Business Growth Summit 📱

I don't see that. Oh shoot, I don't see the— we're live.

All right, we're live and we're recording again.

And we are recording again.

All right, welcome to our next session. Jill, thank you very much. That was packed with ideas business owners can apply right away to get more visibility without waiting for permission. Now we're going to move on to practical growth marketing that can move revenue for you. So our next speaker is my friend Max Bidna. Max is known for turning underperforming funnels into revenue engines and for finding simple growth wins that most businesses overlook. He's gonna talk today about growth hacking revenue, 5 simple growth marketing hacks to grow revenue today. Max is gonna walk you through specific tactics you can plug into your existing marketing so you can see more revenue without needing a bigger team or a bigger ad budget. So Max, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you guys so much for having me and happy Monday.

Good way to start the week.

I'm going to share my screen if this will let me here. Boom. All right, can you guys see my screen?

You got it, man. Yes.

You just got to make it full screen and then we're all set.

Let me figure out how to do that.

You do tools and then presentation mode.

I can do slide There you go. Perfect. Technology, right?

Beautiful.

All the fun stuff. All right. Again, thank you so much for having me. I am a serial entrepreneur, helped more than 400+ companies with their marketing funnel in some way, shape, or form. And the number one question I get is like, hey, you know, what are the few things that I can do to really increase revenue immediately without spending a ton of money? How can I actually capture more of the people who are looking for my product or service today? And then how can I also build trust with people who are maybe not necessarily looking to buy my product or service today, but eventually might do that. And so I put together a list of 5 of my most epic, most impactful, and easiest to implement marketing strategies and growth hacks that can help you generate revenue right now, ASAP, ASAP, ASAP, ASAP. So most founders hate marketing because it's extremely overwhelming. Should I run Facebook ads? Should I run TikTok ads? Should I be posting every day on TikTok with a dance, cute video? How do I make that relating to my product or service? Should I send cold emails? Should I be posting on LinkedIn? There's so many different things you can possibly do to grow your revenue. It makes sense that it's extremely overwhelming. Lucky for you guys, my name is Marketing Max, and I have personally worked with more than 400 brands on all things growth, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. I've engineered growth marketing funnels to acquire customers, clients, users, members, whatever it is that you're looking for. I've helped a bunch of companies do the same. I've driven more than $100 million in attributable revenue for my clients. If you look at the non-attributable, it's probably way more, but actually inside of the Facebook Ads Manager, Google Ads Manager, lead forms, I've generated quite a bit of revenue. And I bootstrapped an award-winning ad agency to 7 figures in revenue, sold it to a private equity fund before starting to build the Marketing Max brand. A little bit more about me. I'm an angel investor as well. I have the cutest dog in the entire world named Junior. He's a 60-pound Labradoodle, so he's not so junior. But Junior is my best friend. And then I have more than 350,000 followers across all of my social channels and my newsletters as Marketing Max. And forgive me, this is not like a light filter. I converted my garage into an office and we have this cool skylight. And around this time every day, I get this interesting Hollywood effect. So that's a little bit about me and why you might want to tune in or why you might want to listen to a couple of these growth hacks. Today I'm gonna share with you 5 growth hacks that any company in any industry of any size can use to grow your business faster. So with that said, let's start with the first growth hack with a simple question. If you needed car insurance today, what is the first website you are most likely to visit? Is it gonna be Geico or is it gonna be Erie Erie, Pennsylvania car insurance company. I think there's a chat here. For those of you that are on chat, go ahead and answer the question. If you were going to get car insurance today, where are you most likely to visit? Which, which website, Geico or Erie, Pennsylvania car insurance company?

Geico.

Geico.

All right. So, yes, the obvious answer is Geico. Why would you choose Geico? Well, it's because Geico spends more than $1.6 billion a year on marketing to make sure that they stay top of mind so that when you are ready to buy car insurance, you think of Geico first. Erie, Pennsylvania car insurance company spends less than $20 $1 million a year on marketing. So staying top of mind is everything, right? An old study said only 2% of your market, only 2% of anyone who could ever potentially buy your product or service is actually waking up today going, I need this product or service. I'm ready to spend time and money to solve this problem by using this product or service that you sell. The other 98% of the market still needs to be warmed up. Right. And so you need to stay top of mind with people. GEICO spends $1.6 billion a year to make sure that when you are ready to buy insurance, you think of them first. So the question becomes, how do you— whoopsies, I go back. The question becomes, how do you stay top of mind with your target customers without spending $1.6 billion a year? Well, the easiest, easiest, easiest way to do that is a $5 a day Facebook ad retargeting campaign. So literally just spending $5 a day on what's now called Meta ads, right? Running ads on Facebook and Instagram, targeting everyone who has visited your website in the last 30 or 60 days is the fastest way to use the strategy that GEICO is using to help stay top of mind with your target buyers. When you set up this campaign inside of Facebook Ads, you want to set the objective to reach, and you want the creative, the actual ads themselves, to be testimonials from people who have used your product or service saying, holy crap, excuse my French, I was skeptical about using this product or service for these reasons, but once I started using this product or service, it helped me achieve XYZ results, right? Or you can create a how it works video because once someone's visited your website, they already know about you. It's your job to educate them on how you actually can deliver the results or the outcome that you want. All right. It's a very well-known fact in marketing that someone needs to see or hear your brand at least 5 times before they decide if they're going to purchase your product or not. And so what I see a lot of times with clients is they're running Facebook ads, they're posting on LinkedIn, and people have heard of them maybe once and maybe they see one more ad or maybe they see one of their LinkedIn posts, but they're not doing everything they possibly can to stay top of mind and make sure that you're getting someone to that 5th or even 10th touchpoint. GEICO has hundreds of touchpoints with me at this point. They advertise in every single sporting event and every single commercial break. There's GEICO. I watch tons of sports, right? Every single billboard in most major cities, Geico, they have hundreds of touchpoints. You can achieve the same result on a smaller scale simply by retargeting everyone who's been on your website in the last 30 or 60 days with a very simple $5 a day retargeting campaign. Staying top of mind is everything because people actually spend days deciding if they're going to hire you for your services or buy your product, no matter what it is. And the truth is, if they see your ad once or they see your LinkedIn post once, they might forget about you. They might be seeing your competitors' ads more or your competitors' posts more. So running a $5 a day simple retargeting campaign is the best way to stay top of mind and convert more people who know you exist, but just haven't purchased yet. They're window shoppers into actually coming in and purchasing from you. The $5 a day retargeting campaign is how you can be like Geico. All right, the second growth hack is A/B testing. Most people, they create their website and then they never update it ever again, but the truth is your website is your 24/7 salesperson, and it's the most forgotten about part of your entire marketing strategy, motion, stack, the entire marketing engine that you've built. However big or small it is, showing up at conferences or webinars or summits, posting on LinkedIn, running Facebook ads, lead gen affiliation, whatever it is, the website is the most forgotten part of your entire marketing strategy. It is not set it and forget it. It is not ever completely perfect, so you need to run an A/B test or many A/B tests to split test how to get people who visit your website to actually convert into a lead or a purchase from your website, right? This is how the math works out. Say that 1,000 people were to visit your website today. The average website converts 2% of all website visitors into whatever the action is that they're going to take. So if it's an e-commerce store, on average, 1,000 people who visit the website will convert, or sorry, 2%, so 20 out of every 1,000 people who visit your website will purchase the product. If you run a marketing agency, roughly 20 per— 20 people out of every 1,000 people who visit your website will fill out the form to get in touch, right? Out of that 20— or sorry, out of that 2%, 20% of those people will end up purchasing on average. So out of every 1,000 people that visit your website today, you might get on average, right, this is across many industries, big or small, no matter the product or service, On average, 1,000 people visit your website, you should expect roughly 4 customers, right? This is how the basic general math works for every single business, all right? Now, let's say 1,000 people visit your website today and 2% fill out the form, as we just said, right? If 20% of all the 2% that fill out the form become a customer, you have 4 customers. But let's say we're able to double this 2% number into 4%. Right, let's say 4% out of every 1,000 people that visit the website fill out the form and get in touch. And let's say we hold that 20% number the same. We now have 8 customers, 8 customers instead of 4. We've literally 2x'd our revenue, all right, literally 2x'ing our revenue simply by figuring out how to take our website conversion rate from 2% to 4%. A lot of people say at this point when I give this presentation, but Max, it's not easy to 2x my conversion rate.

Check this out.

Using my favorite A/B testing tool called Unbounce, unbounce.com, I'm not an investor, I'm not an affiliate, I don't get commission for recommending them, I'm a big-time customer there, but unbounce.com, using Unbounce, I was able to 2x my client's revenue by simply changing 2 things on their website. I moved their logo bar. You know, a lot of companies that are services, they have a logo bar of companies that have worked with them, right? It was in the middle of the website, middle of the homepage. I moved it to the top, right below the main tagline, all right? And then I also changed the button from Get In Touch to Get My Reel. They were a demo reel production company, all right? So I changed those two things. And as you can see, I took their conversion rate to more than double. All right. I literally 2x the amount of people that filled out the form. Out of the 100 people that visited this page, 3 people filled out the form on the original, original version of the page. But when I moved the logo bar from the bottom to the middle and when I changed the button, the text in the button from Get in Touch to Get My Reel, Now 9 out of roughly 158, but the conversion rate doubled. And so this is my point. If you can double your conversion rate, you can literally double your revenue. So why is A/B testing an afterthought? The honest answer is I don't know why it's an afterthought. I spend tons of money with Unbounce for all of my clients, and you should be too. So help me help you. For showing up today by doing the following. I want you to rebuild your homepage on Unbounce. Again, I'm not affiliated with them. I just think it's the greatest tool and the fastest way to grow your revenue. Rebuild your homepage in Unbounce with multiple different variations and send traffic to the new landing page. So just to show you guys, this is a screenshot literally from Unbounce. This is variation E, this is variation B. You can duplicate a variation and change a tagline, change a button color, change a picture, change anything you want. You have one URL, so you send everyone to that one URL, right? And then Unbounce does the work of splitting the traffic, the amount of people that click on that URL into visiting variant 1, variant 2, variant 3, in this case, variant E, variant B, right? So rebuild your homepage in Unbounce with multiple variations and send all the traffic to the new page, all right? Then a little pro tip is you can install this tool called Crazy Egg. It's like $30 a month. And you can change one simple thing on your existing site. All right. Crazy Egg is a less expensive way to accomplish the same goal without Unbounce. So if you don't wanna spend $150 a month on Unbounce, Crazy Egg, you can change and manipulate a single thing on your existing website without having to create a brand new landing page. But whether you choose Unbounce or whether you choose Crazy Egg, It is the fastest way to increase your revenue, period, end of story. All right, A/B testing, doubling your website conversion rate is not as hard as you think. You just have to get a little creative, a little clever. You can even ask ChatGPT, take a picture of your landing page, upload it to ChatGPT and say, what is a normal thing that a conversion rate optimization specialist would A/B test here? And again, 2x-ing the leads, generated from a landing page or website could literally 2x your revenue. That simple. And this test literally took a week. Like, that's how fast it was. Literally a week. So you could literally 2x your revenue in a week. That's how marketing works as you look through the whole funnel.

All right.

Number 3, this is my second favorite growth hack of all time, and it's how you can take on your bigger competitors, or as I like to say it, how you can take on Goliath. Let's say you sell a CRM for marketing agencies. Lucky for you, 165,000 people in the United States Google CRM every single month. But if you were to go to Google Ads and bid on the term CRM for marketing agencies, you're going to be spending upwards of $26 a click. $26. We just learned the average website converts at 2%. You're gonna be spending thousands of dollars to get someone to fill out the form if you're spending $26 a click. So it's not feasible for you to bid on the term CRM for marketing agencies if you're a medium to small business that's not venture-backed. So how can you still tap into the demand that Google captures without spending a fortune? The answer is bidding on your competitors. It costs $26 a click. To bid on that term CRM for marketing agencies, but it costs half of that to bid on a competitor like Pipedrive. Or let's say you're selling running shoes. It costs $1.25 to bid on the term running shoe, but it's only $0.19 to bid on Nike. Conquesting is what this is called in the Google Ads world. Bidding on your competitors' names is one of the best growth hacks of all time. And I did this myself to grow my agency before I sold it. My first agency was called Hells Creative and bidding on the term Facebook Ads Agency was literally $10 cost per click. So at 2%, I'm spending like $200, $300 just to get someone to fill out the form. But our biggest competitor was actually at the time Hawk Media, the gentleman who's speaking next, the founder, I believe Eric Huberman speaking next. And so what we did is we bid on the term Hawk Media and we ran this ad. This is an exact screenshot. Other agencies equal expensive. Hells Creative equals 4x ROI. Back then we generated a 4x average return on ad spend for our clients. They were spending a ton of money. They, meaning Hawk Media, were spending a ton of money on Facebook ads. And I knew as a marketer that when brands spend a ton of money on Facebook ads, lots of people actually don't want to click the ad itself. They want to open up Google and see the Google listings or see some reviews or see other things that Google might populate about the brand name. So I knew that there was a ton of people Googling Hawk Media, and so I started bidding on Hawk Media at $3 a click instead of Facebook ad agency, quote unquote, at $10 a click. And this one ad took my agency from a measly $20,000 a month to more than double at $45,000 a month in just 60 or 90 days. I forget the exact number. This was like 8 or 9 years ago. So forgive me, but this strategy, bidding on your competitors, absolutely 110% works. All right, it prints money for small businesses who are trying to take on their competitors. And one of the cool things that I don't mention on the slide is if someone's Googling your competitor, unless they're looking for a job at that company, they're probably in what we call the lower part of the funnel. They're probably looking at your competitor because they're considering working with your competitor or hiring your competitor or purchasing from your competitor or whatever it might be. And so you're meeting people who are more in demand or who have more of a demand for your product or service than just running Facebook ads or just running LinkedIn ads, hoping that someone who happens to stumble upon your ad in the feed is actually waking up going, you know what, I need your product or service, right? Facebook ads, the best, fastest way to capture existing hot, steaming hot demand. All right, we're going through this pretty fast. I know we started early, but let's jump to number 4. We're gonna get in front of your target customers for just $19. All right, so remember I just mentioned Google Ads is the best way to get in front of people who are actively searching for your product or service, and people who are waking up going, I need this, right? But Facebook, or sorry, Google Ads could be quite expensive, right? Even at $10 a click or $3 a click, you know, you gotta spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars, right, a month. Well, here's a way to do that for $19 a month, all right? Let's say you sold a CRM for a marketing agency, like we just said, your CRM for marketing agencies. Wouldn't it be nice to know every time an agency was actually in the market for a new CRM without having to give Google thousands of dollars? Well, you can do that with this thing called social listening. I use a tool called Siftin. Again, I'm not affiliated with it. I'm actually a paying customer, $79 a month on their more expensive plan. But what Siftin does is it monitors all of these websites for keywords that you give it, and then it'll send you a Slack message saying, hey, someone just tweeted out, what's the best CRM for marketing agencies? Or someone just posted on Facebook, what is the best PR agency I can work with in the tech industry? So on and so forth, right? So social listening is the way to capture existing demand without, without spending tons of money on Google Ads. And literally $19 a month on Siftin, it'll monitor all of these websites. I believe except Twitter, that's what I pay like $79 a month for, but it'll monitor all of these websites. That way when someone says, I'm looking for what you have to sell, all you have to do is see the Slack message and then respond to someone in a comment on Reddit or Hacker News or Product Hunt, or I think it's Y Combinator's news, or Facebook or Upwork or whatever. All you have to do is respond, right? All you need to do is literally listen for people saying, I'm looking for what you're selling. It's one of the best, simplest growth hacks to find customers quickly.

All right.

