ll come back to it. Why don’t I hire for you doing so? I kind of address this a little bit.
[00:39:04] I don’t know if that came before I did my little spiel, but it’s basically like, we don’t. We don’t do that. This is how we do it. Our services are in very high demand. We’ve done that. We like a story that that I use that’s true is, you know, we started out doing SEO and we did a really good job and then we got fired. But people loved us. But they said, we’re too busy. So it’s not it’s not a good business model. When you get to a level where you can kind of when you get to a level where you have referrals coming in nonstop, you get to kind of choose the rules and these are the rules that we’ve chosen. And you know, when we do things this way, we our goals are in alignment as you like. The more business I bring you, the more that we get paid and we both want to move this forward. So it’s designed. Our system is designed for people that want to grow big businesses. And if that’s not you. I totally get it. What we do is not for everyone, right? It’s for people that want to grow big businesses. Some people like, Hey, they don’t want multiple crews. There’s, you know, everyone’s got their own business. You created this business because you wanted to set the rules.
[00:40:21] So if this doesn’t align with where you want to go and how you want to set things up, then that’s totally cool. So like, that’s kind of what I would do if someone saying, why don’t I hire for SEO? I have this kind of like sincere. It is one hundred percent sincere. I’m not going to build a site that they own. I’m just I’m not going to. I know how that’s going to play out. I’ve already done this enough times and it’s. Some lessons you can’t learn from someone else telling you you have to shoot yourself in the foot a few times, I had people tell me this, I did it and then I got sucked in multiple times and then at some point I’m like, This is just stupid. I’m not doing this again. I’m done with this like, I just refuse to do it this way. And as the sales skills improved and like the confidence and the certainty on what we’re going to deliver improved, I found that it’s it doesn’t really change anything. We don’t we don’t lose these people because of that conversation. Whereas before I think I used to and now like they, they almost get more excited by the fact that you’re rejecting their offer and saying, nope, not going to do it that way, you know? So hopefully that gives you,
[00:41:32] Yeah, maybe, maybe that’s because they know it’s not going to work too. They’ve already hired people to do that, and it hasn’t worked. They’ve gotten swindled or whatever. Waste of money. Waste of time.
[00:41:45] Yeah, yeah, so, Greg, saying when someone says, I’ve heard this line before, I like it when someone says that’s too expensive, then like you can say, like compared to what? Like eventually what? I like to paint the picture and I’m trying to do the same exact thing for you guys that are using our software is I’m going I want to make it expensive for you guys not to use our services. I want to give so much value that if you don’t use it, it’s going to cost you money. And you know, yes, it’s it’s our price is more expensive than like this other price. But it’s it’s and I always go back to, especially if it’s a guy in the contractor space like cars or something that. Like, that’s that’s an easy thing, so like, yes, a Ferrari is more expensive than a Honda Civic. We’re the best at what we do and we don’t sell. We don’t sell it for these other prices, just like. And here’s immediately go to them, right? Like, you guys, are you guys selling the cheapest stuff in town or are there people that do worse work? You guys charge a premium for being great at what you do. So, Greg, it’s the same thing. We’re doing the same thing. Like we’re we’re like, I encourage you if this doesn’t sound, if you don’t want to work with a company that’s focused on this, then choose someone else because this isn’t going to work out.
[00:43:08] It’s going to be frustrating for both of us, right? Like I said, we’re designed to to take over an entire market like I go back to. I played a lot of sports, so I always go back, especially with the guys. I go back to sports. I’m very competitive. When we come into a market, we are absolutely going to demolish the competition. The competition, like we’re putting a dartboard on the wall and we’re going to throw darts at them. They don’t know a war has started, but we are coming for them and we are not going to stop until we absolutely destroy them. They are not welcome on the first page when we’re in that market, right? I kind of view that as my yard and I don’t want these people in my yard. So that’s kind of like I try to get them like, you kind of get that emotion in there. And I mean it, like, you guys can probably feel it. I mean it. I want like, I want it. It’s not it’s not it’s not so much about the money, it’s like a game, it’s a video game or like a sport like I’m competitive, I want to win and their competition is my competition. I let them know that and like, you kind of start combining some of these things in there.
