The Shortcut to High Margin Income. Hormozi Hotline | Ep 926

Let's rock. Justin, you up? Justin? Justin? No Justin. Okay, Justin, I'll get you next time. Otherwise, you guys can hear him now? Jesus Christ. All right, Justin, this is the last time. I'm gonna get on here, and if I don't hear him and only him, I'm eating this sandwich because this thing smells amazing. All right, Justin, are you on?

I'm here.

All right, we made it, guys. We did it. Justin is on. All right, Justin, are you doing $600 or $600K a month?

$600. You can— general income is $120K a year.

Okay, so you're doing $120K. And what do you do? So you do automation for ERPs?

Yeah.

Okay.

Especially order processing.

Auto processing. What is that? Order processing.

Emailed it. Yeah.

Okay. So before this, you were doing what?

Automate anything for anyone.

Automating anything for anyone.

Yeah.

Okay. So how were customers coming to you before this?

2 years ago, I did some videos on how to automate things. And that's been it. Those videos have driven everything.

Do you still make videos?

I'm about to start again.

Okay.

Um, with a new type of video because those videos got me leads that were freelancers who wanted to automate for other people. There weren't that many business owners.

Hmm. Would you ever teach people how to automate stuff?

I've done lots of videos. I have lots of people on my LinkedIn who want to learn how to automate. I'm trying not to.

And you don't wanna sell to them?

But I don't know how much money they have, to be honest. A lot of huge chains started.

It's not about how much all of them have. It's about how much 5% of them have. So what's the goal here? Do you want to make money? What's the goal? What do you want to do?

The goal is like $500K net profit.

You just want to make money?

Per year.

You don't care about building a sellable thing. You just care about making money.

Yes.

Okay. I think that if you have a tremendous— like right now you have a very valuable skill. I think that you teaching people this valuable skill might be something that will for sure be able to make you $500,000 a year net profit. If that's your goal.

Okay.

That is, I think, for sure the easiest path. Easiest and fastest.

Okay.

Now, if you're like, I want to get to $20 million a year, different. But if you're like, I just want to get to $500,000 a year, super doable.

Okay.

Yes. I think you just take all these people who are reaching out to you and the videos that you clearly do really well. Do more of that, and then probably sell some sort of like automation certification, something like in the neighborhood of like, you know, $3,000 to $6,000. So like you have to sell 2 people a week to make $500 grand, right? Okay, that sounds chill. Yeah. Okay, let's do it on Skool.

Yeah, exactly.

Definitely. I think the number one community on Skool right now is an AI automation thing. Like for sure people buy that. Just do it, just sell it as an annual membership. They get 5, you know, 5 call it $5,000 or $6,000 a year. If you don't feel confident yet, start at $3,000, you can bump it to $5,000 or $6,000, have it billed annually. And they get access to 20 different types of automations that are most common for businesses. And the nice thing is that you'll get both business owners and freelancers who all want to do it. Either they want to do it for themselves or want to do it for other people, but either way it works.

Yeah. Okay.

And if you want to be more efficient with it, I would drive it to a sales call funnel rather than direct to a purchase page. And so I would just like sell them and then basically show them the about page, have them buy on the call with you, and then they'll be in.

Yeah.

Love this for us. Was that as good for you as it was for me?

I mean, I have to do that for a long time. That's good to have some, some permission.

Everybody wants this one thing from you that you have this very, very valuable skill. You have an existing media asset that continues to deliver these types of leads. Let's just go make a high margin product that you wanna make $500,000 a year. Awesome. Great. Sell 100 people at $5K and it'll recur. Awesome. Amazing.

Awesome.

All right.

This was great. All right.

We'll talk soon. Welcome to Proposé Hotline. And thanks for being a sport about the audio. You were great.

All right.