Now we're coming around to the fifth and final growth hack. This is the greatest growth hack of all time. I believe it because I've built many businesses now on the back of it. All right. And it has to do with CAC, this marketing term called CAC, cost to acquire a customer. What if I told you that you could acquire a customer for negative CAC? Meaning instead of you paying Google or you paying Siftin or you paying Meta or you paying an agency or whoever to go out and acquire that customer, right? So CAC generally is if you spend $10,000 a month on Facebook ads and that's all of your marketing expenses, right? And you acquired 2 clients or 2 customers that month, then your cost to acquire a customer is $5,000, right? You have to spend money to make money. That's totally normal. That's business, right? But what if there was a way to actually acquire customers for negative money, meaning you got a customer and you also got paid? Well, that's right. You actually don't have to spend a penny on marketing if you implement this growth hack, all right? You build a profitable media business in your niche. So again, sticking with that analogy or that example, let's say you sell a CRM for marketing agencies. What if you built a weekly newsletter where every week you featured one big tip for agencies, how to grow your agency faster, how to close more clients, how to generate more leads, how to hire really good talent. You share one tip. And then in the bottom of that newsletter, you put a very simple ad in a nonchalant way for your CRM, right? Every week people are gonna be getting a tip from you. They're gonna be learning how they can grow their business faster, how they can implement different strategies to increase their profit, increase their revenue, streamline their workflows, get more time back in the day, whatever it is. You are building trust with them every single week with that tip specifically for your target audience.

right?

And then in the middle or the bottom of the newsletter or both, you're putting an ad for the CRM. Naturally, people are gonna be like, oh, this company or this person's pretty smart. They know what they're talking about. I trust them. Maybe I should give their product a try.

All right.

But Max, how do I grow the newsletter? Don't I have to pay to grow the newsletter? Well, yes, but you can spend money to acquire subscribers and you can make your ad money back, the money you spend on ads, in the newsletter with ads alongside the ad for your CRM. All right, and it's very simple math. Let's say the cost to acquire 10,000 subscribers is $30,000. You spend $3 on average to acquire one subscriber. All right, your ad revenue per newsletter could be $1,000. You could sell an ad in your newsletter to other people who also wanna reach the people who are on your email list, to the 10,000 people, you can sell an ad in the newsletter for $1,000. So your revenue is $4,000 a month, right? If you spend $30K in a couple months and then you turn it off and you have 10,000 subscribers, your payback period is 8 months. And if you wanna add a few extra cents each week, right, this $4,000 could go up to $8,000 or $10,000 pretty quickly, all right? And you have not only your revenue from the ad sales that you will break even on in 8 months if you do a weekly newsletter, but you will also have ad spots to promote your own CRM, bringing you negative cost to acquire a customer. All right, some examples of this working are HubSpot. HubSpot bought a newsletter that had millions of its target customers for roughly $80 million called The Hustle. Pilot House is a marketing agency outside of, not Toronto, I think they're in Canada. They specialize in e-com brands. They run marketing for e-com brands and they launched the DTC newsletter as a separate media branded company. The DTC newsletter, and they now have a podcast, does a little over $1 million a year in revenue simply from ads, and it's very profitable. But when they have an unsold ad, which is natural, you can't sell out every ad spot, they promote Pilot House, and that's how they were able to grow from 5 or 10 employees all the way up to 150 employees. It was because they had negative cost to acquire a customer because the DTC newsletter generated enough revenue profitably for them to make some profit on it. And then the unsold inventory went to promoting their agency called Pilot House. Penn Entertainment is another great example of it. All right. Penn Entertainment is a publicly traded company. They bought Barstool Sports because they needed distribution. They needed to get their product, a sports gambling app, in front of an audience.

Right.

That's all marketing is, getting in front of eyeballs and convincing those eyeballs to give you money to buy your product or service or whatever it is. Right. Penn Entertainment didn't have a distribution channel. They did not have the eyeballs that The Hustle had. So HubSpot bought them. Pilot House didn't have the eyeballs of their target customer, so they built it with their newsletter, right? Penn Entertainment didn't have the eyeballs of their target customers, so they bought Barstool. The future of marketing is not a marketing department, it's a media department. We need to think of marketing departments as media departments, and especially if you can get it ad-supported, you can turn your marketing department and your marketing spend, which most people think is like the biggest suck on your budget possible or on your expenses possible, you can turn it into a profit center, not just a revenue-generating center, but a profit center, right? If you still don't believe me that this is the greatest growth hack of all time, I do this. This is how I've built my businesses now. This is the funnel that I run. I run an ad saying, don't be left-brained. Everyone in marketing asks these questions that I've mentioned at the beginning, right? Should I be posting on TikTok? What are the newest tools? And I read Growth Daily every single day, right? Growth Daily is one of my 3 newsletters. This is an old screenshot of a landing page when I have a couple hundred thousand subscribers, but back in the day, we'd run them to a landing page. It said, join 60,000 world-class CEOs and marketers right now. and we will send you a growth marketing tip every single day. The moment they give me their email, I then drop them off on a Typeform where I ask a couple questions. Where are you located? What job title do you have? What company do you work for? What's your biggest marketing strategy, uh, struggle at the moment? And then if they are struggling with, let's say SEO, my last question is, we've partnered with Breezy SEO, the most effective and affordable SEO agency on the planet. Are you interested in a free 7-day trial of their SEO services? And if they say, yes, I'm interested, Breezy SEO pays me money, right? So I'm able to recoup the investment that I spend on Facebook ads or Twitter ads. There's actually a Twitter ad to grow the newsletter, but I spend on Facebook and Twitter. You're able to recoup that investment quickly because I took this email and all of the details they gave me about who they are and what their company is and what their budget is and what they're struggling with. And I immediately ask them, are you interested in this product or service? Once they say yes, I sell their information as a lead to someone else, right? And then Breezy SEO also advertises in my newsletters. And when I have an unsold spot, I promote my own businesses, right? I've been doing this for the last 3 years, investing my own money and recouping the investment back from advertisers. Like Monday.com, Notion, HubSpot. Tony Robbins is one of my biggest advertisers, and a lot of small businesses as well who wanna reach the marketing max audience, and I have 200,000 daily active subscribers now. Most importantly, not only has the ad business been profitable, but my other businesses have grown like crazy solely using the strategy. I have not had to spend a penny on marketing or PR or advertising elsewhere or influencers because I have my own distribution. I have my own eyeballs. That's why this strategy works so well. All right. And if you're asking what my businesses are that I promote inside of my newsletters, that I literally have a negative cost to acquire a customer on, well, you know those 5 growth hacks that I just mentioned to you guys and that we just walked through? The $5 a day retargeting ads, the A/B testing with Unbounce, the Google Ads lead gen, the Siftin social listening strategy, and the newsletter lead gen strategy, right? These are the 5 growth hacks that you should be implementing today no matter what. Well, my business is that me and my team implement 2 of these for you. My team is currently running Google Ads as a lead gen service and writing weekly newsletters and running Facebook ads to grow the list and selling ads in the newsletters for 60+ businesses actively right now. This is a screenshot of our homepage, but yes, we build your company a revenue-generating newsletter that delivers 10x more qualified leads or MQLs, marketing qualified leads, than any other channel. We do it for large companies like SmartAsset and Serps and Back at You, and then some more niche businesses like Birdie Houses and Scalable and NaviSavvy and Better Bookkeeping, right? No matter the product or service, staying in front of your target audience every single week Building trust with them, building value, right? Earning their trust that when they are ready to buy, they come to you first is the best strategy of all time, especially if you can get your newsletter big enough to sell ads in it because you can recoup the cost it takes to hire my team to do it for you, right? So if you want me and my team to stand up and optimize Google Ads to capture your lowest-hanging fruit demand, or if you want me and my team to write and grow your company's trust-building weekly newsletter, or you want both, you can go ahead and scan this QR code to get in touch with my team and learn more about how we can help you do all of this. Thank you guys so much for listening to me. I'm happy to answer any questions. And if you're maybe not ready to work with my team yet, no problem at all. If you wanna see what my newsletters are all about, every single day I send one marketing tip and some marketing industry news to 200,000+ people. You can scan this big, purple QR code here to sign up completely free, and you can go through that funnel that I just walked you through on the back end of the signup of the newsletter. Thank you so much for having me. Any questions? Yes.

Okay. Thank you, Max. That was a masterclass in ways to get more of the ideal people in the door and uncover revenue sitting in your business or that you could bring in. So we're gonna, I'm gonna have, because obviously we've got some time now between now and our next session, after we do Q&A with Max, we've got time left, I'm gonna throw in a bonus session. Max, this is absolutely incredible. I greatly appreciate you sharing it with us. What do you think the big mistake business owners and entrepreneurs are making when it comes to these types of things is?

I think the biggest mistake brands are making is the first growth hack, right? It's this one, the $5 a day retargeting. Most people think they can just run an ad or get in front of someone once and expect them to buy. And that's just not how people buy. You need to get in front of people multiple times. And so a couple of these solve that, right? The $5 a day retargeting ad solves that. The newsletter solves that. Even the Google ads, right? That can be a step in getting you closer to the 5th or 10th touchpoint. But I think most people are always like, ooh, how do I get in front of new potential customers once? Not how do I get in front of them multiple times and educate them that they actually need to buy what I'm selling? Product or service. So I think everyone needs, everyone needs a 5 to 10 touchpoint strategy.

That's awesome. I love that. And there's stuff on there that we're not doing that we will soon be implementing. So greatly appreciate that. Adrian, do we have any comments from chatter?

Hello, ChatterSocial friends. Any of you like to unmike and either say thank you or share a question? Sure, I will. Hi, my name is Sean. Hey, Adrian, first of all, shout out to you for bringing this amazing content over to Chatter. Thank you so much. Um, this is absolutely amazing. I am just blown away. I mean, this is like just a bunch of power-packed information that was easily digestible, didn't go too much over my head. I understood it. So thank you so much. Um, and just so many things that anybody can just pick up today and just kind run with, um, and have like probably an immediate, um, difference in their business. Uh, I have a million and two questions, but I'll only ask one. Um, and really the question is, is in the, um, subscriber acquisition strategies that you, uh, suggested. The first one was, well, you spoke about HubSpot, you know, purchasing a newsletter, and I know you didn't do that personally, perhaps, but I'm just kind of curious on what's the strategy behind that. Like, you want to purchase a domain name, you kind of understand how to go about that process, but like, if you really want to purchase like a newsletter or, you know, maybe even like a Facebook group, like, how do you actually approach that and what are the logistics behind it? And then you talked about acquiring subscribers and, you know, as an effective cost strategy to sell products. So is acquiring subscribers really just about pushing ads and kind of promoting your newsletter and that way you're gaining more subscribers? So I just wanted to take a deeper dive on those two things.

Yeah. Happy to answer both of those. So there's two ways to get attention when it comes to any sort of asset, right? You can either start from scratch like I did. And you could start posting on your social channels, "Hey, every week I send a growth marketing tip," or "Every week I send a tip on fashion or beauty or art or cooking or whatever your niche is, right? I have a newsletter and you should sign up." That is the kind of easier way to go about it, or in some ways easier because it's less expensive. If you just want to start with a large group, you can buy a newsletter like the Hustle or like HubSpot did. You could buy a Facebook group. I have a friend that bought a Facebook group in the financial services industry. He went on Facebook and he typed in stock trading and he went to Facebook groups and he went to all of the admins of all the groups and said, I'm interested in buying your group. Would you ever sell? What's the number you would sell at? And he struck a deal. He bought a group for, I think it was $15,000 or $20,000. and the next day he immediately changed it to, you know, group name by his company. And every week he would post freebies inside of the group, uh, to get people to book a call with his sales team. And I think he recouped his money back in, in a couple weeks because he was able to just really start shilling his product or service to that kind of siloed, uh, group of people, to that siloed, like, attention, um, pocket, if you will. So it's literally just a matter of going to an influencer, going to a, Instagram theme pages, like I'm in the marketing space, marketing agency space. There's a theme page called Agency Problems that has like 50 or 100,000 followers. And the memes are super, super, super niche. But you know, if you've never worked in an ad agency, you would never understand any of the jokes. But if you sell to people that work at advertising agencies, like large advertising agencies, you know, that attention, that those eyeballs might be worth, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to you, depending on the LTV of your product or service. So, you know, anything is an asset. And if you're interested in buying a Facebook group or a newsletter, simply just reach out and say, would you ever be interested in selling or joint venturing or partnering in some way, shape, or form? And then, yeah, on the other side, if you don't have necessarily the budget to get started with that right away, or if you want to just start a little bit more organically, you start posting on social and you got to give people a reason to subscribe. It's not, hey, every week I send a tip, right? You got to say, Well, right now I'm giving away my 5 best growth marketing hacks, and then every week I'll send you a growth marketing hack. That's what I do, right? Those are all the ads that I run say, you're about to get my 5 best growth marketing hacks. The landing page says, you're about to get my 5 best growth marketing hacks, right? And once you subscribe, I'll have your email, so I'll send you one every week that you can unsubscribe from, right? So you gotta give people something right away to incentivize them to give you their email, and then I have a little automation set that the moment they give me their email, I just send them an email with an ebook with 5 growth hacks. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Does that answer your question?

Okay, awesome. Sounds good. I love it. Thank you so much.

You got it.

Thanks, Vishen. I missed your voice. Oh, Anna Lee, let me bring you up. Any, anyone else want to unmute to at least ask a question or say thank you to Max? He's not probably familiar with ChatterSocial, so let him hear a little, a couple voices. So he's curious.

It's Nuala.

That was absolutely fabulous. A masterclass.

Thank you.

Thank you, Nuala. Anyone else? All right, then I guess we've got Max. By the way, I'm Adrienne. It's really nice meeting you. Thank you so much for all your information. I really enjoyed it, and, uh, we're excited. I'm excited to— Seth, I'm excited to see what these presentations— like, I'll be able to read them in the book. So really excited to see what all turns out to be. I think we're all going to be really happy and surprised. But if nobody has any more questions, Max, Thank you so much. You wanna stay on stage? You want— should I let you go? What would you like to do, Max? Should I tuck you away?

Thank you for having me. I feel like that is going to— oh, we got a question.

Oh, go ahead. No. Nuala's always, like, a little bit later. Go ahead, Nuala.

I'm sorry.

I'm bouncing about doing other things. Sorry.

But I'm listening.

Yeah. I have—

right.

So say what you do is free. It's funded, right?

Um, so that's kind of hard to sell, right?

Um, but you do want growth and you do want to build a community.

Maybe, um, you know, maybe, um, paid-for monthly community.

Um, well, how would you, how would you kind of use you, one of your growth marketing strategies for that.

This is free, but we want you to join our community where you will get a whole load of advice from all these experts every week or whatever.

Yeah, I think, I think the fifth strategy, the newsletter growth strategy, is the right one because you get people onto the free newsletter. Like I was just answering the other question, you know, offering a free piece of advice or a free weekly newsletter or whatever it might be, um, is an easy way to then say, hey, if you want more, you can pay for it. If you want to unlock the best strategies, you can pay for it. If you want to unlock interviews with the most exclusive people, you can then pay for it. So I think it's, it's like anything else.

Oh, I love that.

You have a free newsletter or a free Instagram or a free whatever, you provide the value, you show that you know what you're talking about, And then people want more naturally, right? It's like, you know, you go to a concert and you're sitting up top and you love the artist, you're sitting in the nosebleeds, and then the artist blows you away. And the next time they come to town, you're like, I'm gonna sit closer because that's gonna be an even better experience. I'm willing to pay more for a better experience that has more value to me or is gonna be more memorable or just a better overall experience. It's the same thing. So I would start that with a newsletter.

I love that.

Thank you very much.

Of course.

Thank you everyone on ChatterSensei.

All right, thank you very much, Max. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. Enjoy.