[00:44:13] And it’s like, I mean, our close rate, when all this stuff kind of got blended in together correctly, our close rate is very, very high and it almost never happens where it never happens, where the person is like qualified. And they I mean, it probably happens sometimes, but very rarely where the person is like qualified. They want to grow a big company and then they’re just like, they don’t move forward with us, right? And I don’t think there’s anything special about this. It’s just it was reps. It was just a bunch of practice on this stuff. And eventually we got us to the spot where like, we’re comfortable with with the lines and you guys got to have your own stories and stuff, right? It’s it has to be authentic to you. Coming from a sports background, I like, I think about those games and those like the competition of it, like I feel when I’m saying it. So you just you don’t have that and then you try to put it in. It’s just it’s not going to come across as true. It’s not going to ring true for the people listening to it. So I think it’s always important to be authentic with with this type of stuff. Jeff, I think we’re not live on on Facebook. So I think the questions are all limited to to Zoom today, right? Right.
[00:45:26] Yeah, we are live on YouTube, but I don’t even know how that works as far as like getting comments and whatever.
[00:45:31] We’ll have to get this thing sorted out next week, but a couple of things I wanted to talk to you guys about. So I went and I did another mastermind this last week in Nashville. And for me, the sales and marketing part is not where I struggle. It’s and like, I’ve talked about this in the past, as you grow, it shouldn’t look like this. It’s going to look like this. You’re going to hit steps and you’re going to kind of plateau for a little while. So I have noticed and it’s my belief I was actually talking to Nic Wood about this. I think that was yesterday about like building, building a big business and the common thing that I think a lot of people miss on his operations. So when I was at this mastermind this last week, I want to meet with the operations person. So they what the format is. They present you with a few different topics and they teach you some strategies that they think are going to apply to a big number of the people in the group. And then there’s the opportunity to go and talk to the head of their different departments. So they have like client success. They have sales marketing. In operations, I think that’s what it is, so I always go to operations and I talk to these people and I I think it’s a very common issue that a lot of you guys have the guy.
[00:46:50] So let’s talk about operations. So operations is not like a single department. So if you were to split up your business and say, Hey, this is like the financial and marketing and then you’ve got like fulfillment or client success, like operations kind of permeates all these different parts. Right. And for those of you guys that are struggling and you don’t seem to have things streamlined, right, then this could be an operations issue on some level. So the book that I’ve recommended time and time again, I’m actually on my third time reading it now is traction. So this is an operations book on how to streamline your business. And I think one of the things I’m going to be doing is hiring like a professional to iOS. It stands for entrepreneurial operating system. You guys haven’t been through this book. I think it’s one of the best like operations management books that that are out there. There’s just a lot of principles that you put in place. So I’m going to hire this iOS implementation specialist to come and work with us in our business, and I’ll share the things that I learned from this at this, at this mastermind. There’s a guy who is like, he he’s this person, he’s an implementation specialist, and I spent a lot of time talking with him and the operations guy. So talking to the operations guy, he was like some of the big takeaways that I had is he talked about how he had worked for.
[00:48:11] I think it was a Fortune one hundred company and he was an operations, and he had bounced around between different big corporations that he had worked for. And he didn’t really like working for corporate America, which is like a common thing. But the reason he didn’t like it is maybe different than than most people. So what he was saying is he didn’t like it because like, they already had everything figured out, right? So all of these fortune, one hundred and Fortune 500 companies, they have everything figured out. They have all their processes dialed in, and that’s a big part of why they are where they are, right? So if you yeah, that’s the one. Great. So if you’re somewhere along that way, I don’t think we have any Fortune 500 companies on this call. So if you’re on your way, like there’s a reason why these are there and operations never ends, but it it becomes like less creative. Right. So seeing that these big successful companies all have this in common is like success leaves clues, so we should model that right. So. So I started asking them, like, how do you find these operations people? And there’s kind of two types of people that that we have. There’s visionaries and there’s integrators.
[00:49:23] So we kind of like fall into those so visionaries. I’m a visionary. Jeff is a visionary. We have these ideas we can come up with, like solutions for problems. But the execution of the problems can feel monotonous to us, right? Like. I don’t like doing these like like constant, repeatable tasks like I will do them to get to where I need to go, and that’s why we’ve kind of like been able to build this, but it’s been painful for me to write out SOPs. But some types of personalities enjoy that right? So you need to find someone like this and you can have like you. Maybe your company isn’t where it needs to be to be able to hire somebody that is going to be this like full time integrator. Or it would be like a CEO chief operating officer, right? I think that’s what that stands for, but that’s essentially the type of person that you need and they have these in fractional pieces. And there’s also you can hire a consultant. This doesn’t have to be as scary as like, yes, these people are going to get paid like more than probably a hundred k a year, but maybe bringing in someone like this for a few hours to give you advice on how to streamline things in your business, could this could come back to you? 10. One hundred fold, right? Especially for things that are constantly being repeated.