I'm going to take a sandwich. Oh, no, you're good. But good observation. All right. Thanks, Josh. Appreciate you. All right. So let's rock and roll. I'm going to have this sandwich and I will stay on as long as it takes me to eat this sandwich. If you guys can pause on any of these questions, I will try and answer some of them. So I'll give you some secrets of my sandwich, my sandwich habits. I eat a lot of sandwiches. So I eat sandwiches for lunch pretty much every day. I alternate where I get them from. And so yeah, that's, that's how I do that. So this is, each one of these slices is typically 1 ounce of meat. And so if you get 3 slices, you usually have 3 ounces per. And so this is 6 ounces because it's 6 slices. And so I pre, I pre-tear all of my extra meat because anybody who's had a lot of sandwiches knows that if you try and load the sandwich up, it becomes this open thing and the ratios get all off. And so what I do is I tear, pre-tear these to like my bite size. And so then I take my sandwich at the appropriate ratios. Now we're going to need the most added meat is going to be the front and the back. And so I will take my, my front guy, get a dip. So I'm not being a, not being a pig here. Just get a little dip on the front so I get a little sauce, because I have no sauce on the sandwich. That way I don't, I don't trust somebody else to just put tablespoons and tablespoons of mayo on. And then I basically front load it. Hard to beat, hard to beat. All right, maybe we'll go question, bite, bite, question. Maybe I'll go 3 bites. Bite, bite, bite, question. Oh, I'm so hungry. Okay, just pause it somewhere. Okay. Home health agency, pre-revenue. Home health agency, I don't even know what that is. Opening in a month. Okay. What are some advice in this industry when we rely on insurance for payment? Yeah, or do we have to rely on word of mouth? Well, dude, you're pre-revenue. You don't even make money yet. So like you can be cash or you can be insurance. I typically don't like someone else controlling my pricing. The advantage of being quote in-network is that they should be able to send you lots of customers. That's like the main the main benefit of being like kind of in-network. I would need to know more about home health in terms of what that actually is. So I'm actually kind of confused. There's a lot of like home health services. Alex, all your strategies are used in new service businesses, but as a doctor urologist just starting out and they're already famous urologists in my city, how can I build my practice using your models? Dude, it's gonna be marketing, man. You just gotta advertise. So you have to make content around your stuff. And one of the advantages that you will have compared to the more established guys is that you should, should be able to run higher margins because you're not doing, you don't have nearly the overhead that they'll have. So you're going to beat them on being able to be higher margin per service and that their people or patients are going to have higher access to you. All right. Those can be the primary things. Something worth considering, by the way, I think concierge doctors tend to do very well. I don't know how many, like if you're going to do like surgeries or what, but I think you selling people because like you're just getting into it and you might as well start where you're going to end. Most of the physicians who practice for 20, 25 years realize that a concierge model that doesn't rely on insurance is a far more profitable and way better way to live. And so they just convert from having like, you know, 25,000 customers to just getting 500 customers who pay them like $1,000 a year and they make $500,000 a year. Super chill. They have their cell phone number and just like makes life really easy and they just become general practitioners for those you know, 500 or so customers. So something worth considering there in terms of strategies. But by and large, you're going to have to advertise via content today. That may change, but right