Our pleasure. All right, so, um, before— we're gonna slip in a bonus presentation before our next presenter at 2 o'clock Eastern, so I got about 25 minutes. And I'm going to teach you the 5 principles of magical marketing to attract new clients, customers, or prospects like magic. So grab a fresh sheet of paper. You're going to need it. These are the 5 principles that any business can use to attract new clients, customers, or patients like magic. So number 1, the most important principle, and this informs 50% of the success or failure of any marketing that you do. Number 1, the most important factor is who. Write down the word who. Who is your target market? So the more tighter you define who your target market is, the better chance you have of succeeding. So for example, we do a lot of work with professional practices and we have a lot of clients who are financial advisors. And I'll say in my first question in any marketing consultation, which you all can take advantage of at bookwithseph.com, the first question is who is your target market? Who is your ideal client? And a lot of financial advisors will just say baby boomers with money. And I'll say, that's great, but it's not narrow enough. You don't have enough money to reach every baby boomer with money in your town, and they don't have anything in common. So your marketing message is going to be really generic and have a really low response rate. But if, for example, like, this is an actual client— had a client dentist come to the office, meet with me, Who's your ideal patient? Anybody with teeth. Doc, you can't afford to reach everybody with teeth, and not all of them can afford to pay you. And we did a laser-focused deep dive. It took a month to interview his staff, go through his CRM, his database, uh, talk to patients, and figure out who his ideal patient really was. And it turned out, in this particular case for this dentist, his ideal patient was a 45 to 55-year-old suburban woman who had got— who was affluent, who had gotten divorced in the last 6 months. She was starting to date again. She was terrified of competing against younger women, but she wanted to do something to improve, make her feel more confident in her appearance, but she didn't want plastic surgery. That is a laser-focused micro-niche target market. It is a very defined list. It is a very small list. And because of that, it was— he was able to easily, affordably dominate that marketplace and become the divorce smile makeover expert in his city. He literally quadrupled his business and cut his work hours to— he was working 7 days a week. He went to working 4 and quadrupled his business because he was only serving these women, this specific target market. And he was no longer taking insurance. He was charging premium prices, cash only. That is the power of narrowing down your target market. So most important factor: who is your target market? The second most important target— important factor, excuse me— who's your target market? Where are you going to find them? So you have to be able to reach them affordably, and you have to be able to reach them where they're hanging out. If you use a fishing analogy, you have to fish where the fish are. So if I wanted 80-year-old arthritic widows. If those were my target market who quilt, right, I would not be running ads on TikTok because they're probably not on TikTok yet. I would— if they've got arthritis and they quilt, my best— and they're over 80— my best target might be an ad in Quilting Magazine, an ad in Arthritis Today magazine, Or you can do what's called a merge purge, and you can rent the lists, the subscriber lists of both magazines in your area, and you can then see who's on each magazine. So if there's a subscriber to Arthritis Today and they also subscribe to Quilter Magazine, they are probably a quilter with arthritis, and there is our micro-defined target market. So Who is our target market? Number 2, where can we afford to reach them? And then 3, what are we going to do that's different? So it doesn't matter if what you physically do is different, but it has to be perceived as different, which can be solved by marketing. So if I am— I'll keep going with my dentist example. 6 months after rebranding as the Cosmetic Smile Makeover King— he, uh, the Divorce Smile Makeover Expert— literally every other dentist in town was yelling from the rooftops, we do smile makeovers too, we do cosmetic dentistry too. But it didn't matter because he had planted a flag and claimed ownership of the target market. So what he did— the actual dentistry was the exact same as every other cosmetic dentist in his town, but what was different was both the marketing and the experience we built around it. So if you went and got a cosmetic dentistry, a smile makeover, any other dentist, you drove to the clinic, you had the makeover, you went home. His experience You got picked up at your house in a Rolls-Royce limousine. Your best friend locally had to come over to your house and meet you there. The limo drove you to the office. The office did not look like a dental office, it looked like a med spa. You sat in— he had chairs made. They weren't dental at the end of his dental— they weren't just regular dental chairs, they had massagers built in, so you're getting a little massage. They had mani-pedi extensions put in, so you were getting a mani-pedi while you were getting your teeth done. Getting massaged, they're playing— they're putting aromatherapy, they're playing soft music. Um, your friend is sitting next to you in a chair, not getting her teeth done but having the whole rest of the experience, getting the mani-pedi, drinking champagne while you get your teeth done. When your teeth are done, the limo takes you to a high-end women's clothing store where a personal stylist meets you and picks out 3 outfits for you. Then you, your friend, and the outfits get taken to a salon where you get your hair and makeup done. Then you, your friend, the outfits, and your new hair and makeup get taken to a photography studio where you get professional photos taken for the dating sites for your new profiles. Then the limo takes you home. Completely different experience. Same dentistry, same basic dentistry, completely different experience. Which is why he was able to charge twice as much and have a waiting list 3 months long. Because every woman getting divorced knows someone else getting divorced, or shortly after she gets divorced, if she's the first one in her friend circle, eventually somebody else gets divorced and they see her new pictures that she puts all over social media, right? Fancy outfit, hair, makeup, teeth, looking amazing. They want the same thing. So who is your target market? Where can you reach them? What are you going to do that's different? Why? Number 4 is why. Why should you do business? Why should they do business with you as opposed to anybody else who does what you do? The answer to that question is called a magical marketing proposition, or as Dan Kennedy calls it, a unique selling proposition. So that's the answer to the question: why should I do business with you as opposed to anyone else who does what you do, including doing nothing? Because we as entrepreneurs, as business owners, forget that doing nothing is our competition. People have to be disturbed enough to change. If your prospect isn't in enough pain, they will not do anything to change, right? So I was slipping through the channels the other day, uh, trying to find the show I was looking for, and on one of the channels there was a thing that said the name of the show was called My 600-lb Life. And I just said, what the heck is that? And I flipped it on, and it was this reality show following these people around who weighed 600 pounds. And you see their life. And if it was really disturbing, but if you weighed 600 pounds and you're happy about it, you don't have a problem, you don't think there's anything wrong, you're never going to go on a diet, you're not going to get bariatric surgery, you're not going to do anything. You're just gonna enjoy being 600 pounds. Now the people on this show obviously weren't happy about the fact that they were 600 pounds and were trying to do something to change that. And that was the whole show was documenting their journey. Just like if you watch like The Biggest Loser, I don't know if it's still on, but was on for many seasons where you watch the people, you know, diet and exercise and train and lose weight. So your prospects have to be disturbed enough to change, even if what you do is a good thing. Like marketing, right? We help grow your business. But if you're happy with where your business is at and you have no desire to grow past where you're at right now, you're never going to call us. You're only going to call us if there's another level you want to get to. You can be upset about where your business is, you can be happy about where your business is, but you have to want to go higher. Otherwise, you would never do any marketing if you didn't want to grow. So why should they do business with you? As opposed to doing nothing. And it can't be because I give good customer service, or because I've been in business for 20 years, or because I really like my clients, right? They can't tell us apart. So most of you have competition. Whatever it is that you do, you have competition. If you're a financial advisor, there might be 200 other— 200 or 2,000 financial advisors in your county. And if you line up 100 of them in a room and say, who here gives good customer service? They will all raise their hand. Who here loves what they do? They will all raise their hand. Who here believes that they're taking good care of their clients? Everybody will raise their hand. Who here thinks they do a good job? Everybody will raise their hand. No one's ever going to say, I'm terrible, no one should hire me, right? So if you got 100 of what you do— 100 chiropractors, 100 financial advisors, 100 accountants— all saying the same thing, how is your prospect supposed to tell you apart? The answer is they can't. Your marketing has to differentiate you because it can't just be, I'm good at what I do. Good is table stakes. Good is what they expect, right? If you just do everything you're supposed to do, your prospect, your client, will never refer you to anyone else because you met their expectations, right? When was the last time you went to a restaurant, the server took care of you that they thought you should have, right? The host sat you down, they took your order, they brought you your food, your food was what you expected, and you left, right? Did you tell anybody about the experience? No. Did you post about on social media? Did you tell your friends? No, of course not, because that's what was supposed to happen, right? But if they exceed your expectations, if there's surprise, if there's delight, if there's going above and beyond, Then all of a sudden you tell people, because now you have an interruption of expectation in a positive way, which results in testimonials and referrals. So who are you going after? Where are you going to find them? What are you going to do that's different? Why should they do business with you? And then how is the last one. How are you going to communicate What you, what you do that's different and why they should hire you, to who you want to go after, where they are. How are you going to communicate all of that in an automated way and build what's called a marketing system, an automated marketing system that will communicate your message to your marketplace where they are in such a way that they raise their hand and say, yes, I'm interested in that. I want to talk to someone at this company about that. How is how you combine the first 4 together to build an automated perpetual marketing system that fills your calendar or your, uh, with prospective clients who want to talk to you. And they're— they know who you are, they know what you do, they know why you do it, they know what you charge, and they want to talk. So they should be pre-qualified, pre-interested, and predisposed to doing business with you. How is how you fill your calendar or your bank account with people hiring you. So what often is— was what was addressed earlier, I thought, brilliant. I thought Stephen said it brilliantly. He said we got stuck in, as entrepreneurs, as business owners, thinking of all these different things, right? Every— chasing every shiny object. Oh, there's a new network, I got to be on ChatterSocial now, right? I haven't been— I, you know, the last audio platform I was on was Clubhouse. I don't know what happened to Clubhouse. I don't know if they're still around. Clubhouse took off during COVID and then when you couldn't go anywhere and there were no events anymore and everything was online, and people love the idea of, hey, I get to talk to this guru on chat on, on Clubhouse. I don't know if they're still around. Chatter appears, from what I know. Maybe Chatter has taken over, which is awesome. So I gotta get back. I gotta check out Chatter.

So pick—

don't get seduced by every shiny object. Pick one target market. This is the rule of one. Pick one target market, pick one location, one form of media you're going to use to reach them. So you don't need to be everywhere all the time, all at once, right? We're live streaming this to a dozen different places, I think. But who's your target market? Where is one place you can reach them affordably? What are you going to show them that's different? Why should they do business with you? And how are you going to do that? Go after one target market with one message, one offer, Make money helping people and keep doing that until you've helped everybody in that target market that you can reach in that method, and then you can start branching out. Too many times business owners, entrepreneurs come to us and we see they're doing 10% of their effort in 10 different places, right? Oh, I did one Facebook post a month, I did one Twitter, I did one YouTube video, I did one podcast, I did one of everything. Well, which is going to work better? Doing 10% of the work 10 different times in 10 different places, or picking— doing 100% of the work all in one place all the time, right? I talk— it's funny, I have marketing coaches, I have marketing consultants who help us, right? Because I don't have the monopoly on good ideas. I want to always learn and stay on the cutting edge. As Stephen said, I want to learn from people like Max, as we just talked about, and Eric, who's coming up next. And I said, oh, I want to do this. I got this great idea. And one of those coaches told me, Seth, why are you doing that? Have you finished doing the first thing? Have you finished mining all the gold out of that hill? I said no. He said, well, then you shouldn't be digging another hill. Shouldn't be digging another mine when you haven't finished mining the first one. So we're going to give you a lot of different ideas today. You've had a bunch already, some about your mindset and your psychology, some about specific marketing tactics. And we got a whole lot more coming, but I don't want you to get overwhelmed with 8 different— 8 or 9 different sessions. At the end of today, when I take notes, I take notes in 2 different columns. One is what I'm learning, the other side is the action items. And then at the end of the day, I'm going to take my notes and rank them all in order of priority. I'm going to say— I'm going to rank them on a spreadsheet, and they each have a different factor, 0 to 10. And I'm going to rank them by ease of implementation. How easy would it be to implement this idea? Speed of implementation. How fast can we do it? Profitability. How much money do we think it can make us, right? Is it— how much work is it going to take? How fast can we get it done? How much money is going to make us? How much is it going to cost us? And each category gets a score, 0 to 10. You total them all up, and then I rank them, and I go through, I sort my Excel spreadsheet by— if I have a dozen ideas from today, action items from today, and It's now going to sort them and tell me this is the order in which you should do them. I'm gonna do one at a time, and I'm not going to do item number 2 until I finish item number 1. And that's how you stay organized. And that's how you do one thing really well at a time and not get overwhelmed. Hopefully, that makes sense. Any comments or questions about The 5 Principles of Magical Marketing before we bring up Eric in the next 9 minutes.

Wow.

Wow. Can you hear me?

Just make sure I can hear you. I can't see you yet.

Yeah, you don't need to see me. I, I'm blown away. I'm blown away. Especially thank you for the organizational tip. I love that. That is why you're so brilliant. And I'm shouting. See, I told you one day I would shout it out of the mountains. But, you know, we'll just make believe these are mountaintops. To my My friends on ChatterSocial, anyone have any questions, thoughts? Got some marketing people in here. Just give it a second to see. I can't tell if someone unclicked. All right, anyone want a mic and say thank you to Seth?

I do.

Yay!

I've been in here since the beginning. I love your, um, your energy, and I love your matter-of-factness, and I love just that you're such a strong speaker and things like that. And I was serious this morning whenever I said I hope you'll come back or tell us where you're doing it, whether it's here or not, um, and do the AI podcast thing with more details. I'm very excited.

I'd love to coordinate you about doing it for all of Chatter.

All right, I love it. And I'm just gonna take one second, Leah, to just say that ChatterSocial founder is Nelson Apega. Nelson ran a big room across the hall, and Nelson realized everything that was missing with ChatterSocial, and one of it is that it's the video streaming. So it's a live streaming platform too. Honestly, Seth, it's where my family is, many of them. I, you know, I feel I'm at home here, and it's just always a lovely place, and everyone is a business professional, and they are all incredible. So thank you all so, so much.

Awesome.

Well, thank you for introducing me to it. I didn't know about it before you told me, so I can't wait to, after today is over, go, go dive in.

Okay, um, there's some fun rooms at night. Okay, you can find me at Debate the News. Now, is Eric here? He is. I may be missing him on my screen. Anna Lee does have a hand up if you have more time. Yes, of course. Anna Lee, Anna Lee from— Anna Lee, introduce yourself and let Seth know where you are calling from.

I'm calling from Ecuador.

Oh wow.

On my own, uh, digital marketing journey, and at the moment I'm really exploring all facets of branding, and the one that I've just been exploring has been positioning in the market.

And what you just covered totally crystallized so much of what I've been learning for me.

So thank you for that. And yeah, we'd love to see more of you on, on Chatter. And yeah, it's, it's always so interesting to get— I love the examples you gave because that triggered some ideas for me, not just for myself but also for a charity that I work for, because we want to make use of the Google Ads grant, which is notoriously difficult to spend apparently. So I've been looking at our website and how we can make that better before we even try to start using this Google Ads grant. And it's also given me so many ideas because as a charity, even though we're not a business, we still have to position ourselves in the market.

Why support us?

Why Why do we give you a better donor experience? And even for corporate donors, why would you want to partner with us as opposed to another charity? So thank you so much for that. It's so useful.

You are very welcome. Thank you for the kind words and the support. We have experience managing Google Ad Grants for nonprofits as well. So I feel your pain. Happy to have a conversation about that if you would like.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Annalee. Appreciate you all the time. So I just want to confirm next. Did, did, um, I did— is Derek with, or do you see, do you see our next speaker?

And I may be, I can't see anybody. So, okay, in the studio chat I saw Jill and Mary Beth commenting, but I don't have the ability to see people.

Okay, so sorry about that. So right now I do not see, Partee had come in early, which is quite lovely.

And there's a Derek Presti, but he may have been with, oh no, Derek isn't a presenter. I know. Oh, I can't see the people. That'd be super cool if I could see the people. Um, but I'll call StreamYard.

Who's Derek with?

Derek is a viewer, not a presenter.

Oh, okay, Derek.

Okay, no, we're waiting for Eric Huberman, who should be here, and then confirmed that he was coming today, so he should be here in the next 3 minutes.

Awesome, awesome. So I'm thinking to myself, Seth, What actually, if you like, what do you— you've had so many interviews. I, if I'm correct, did you hit your 4,000 on Sharkpreneur?

No, um, no, we've— Shark, let me— I'll go tell you how many we've had on Shark. I know I've done over 1,000, um, on Shark. Let me see where we are. Give me 2 seconds to pull that up. Uh, let's see, we are booked until March, and as of right now, I will have conducted 1,268 interviews.

That is incredible, you guys. Isn't that amazing? And Seth is doing— you're what, about 2 a week, Seth?

3.

3 a week. Wow. And you, you really have it down to a science with some great guests. So definitely, guys, Sharkpreneur, find that podcast. And I produce the Grow Your Business and Grow Your Wealth with the amazing Gary Helt, who is just fabulous. And I know everyone wants to be on Gary's show. And also I have so much pleasure in producing Whiny Palooza podcast, W-H-I-N-Y P-A-L-U-Z-A, just so you spell it correctly, with Seth's wife Rebecca Green, which is really an amazing podcast. And it's been nice. We've had— oh, I see Eric's here. We've had Katya. And we've had, we've had Marcella on the stage. Okay. We're going to add Eric to the stage right now. You guys share the room, please. Eric is amazing. And let me just unhighlight Seth. And there we go.

Awesome. All right. Thank you everybody. Thank you, Eric. Now, thank you, Max, our previous speaker. We're going to zoom out and look at marketing and from a higher level, how to scale smarter, not just faster. Our next speaker is my friend Eric Huberman. Eric is the founder of Hawk Media and has led thousands of growth campaigns for brands you recognize. He understands what it takes to build marketing that actually supports the business instead of overwhelming it. Hawk Media is one of the fastest growing marketing agencies in the country and one of the bigger ones. He's talking today to us about scaling smarter, building sustainable growth in modern marketing. He's going to show you how to build a marketing engine like we talked about, that 5-step, that marketing platform, that marketing system That performs in the real world and how to use data intelligently to grow without burning out your team. Eric, thank you so much for joining us, my friend.