[00:50:43] Right. So getting some processes in place and learning the foundation of how to put these processes in place is huge. And that’s kind of what that traction is about. So I was asking you, where do you find these people? Where do you hire? Where do you recommend hiring these people from? And he told me that all of his best hires have come from his like his own network, his own personal, not like job boards and stuff like this, like finding people that he knows that he respects, that he thinks are great at what they do. And then like recruiting them. So we probably all know people that are visionaries and integrators in our lives somewhere. So here’s a test that’s like, how do you test these people on whether they’re a visionary or an integrator? And he said this was like so simple and amazing. So how do you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? That was this question. So for me, I get a piece of bread. I put peanut butter on it. I get another piece of bread, I put jelly on it, I combine them and I eat them right. That’s that’s what it is for a visionary. You ask an integrator of that question, and they’re going to answer something like this. Do I have the peanut butter already? Do I have the jelly? Ok, so I’ve got both.
[00:51:54] So what I’m going to do is I’m going to open up this cabinet over here. It’s the third cabinet from the right and on a pull at the plate. I’m going to set the plate onto the table. I’m going to open up the drawer, I’m going to pull up a knife and they’re going to go through every little like detailed step for me. It’s excruciating just to describe that and go into that steps where I’m just like me, I’m like, Let’s go go faster, faster, faster, you know? But there’s people who love that in our we need people like that to help us streamline some of our stuff. Because if you’re a visionary and you’re just doing the high level stuff, the weakness of the owner is going to be the weakness of the business. A lot of times, right, so this is going to be passed on. You’re also going to kind of like Vibe more with certain personality types. So for me, I hired Jeff Jeff’s another visionary like we think in the same way. And you know, it’s it’s there’s a lot of people within my company that have that, and I’ve realized the penalty that we’re paying for that. So I think this was that was some of the big takeaways for me from this last, these last few days. So I would encourage you guys, as you scale your business to be thinking about some of this stuff, it doesn’t have to be so like big and bad, but you do need to have these kind of like SOPs in place.
[00:53:14] So SOP standard operating procedure, if you guys haven’t heard that term, you have to have playbooks. You need to have this stuff documented and you need to document it in a way that, like a child can understand. You need to document it in a way where you hire somebody that is not an expert in this field and they can see it and they can go through and they can follow it and be successful with it. And when you do this and they have questions, that’s feedback that you need to adjust your system. Just like for you guys, when you guys have questions about how these snap works, then it’s like for me, Mike, why does this person have this question? Because I kind of feel like I failed the person if they have the question and like, we have so much going on to try to fix some of the confusing parts of our system that you guys haven’t seen, but every single time one of those questions come in, I’m like, OK, let’s like let’s feedback. You need to do the same thing with your with your SOPs, right? Or like whatever you’re building out and you need to have the stuff in a spot that is going to be easily accessible and shareable.
[00:54:14] So it’s best you don’t need to build out a whole website for it. We built a website for it. I don’t recommend doing that. Let’s start simple. If that is needed later on, then you can do that. You can just start with Google Drive’s, right? And you can divide up the piece by the rolls, right? So you could say that, OK, this is like my back linker and this is my website builder and I’ve got different folders here. And here’s the different steps maybe have like a master page with links to other pages that are like, OK, this is an overview of the role. And then here’s a list of links and then each one kind of links to the soap that it’s associated with. You’ve got to have a system in place. Not only is it going to allow you to streamline things, it’s going to prevent mistakes from being made. It’s going to make your company more valuable, like if you look at companies that have SOPs in place for everything and you were to go and try to sell this company, if that’s not there, it was like, how is the new person supposed to take over that? There’s a reason why this is valuable. This is where you go from being like self-employed to owning a business. So the difference being like you have the ability to step away and do something else.