now it's going to be content because you're not going to be able to outspend the other guys on the ad side. And you should be able to run decent margins and maybe having a couple of relationships with maybe like some hospitals or other practices that might get urology type stuff, maybe just some general practitioners. That they'll refer you business because they'll feel bad for you. So with that question, we will now have a couple of bites. So if you guys are eating lunch with me, then cheers, we can have a bite together. Yeah, I don't know about you guys, but I'm starving. You get to, quote, see how I'm, quote, off camera. And so you're like, I wonder how he's like normally. It's like, this is it. This is how I am. All right. I said 3 bites. Okay. Trying to decide between being a loan broker earning 1% recruiter brokers and 0.5% of unlimited all the ones. I mean, for sure I would go recruiting brokers. So you're telling me I can get half as much money on unlimited people versus 1% for myself. Each one of those become a consistent node of revenue that continues to pay you over time. So this is a leverage question. You literally just get paid on every single person. Basically, as soon as you have 2 producers that do well, you would make what you were making before. Like, to me, that's a no-brainer. Best way to scale a wedding photography business. So everyone, you have basically 4 fundamental ways you can advertise. Core 4. You've got outreach, you've got— so outreach to get customers, number 1. You've got paid ads, number 2. Number 3, you got content. And number 4, you can do outreach to affiliates. So if I own a wedding photography business, then I'm gonna be curious as to like what percentage of people are running wedding photography businesses that are doing this off of, like how many people are coming off of ads? How many people are coming off referrals? I would bet that for a wedding photography business, like it's a one-time purchase that you make. You probably ask other people who are local to your area who they used. So I would be more likely to probably recruit wedding planners. So I would probably go outbound wedding planner. Offer to do photography for whatever price they can sell it for and tell them they can keep 100% of it for like 1 or 2 customers so that they have an incentive to push me and they get to keep 100% of the money. And then I prove to them that I'm good and then we figure out some sort of deal and I would just repeat that over and over again. And so each of those wedding planners and helpers would then become my nodes of distribution that would then feed me customers. That is how I would probably do it. All right, I'm owed another bite. Little dippy dippy, little dippy dippy. Rotund question. So Wisdom Path, as an autistic, how to translate feedback into defined action that leads to improvement at business? Honestly, man, just read the books. Like, I feel like I write as an autist. Seriously, I just like, I just break everything down into behaviors. And so I think that's the whole point. And so I also just wouldn't let like any labels limit you. Like some of the most successful people in the world are autistic. So like, I just wouldn't like let that be a handicap. A lot of super successful entrepreneurs are quote ADD. It's just like, I would say it's more of a trait rather than a handicap. Just something like worth, at least that's how I see it. Global Hangout Eating. What lead magnet would you set up for a craft subscription box business? Hmm, good question. What lead magnet for a craft subscription box business? Hmm, well, it'd probably be— I feel like that's more of an e-commerce play. I don't even know if I'd have a lead magnet. I would think that it'd be more like, I'm gonna make content using the stuff in my boxes and then solicit people to go buy the next box. And then I'd probably go like, first box or first 3 boxes are like half off or something. And then after that, after they've had 3 boxes, Let the price bump. That's what I would do.