Of course.

Thank you for having me.

My pleasure.

Should I kick it off?

Let's go.

All right. Yeah. So, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. It was Seth mentioned a little background. I built and sold two e-commerce agencies and then about 12 years ago started advising and consulting for a bunch of brands and just saw that the marketing ecosystem's broken. You know, 99% of agencies out there have no idea what they're doing. A few that are any good are really expensive, want long contracts, or just very opaque. And so just thought that it is crazy that there's not a marketing company out there that's the best at what they do, but also easy to work with. And that's what, that was the nascence of Hawk Media. And so now fast forward, we've grown over 6,000 companies successfully. Uh, currently we're running marketing for about 600 brands, a little more. About 250 full-time people, just got rated the fastest growing company in LA in our 12th year. So a lot of fun things. And so to break it down, we really, uh, after years and years of doing this, we started to identify that there is really a, uh, succinct marketing strategy and a way to sort of look at the marketing landscape that makes it really digestible, easy, et cetera. And we actually wrote a book about it called. The Hawk Method. Um, and it's how we analyze all the companies we're going in to work with, and over time, how we decide where should we be focusing, how do we identify the holes in their marketing strategy, and how do we know where to attack. And over time, we also then built our AI tool called Hawk AI that's doing this in an automated way, that's analyzing about 6,000-7,000 companies' marketing, media, and revenue data in real time. And then we're able to plug that, an individual company, and analyze it, know exactly what's and not. And this all goes back to this basic marketing thesis. And what's fun is like the perfect rating we got on the book, which the guy deleted it and it was really, I was bummed cause I didn't screen grab it before he did. But basically he said, I don't get it. This is just modern marketing 101. And the fun thing is that's exactly it. This is modern marketing 101 and it is the basics. But what I see with it is for a CEO, for a marketer to try to just distill things down, like, you know, the, the KISS methodology, keep it simple, stupid. Uh, I think this is the best way to look at marketing. I think people overcomplicate it and get, you know, lost in the weeds because of how complicated they make it. And so I like to keep things simple. And so when we talk about the HAWK method, we talk about the three pillars of marketing: awareness, nurturing, and trust. Awareness is what you do to let people know you exist. It's advertising, it's PR, it's what most people think of as marketing. And so what we talk about is in awareness, uh, you, you have to have that piece of the, that pillar, that piece of the tripod, because if you're not introducing yourself to new people constantly, you will shrink, you know, your retention will never be 100%, you know, and the simple example of that is people do die and I hate to be morbid about it, but that is the easiest example of like, you're going to lose customers. They're going to move. They're going to change their habits. They're going to change their lifestyle. They're going to change their economic situation, whatever it is, you're going to lose customers. And that's a certainty. So if that's a certainty, then you need to find new customers always just to maintain, let alone grow. And so continuing to bring in new people into the funnel is a necessity of any business. And some people sort of rest on their laurels or wait for word of mouth. People love to brag about, oh, we've done no outbound marketing, no sales. It's just word of mouth. And while that's great, it, because it obviously you can save a cost there, you don't really control your destiny then. And I have a great company that we're an investor in called Telly, free televisions. It's, they literally give you a free television and they, it's powered by advertising. So for this group, it's actually a really cool thing. I recommend checking it out, telly.com. The great example there, Ilya, the founder also started Pluto TV. He's a brilliant entrepreneur. And when we were talking about a year and a half ago about the business, they ended up at about over a million customers, over a million people on their waitlist to get a TV without any marketing. It was PR and word of mouth. And every time they send someone a TV, 8 people are referred by that. They have an average 8K factor, which is crazy. So they get constant viral inbound. With all of that, he still is running some basic performance marketing to see how he can what his CAC will be so that when it's time for him to control his own destiny and scale this faster than maybe word of mouth will, he can just turn it on. And so to me, that's, that is that, you know, awareness piece is having a methodology and a scalable methodology that, you know, that when you're ready to grow, you can turn it on versus just being the victim of however fast people talk about you. And don't get me wrong, again, sometimes that will be fast enough that you can't even keep up. So you're not going to like overdo it and try to like even get more over your skis, but having that done is important. So getting more into awareness, a lot of people have trouble figuring out where to go. So I'd say number one, word of mouth is still the biggest driver of business. Back to Telly, 8 people come in for every one they sell, which is crazy. Like again, that's hyper-viral. That's how— what they've seen, it's one of the fastest growing companies in the country. Like that is a crazy great business. That's not always the case, but word of mouth is really important. So the best way, and from what I've experienced, to drive word of mouth, there's two. One is to create a very concise way that you explain what you do. You know, we call it the value statement. So not an elevator pitch. No one has 30 seconds. Not a value proposition, not a pitch, but more just like when people ask me what Hawk Media is, we're your outsourced CMO and marketing team. So people immediately go, okay, I understand what you do. You're, you know, fractional CMO. You have this marketing team, you do marketing for people. Got it. Um, usually these days I'll even explain the scale. I'll be like, we're an outsourced CMO and marketing team to over 600 brands currently. And people go, okay, so it's a big company. You're premium cuz you're doing the chief marketing officer work and you've got the team. Like there's a lot that I say right there, but what that does, it's not just about me talking to people. I do have time to give an elevator pitch. I can take minutes usually to explain someone what we do. The issue is if first off attention span, they might not pay attention to it, but more even more so when they go to explain it to someone else, you have to give them something really easy to rearticulate so that when they tell someone else about you, they feel really comfortable doing so. And that person receives it well. So it, you know, if I tell someone we're your outsourced CM marketing team, when they hear, oh yeah, I need help. They hear from another entrepreneur, I need help with marketing. Oh, you should talk to Hawk Media. They're like your outsourced CMO. That makes them feel good. I know how to articulate and pitch you. I'm gonna go tell people about you. People love to be helpful. That's easy. If I didn't articulate it so well and they went, yeah, you should go work with Hawk. They're like a CMO thing with a marketing, like they're like an agency or something. The first time they feel that awkwardness of like, I don't know how to explain that is the last time they go tell someone about me. And so that kills word of mouth. So that's number one with word of mouth. Number two. Is, uh, content. We'll talk a lot about content today, but people don't generally share a product or a service as often unless it's right up the fairway. Like someone's like, I am desperately in need of marketing. They're like, oh, actually I know someone. That can happen. But generally they're not just like out of the blue sharing it, but what they will share is your content. So if I go publish, you know, great ways to build your marketing strategy for the holidays, That a bunch of brands will probably share. They're not gonna share, go work with Hawk Media. They're just gonna share, hey, Hawk put out this thing. They're knowledgeable. You should check out the content they're putting out. And so that also can increase the word of mouth cuz people love to share content with each other. We've all sat on Instagram and sent our friends memes and reels. Same thing goes with business too. People are sharing content and great articles and great pieces. That being said, it has to be great. I see a lot of people talking about replacing their content team with ChatGPT and Sounds like your content is very mediocre. Like it's just not a thing right now. It can be helpful, but the idea that people are replacing all these things with AI is not a thing. As someone that's fully bought into AI, built our own AI tools, invested in AI tools, I'm not anti-AI, but I think people are really over-indexing in it and basically are sacrificing quality for the sake of automation. And that's not gonna work out very well. It's a competitive landscape. You'll lose. So that's. The initial part of awareness, then you get into advertising and picking where to run ads is actually not as intuitive as people think. It is once you understand it, but in the beginning, people love to say, for example, I'm B2B, I'm gonna advertise on LinkedIn because LinkedIn's a bunch of people in business. And that's not, I mean, everyone, people on Instagram, like I'm on Instagram too. I run a business. Why not reach me on Instagram than LinkedIn? What's, what's the difference? Why do you want to reach me on LinkedIn? And what people are forgetting is you have to reach people within the context of what they're actually using the platform for. Um, the example again here, let's just use LinkedIn. I go on LinkedIn to answer messages and maybe post, but I don't like sit there scrolling aimlessly through the newsfeed. Some people do, but not many. It's a much more lean forward platform, which is why the advertisements traditionally don't work very well. And I'm speaking in hyperbole. I'm sure there's specific examples where an ad has worked. but in a general, you know, scalable basis, LinkedIn also changes their CPMs a little too often that it's really hard to build something predictable and scalable back to like, you want to be able to turn it on when it's right, when you're ready. Now, the best comparison here I have is Meta versus Google. So with Meta, you're basically reaching people at a time when they're just scrolling through reels or newsfeed. There's almost nothing productive people are doing on Meta. They're bored. And so whether it's Instagram or Facebook. You're reaching people when they're bored. You can be very targeted and you can say, hey, we exist. So Meta is my opinion, still the best place to create new demand for a product or service. So you're going to reach people when again, they're totally bored saying, show me something, give me something. I want to see something. And you can serve that up at a time when they have nothing better to do. And so it's a great way to again, create new demand. And why I say create new demand, because if they already have a demand for something, that's really hard to attain. Obtain because there isn't a search bar. You don't know what they're actually into. So if it's something like, I need a DUI attorney, I just got in trouble, Meta is not a great place to advertise for a DUI attorney because like, what are you gonna do, target people that are fans of Mercedes and Jack Daniels? Like, it's not built for that. It's not built for the timing aspect of it and the answering existing demand. It's built for things that you can impulse buy, that you can create demand for. They can be like, hey, I know you haven't thought about this, but you Hey, check this out. That's where Meta comes in. Google answers the other problem, answering existing demands. So again, DUI attorney, I got a DUI, I need an attorney. Perfect. Show up. The other side of that though is it's not great at creating new demand. For example, if I'm searching for running shoes, Nike, Asics, Hoka, like the big brands are going to take most of that traffic and most of that conversion. People might click your ad to check you out because they're doing research, but you're probably going to have a really bad conversion on that when you're a smaller brand. And so when you're answering existing demand of, you know, someone has a need and you have the way to solve that need, Google's really great. But if you're trying to build a brand and you're trying to like reach new customers, create new demand, let them know you even exist, Google's not going to be as good. So thinking through this now, if we get into the other ones, TikTok, I actually think is going to be, continue to be better and better and better than Meta. It's starting to get parity. It's not quite there, but, uh, They just have, they're way behind on the ad product because it's just a newer company, but the way they've educated people to use TikTok, it's way more based on your interest graph than your social graph. Like Meta has always been based on who you follow, who you like, and tried to show you stuff from your friends and who you follow. And then stuff like that. TikTok came out and said, I don't care who follow you follow, who you like. We're just gonna show you stuff that you seem to be interested in the moment. It's like I get tons of snowboard videos, some business and marketing stuff, a lot of standup comedy. Comedy. Like, these are the kind of things that show up in my TikTok because that's stuff that I've engaged with, not necessarily that I've followed. Um, vice versa, Reels is now trying to do that, and so they're getting closer and closer. But Reels, it's this funny thing where they're still kind of stuck in how Meta was originally built, where TikTok is just native interest graph. They're just about what you're interested in, don't care who you follow. And the example I'll give there is I have around 200,000 TikTok followers. I can post a video that gets like 300 views because if it doesn't serve my following, it's not something based on why they followed me. People don't care. And so that's TikTok. I think it'll continue because of that interest-based graph. People are then way more, they're way more open to receiving random content because that's how it's built out. The idea is like you, uh, it's based on again, what you're interested in. So basically your experience on TikTok is seeing content from random accounts constantly. And so when you end up seeing an ad, it's just another random account. Doesn't matter. And so versus on, again, Meta, Facebook, Instagram, you're used to seeing stuff from people you know. And so when you get disrupted with, or interrupted, excuse me, with someone advertising to you, it's a little bit jarring. It's a little different. Obviously still works. It's best advertising platform out there, but I think TikTok has a chance of being better.

Snapchat.

Really built themselves on sending, you know, one to few messages and being in touch with a small group or individual. And so it's a little too lean forward. That's why advertising struggled. Twitter, same thing. You're not really just scrolling your feed generally. You're either trying to change that, but usually it's been used more to like go read specific people's tweets, follow specific people, have communication. So those advertisements are actually just interrupting you and they're annoying. YouTube, same idea. I do think YouTube influencer work works really well. Integrating within the content is great. But mid-roll and pre-roll, that's just annoying. And as annoyed as you are as most people, and I know, again, these all can work, but it's not the best. And so these are all things to think about on the, the, the awareness side. And then you get into nurturing. So awareness, again, we've talked about like, how do I let people know I exist? You know, and some of the things I missed is like, there's also PR. There's a lot of other ways to get out there. Influencer marketing can help. Like, there's other ways to reach, but you guys get the idea. Then you get into nurturing. And so the biggest thing I see people miss, especially in e-commerce and anything digital where you can actually track, like, I spent this much and I made this much, is the idea of a consideration period, or what's called a purchase cycle, a sales cycle. There's a lot of different terms for it, and it's really that time between when they become aware you exist to when they actually become a customer. And from what we've seen, for e-commerce specifically, the average sales cycle for a $50 purchase is around 3 weeks, for $100 is around 5 weeks, $200 around 6 weeks, and then it trails off between 2 and 3 months. So let's just say broad strokes, the average sales cycle is a month. What that means is if I spend money today on advertising, I don't see the half-life of the returns of that, meaning half of my returns on that for an entire month. So let's start with the tracking piece of this first. If I spend $10,000 today and then I go look at how much I made today, does that make any sense? Because people love to look at this. Look at my daily ROAS. It's the dumbest thing. It immediately tells me that person doesn't know what they're doing and they're a bad marketer. And most marketers are that way. So what happens is, let's say, let's take it down a notch. Let's say I'm spending $1,000 a day, $30,000 a month. On advertising and I spend it for a little while and I quote, am optimizing it. So I'm convincing myself that I'm doing things to make it better. And then after about a month, my sales cycle, all of a sudden I'm making $5,000 a day. So now I'm still spending $1,000, I'm making $5,000 and it's happening. It looks like I'm making 5 times ROAS. That's acceptable. We're doing great. We keep going. Then I go, I want to scale this. And this happens all the time. I put a, you know, I take that $1,000 and I move it. I'm feeling bullish, I move it to $5,000. So I 5x my spend. And so I expect, you know, I'm making— spending $1,000, making $5,000. If I spend $5,000, I'll make $25,000, right?

Great.