[00:55:23] If you’re self-employed and you step away, everything stops, right? So. One of the things that that we have in our agency, and I think that when I heard Jeff, that was that was kind of like where like he took a lot of work off my plate that was hard to replace, to have someone that’s like actually talking to my clients and doing the sales stuff. All of these pieces didn’t happen overnight. I just kept like adjusting, and to be honest, it’s not perfect at all. We have a lot of leaks that we’re trying to plug. But the fact that we’ve been able to get it to this point where I could go and invest my time and build a software company while traveling around the world is a testament to the fact that that we have these all these swaps like I recorded video after VIDEO. Here’s a here’s what you can do is you can record yourself and just talk through the process, right? And maybe it’s like a forty five minute explanation to explain something that takes seven minutes and you could have this video be edited in prepared by a VA like, Hey, this is what I want you to do. I want you to cut out the stuff that doesn’t matter in here, and I want you to turn everything into a checklist that I’m doing.
[00:56:35] And then I want you to have somebody else that. Doesn’t know how to do this, do this. Get the feedback and find out what we need to change, right? That’s the like you could do that you can do that tomorrow, right? You can start to have your SOPs and just put them in Google Drive. And this is the beginning of how you’re going to scale. Scale your company right is you can’t scale it if you have to teach everyone everything every time, right? So another idea that that that I’m excited for is this what we’re calling our protege method. So I’ve got three managers in my company that kind of delegate, and what I want to do is I want to have my managers, each one of them train a protege so that we can have six managers, right? And they’re going to be responsible for a project and they go and build it and they, like, interact with them, correct them. And then probably after like the third project, I think they might be able to be on their own a little bit, right? So we need to be putting these things in place, though, like if you guys want to scale. But but honestly, you can’t do any of that stuff unless you unless, you know, unless you know these methods, you can’t train someone on something you don’t understand, right? And you can’t count on them to do it right.
[00:57:46] If there’s no playbook, there’s no way to evaluate it, right? So a big part of the iOS framework and the the traction book is weekly scorecards. So this is something that we put in play for some of our team and then I never got it in place where my managers and then this last week, you know, I had this opportunity to talk to these people at this mastermind and here’s where I really struggled is like a lot of our managers, they might be managing like 20 projects. So how can I how can I have like monthly and quarterly goals that included so many projects because I don’t want their quarterly goal to be like, Hey, get this one website to rank. We’ve got 20 you have ownership for. So one of the things we recently did is I had my managers go through, had one of my managers go through and build a playbook with like every single thing that we do along the way. So we’re dividing three things into like three phases. So we have like the build phase and these are only these are things that are all they can be checkbox. It’s a yes or no, whether they’re completed, that’s different than kind of like our ranking phase where it’s like, Hey, what’s the heat map average for this GMB for like the top 10 keywords? That’s something that is not a question of just completing it.
[00:59:08] Right. So let me give you an example. Fifteen hundred pages, fifteen hundred words on the home page. Yes or no? Yes. Do we have a GMB? Yes. Do we have like five reviews for the GMB? Yes. So those are things that are a part of our build phase. Then we move into the ranking phase, right? And then finally, we have like the ongoing maintenance phase because we all agreed that. This sites will never be finished, really, but once we get into that ongoing maintenance phase, then can kind of just like almost be on autopilot, we’re just kind of like doing a few things a month, backlinks at a few pages, this type of stuff. So now we have like a percentage of completion for the build phase, and that’s how we can have. I can have that score across a list of priority sites. So that’s kind of how I set it up so that we could have like they have 20 projects. What is the percentage of completion for your 20 projects? What’s the target like? We need this percentage and then we’re kind of like each week we’re basically just like I had you guys do with your accountability groups, you want to reverse engineer your goals. So if you’ve got like 90 day goals, then like, what do you need to be doing each week to ensure that we hit that 90 day goal like we can break down the build phase each one, right? And we like the idea is that you set up the milestones and the parts of your build phase.
[01:00:31] To guarantee success on the other end. So, like the amount of leads or your heat map average, those are lagging indicators. They happen after things have been done right. The amount of phone calls, those are all a product of things being done. So so what are the leading indicators that you need to do to ensure that the lagging indicators get to what you need? So that means so like for us, we were going through this like, OK, we think that maybe we’re going to need like three to five jobs and we know that we’re going to need like five reviews for the jobs and we know that we’re going to need like D.R. And you are from a backlink analyzer of like 20, right? So if we start to like stack all these different things, then we believe that we can manufacture the leads and the good rankings, right? So we’re taking the things that we can guarantee can happen, and we’re stacking up enough of those. And if we do all these things, then we believe that it’s going to create this like amount of leads and stuff. So that’s kind of I don’t know if this is clear to you guys or like maybe you are already thinking this way, but that’s how we’ve structured it.