Okay.

All right, Micah. I have $150,000 marketing budget a month. Okay. 30% budget is what works. 20% iteration. Cool. Love that.

Okay.

My director said 100 new creators a week. Love it. So how do you run that many if they don't exit the learning phase? They should. I mean, $150,000, you're doing $3,000 a day. I mean, as soon as you do start to have winners, like once you get a certain amount of spend, they should get out of learning. Absolute worst case scenario, cut the creatives down to 25 or 50 and then run it that way. But it doesn't make sense to me that it wouldn't exit learning. I have a client acquisition and retention agency for residential cleaning. My price point is $1,500 a month. Recently sold the whole system for $5K through school. The sale wasn't smooth, so I don't know if I have product-market fit. I mean, if you've only done one, like, you probably don't know anything. You probably have to, like, learn how to sell. You said it's a— like, you save acquisition retention agent, which sounds like marketing and some sort of information that you're selling. And you sold the whole system, but there was no recurring unless you're doing $5K annual, which makes not a lot of sense given it was a service for residential cleaning. So with a business like yours, what I'd rather do is have, like, a big headlong town model. So it's like, maybe it's like $5,000 up front, and then it's like $1,500 a month. 5K upfront, $1,500 a month after that. And then in terms of the sale being smooth, I don't think it's product market fit, dude. Like residential cleaners want customers, they want to keep customers. You don't need to test product market fit. You just don't, you know, you gotta learn how to sell. That's all that is. And it's also like, what are you judging this on? Like one conversation or like 100? Like I would just like erase that from your mind. Okay. The Maker's Lair. Hey Alex, I'm building a branded medical product with an app. Okay. How do I know if the product truly works? When to double down versus pivot? I mean, shouldn't you try the medical product out? Have people use it? What you should be following is Y Combinator has just really amazing stuff for if you're getting in the product direction or app direction, excuse me. And I would really strongly be considering, like, I don't dissuade you because I want everyone to start doing things on their own, but like, I won't even get into that. I'll just say this. Try and find 100 people who love the product and keep making it until those 100 people are obsessed. Don't worry about anything else. All right, I'm owed a bite. It's bite time. Peanut butter bite time. You know how it is, Luke. So we can all thank my Gen Z, Gen Z Luke the Duke for being like, hey, livestream is cool. You should try it. And so here we are. Also, the first time we did one of these was on Sean, Sean Puri's podcast. And he was like, we're, we're calling our Hormozy hotline. And so we called people up and people seem to really like it. And so That is why we're doing this. I'm so hungry. Okay. I'm a video game coach making $45,000 a month, 57,000 subs on YouTube. I charge $30 a month and get 50 to 60 new students with group coaching, but I churn the same number. Okay. Yeah. Realistically, you'll likely want to sell— like, here's the thing. Education alone is not a recurring product. Community is a recurring product. Services are recurring products. And so we want to make sure that we're matching how we're billing to how we deliver value. And so it's far more likely that you deliver value upfront, right, to people. And so I would suggest probably raising the price or doing some sort of annual thing so that you can appropriately value the information or the education and then have a much smaller backend for the access to the community. And maybe other services or calls or whatever else that you do. I think it's one of the biggest mistakes that people make in the education/services world is that they think that because someone would say yes today when they don't know how to do something, that 3 months from now when they now know how to do it, that they still wanna pay that. So we have to break apart our product offering into what are things that are consumable and what are things that are one-time. And so the one-time things typically have significantly more value, and then you have the consumable elements that are typically less value, but they recur month over month over month. And so for example, I am a reoccurring customer of the sandwich shop because it is consumable. I eat it and I still need another one tomorrow. Whereas if I learn how to make sandwiches for myself, then the skill of making the sandwich will no longer be required, but then I'll need a subscription to bread and meat and lettuce and whatever. And so you wanna break apart your product into like community is something that people consume on a regular basis. Calls might be something that they consume, but those in and of themselves might not be inherently valuable. I mean, depending on how good you are. But education system can be valuable. And so all these kind of depend, but this is something that's valuable one time today when I don't know how to do something until I do know how to do it. Once I know how to do it, this is worth nothing. And so what happens is people say, "Okay, well this thing's worth $5,000, so I'm gonna bill $200 a month for a year." Doesn't work that way. Bill what they want, what they need up front, and then when they have different needs, which might be lower, you then bill appropriately to that. Okay, one, Alex, tell me something. See, you gotta ask questions, man. Questions is much nicer, it's much more polite. I wouldn't come up to you in the street and just start shouting at you. All right, I'm gonna have another bite. So hungry. All right, 90 Strong, I'm a brand ghostwriter for executives on LinkedIn. Despite posting daily, my reach is stuck at 200 views per post. How can I break through this plateau? So you're a brand ghostwriter for executives on LinkedIn. It is a little bit ironic that this is what you specialize in. I just want to say that. I'm going to call it out. Okay. I'm guessing you're probably just doing a lot of GPT stuff. And if you are, it probably sounds like everyone else's GPT stuff that's on LinkedIn. You want to tell narratives and stories. Like, what are the things that AI cannot do? AI cannot live in reality. And so, like, the reason I am using real businesses and I talk about my own stories, those are things that no one else can copy, right? If I say, here's the 6 steps to XYZ, 100 people will say, these are the 6 steps XYZ. But the examples that I use are things that no one else can copy, right? The proof is something that no one else can copy. And so if you're a brand ghostwriter for executives on LinkedIn, I'm assuming that you're trying to get more customers for yourself. And so you're going to want to make the type of content that executives on LinkedIn might consume. This is where stories and examples are super valuable. Now, my guess here is that you don't have enough customers to give stories from. So this is why I suggest to people to take on people for free or at massive discounts so that you can build up your track record and have stories to tell. And I think that will probably make your content more valuable or more interesting. All right. Starting a beauty brand, I sell in North America. Do you suggest I focus on B2C through micro-sellers and affiliates or focus on B2B?

Let—

unless you have experience with B2B, I would probably start B2C. All right. Starting my marketing business, zero experience, using your books to learn. Thank you.

You're welcome.