I spend $5,000, and over the next week I still make $5,000. So there's no additional returns. I'm making $5,000, $5,000, $5,000. I'm spending $5,000. Like, all I'm doing is wasting from all the data I'm looking at because I forget that it's gonna take the average person a month to convert. And then I see it ramp from 5 to 7 and I go, this isn't working. I'm spending 5 and making 7 now. Like, I'm gonna turn this off. And then I turn it off, I bring it back down to 1,000, and then like 2 weeks later I'm spending 1 and now I'm making 9. I'm like, whew, glad I didn't waste all that money. I'm making 9 now. And then it goes up to 15 and I'm like, whew, there we go, spending 1, making 15. My ROAS is 1500%. This is amazing. We're crushing it. We're the best marketers ever. And then like a month later, I go back down to 5 and I'm spending 1, I'm making 5, and I can't figure it out. What happened? We didn't change anything. Like, why did we— People forget that it's not all in this fucking Excel vacuum that you just, you know, that things just happen because, you know, oh, well, we must have messed up the ads. And I watch as people start scrambling and trying to make better creative. And get back to that 15x ROAS, that becomes a new benchmark. And what they did was they just looked at the wrong window. So really understand your own sales cycle and look at the window on that. And so this gets into nurturing because then what you do is you figure out all the strategies to get people to convert at a higher rate and convert faster during that. Things like email marketing and SMS. And by the way, content, because people are trying to decide, do I trust you? Do I feel good about this purchase? And frankly, sometimes they just forget. Most people are scrolling through, you know, if you're advertising them on Google or Facebook, they're sitting on the toilet watching stuff. They get up, they leave, they don't remember what they were looking at. So just staying in touch with people and nurturing them can really accelerate that purchase cycle as well as increase that conversion rate and help them come back. And then once they purchase, bringing them back is the most important thing. This we've seen with a lot of brands that have been high flyers that then don't end up succeeding. Because once they hit that lifetime value mark, their projections go out the window. The, the best example of this recently is Casper. You sell these $1,000 mattresses and then their second product was dog beds. Like that didn't really increase their lifetime value of a customer by much at all. Cause even if 100% of people bought those, it would have been like a 10% increase. So you end up with, you know, no ongoing purchases. It is really hard to acquire customers. If you have nothing else to sell to them, no continued outreach, no continued sales motion, you can go run through your money really quick. And so you have to figure out merchandising and that's not necessarily a marketing function, but a lot of times collaborates with it in a big way. And listen, it's really easy to market great products and impossible to market shitty products. So if you're selling one thing and that's it, and there's no repeat purchase, you're gonna have a really hard time. With marketing. Um, and that's a nurturing piece. So between that sales cycle of what do I do when I bring people, uh, I've now made people aware I exist. Now I know that it's gonna take again, an average a month for them to buy from me. What do I do during that period? And then post that period. So I keep 'em coming back. How do I treat them? Even things like customer service, et cetera, that help people want to come back. The last pillar is trust. And by the way, I'm gonna leave about half of this for Q&A. I don't know where I find the Q&A, but I'll, definitely ask you guys to come back in. Um, trust is synonymous with brand, but as an early company, before you've established a great brand, trust comes from third-party validation. What I mean by that is testimonials, reviews, uh, what do you call it, um, endorsement deals, celebrities, uh, influencer marketing, any way you can borrow someone else's trust. And here's a fascinating whittles anecdote about that. Um, trust doesn't necessarily have to be from a trusted source. People are just looking for third-party validation. There's two fun examples of that. Number one, if you have seen the show How I Met Your Mother— and actually, I should say, if you haven't, it's about the main protagonist Ted is telling his kids in the future how he met their mother. And it's all these stories, cute stories about how he dated. It's a sitcom, uh, and how he met different girls and da da da. And he has his best friend Barney, who's this wealthy kind of womanizer guy that's, you know, always clever and hitting on girls, et cetera. And Barney's always trying to help Ted meet girls. And so his favorite thing to do is to go up to random girls in the bar when Ted's standing there and go, hey, have you met Ted? And these girls don't know Barney, but this confidence in this, just, hey, have you met Ted? In the show always works. They're like, no, hi Ted. And that strikes up a conversation, breaks the ice. I've talked about this for years. And then about 3 years ago, I ended up at a lunch sitting across from a woman and we're talking. I'm like, so what do you do? And she goes, I'm a showrunner for a show called How I Met Your Mother. Like, oh, we've gotta talk about this. I've talked about this at a lot of marketing as an example of like how you can build trust even without that existing trust. She goes, oh yeah, we used to go after set all the time. We'd go to the bars and we'd do that all the time. It works every time. So human nature. You want to see some third-party validation, go like, can I trust this person? Even if it's from someone else that you don't know who they are. It's this weird human tick. And probably somewhere in our biology, it came true of like just watching how other people interact. That, and another fun example of this that I do this all the time when I speak in person publicly, uh, I do a show of hands, who here shops on Amazon? And I'm sure a lot of you listening, most of you shop on Amazon. And then I go show of hands, who here reads the reviews on products that you're looking to buy, or at least looks at what the rating is or the review? Most hands go up. Most people check out the reviews. Okay, cool. And show of hands, who here believes that most of the reviews on Amazon are bots and bullshit? Most of the hands go up. And then I just pause for a second. It's like, and I'm guilty of it too. It's like, isn't that funny? We know that the reviews on Amazon are BS. We know that they don't mean much, and yet we still like to look at them and make it— makes us feel more comfortable making a purchase. So It's, it's a funny thing, trust, in that sense. And, you know, you don't want to abuse that, but the idea is you can build trust in a way that's, you know, people do it all the time. I watch, there's a lot of marketing companies that'll build like a publication to like give them their own awards and stuff. Now, if you get caught just completely lying, there goes your trust for the rest of the business. So like, you don't want to completely abuse this, but there are ways to understand that like having a testimonial from someone, they don't necessarily need to be the CEO of Amazon to actually be a great, you know, credible customer. People just want to see that other people have had a good time with you. And so that's an important thing to keep in mind is not to— you don't need to over-index it. The other piece of trust, again, this kind of plays into brand, is your brand is basically what you deliver consistently over time, good and bad. So examples of this, I always ask people, shout out your, uh, a brand that is the worst at customer service. And it is always 100% of the time, either a cell company, Verizon, AT&T, or a cable company, you know, Spectrum, Cox, Comcast, always every crowd. It's one of those. And it's amazing that they've all built a brand for customer service that's horrible. And then I go, okay, what's a great customer service company? And I generally hear Nordstrom's or Zappos. And so Zappos is my favorite example. Obviously it's not as relevant these days. I'm sure they're doing fine, but they're not, you know, there was a day where they're, you know, the darling of the tech industry. But with Zappos, they leaned into customer service and there's stories of like spending 8, 12 hours on phone with a customer. They wrote a book called Delivering Happiness, uh, all about, you know, giving great customer service. And so what becomes interesting about this is two things. I'll start with confirmation bias. Now that I believe Zappos has great customer service and Verizon has horrible, if I call Zappos and I have a bad experience, my thought goes to, eh, that person must have had a bad day. Zappos is great. If I have a good customer service experience, I go, see, they're amazing, love these guys. Vice versa, if I call Verizon, I have a bad customer service experience, I go, see, Verizon are a bunch of assholes, they're horrible customer service, I hate these guys. But if I call them and I have a good customer service experience, I go, Well, at least they have one. And that is the brilliance and the craziness of confirmation bias. We see it in politics. We see it in a lot of things. People are so stuck on their existing beliefs. They will shape the world around them in the exact same situation differently based on those. And so that knowing that there's a way to play with that. And that's what Zappos did. They wrote a book called Delivering Happiness, talking about how great they are at customer service. And so now. When someone calls them, if they have a bad experience, they give them the benefit of the doubt versus if they have a good experience, it just reinforces that. And I'm sure that also has pushed their culture to emphasize customer service and they actually are good at customer service, but it's amazing how much further that can go with your brand when you talk about it and deliver it. Another good example is like McDonald's, you know, they're fast, consistent, you know what they taste like and synonymous with the obesity epidemic in the United States too. So you sometimes can't control all of this stuff. Other people will do it for you and you'll start to err that way. But leaning into the things that you find important, that you think your customers will find important, and being that— for Hawk Media, our mission is be the best at what we do and easy to work with. Super simple. We know that what matters to us and our customers is that we're really good at marketing, but we're also flexible. Cost-effective, easy, nimble, all these things like that is what's important to our customers. We emphasize that's what we care about, but we also manage to that too, because you can't just talk about it and not do it. Cause what will happen there is you'll attract people that that is important to them. You won't deliver on it for long enough. And as much as you talk about it, they'll be like, oh, now you're just full of shit. And so you have to deliver on it to an extent, but you also get some grace if you push that. And so as you over time deliver consistently, if you're really good— again, McDonald's delivers unhealthy food, so you get obesity. Uh, Verizon delivers horrible customer service, that's what they get known for. They also might— I don't, I actually don't know this, but say Verizon has the best coverage maybe, so they get known for that too. So then again, people might hit a dead spot for Verizon, be like, wow, I guess this is— we're remote, Verizon doesn't even have service here. Like, there's a lot of things that go into that consistency that help you and hurt you. Um, and so being really intentional with how you build that brand over time is really a huge part of how people will convert, because back to this being a part of trust, whether it's third-party validation or building a known brand, 75% of people won't buy from a company they don't inherently trust. The 25% are what are called the early adopters. They're people that'll take a chance, take a risk. And those— it isn't a type— it is a type of person in some ways, but it also depends on the vertical. It depends on what you're selling. There's different people that'll take risks on different types of products. So there's that piece of people, and that's really what you're going for with that initial awareness, because you wanna convert those early adopters to then create word of mouth to build that trust, to then get everyone else to come. So these are the ways you think about building this. So back to give a quick synopsis. Awareness. How do you let people know your company exists? How do you just get out there and let them know? And you need to be constantly introducing yourself to new people. To maintain, let alone grow. Then once they know you exist, you've got nurturing. What do you do to convert that? What do you do to bring them back? What do you do to stay in front of them while they're considering buying? And what do you do to keep them coming back once they buy, to keep a customer and keep frankly getting more share of wallet? And then the last piece, trust or brand. How do you build that trust so that all those people that are not early adopters continue to buy? And so with that, that's the HAWK method. Anyone wants to shoot me an email, it's just e@hawkmedia.com. Hawk has an E on the end, and I'm happy to shoot you a digital copy. And yeah, happy to open it to questions. Seth, if you're here—

yes, I am here. Awesome. Uh, so thank you so much, Eric, for sharing. That was absolutely a fire hose of awesome, awesome content. So what do you see are some of the biggest mistakes that we as business owners are making when it comes to trying to get those 3 things.

Yeah, it really goes back. I think the biggest is that it is really scary to wait the sales cycle when you're scaling marketing. And I think just knowing that, knowing that there's a return, like a time period return is critical because yeah, it's really easy to get scared, get gun-shy and spend for a couple weeks and go, you know, we, I've heard it with, I run into so many founders that are like, yeah, we haven't been able to scale our ad spend. I'm like, why? They're like, well, the moment we ramp it up, our ROAS goes through the floor. I'm like, because you're looking at it on a daily or weekly basis. Your sales cycle is not a week. Like it is that simple, but just, it's, this isn't intuitive to everybody. And when you're managing a business and you're worried about losing money and you're being precious with cash, which you should be, this can be something really scary to step into. So still incrementally stepping into it, you know, depending on how aggressive the business wants to be, anywhere with between growing your budget 20% month over month or growing or doubling it. Like I'd say that's the range. Any less than that and you've got, you know, sort of a, the problem is you've got less than a standard deviation of like, you don't even know if that was just seasonality or it actually scaled it. I would spend at least 20% more to really see the bump, but 20 to 100%, somewhere in there, depending on how aggressive you want to get, and then give it time to play out.

I think it's really fascinating because, um, I've interviewed over in, in done over, let's say, I think we're at 1,200 interviews. Of Sharkpreneur, at least 100 of them, if not more, have been other marketing agency owners, thought leaders in the space. We have some of those, some, some different folks talking about different areas of marketing today, obviously. And not a single person has ever mentioned to me ROAS in combination with time in terms of, wait a second, even we've even told clients that, hey, you can't just double your ad spend overnight and expect your numbers to stay consistent. but we never mentioned, I never thought to mention, you need to think about how long your sales cycle is. And if you really wanted to chart the difference, you gotta do it over time. I think that is really, really fascinating and something I haven't heard anybody else talk about.

And it's to me, cause we've been in it for so long, it's, you know, it's crazy to me. It's just like, this is a very obvious thing. When you talk to people, everyone's like, of course I have a sales cycle. It's like, do you think everyone sees your ad and buys instantly? Like, No, definitely not. But when we talk about marketing, nobody looks at that number.

You have grown a very, very large agency. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the lessons you've learned managing a large, diverse, and sometimes remote workforce? Yep.

Number one, I think people can work remote at senior levels and once they've been trained. But bringing onboarding people remote is incredibly difficult compared to in-person. And we've really started to err towards in-person. Um, most of our, almost all new hires now are in-person in office in LA. Um, and we saw the difference, like prior to COVID, we were not remote. Post-COVID, we, you know, we have slowly gotten back into it. The difference in productivity and training and ability to ramp people up in office is just night and day. Um, the biggest thing I think I've learned managing a ton of people is building the culture I want to build. Um, I tend to be, you know, really try to emphasize integrity, taking care of people. I want this to be a place people love to work. Um, we've had a bunch of awards over the years for that kind of stuff. And you realize it when you start to placate to what everyone else wants and try to be the play— like, you know, you put— if you put the mission as, I want this to be a place that everyone wants to work. There's two ways to go about that. One is listen to all the complaints, listen to all the problems, listen to everything that people don't like, and try to change the organization to make it so they like it. Or two, be who you are and be really transparent about who you are as an organization, and then find the people that want that. And I learned that lesson, you know, took a while, but I learned that lesson later, and it has been one of the best lessons I learned is be very clear on what you're trying to build as the founder. And then be really articulate about that in your interviews when you're onboarding people, scare them off, tell them all the reasons they're going to hate it here. And then people that make it through that, you end up— and I'm dealing with this now in a good way— you end up with a team of people that it's like, there's no misconception. And they— and now you can be you, you can build the thing you want to build. Everyone's loving it. Because they knew what they were getting into versus people that are like, wait, I didn't sign up for this. Like, why am I doing this? Why, you know, this company's example, like we are pushing hard. There's a reason we've grown fast. It doesn't happen on accident. And that, you know, I always articulate when we're interviewing, like, I want to, you know, I want to dominate the marketing world. I want to really— marketing domination, love it. Um, but, uh, we— I want to dominate the marketing world is what I tell people all the time. And And when I say that, I'm like, and now if you're gonna join this team, understand that that doesn't, again, it doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't happen working normally. It's like, that means we're gonna be pushing and grinding and working our asses off. But if that's exciting to you, it's gonna be great. If it's not, you're gonna be miserable here. You're gonna burn out, you're gonna hate it. Don't come here. And so we've had many people walk out of interviews, renege on their acceptance, like within a week, like do all sorts of stuff. That my team would come to me when we really got focused on this. My team at first was like, we might wanna tone this down a little bit. Like we've had, this was like 6 months ago, I think we had 7 people in 2 months renege on their acceptance, be like, nevermind, which we had never had before. And I thought about it for a second. I'm like, well, no, that's perfect because those people would've hated it here anyways. And we got 'em out before they even started. Like, don't get me wrong, it's annoying. We gotta go find people, but we're take, we're, you know, it's the age old Cliché, hire slow, fire fast. Our way of hiring slow now is scare everyone off until someone actually is nuts enough to want to take this job, and then they're stoked. And so why that all fits in, why I think that's important is there's two reasons businesses fail. Number one, they get underwater financially. They get underwater on debt. They raise too much money and can't ever pay it back. They do things that financially they can't overcome. That's number one. So how do you avoid that? Don't do that. Don't take, you know, don't overvalue your company in a hype cycle, raise too much money that you'll never pay back. We've seen that happen, you know, with a bunch of companies recently in the past few years. So don't do that. Don't take on a bunch of debt that you can't service. Like, you know, nominal debt, fine. Using debt as a tool, fine, but don't get, you know, too aggressive here. And then on the, uh, the other side, so that's one reason they fail. Financial. The other one, leadership gives up. That's it. Because if you're not underwater financially and leadership sticks with it, you can shrink, you can contract. But if you're— if your leadership really sticks with it, your business will always survive because the only other reason it'll fail is financially. So if that's the case, that the survival of my business is based on two simple things— don't get underwater financially and don't burn out, basically— then I'm going to build the company that I want to build, that I want to run, that I enjoy. 'Cause then we can go forever and, and I'm just gonna be careful about my finances and I'm gonna be careful about, uh, personal retention. And so I've learned to really build the thing I have fun, to really hire, take things off my plate I really don't want to do. You know, if I need a break, take it. If I want a vacation, take it. Like this is a marathon, not a sprint to me. And so again, to building the team, I'm gonna build the team I want to work with that I'm excited about, that I, I can sleep at night because I know I've got a great team around me. That's super important to me. And thankfully I have that. So I've been able to run through a wall.

Awesome. On a personal note, I believe you were just at Art Basel. Tell us a little bit about that experience. Yeah.