[01:01:44] So that like you want your milestones to kind of like guarantee success, right? I know that if I if I get this and maybe it needs to be different for each project, right? Maybe like, Hey, we’re going into this market and we for this one, for these jobs to be ahead of the competition, we know we need 20 reviews on each one. Ok, so if it’s going to be 20 reviews over 90 days, then I need to be getting like three and a half or something in order for, I don’t know whatever, four and a quarter a week right? Or do the math right figure it out and say, OK, this is what we have to do to ensure the success. Guys, this doesn’t have to be such a mystery on why things are not working right. If you just turn this into like mathematics and logic and work backwards, we can. I feel really certain that we’re going to get there with our projects, it’s just a matter of time. Sometimes we might miss the mark. It’s a great opportunity to learn. All right, cool. I see Graham, my biggest goal for the next two months is completing our soaps. I love it, man. I think that is. I think it’s a phenomenal way to to kind of ensure that your business is positioned to scale in.
[01:02:58] You know, what I found is we try to we try to expand so quickly with that visionary attitude and not the integrator attitude. We have cars going down the assembly line with no steering wheel, and we didn’t find out until we were like way down the road. We’re like, Oh, so that doesn’t have like, there’s no back lanes or like that’s missing. Like, we don’t have any live games on this one. We didn’t. We didn’t know, like we didn’t have a system in place. I have something I’m working on. It’s not ready, it’s probably a few months off. It’s not part of the software. It’s part of another software that we’re using. I’m going to give you guys at some point this rebuilding this we’re using. If you guys haven’t seen notion notions, awesome. It’s like this relational database where you can like, say, like, Hey, these are the websites. This is my it’s like a spreadsheet where it’s like, Hey, these are these are my list of websites. You have a second spreadsheet. These are my list of games, and you can say this website relates to this GMB. And then I could make a kind of a view that says, Show me the GMB for that are associated with this website that have less than like X amount of reviews.
[01:04:03] So like, it’s really cool. It’s so you have like this type of data and this type of data and there’s a relationship and you can relate those and then you can rely on those relationships to build dashboards at super cool. I have this goal to kind of build one out that could be more universal, and I think it would be a really valuable resource. We’re just we don’t have ours dialed in yet. I hired a notion experts to to kind of like consult with us. I see that we’re about over time. I see Patrick for getting GBS. Is there a 360 camera photography method? How does that work? There is. If I don’t know if that’s lost favor over time or if that’s still something that’s really valid, I know we used to do it. There’s a friend of mine who kind of specialized in that. I don’t really hear many people talk about it, like, I’m talking to the I try to form relationships with the people that I believe are like the highest level in the industry. And to be honest, I haven’t heard of anyone mentioning that at all. So I would. My personal viewpoint, I wouldn’t focus on it, I would I would just like focus on the stuff that we know works and I mean, you’re welcome to experiment with it, but I just haven’t heard anyone mention that stuff in a couple of years.
[01:05:19] It can be good for prospecting, I think, but I don’t know about forgetting GBS.
[01:05:24] Yeah, for ranking. I don’t know if it’s really going to give you a hair judge. Ok? I had one other thought, Yep, you are welcome, Mr. Patrick. Yeah, I lost my train of thought. Jeff, do you have anything to add to any of this?
[01:05:41] Have I missed any questions and you haven’t missed
[01:05:44] Any questions on? I definitely agree with all the stuff that you’re that you’re laying down right now.
[01:05:51] You know, I got a quick question on the reviews real quick, because you mentioned not sending text for the reactivation campaign. I was going to send out a review campaign for a client tomorrow and do like the text email combo. Do you think things should be good that way?
[01:06:13] I am not an attorney, but one hundred percent think that you’ll be fine. I think it’s my. Confident belief that a the problem relates to marketing and trying to add request that people will spend money. Right. But I haven’t heard I know that it is. I know that that you can get yourself in trouble for like doing fake reviews and this type of thing, but for requesting real reviews from people that have had service from the company. I haven’t heard of that being a problem with anyone in the past, but like I said, I’m not an attorney, so kind of proceed at your own. I I my personal opinion, I would feel very confident and that I wouldn’t have any worries at all.
[01:07:01] Could do we have can we take just like a maybe a little quick moment here to talk about how everybody’s dealing with GMB verifications? Are you guys having good success? I don’t want to. I don’t want this like spin off into another 30 minutes on the call. But does anybody have any like immediate feedback on how they’re doing with GMB verifications?
[01:07:23] Yeah, I’m doing good. I just got two instant verified
[01:07:30] Or that you think those are going to stick?