How can I get more experience to sell my services to big companies? Everyone start for free. And you also have to earn your way into bigger customers. And so this is why it's normal for people to consistently go upmarket because they realize that the work it takes to do to serve bigger clients is about the same. But the thing is, is that to get the trust of bigger clients, it takes more experience and more know-how. So saying like, I have zero experience, you know, I'm going to read your books and I'm going to start taking Amazon down as a client is super unlikely. And so you're going to want to start with smaller businesses and then work your way up. And if you don't have any experience, this is why I advocate for starting for free. Like, you want to get proof before you get anything else. Like, it will take you so much longer to get your first 10 paying customers if you try and get your first 10 customers to be paying. You want 10 free customers. Leverage the testimonials, learnings, and examples from those 10, because the people who then buy from you don't know that those people were for free. Then you could get this next 10 using the first 10. This is leverage. To start an automation business for finance departments of companies of 20 to 200 people, what kind of LinkedIn content should I make? Just talk about what you know. So talk— I mean, if you're, if you're making these kind of automations for finance departments, like, talk about one at a time. The automations that you do and what happens as a result. Like there's probably 150 repeated tasks that finance departments do. So I would probably like, first off, make myself a list of every single micro task that somebody in a finance department would do. And then one by one, that would probably be my content schedule. And I would say, I'm going to make 150 pieces of content. Each one is gonna explain how to automate each one of these specific portions. People who will read that and watch that will be the types of people who will buy your stuff. Don't be afraid of giving away the secrets. Like, no one in finance is going to want to learn your tech stuff. They just want to know that it works. Especially if you can show like a mini, like, like a 5-second or 10-second thing of like a process running in the background or how it's happening automatically that's showing the result. I think that will be super valuable. Okay. I think this may be my last one and then I'm actually going to eat lunch because I'm very hungry. Gaz here. $34,000 a month, around $3,500 in ad spend, 20% net. Dental product, number 3 on Amazon. When scaling spend, it destroys margins with little gain. Number 1 competitors, $250,000 a month. Any advice? I'm guessing you're running your ad spend on Amazon. That's my guess because that sounds very Amazon-y, which is like they pretty much know exactly how much you make and then they just charge you the amount that your profit would be. So you just pay them more. So I mean, to scale, you're going to probably— I mean, you want to max out your existing channel, but if you have no other way of making your product more valuable, then I'd probably start looking at new channels. Like Amazon is just a channel, you know what I mean? Like there's really nothing. It's just a channel. Can you get micro-influencers to do it? Can you get other dentists to do it? Can you do B2B on wholesaling? Like there's so many different angles that you could take to advertise a product. They're spending $250,000 a month. I don't know how. So I would try and figure out how they're spending $250,000 a month. Do they have better reviews than you? And that's what allows their page to convert better. Do they have a backend that when customers buy the first thing, they buy other things? Like, I just don't know. And maybe $250,000, probably making $250,000 a month. And it might just be that they have a better product, being real. And so Amazon is very like winner-take-all market for the best products. And so like, I don't know what the number 10 business book does, but like the number 1 business book makes a hell of a lot of money. And so if the number 1, 10 business— like, imagine that. Let me give a different example. So like, let's say that number 10 business book wrote this question was like, hey, I'm doing $5,000 a month for my book. The number one person is doing $250,000 a month. How do I get it bigger? It's like, realistically, it's like you've got to have a better book. Like, that's the real— you got to have a better book. Now, of course, you can market in more ways, but if you're like, how do I get bigger on Amazon, it's going to be down the product. I mean, they built their whole site to maximize quality of product relative to price, of course. Okay. How many hours would you go? How do we do? 3 hours. 3 hours. Holy cow. Time flies when you're having fun. You guys rock. If you guys like this, I'm going to keep the stream up for 30 more seconds. If you guys like this, please let me know if you like this format. If you do, I'll keep doing it. If you don't, I like it. So I'll probably keep doing it, especially if you're a business owner. I made this stuff for you guys. I love talking business. I hate making YouTube videos. And so I'll probably do more of this because this is just way more fun. And what do you guys think about having a regular like show? Like, what do you think? Like a, like a once a week or like a twice a week kind of livestream? Like, kind of like I started today, like maybe 30-ish minutes on like a specific type of, you know, training or something like that around anything that's, you know, technical and then transition into kind of Q&As with y'all. Okay. Rock and roll. You guys rock. So appreciate you guys. I hope you guys all have amazing sandwiches for lunch, no matter where you are. The best sandwiches. I wish that— I wish everyone amazing sandwiches. Uh, with that, rock and roll. Appreciate you, and, uh, I'll see you guys next time.