So I've gone a few years. This is the funny thing about what I do because we're working with so many— well, we're a middle market company, so many entrepreneurs. It turns out that going to this circuit of like the next hype event actually opens a lot of doors on the marketing side. And so while from an ego perspective, I have a really hard time reconciling that I should be at like F1 or Super Bowl or Art Basel or whatever it is. Every time I go, I'm like, yeah, that was incredibly productive use of my, an incredibly productive use of my time to meet great founders, great entrepreneurs, investors, et cetera. So. Yeah, I went to Art Basel, which kicked off with an event called Chapter X that was for post-exited founders. So I've sold a couple of companies too, but I got to be in a room of 200, 250 founders that have all sold businesses and are building their next thing. So very high quality room. Spent 3 days with them. And then, I mean, every day was another thing and another dinner and another event and another family office event and a tech event and an entrepreneur event. I went to one art gallery for 5 minutes to meet up with someone because we're planning a marketing summit down in Mexico with them. And he said, hey, I'm at this art gallery, want to just come and see me in person? It was like 2 blocks from where I was, so I went. I generally try to like, because I'm there, because I do go almost every year, I try to go like spend, you know, a few hours looking at art just because I'm there for a week. But this trip was that— I think the past 8 days was the most packed I've been in a very long time. And side note, like, I don't drink, I don't party. Uh, thankfully had plenty of fun in my 20s and kind of over it, but I was still out till 3:00 AM every night, up again at like 9:00 AM, you know, 8:00, 9:00 AM to go do something else. So like you're talking maybe 4 to 5 hours of solid sleep a night, which I need my 7 or 8. So full transparency, I am tired today. I also have a daughter with that decided to— I took her to a movie yesterday, got home yesterday morning. Stayed, you know, slept 4 hours Saturday night, jumped on an early flight to get home to my family, took her to the movie theater, and she immediately threw up on me and has the flu. So, uh, stayed up all night with her now. So tired. But that's the thing is like you can sense the energy, even though I would love to go to bed right now because this stuff's fun and like I've built it in a way that I enjoy it. So like, I, you know, power through today.

I'll—

I'm probably ducking out at like 5 today instead and gonna get some rest, but it's that the stuff like Art Basel where I, again, I probably met people that, and I'm really good about follow-up. I'll probably have 30, 40 follow-up meetings from that week with companies that we can partner with, that we can build with, et cetera. I've already got 5 or 6 done as of yesterday. So it's a really, this is something I try to teach our sales team. Like once you get good at converting and turning these fun things into business, and understand that like everyone there is out and about because they wanna build something and they, they're living and there's energy. And that to be to that note, like Miami has a lot of energy right now. There's also a lot of hustlers and people trying to just get any money outta you. That's just part of the ethos, but it's a lot of energy. Then you can have a lot of fun leading a company like this because like every year, one of the most productive things I do is I go to the south of France to Cannes Lions, the marketing conference, and I run around France for a week, which is, again, feels like the douchiest thing I could possibly do, but it is super productive. So like my calendar is blocked every year in June to go to France, like, and it's a great thing to do. And I would, it's unlikely I won't do that ever as long as I'm running this company. And so things like that that become a really fun part and a perk of running something like this, I think is also important.

That is awesome. Well, we greatly appreciate you spending some time with us. I know Obviously you could have begged off and said you needed to sleep. I would have totally understood that as a dad of young kids. Adrian, before we let Eric go, any questions on chatter?

And first of all, Eric, I want to say hello. My name is in Business Girls Summit, so I'm Adrian Barker. Nice to meet you. I loved everything you said and I love the Zappos story. And it made me think that that's also like our own personal brand too. You know how we get back to someone, how we answer the phone, how we respond. Absolutely love that. So thank you so much. And we are live on Chatter Social, which is a fairly new app that is out there, a live streaming visual community-based app. And so we have many people in the room actually. Let's see, does anyone have any questions or would you like to unmute and at least thank Eric? Hi, Adrienne, it's Leah.

Hi, Eric.

It's Leah Rosenberry. I'm the head of community here on Chatter. I have to say, my— one of my favorite parts of everything you said was that you take those 2 weeks and do work, but you're having way more fun than that, it seems like.

Oh, to be clear, it's not 2 weeks.

I love that. I always—

It is a good portion. We talk about work-life harmony. Like, how do I make— like, I do 2 heli snowboarding trips a year with entrepreneurs and get business out of it, but go jump out of a helicopter on a snowboard. Like I'm big on finding fun things to do with entrepreneurs.

I love that so much. Great, great attitude and a great way to live.

Thank you.

And does anyone else have anything that they want to add, share, say thank you? Well, I have a big thank you. That was great, Eric. Thank you. Thank you for communicating with me so nicely. I really appreciate that. I don't take that lightly. And I don't— let me just look at the chatter box here. All right. No, great room. Just getting a lot of messages how great the room is and your, uh, your presentation was fantastic. How can people— how can they follow you? Are we just Googling Hawk Media?

Yeah, you can go hawkmedia.com, or I'm just @erikuberman on every social. I'm pretty reachable. Um, I'd say the only time I don't respond to messages is when it's just some random pitch that's obviously automated. Other than that, I'm pretty accessible and reasonable about getting back.

Wait, I can't have my AI agent call you? I can't have my—

that's not a thing for me.

All right, thank you, Eric. We greatly appreciate your time. Thank you, my friend.

Yeah, thank you guys. Talk soon.

All right, uh, let's see here. I believe Uh, Parteev is here early, so we're just gonna start early if that's okay with you, Mr. Shaw.

Okay.

Um, before we start, I want to say thank you for giving us some of your very valuable time on your birthday. Happy birthday! Well, we're not all— I'm not gonna get everybody to sing to you, but happy birthday and thank you for spending some of it with us. We're gonna talk today. We're gonna talk now. Partiv is one of my nearest and dearest friends and the founder and president of eLaunchers. He's internationally recognized for his work in direct response marketing, CRM optimization, and lifecycle campaigns. For more than two decades, he has helped small business and professional practices build high-converting follow-up systems that turn leads into long-term profitable clients. Today, he's gonna be sharing with you how to design a marketing and follow-up system that never leaks revenue. How to personalize your outreach at scale and how to use automation to deepen relationships rather than weaken them. Pardeep, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you very much, and I'm grateful to be here, Seth. My intro that you read, do you think you can read it again with an Indian accent?

Yes, I can.

Our next speaker today is Pardeep Shah. All right. Wait, what happened to Seth?

I'm still here. I'm just off camera so everyone can focus on you.

Okay, then. So there are a couple of ways we can do it. I'm supposed to be— first of all, I'm here. I'm your 3:00 speaker. I'm a little early.

Yes, we've been ahead of schedule, which is rare.

So I was thinking, how about we just do some improv or random Q&As and just get to know each other with the audience and let them just ask some questions before I get into my presentation. Do you think it's okay if we can spend 5-10 minutes where people who already know me, have heard of me, bought one of my books, are doing something, um, and they want to ask me a question, ask a question about Kennedy, ask a question about Seth, or—

I, I think that's a great idea. However, I'm gonna say let's do it after your presentation when they will have more questions.

Okay then.

All right, so there are— I can— there is a way for me to share my screen, right?

Yes, there is a— the thing that has a monitor with a plus sign in the middle of it is your share button.

Okay. Doesn't it feel great to be providing tech support to an Indian?

I wasn't gonna say anything.

Okay, share screen.

You're allowed to say that. I am.

I know, I know. I can get away with everything. Am I sharing my screen or not yet?

Not yet.

Okay, share screen.

Then you got to pick the window.

Entire screen, allow. Am I now sharing my screen?

Yes, but now we're seeing your web browser. Okay, I want you to go to PowerPoint, go to slideshow, make it a slideshow, and then share that, share that window.

Okay, I have to show you my Hey folks, my PowerPoint. Now can you see my PowerPoint presentation?

Yes, perfect.

Awesome. So I would like to play this video, but I don't know how to. Can you play this little video?

We can't play it for you because it's your PowerPoint on your desktop. Hit play, we'll see what—

oh, it didn't.

Nothing happened. You can hit play there and we'll see if it shares the sound.

Okay. Does it share a sound or no?

No.

Fine.

So we are going to skip that part. If you guys want to watch a little 1-2 minute fun video about me, go to www.meetparthiv.com.

Okay.

It's a— it has about a couple of minutes introduction of a bunch of people saying good things about me. But if you keep letting the video play beyond like first 1 minute 50 seconds, it gets into a heartwarming story, a case study of what I did during COVID to help one clinic. And we did it. Several dozen times during COVID So I'm really proud of that story. So enjoy the show. Awesome. Okay, so the topic that was assigned to me by Seth and the webinar gods is Business Kama Sutra: Building Relationships That Convert to Revenue. I have a large, deep presentation that I am willing to share. If you want to interrupt me, ask questions and make me stop talking back, you can do that. Just Seth will either drive me somewhere else, or you guys can just go ahead and ask questions and I will skip the rest of it. If you want to talk to me one-on-one about either technology, web, data, graphic, strategy, concept, all of it, I am here. X marks the spot. 15th August 2025. I mean, 15th August is the Indian Independence Day. So 15th August of every year, I gather with my gang and we have a celebration of success and declaration of of independence. And I always remind myself of the X. Seth, you know the X, right? The Toucoma Club X Award. All right, Seth, can you hear me? And are you still going to stay on stage with me, or am I just—

I can hear you. I'm not sure what you're referring to. And if you were— if we're supposed to be looking at your screen right now, you're not sharing.

I'm sharing my PowerPoint. Why is it not sharing?

You hit a different button.

Okay, so I'm supposed to go and share my screen again. Uh, thank you. So if I am not sharing a screen, please tell me that you cannot see anything because that's problem. All right, I am now going to go back in my PowerPoint. And I said, this is what we— now can you guys see my screen?

Yes.

Great. And still— and, and, and, uh, uh, Seth, please stay with me because I cannot see what you guys can see.

Okay, got it.

All right, thank you. And I wouldn't know if you can stop hearing me, so once in a while just Keep, keep talking to me. Okay. Awesome. All right. So the X marks the spot. This is the X I'm talking about. The Two Comma Club X Award. Seth, people in your audience, are they familiar with ClickFunnels and Russell Brunson and Two Comma Club and Two Comma Club X and all?

Well, there's a lot of people also streaming this on Chatter Social. So let's assume they're not.

Can you introduce me and Russell and, uh, the 2 Comma Club thingy? I'm kind of shy talking about me.

Sure. So, um, Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson are two of the modern godfathers of direct response marketing. Russell Brunson is the founder of ClickFunnels, which is the largest, fastest-growing software-as-a-service startup in history. Which went from $0 to $100 million in 3 years, and which Partiv and I are both developers on. And the Two Comma Club Award is very, very rare and given away— given— it's like a platinum record given to entrepreneurs who have driven over $10 million in revenue through one single marketing funnel, which Partiv has received.

These are my two 2 comma Club Awards. You can see the 8 on my— behind me, right? And what about the X Award that's behind me? You want to talk about the X?

Why don't you talk about it?

Let me talk about it.

Fine.

X is what you get if you can make $10 million from one funnel. Oh, look, here's the problem. Not a problem. Here's what I found to be true. A funnel is an income-producing asset. It will make you money. A funnel will make you more money when it behaves like the human that you are. But you will make most money when you begin behaving like your funnels. Today I'm going to talk about— let's see, share screen again. I want to share my entire screen and bring you back to PowerPoint. Seth, can you see my screen and am I back on PowerPoint?

Yes and yes.

All right. So I am a man on one mission, and that mission involves you. We are here to grow your brand. I want to show you how we grow so you can grow and keep growth going, right? This is me and my wife Deepa, and we are posing with my 2 Comma Club X, the $10 million, um, trophy that was, uh, received in 2024. Um, I took my lifetime of work. I'm a business growth strategist. Um, I built a system and method for developing a business growth strategy that is less likely to fail. We filed the patent, got the patent, got a second patent on it, and now I'm willing to share that intellectual property with anyone who's interested in reading all about it. So let's talk about agriculture versus horticulture. Seth, have you ever been to a farm, Seth, or no?

No, it's been a long time.

You know what, you know what this is? This is the rice farm. You know how rice farm works?

No.

You flood the field with water and then there is rows of grains and then every grain takes as much water it needs to grow the plant. It becomes a rice plant and the rest of the water goes to make the a ground fertile. This is how a branding campaign works. This is a vegetable garden. When you don't have enough money to spend on marketing, if you're looking to cut back on budget, you go from agriculture to horticulture. You go from branding to direct response marketing. I'm not a branding guy, I'm a direct response marketing guy. I do direct mail marketing. So unlike, uh, some of the people that we met today, especially Mr. Hawk, the speaker before me, brilliant guy, but I don't do what you do. I don't do Google, Facebook, SEO, PPC, etc. If someone wants it, I just refer them out to said. Okay, here's what I do. I wrote a book called— by the way, all— do you see all the books that are, that are behind me?

Yes.

Okay, I wrote them all. I wrote 37 books. I even have a program called Direct Response Books. I'll talk about that in a minute. One of the books I wrote is called Brent Never Forget. Brent is an elephant. He is a, an elephant, so he doesn't forget. We are humans, we forget. And Seth, what happens when we forget stuff? If you forget to do something for a prospect, we have an opportunity cost. And if we forget to do something for a client, we have a brand damage, right? So how do we make sure that we don't forget? Bring a little Brent, a business relationship system for your enterprise. Can be on any software, but it connects you to this lady. Her name is Jane and she is your buyer. She buys. This is your Brent. Your Brent is a data warehouse, a campaign software, a response management system, a sales cycle management, an order management system. It would do your segmentation. You can run campaigns out of it online and offline. You will manage responses from it using a call center, landing pages, business reply mail— if you guys still even know what it is. Most people don't know what a business reply mail is. This anymore, but it still is a thing.

You—

when you do a campaign, they will respond. You got to— that's when your job really starts. Marketing ends, prospecting starts. You got to contact the prospect, demo, meeting, proposal, close the sale for a pilot, check credit, onboard them, customer service, deliver what you Nurture the relationship, cross-sell, upsell, build rapport, and ask for— for my— your life is complicated, isn't it? It is. How do you do that without automation?

You can't.

You do the best that is humanly possible, but usually it is not good enough. And therefore you forget to follow up with prospects who at one point requested information, opted in, but you guys never met. That's this campaign, Business Kamasutra campaign. This was built in 2015. It has been installed 700 times. It has been installed for dentists, attorneys, financial advisors, small business, big business, large businesses, The largest company that I have installed this for made about $24 million a year in revenue. The smallest company was someone who could barely afford to pay for the software. So this works as long as you are a service provider who sells to consumer, and you are selling something That's between $6,000 and $17,000. It's very interesting dollar range. I'll come to that in a little bit. Can I move on into technology, Seth? Yes. Who am I and what do I do?

I'm a data scientist.

That means I smell and chase money. My secret weapon is the big data for small businesses. I can spot an opportunity. I can paint your picture with me in it. And I do it systemically. So I can paint your client's picture with you in it. And I know exactly when and how to ask for an order so I can build an automated system for you. These are not superhuman strength. I mean, I just use science and math to do this. My English is better than my math. My English is better than Seth's. I'm sorry, my math is better than my English.

See what I mean?

I'm not doing— yes, but my math is better than your English.

I don't know about that, but we can forget about it.

Fine.

Okay, so here's the concept and the strategy. Okay, an ancient sage in India wrote the first book relationship hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, Kamasutra. This is a book that talks about adding longevity to relationship by adding pleasure to intimacy. Found that people meet, date, and mate the exact same way as businesses meet, date, and mate their prospects, clients, and JV partners. But therefore, I wrote a book called Business Come Etc. The book draws parallels between the two processes—how humans meet, date, and mate, and how companies prospect, pitch, and close. And both processes, data drives everything. And in both processes, both parties must have an intent to engage at the beginning. Okay, needs it any business that has a complex sales message, long sales cycle, need to establish trust and credibility with a cold, cold audience before asking for an initial purchase. So in short, dentists, attorneys, financial advisors, etc., etc., right? The business problem it solves is the— I mean, you know, Seth, what if I want to just share this PowerPoint so you can read it? I like to talk about how the campaign works in theory and philosophy. Does that work for you?

Whatever works for you.

Because I don't want to— this is a— I'm talking too much. I like to just go a little faster. I want to just go into— I want to describe this as a— let's see. You can see my screen, right?

No, you stopped sharing again.

Back to PowerPoint.

You might just go through the— just go with the PowerPoint because you're not going to be able to— I, I don't know what get it to me and have me read it means, so.

Okay, fine. Okay, I'll, I'll just, uh, share this. Uh, okay, so this is my campaign. I'm just going to stay on this screen.

Okay, can you— well, we can't make heads or tails out of it because it's got a million parts on it.

So look The problem it solves is that you spend money on marketing, but you're unhappy with the results. And that's because people are opting in, but they're not going to buy right now. And they will buy it someday, maybe later, maybe never, but you got to stay in touch with them until they're ready to buy or unsubscribe. That's what it The technology I use is— I use HubSpot as my growth operating system, but this has been placed on Infusionsoft, Keep, Thrive, whatever we call it now, ClickFunnels Classic and New. I have built this on ActiveCampaign. I have built this on GoHighLevel. And for print automation, I use a software called Mailbox Power. So if you are familiar with Mailbox Power, you actually use it for your client, right?