[01:07:32] Yeah, I mean, well, they’re sticking right now. One is just my client gave me four addresses, so as a referral that I got. So give me four addresses and then two of them got there. All I put all the GMB is on the same site with like location pages.
[01:07:48] Are you doing anything to get any kind of back linking or social?
[01:07:54] I think, yeah, just a just a couple I find niche is kind of easy. So I think that’s part of it as well. Yeah, I think I think that might be part of it, that it’s just kind of easy, but I just had to do like an email verification. You want us to make the next tougher. What’s up?
[01:08:14] Do you want us to make the niche tougher?
[01:08:16] No, it’s awesome, man. I got I got I already got five to six leads coming in and I started with I did the start up like you were talking about. I did fifteen hundred dollars up front and I already got five leads, so I’m ready to move to two thousand on Monday already.
[01:08:35] That’s cool, man. I think I saw in the accountability group chat that you are that it looked like you were crushing it.
[01:08:43] Yeah, I’ll be at twenty one k recurring. That’s awesome, man. What were you at six months ago? Well, I was at that like fluctuating between six and eight AK for a while. I mean, in December, I was at six thousand six hundred. Wow.
[01:09:02] So you’ve added like 15 K in two months,
[01:09:05] Mostly last month. Yeah. What changed? Just one charge at higher prices. I got let’s see, I got three referrals in the last. Like three weeks as well. And then I’ve gone to four clients, and I jacked their price up because they’re just they’re not paying me enough, but just getting on a Zoom call with them. That’s been the biggest thing. Before I was just doing phone calls like just showing them everything. I think I was hesitant before, like showing them my sights because I was afraid they were going to do something about it and they’re not. So I’m just showing them everything. So we’re on the same page. They know where the leads are coming from and then using lead value calculator like showing on, Hey, this is what the leads are, what’s your average profit? And then coming up with a number that makes sense because man, I was getting people that were, you know, wanted to do one hundred and fifty two hundred dollars and now the same, the same leads, I’m getting two thousand four. Yeah, I think
[01:10:14] I was a part of that conversation at one point where you said you were, I don’t know if it was on one of these calls or if it was in a Zoom chat that we were. I can’t remember, but I remember you’re like, I’m getting like three hundred dollars. And yeah, it was. I was like, that, yeah, I get rid of them.
[01:10:31] Yeah, I don’t hear
[01:10:33] If I imagining that or did
[01:10:35] That, like said, Yeah, no, that’s yeah, that’s cool, man. So, yeah, the lowest point. Sorry, go. I’ve got a cautionary tale for GMB owners and manage your accounts. A post that I came across where they had multiple GMP’s got nuked because the manager account had been doing pin drops. So all of them got wiped. So whatever you’re using for your manager, account for your GMB, make sure it’s clean as a whistle and hasn’t been up to any nefarious activities.
[01:11:09] They were all under one account, all under one manager account.
[01:11:13] Yeah, man, yeah, yeah.
[01:11:14] So like, I mean, if this isn’t clear. Let me make it clear I never put more than one GMB in one email account under any like this is I avoid that at all, cos I’ve heard of people losing like two hundred jobs in one shot. They were all in one account. Graham, you were in the coolest background board. I’m getting hypnotized by those blocks moving in and out. That’s super cool. I want to tell you, Grandma is one of the I think you got some great news about your mother, huh?
[01:11:48] Yeah, we’ve had a really bad run. My dad broke his hip. Worst break doctors ever seen my car got written off. You know, a few days ago, my mum had like a growth and she went in and had like heaps of tumour removed and she had to go back in a second time. And they weren’t sure if it was, you know, going to going to take her out. And they operated on her again and they set off the piece that they cut out to pathology and it came back negative for cancer, man. So, you know, so all this shit’s been going on, man. It’s like we got some good news, you know?
[01:12:22] That’s awesome, man. That’s that’s. I saw that and I was I was I was so excited to hear that man. I know that you’ve been kind of stressed and I’ve kind of got this like mentality. Sometimes you’ve got to take the garbage out and so you’ve got an empty trash can. All the garbage is out on the street, so you can kind of focus on the positive stuff now, man. And, you know, enjoy the rest of twenty twenty two and awesome things happen until you men.
[01:12:48] Thanks, brother. No life is what you’re making, it’s all about your attitude, you know? I mean, don’t get stressed over the things you can’t control. Just focus on things you can, and it’ll work us way out. In the end, you know, it’s like, look at this group of people, all these talented dudes, you know, all in the journey of discovery and learning and having fun. And like, you know, a lot of us are reliving life and and getting back years that we lost and like, it’s just, I don’t know, man, even just hanging out with you guys, like even my mindsets changed a lot over the past year or two. Like even the health, physical wise, things like that, it really does make sense that you’ve got to surround yourself with the right people. Like once you’re in that ecosystem with those people, you get that groove thing thing happening and you’ll notice that everyone’s on a whenever there’s a comment or someone’s stock in the group. It’s always positive stuff. It’s always positive mental attitude. I think it’s very, very important you have yourself in that right environment, surrounding yourself with the right friends.
[01:13:44] Yeah, yeah. I couldn’t agree more. Man, it’s it’s it’s. You’ve got life decisions every time something happens. How are you going to interpret this? Like, what are you going to take away from this? I had. That’s abroad and in our business, and it cost me about six thousand. I didn’t. It all happened within like a like within a few days. And my viewpoint was like. Like, man, this what an awesome thing to happen to us because it could have been one hundred times worse, and I was like in a situation where I could respond to it and then we plug the leak and we fixed it. And now that’s like, it’s an awesome learning experience. We hired somebody, they kind of look things over and they give us a lot of advice. And actually somebody tried to like it, got tested a few days ago and their test was like successful on our end, where things were shut down really quickly. And so it was awesome to have it be that way because it could have been so much worse. And I know a lot of people are going to look at that and think that you’re forcing it. But it’s all it’s all perspective, man. It’s it’s like if you guys haven’t read the book or actually, I recommend listening to this audio book by Jocko Willink.
[01:15:09] Extreme ownership. He was a navy seal. He actually narrates the book. It’s phenomenal. Like talking about like it’s all mindset. Some of the some of the most successful people they just like, have run into it time and time again. But you would never know that because the way that they view things and it’s awesome. I had a big realization about two weeks ago. I spent some time with some family and I had this habit. I always try like, I think it’s a really I’m proud to have this habit. I see I try to see the best in people, and it doesn’t always when you’re around negative people and you have that mindset that you see the best in people, you don’t always realize the negativity that they’re bringing. But after a few days of being around some people, I was like, God, I’ve got to get out of here. This is just like killing me. I didn’t just like click to y. It was happening. It was like, it’s that like, you don’t always see the people for being negative. And but when you’re around these people, I left that and I went to an event where it was just like all super positive people and I was like, so energized, I was drained.
[01:16:13] After leaving the first one and after a few days, that was Jeff when we were in Orlando for the the last mastermind being around those people, I was like energized. I was like, Man, this guy’s doing such like awesome stuff. Like, there’s so like like they, you know, you guys have been in an event where they want you to get up and like, jump around and like, kind of get the energy flowing. So a lot of times when they have those type of things, you’ll look around and it’ll be like 40 or 50 percent participation. But this event, with the mindset of these people, it was like almost every single person is like doing aerobics and like to try to like following the person up. It was just a mindset of like going after life and not like worrying about all these other, all this other like bullshit that we worry about. This group of people all kind of had the same mentality and like, like, it’s just it’s awesome when you’re around those people and sometimes you don’t realize what’s missing until you see it. Like until you’re like in another spot and then you can kind of look back and compare it.
[01:17:19] But what’s the old saying? Pat Misery enjoys its own company. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I remember reading a book about a guy who is really optimistic and enthusiastic kind of guy, and he had to carpool with this bloke to go to work. And this guy was really negative because honestly, after two weeks, he goes, he actually brought me down that bad. He goes, I started emulating the guy, you know, like, these people are infectious, whether it be positive or negative. So, you know, I’ve cut friends from my inner circle that I’ve known for 10 20 years. I’ve made that calculated decision to say, Hey, I really as a friend, yeah, fishing and stuff. But I’ve got to remove this person from my life because it doesn’t. It’s not aligned with my agenda. My agenda is to be successful and to be positive and, you know, to move forward. And you just got to cut those ties, guys. If anyone’s, you know, even with your family so you could pick your friends, not your family bullshit, you can pick your family to man, you just drop the number. Yeah, that’s yeah. It’s yeah, you’ve got to get rid of that stinking thinking and you surround the people with, you know, we’re all chameleons, right? And so if you hang around Graham a lot, you might get him a funny accent like him, you know, or if you hang around somebody like me, you may talk like me, so you become whoever you most associated around. So you have to be very, very careful, careful of who you hang out with. Yeah, for sure.