We do it every day.

So you can jump in and help me talk more about MailboxPower if you think I'm missing something. The MailboxPower is a marketing automation system for print. It can send a book, it can send a postcard, it can send a personalized gift to you, and it is triggered on demand from your HubSpot, GoHighLevel, ActiveCampaign, or Infusionsoft, or whatever software you're using. Is that a good description of the technology set, or do you want to add more to it?

That is a good description. I think you turned your camera— stop sharing your camera. I don't know if that's intentional.

I don't know. You can see my screen, right?

Yes, we can see your screen.

That, that, uh, that—

if that's good for you, that's good for you.

Uh, it shows I can I'm sharing my screen. I don't want to deal with tech. I just want to stay on.

Okay, go back to your PowerPoint. Just keep going. This is good. Yes. All right.

So I wrote a book called Business Kamasutra. You can download a free digital copy of the book from businesskamasutra.com. You should opt in to experience the funnel. I'm going to show you step by step. There are 7 steps that breaks down this entire campaign that Seth says he cannot make heads or tails out of it because too many moving parts. Okay, so step number 1 is— this is the whole campaign, 7 steps to it. Let's talk about drawing parallels between sex and business. Business. Journey from persuasion to pleasure in sex and business follow identical 7 steps. Segmentation, you go to make sure that you are in front of the right audience. They can afford to buy what you're doing, they can afford that, they need what you're doing, and you can deliver value. If Your segmentation, the who, is done well, as taught by Seth a little while ago. You need to organize, orchestrate, and execute an approach. Approach can be email marketing, direct mail marketing, Facebook advertising, Google advertising. It doesn't matter how you do it. There ought to be an approach. If the approach goes well, you can have— you shall have a consent. Now the consent you get is for dating, not mating. So you got to have a dating ritual before you talk about your mating ritual. The one thing that matters more between consent and mating is trust and foreplay, something most brands most marketers, most salespeople ignore. A relationship is transformed when you make a prospect and a client feel welcome, and you go into the relationship at the pace that they want to. But when you have to do this for your business multiple times at the speed of business, You need the assistance of marketing automation. You can automate this role in your business. Segmentation. You could start with who you are, who you are for. How do you want to please them? How do they want to be pleased? Do you have the capacity to please them the way they want to be pleased? And are you okay with the paycheck that comes with pleasing them that way? So there is a lot more to identifying your who than just figuring out, I want to sell this, these are the people who are likely to buy. You're going to look at the promise, transportation, promised transformation, and their ability to actually acquire the transformation. Okay. Step number 1, segmentation, who you are. Step 2, approach. Now that we know who you are, you got to execute the approach. So the rules of approach is you're going to show up like no one else. Everybody wants the same price. So make multiple attempts, use all media necessary, and deploy all media simultaneously so they will notice you. So here's an example. When I work with someone like Seth, who does Facebook and Google marketing, we market to literally the same audience using direct mail and email. While he's doing Facebook and Google. All of it is designed to drive people to a landing page and a funnel where we will capture the lead and follow up with them online and offline. Consent. If the approach works, you get a consent or a rejection or a brush-off. Now, what do you do when you get consent? This is where you have to acknowledge consent and express gratitude. The last page of a funnel is a thank you page, but if you have a multi-step funnel, you've got to acknowledge consent on the previous page, express gratitude, and then take them to the next step. You got to do it promptly. If someone requests information, you got to thank them immediately and take them to the next step. And you get consent for dating, not mating. So don't just be pitching. If they ask for a free book, give them a damn book. Don't say, I'll give you the book, but can you give me $20? Sir, can you give me $100? I'll sell you a strategy session. When you are educating, you're educating. When you're entertaining, you're entertaining, right? Trust. I have an interesting take on trust. Trust is a mathematical thing. It's a qualitative variable that can be predictably quantified, and therefore it can be measured. You can elevate trust by listening to what they are saying, compute what you hear, forecast what they want to hear, and then say something they want to hear without breaking the symphony of communication. When you withhold information or when they don't understand you, it creates turbulence in the trust relationship. When trust is elevated to a point of monetization, both parties are ready for meeting. Now it's important for you to know, are they ready for you to ask for an order? If you do it too soon or too harsh, the deal is gone. You're compromising the sales experience. Let data be your guide. You are here to give pleasure, not get pleasure. When both parties are ready, if there is a match between what you are offering, what they need, the pain they have and the pain relievers your product has, the desired gains they have and the gain creators your product has, then there is a match. When economics are not out of whack, And if you didn't compromise the sales experience, a deal is imminent. Go ahead and present. Go ahead and show your fee estimate, engagement letter, rules of engagement, standard operating procedures, scope of work, etc. But make them feel good. Educate them. Have a stack of books that you can FedEx to them. Have a whole bunch of videos that they can watch. If it makes sense, have them come out so you can meet with them. Don't rush in. How you make them feel is very important. It's more important than what you actually do for them. They will, 10 years from now, 5 years from now, 1 year from now, they will forget what you did for them. They will forgive what you didn't for them. But they will never forget how you made them feel. Now, go ahead and make the deal. Deliver what you promised. Here's a secret. Don't promise what you cannot deliver comfortably. They don't expect you to take them on some enchanted journey. They just want you to do what you said you would do, and they want you to do what they think you should do. So keep track of what you said and keep track of what they think. That's what you need to do to make and keep people happy. The transformation of the relationship happens after the initial transaction, initial delivery, first 90 days of the relationship. Do it again, do more of it, get testimonials, get referrals, and transform a transaction into a lifelong business relationship and friendship. Now, here's an interesting thing. An exercise called they do, we do. We send them marketing, they visit our website, we persuade them to fill out the form on the website or the landing page, they fill out the form and click submit, we go to add them to the long-term nurture immediately, we take them to the second squeeze and ask more questions, they download the digital gift, give us their physical address, we ship them the shock and awe pack. Page. They talk to our telemarketer and book an appointment. We add them to pre-appointment sequence and confirm the appointment. And they show up or not for their appointment. We enter their appointment information into Infusionsoft, KeepHub, whatever we do. They buy or not buy. And based on what happens, we add them to one of the following sequences. This is the core of the automation. Here's the campaign workflow. You spend money in marketing to drive them to the homepage or a campaign-specific landing page. You capture the lead, deliver the free report or a digital gift, and start a new lead sequence. The first squeeze, I capture their name, email, and mobile phone. There is a theory that says if you don't ask for phone number, your lead capture rate will go up. But I like to capture the mobile phone so we can call and text them immediately. If they don't opt in, fine, good riddance, just get more deal flow. Thank you page takes you to second squeeze where we ask for their physical address so we can FedEx them whatever it is that we designed in print. Assets you're going to need is a marketing automation software, either HubSpot, Infusionsoft, ClickFunnels, whatever. You will need 2 web forms. I prefer 5 videos, a home squeeze, second squeeze, thank you page, tell a friend page, and a brand welcome page, a digital gift, a PDF that you can mail out to them, something you can ship, book, printed free report, a sales letter, or a shock and awe package, etc. And Seth can tell you more about all these. The content you're going to need is you need an email list, email header, email footer, a signature, PDF copy of the digital gift, report delivery sequence, which is one email and add the client to the new lead sequence automatically because this should be done automated. New lead sequence is a series of emails, 5 to 7 emails that will go out automatically. If we capture print, you can trigger print automation in MailboxPower. The human steps are, you got to call and qualify, then you ship the welcome kit. So you know why this is very important? Why you should call and qualify before shipping the book?

So you send it to the right person.

Yeah, but there is something far more important. Water. If someone requested your book, even if they paid $10, $20 for it, if you ship it and then call them, said, this is possible, did you get my package? No, I didn't get it. Okay, did you get my package? Yes, I got it, but I didn't get a chance to read it. Okay, I got nothing to talk about. Did you get my package? Yes, I got it, I opened it, I read it, it looks interesting, I'm not ready to talk to you.

I'm out of luck.

But if I called you saying, Seth, thank you for requesting the pack. I'm fixing to put together FedEx. It'll show up in couple, 3 days. It should go out today or tomorrow. Uh, just curious, why did you request it? What are you hoping to get out of it? I want to make sure that I give you everything you need. And, uh, let me confirm your address and I was hoping, do you have an ability to book an appointment so we can talk at length about how I solved the problem? You see how the exact same call goes differently if you call before shipping the gift? Yes. Awesome. That's—

how am I doing on time? You're great. You got plenty of time.

Okay. So then you book an appointment, you package, you send appointment confirmation, you send them direction if they're coming to you, send appointment reminders. And on the day of appointment, one of 3 things will happen. They will show up and buy, show up and not buy, or don't show up. You need to put in your appointment outcome in your CRM. Day of appointment, if they bought, they go in sequence number 1. If they don't show, they go in sequence number 2. If they don't buy, they go in sequence number 3. Mr. Partner, one email, two letters, and a phone phone call. Hey, you were going to meet, you didn't show up, can we reschedule? You send out a couple of letters about 7 days apart to reschedule. If the appointment is not rescheduled, add them to unconverted leads, lost opportunity buckets, and remarket to them. No sell— this is different than no show. If someone meets you take your pitch and don't buy, you can't call them back too soon. You got email them, thank them for their time. I forgot to do something. So what I have is I have one email that goes out 30 days later saying, hey, I was reviewing my notes and I am thinking, and I have an idea that I want to run by you. Can you book an appointment? That one email has generated me significant number of follow-up appointments. If you feel that there is no match and you should not be working together, don't waste their time or your time. Eliminate them from the system and move on. Welcome to the family. Handwritten thank you card, and sending them a welcome kit that has the why, why you are here, what we will do together, how we work, resources available, accountability, consequences if something is derailed, if you don't do your share of work, if you don't to do our share of work. So you want to give them clarity on the journey that you're taking them to. See, when you're on an airplane, they're going— the pilot tells you that we are flying 35,000 square or 35,000 feet. You don't— they just want you to know. They want you to know that there will be turbulence. They want you to know that you can take your seat belt off. You're engaged when you know you feel good about the journey you're on, and then you ask them for referrals. A long-term nurture is a weekly email, monthly printed greeting cards, a monthly or quarterly printed newsletter, a monthly holiday card, birthday, half birthday, and quarterly phone calls. And all of this can be automated. With Mailbox Power and your marketing automation system. But there is one thing you have to do, Seth, and that is make the phone calls. You got to stay in touch with every prospect who is in your pipeline. Otherwise, the whole exercise is moot. Am I the best telemarketer on earth? No, I just have a very well-calibrated system. So before I take question, can I talk more about my telemarketing ritual? Yes. Great. So There are two roles, and each role has its own ritual. There is an opener or a setter. This is a person who makes outbound phone calls to prospects. This person persuades the prospect to book an appointment. This person reminds the prospect of an upcoming appointment. This person follows up after the appointment with the closer. Seth, do you make your own Opening calls, or do you have someone who calls for you, who books an appointment for you? It's gone. Okay. So in my case, I am the opener and the setter and the closer. When I'm in my opener mode, I want phone calls to be quick, short, fast, and I just want to book an appointment. When I show up for an appointment that's scheduled, I come prepared, take notes, and be prepared to keep booking follow-up appointments. And the CRM software is supposed to keep track of the opener calls made and the closing presentations made. So you're going to count what matters. How many dials? How many conversations? What's your conversion? My matrix is you want to have 3 to 4 conversations per hour, 3 to 4 hours a day, 3 to 4 days per week. That's going to get you 27 to 64 conversations a week. This is the rule: a third, a third, a third. There are 3 things you do as an opener and a closer. Pre-call, you got to research, read notes from old calls, and prepare for the call. The call, you got to do your thing. And post-call, you got to do the journaling. You cannot skip a step. Tools of trade, good CRM with click-to-call. I use HubSpot. I use the snippet tool of HubSpot to— you can make snippets without HubSpot if you're not using HubSpot. Snippet is if they say this, this is what I'm going to say. If I want to send them an email, there is a copy chunk that I can just hit. #seth if I'm sending an introduction introducing Seth to someone. You want to have a call outcome journaling. So don't end a call without journaling how the call went. You want to create a task to follow up. And you're going to complete all your tasks before tackling newly.

Good luck.

May the phone be with you. And I have some gifts and goodies. You can go to businesskamasutra.com to download a copy of my book or request a printed copy of it. You can go to growthstrategiesystem.com to see how my patented growth strategy system works. You can go to meetparthiv.com to book book an appointment with me and watch the stupid video that didn't play on this thing. And next100k.com is a blueprint that you can use to identify how you will get your next $100,000. Freemarketingbooks.com is my bookshelf where you can get— you can read all my books for free. And you can always go to book with Seth.com and ask him about his friend Partha. And that's what I have.

Thank you very much. We greatly appreciate it.

Thank you. Now, can you see me on video?

Yes. Although you're still attempting— it looks like you're still attempting to share your screen.

I don't want to share my screen. How do I do that? I just want to Get out of here. I do.

All right. So what we're going to do next, Adrian, do we have any comments from chatter?

First of all, Partiv, I absolutely loved your presentation. I'm Adrian. Thank you so much. It was great. I really loved it. I loved how you ended it too. With Seth and then ask about you. That is just hilarious. And what was that about sex and business?

That is—

wow, that was great too. So let's see if we have anyone in chatter. We're live on Chatter Social. Do we have anyone that would like to say a question or say thank you, anything you thought you heard that you liked, unmike. So I love that the book, it goes back to the Kama Sutra. So that's hilarious. And he made jokes at the beginning along those lines too. So that really lightened it up. And I love that. I think you are great enough at tech. No worries on that. And if not, I'm sure Adrian can help you out. All right.

Thank you, everybody. We are going to take a 2-minute bio break and then we'll be back for— I've got a bonus session about 5 marketing power principles from Disney that we're going to do in 2 minutes before our next official session at 4:00 PM Eastern. So countdown 2 minutes. And we'll see you right back here in 2 minutes.

Okay, I'll go out and come back so I can watch.

Thank you, Partif. Thank you.

Oh, I love when Seth does his, um, his marketing. One that he did before was great too. Lauren, welcome back. We had some amazing speakers this morning. My favorite, Jill Lublin. I loved everything that she shared. Wow, she is an amazing woman, but I followed her for years, so that's, you know, I could be just biased too. I really like her. Okay, let me see if there's a countdown here. Thank you so much for being here. It really makes a difference. I really want ChatterSocial to be heard and seen, so this really helps. So thank you. I'm gonna do another 30-second countdown. I like it.

Oh, I can't hear you.

Welcome back, Seth.

We missed you.

Ah, I missed you too. And we have a— I don't know why we have this black blank screen.

I don't know either, to be honest. Oh, let me just go like— there we go, there we go.