[01:18:43] I think Patrick and I both noticed that in that room in particular, and just kind of as you guys are talking about it again and that kind of mentality is like everybody in that room was a founder, CEO. You know, probably doing some decent numbers, at least. And it seemed like overall having, you know, two hundred people in that category in the same place, like there’s a theme there, like they just they seemed like they had their shit together in some way. You know that somewhat intangible but somewhat tangible to it’s like everybody was, you know, just that mindset that they had was showing through and all of the actions that they were taking throughout the event, I guess, is a short way to put it.
[01:19:27] Yeah, they they had as a part of that event, they had this thing called sweat every day where they had a 6:00 a.m. run for like three miles. And there’s two hundred people I heard they had, like 40 people that were on this, this run at 6:00 a.m. and Jeff and I were looking around the room and I was like. All these people are like in good shape, like it, look like almost everyone in the room could probably go run by two or three miles. And like. I don’t know how it is. And like Australia and some of these other countries around the world, but in the United States, it’s if you were in a room that was like general public, I think it would be impossible to look around a room of two hundred people and like, go to the mall or someplace and look around at two hundred people and see if you think that like ninety five percent of these people could run like two or three miles without like. And that was not. We weren’t there for fitness at all. That wasn’t a part of this. But there’s just like like healthy habits are going to like, create energy for you and longevity. And like, you know, like how you do. One thing is how you’re going to do a lot of things like most people don’t. Hey, I’m going to like put one hundred percent effort into my business and I’m going to put zero percent effort into my health. Like, most people are going to try to overachieve in all these different parts of their life and they’re going to like, make adjustments, try to fix things.
[01:20:55] They’re reading books and like, Hey, I need like I need. I need to like tweak this one part of my life. It’s not really working, so I’m going to hire to hire someone. Someone asked me this last week. I always wanted to ask these questions when when I was coming up and trying to figure out how things work and someone asked me like. What would you tell Patrick? Of like six years ago, and my response was I would have hired. Oh, Jeff, that was when we were in that. I ran into a high school buddy at that event and we were in that. We were in that hotel chatting right with George. Right. And so my advice is I would have hired experts earlier to teach me things so that I could go faster. And it seems like scary and expensive. But now that’s like, like, that’s what I’m doing with these masterminds is I’m hiring experts. I just I want someone who is awesome at what they do to be able to look at this and say, Hey, here’s the adjustment that you need to make. Because when you’re doing things at scale, that small adjustment and a lot of times it’s going to be a big adjustment gets multiplied over and over again. And it’s you need other people’s insights to look at things and point out like where you have a blind spot. So. I think, Jeff, are we ready to wrap this one? Do you have any? Yeah, we’re
[01:22:10] Bumping up on 90 minutes. Just just a final thought on that is that I think that people who are playing at that, at that level, that of that particular room that we were in with, with successful businesses and whatnot like they have to be, you know, hyper productive and it only gets more and more more and more pressure on that equation every day with everything that’s happening in the world. And so there’s no way that you can produce that level of valuable output in whatever fashion that they’re doing. If you’re not holding, you know, taking your life holistically, you get enough sleep, you got good nutrition, you’re you’re in how you get your exercise and your learning and growing and all these other ways. As far as like leadership, management, sales, all of that stuff comes together. And I think that that was a great example of a room full of people that are focusing on all of those things at once, which is impressive.
[01:23:06] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, guys. I know we didn’t really have like a kind of bounced around in these call. I like to do these sometimes where we just riff. But seven days, guys, let’s make sure that we’re moving towards that. We’re moving our business forwards. You’ve got seven days before our next call. Do what you have to do to move your business forward. Guys, make the steps, have enough self-awareness to look at this and diagnose where there’s a problem. Don’t avoid it because you’re not comfortable with it, because that’s not what’s going to move the dial for you if you’re the bottleneck in your business. Consciously think about how you can not be that bottleneck. How how can you fix that piece, right? You guys have an awesome week congratulate you guys that had the wins. For those that didn’t love to, I’d love to see you guys create those. Jeff and I are working on really coming up with some gamification stuff that I’m excited to launch with you guys. We also have some lead snap swag and stuff like that that’s going to be coming out for those of you guys that are interested in the cool shirts, hoodies, stuff like this. All right. You guys have an awesome week. Everybody stay safe and healthy, and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Take everybody. There we go. A good one.