Let me get one person to do a bonus session while before our 4 o'clock. Um, we are gonna squeeze in one of my most requested presentations, which is all about, uh, the— if it'll work— how to apply 5 $11,543.21 Disney Power Principles to your business. So, uh, can you see my— you cannot see my screen yet. Hang on, why is it not letting me do that? Let's try this again. Share, share screen. Window, PowerPoint, share. Browser can't access your screen. Okay, so you won't be able to see my screen, but I will tell you all, um, I— we will go over the 5 principles anyway. So why $11,543.21? Because that's what it cost me to learn these, if you include the flights, the resort, money spent at Disney Spring, money spent at Disney, money spent at Epcot, money spent at Discovery Cove, money spent on Ubers, food, and merchandise. That's That's what I spent on this trip with our family. Now, my wonderful wife thinks we're going on vacation when we go to Disney, and I think I'm going to a marketing seminar because every single interaction is an opportunity if you pay attention to learn how to improve your business. So principle number 1, the power of character. So if we think about the characters of Disney, Without the relationship that we all have as consumers to those characters, nothing else works, right? They would just be a Six Flags theme park that has no characters and not be able to charge half as much. So how can you make yourself a compelling character? And this is an important lesson I learned: the character you monetize has to be more interesting than your real life. The character you monetize has to be more interesting than your real life. Unless your real life is incredibly fascinating. They have to, your prospects, your clients have to want to be you. So you gotta reverse engineer it and think, who would they wanna be? And most of us don't even tell our story to our prospects and clients, and you should tell it as often as you can, and you should script it on purpose. So what would resonate with your target market? What would inspire your target market The point of making the sale is to start a relationship and convert someone to your point of view. So if I'm a chiropractor, I am trying to convert someone to the idea to be a believer in the fact that chiropractic can help make them healthier, right? If I'm a real estate agent, I know we had a real estate agent earlier, I am converting them to believe that they should choose me as opposed to any of the other 2,000 realtors in their market. So principle number 1, the power of character. How do you make yourself an interesting character? How do you make people want to be with you, spend time with you, right? Number 2, the power of place. Their relationship with you needs to transport them to another place. Now I understand we can't all have a theme park, Right. But by doing business with you, they are leaving their normal world and entering yours. They are entering your world. You need to give them a vacation from their normal life and their normal problems. You want them to look at you as an escape. So we have had this conversation in my house. Maybe you can relate to this where Um, one of my family members might not want to go to the dentist because they associate pain, perhaps, to going to the dentist. Now, no one goes, oh wow, unless you're going maybe for cosmetics. You don't— no one goes, a cosmetic makeover, cosmetic smile makeover, nobody goes, oh, I can't wait to go to the dentist today. But My wife and kids look forward to, let's say, Disney for months. So how can they look at you as an escape? How can they associate feeling good to spending time with you in your business? They need to look at you as something they look forward to. So you also think about the power of place in terms of how Disney does it. They made waiting in line for each ride. For a lot of rides, waiting in line is part of the attraction, right? If you go to the Haunted Mansion, right, part of it is the waiting in line is a separate ride, not literally moving, but as you walk through, it's an immersive environment. If you do Harry Potter, oh my God, they made it so that literally, like, if you're waiting in line to get on the Hogwarts Express It's like a separate attraction. So if you make up your own place, the beauty of it is you get to make up your own rules, and you can make people be compliant to stay in your rules, right? Disney has very specific rules about how you're supposed to behave, how you're supposed to— right? If you have this pass, you wait in this line. You can pay more and get this FastPass. You can pay more and get this. You can only use so many at a time. You can only use so many in a day. And then of course there's the ultimate luxury experience of hiring a Disney private guide, which costs way more and isn't publicly advertised. But then you literally get your own personal Disney person and a cart, and they will drive you around, and you automatically go to the front of every single line of every ride. You can do as many times as you want all day long, which would be the ultimate— what, more— most efficient way, maximum fun out of your Disney experience because you eliminate all the lines. We just have to pay more. So make a line, even if it's an imaginary, and make waiting in line an experience, right? Think about the steps people go through before they get to you. How many emails does your automated system, right, that Partee created— how many emails, how many direct mail pieces, how many phone calls, What do they get before they interact, while they're interacting with you? Right? Do they get videos? Do they watch a series of videos? Do they have a series of steps they have to go through? Right? Before we went live today, right, you know, before we started, Adrienne had used some wonderful AI tools to make a song about today's summit. And she was playing it and we were dancing before we started. That's an experience. Right? What about benchmarks they have to meet? What if you train your clients from the first time that they meet with you that they're supposed to refer to you? You know, it's totally normal that most of our clients refer as soon as they start experiencing how what we do is different from any other chiropractor, financial advisor, etc. You can make rules that they've got to refer X amount of people every quarter or they don't get to stay a client. Right. Think about your doctor's office. Right. I get letter— I got a letter once saying they were firing me because I hadn't made an appointment, because I didn't respond to their phone calls about an appointment. And I called and I said, oh my God, I'm so sorry, I didn't get the message. It might— there was something wrong with my phone. No, don't fire me. Okay, power of character, power of place. Number 3 is the power of ambiance. Disney does a phenomenal job creating an ambiance. If you think about every ride that isn't a roller coaster, every ride where you just go around from It's a Small World to all the— to the Moana, to all the different rides that are not a roller coaster, you are essentially in a wheeled cart, whether it's fake water and you feel like you're— it's on a boat or you're on a cart with wheels and you go around in a giant winding circle. That's every ride, whether it's Ratatouille or Small World or whatever it is, as long as it's not a roller coaster. That's it. The only— uh, The Little Mermaid ride. The only difference is what's painted on the walls and the character statues, and maybe they've got a projection screen. So if you have a physical location, are your walls just a boring paint that came with the location when you rented it from your landlord? What images would you use on your walls? What would— could you hang on your walls to create that experience? What experience do you want them to feel, right? Do you want pictures of— instead of your diplomas and your awards, instead of them being in your office, should they be out in the lobby? And should they not just sit there? Should your staff, when someone comes in for the first time, give them a guided tour and explain why all those awards make you awesome before they meet with you? If you're virtual, what about in your PowerPoints or in your videos? There's a line— my family is big Avengers fans, and there's a line in one of the Thor movies when Asgard gets destroyed and Thor says, Asgard isn't a place, it's a people. So how do you bring that community together? Adrian's done a great job doing that on ChatterSocial. Seth Godin, multiple, multiple-time bestselling author and tech entrepreneur, says people in the book Tribes, which I highly recommend, says people like us do things like this. People like us do things like this. So who are your people and what are the people— what are the things that they should do as part of your community? Power of ambiance. Presentation matters a lot. We were at Disney Springs and went to a restaurant, and I forget the name of it, but instead of them just giving you fries on a plate, for example, there was a wooden picnic bench, a mini wooden picnic bench, and then on that was a bucket, and on that was something else, and on that were the fries. Because we were having a picnic, right? They didn't just give us a plate, we ate off of a mini wooden picnic bench. How can you associate yourself with celebrities, right? They're in the public domain. Those of you who are financial advisors, estate planning attorneys, right, can you associate yours— can you use dead celebrities who didn't plan in your marketing and say, hey, you don't want to end up like Mike Tyson and go bankrupt. You don't want to end up like Prince or Tony, uh, or Anthony James Gandolfini from The Sopranos. When Emmitt Smith was on, I think, a second or third season of Dancing with the Stars, during one of the episodes where they followed him around, he went to the chiropractor and he said, man, I could have never played all those years of football without the chiropractor. I got very, very rarely ever got injured, I very rarely ever missed a game. It was because of my chiropractor. I texted my brother-in-law who has quite a few chiropractic clinics, and I said, you gotta go get this video footage and use it in your practice. It's like, but Emmitt Smith's not a patient of mine. I'm like, it doesn't matter. He's talking about chiropractic. If it's good enough for Emmitt Smith, it should be good enough for everybody else. You can also offer something for sale only in one location or at one time. Disney has competitions. Disney hosts cheerleading competitions. I know because my daughter, youngest, is a cheerleader, and that forces people to come and make it a trip and spend more money. Could you have— I know in our marketing world there is a chiropractor who had a— his birthday party He had a huge party for his birthday in the parking lot of the plaza he was in and did like a carnival and had food trucks and had clowns and magicians and activities and this giant party. And literally half of his business every year came from referrals of people who brought friends to the party, which has nothing to do with getting adjusted. And then there is the power of vertical integration. Can you own or collaborate with all the pieces of your supply chain? So for example, Disney owns the park. Disney owns— has the contracts with all the vendors that supply things to their parks. Then they built hotels and own the hotels, so now they get paid while you stay. Then they bought— built cruise ships And said, if they like us on land, would they like us on water? Think about it. What else could Disney own? Disney could have their own airline, right? How many people— more people would pay for the plane tickets from Disney. They could own all the taxis instead of Uber and regular taxis in Orlando. Why don't they have certified Disney Ubers? So how can you do that? Can you be a closed loop and be the quarterback of it all? So in financial services, can you have the network of the accountant, the estate attorney, the real estate advisor, the insurance agent all together so that you are a one-stop shop? Who else serves your target market that's not in the same industry you do, right? Our Divorce Smile Makeover dentist got more referrals from hairdressers than anybody else because the hairdressers were the first ones to find out even before, but even before the woman called the divorce lawyer, she told her hairdresser she was having marital problems. Problems? What about a yoga studio or kids' sports teams? What else do they do in their lives besides you? What's the gap can you fill? Think about— and the power of story. Walt Disney wrote stories that captured the feeling of that time. Most people don't know this, don't remember, but when he wrote Cinderella, At the time in society, most girls dreamed of being rescued by their prince. They brought out the Avengers movies during a height of a decade that was all about community and sacrifice. You have to tell stories about people like your prospects who start out worse than they are and triumph into being how they wish they could be. One of my favorite books on this is Story Branding by Donald Miller. Your business is not about you, it's about your clients. Everything needs to be about them. So think about it again. Every ride at Disney, including the roller coasters— is other than the roller coasters, you're in a car that goes very fast and moves you around through something like Tron. All of the other things like Soaring was you're in a cart, the screen moves, and it feels like you're flying. Dumbo, Astro Orbiter, teacups. You sit in and you go in a circle up and down. That's it. You go around and around a circle. Same ride that you paid $5 to go for on your local town carnival. And then another power principle, the power of missing out. Only a certain— the power of scarcity. Only a certain number of Genie+ passes come out every day. You have to buy them at midnight. My wife was like, I got to stay up till midnight and buy these things. Get these things. And then there are only a certain— I swear Disney wants you to be sleep deprived. Maybe that makes you spend more money, because then there's only a certain number of Lightning Lanes available for each ride at each time, and you have to register from 1 at 7 in the morning. So you got to stay up till midnight and buy, and you got to be up to register your Lightning Lanes at 7 AM. Disney also takes movies and puts them in the Disney Vault. They will do a promotion going, you can only buy Cinderella for a limited time, it's going back in the Vault, and then we're not going to sell it for years. False— fake scarcity. There is certain merchandise that is only sold at Disney parks. Our daughter Ella, when we went 2 years ago, was looking all over. We had to go and look every store because she was looking for a very specific Disney backpack that she wanted. You can't buy it online, you can only get it at the parks, and it's not always— it's not in every store, and they don't tell you where. Like, you have— they make you go almost on a scavenger hunt to try and find the thing. So how can you apply that to your business? The power of character. The power of place, the power of ambiance, the power of integration, the power of story, the power of missing out, and the power of vertical integration. Can you put those to work? How can you put those to work in your business to transform it from simply an interaction to an experience? So those are my power principles from our most recent 2-year-ago trip to Disney. We haven't been back since because we've been busy going on college trips. So last year was college trips for Max, this year will be college trips, this next year will be college trips for Ella. So I'll find— I'll see if I can find some marketing lessons from the college tours that we go on. All right, and we are getting ready to welcome our next guest to the stage. Um, Adrian Derek wants to know what the name of the chatter social room is, if we could put that in the chat. Oh, Derek, you were just—

he was just in the— Derek, you were in the room. He was here and he was on stage too, so he may be a little confused, but he was, he was already in the room. Okay, awesome.

I hope you found it, buddy.

All right, does anyone on chat or social have any— oops, let me— okay, sorry, Seth. I don't know if you can hear. I think you can hear me. I just can't see myself. Does anyone in chat or have any questions for Seth? I loved all the— I love that, Seth. That was— that That's probably because it came out of Disney, which was in my backyard. But I really, really loved where you're talking about the 5 pillars. Oh, Derek, there you are. You can unmike and say hello. Derek's got a handsome photo of himself. Hi, Derek. Hi, Derek. You just, um, you could just press the microphone button on the bottom. Hi, I'm here.

Thank you so much, Seth.

Good to see you.

I've been popping in and out all day.

I appreciate this. This is awesome. Oh, thanks, Derek.

Good to hear from you. Say hi to Greg for me.

I will, I will. Thank you.

Yes, we'll have to catch up soon. We will. Awesome. Oh no, go ahead.

I was just gonna say, Derek, welcome to ChatterSocial. Yeah, you could see Leah up there. Leah is the head of the community for ChatterSocial, and we have a few people in the room. Seth, But I'm not sure if anyone has any questions or just they're tired. But what you spoke about was great, and Parteev was great. So awesome. We got 2 more to go.

Stay with us, folks. It's been a long day, I know, but we're giving you total immersion here.

This has been amazing masterclass. Where do I send my money? No, I don't see him yet. Okay. Where, where do I send my money for this great masterclass? Oh, thank you. Very nice.

No, we're just giving this away, just pouring good content out into the universe.

I love it. Um, any, any other thoughts, questions, you guys, regarding marketing? You got Seth for a couple minutes. I don't know how long, so ask now.

Disneyfy your business.

Well, I just, I just came in, so I'm catching the tail end, but I just want to say hello. I'm back. And Adrian, thank you so much for all your hard work and bringing everybody together. You're amazing. Thank you, Maria from New York.

We got to remind you guys to say who you are, Maria, with the beautiful red hair and awesome, awesome, awesome. Okay, so we can Yeah, why don't we—

why don't we take— why don't we do a countdown timer, take a break for a few— take a break for 3 or 4 minutes, and then we'll start back up when Mark gets here.

I'm gonna play the song and see if you guys can hear it. Awesome. So hang tight. All this talk about Suno. Suno. All right, so I actually created a song. Let me know if you could hear this. So I'm gonna go to library. So much fun. All right, hold on. All About Gabe. I, I hope you love that one, Sheila. Okay, can you hear it? No, I don't know why this, the Suna doesn't play, but okay, I'll play it this way so you guys can hear it. Whoops, I muted it.

Okay, sorry about that.

3, 2, 1, here we go! Turn it right, feel the rhythm, feel the light.

Every second, every beat, we are rising from our seat. It is showtime, showtime, let the room cheer. The sun is shining, best moment of the year.

Turn the energy higher, like good vibes glow.

3, 2, 1, here we go! It is showtime, showtime, let the room unite. Boom, boom.

That is, uh, now what do I produce songs now with Suno? Uh, it's a lot of fun. Okay, and so we are waiting for Mark Kohler, who I'm excited about, and let's just see. Patience. Derek, we have a minute or two. Can you share like where are you from? I see your, your marketing too. I'd love to know more.

Adrian, did you have a question for me? The line broke up just a little bit.

Oh, sorry. Yes, Derek. I just wanted to— would you mind just introducing yourself to all of us?

I don't— yeah, I don't mind introducing myself at all. I'm actually down in Austin, Texas. I'm originally from Buffalo, New York, and Seth and I, uh, do know each other a little bit. And so yeah, I wanted to pop in today and, and learn from everyone and take full advantage of it. Um, I'm also in the, in the marketing world, particularly on the digital marketing side.

So we do everything from SEO to reputation management to a little bit of AI automation and, um, custom web design.

Yes, the Presti family and I go back a long way.

We do.

That's awesome. Thank you for that. I appreciate it.

Is this your first time on Chatter Social? It is. I just downloaded actually as you were, as you were promoting it and talking it up. I wanted to check it out, so I just, just got it today.

Awesome.

Wow, everyone in the room, everyone in the room, follow Derek. Derek, I'm already following you. Let's, let's Have Derek, follow Derek so he'll come back and join us.

Thanks, Adrian. I appreciate it.

Love Chatter Social. Got some, there's some brilliance right here in the room with Anna Lee, who's actually from Ecuador, Lauren, Leah, Sheila, Maria, Vashon, who's just some really intelligent people. We may be small room right now, but we're mighty as we wait for Mark. Yep.

Mark, let me just— a minute.

Oh, awesome. Thank you, Seth. Yes, this has been great. I don't even feel tired. I like— I literally have no— I've just enjoyed this. I mean, yeah, I've stood up and like moved my body, but wow, I, I'm looking at my notes and I've just loved every second. Awesome. For Sex and Business. Sex and business, that still gets me. Well, I have to remove— do I have to now say not for kids on YouTube? The F-bomb got pulled, so I'm like, okay, well, will YouTube notice that?

I do not know. We'll find out.

Okay, we'll test it. Oh boy. So, um, well, you know what? Let me just see if I could pull Mark's bio. I have it. He is very interesting. Yeah, let's— I know he's not here yet.

My intro.

All right, I'm excited. And we've had plenty of people on, uh, live watching and liking and been resharing, so awesome. It's good, really. And tonight I could sleep because I won't have the nerves.

No need.

Next up, we're going to talk about saving you money in just a minute. We're talking about cutting that tax bill, keeping more of your hard-earned money, giving less to the government.

I always wondered, Seth, what, like, what is it like a teenager when they hear that? What do they think? What goes through their mind and how we have to teach them to understand it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing.

Yes, that is an excellent question. I have taught my kids, hopefully a good chunk about money and finance and taxes. Um, and it's funny because I will teach them something and then Ella's response is— default is usually, yeah, but you're just going to manage my money and my taxes and my finances for my whole life, right? I said, that's sweet. Not exactly. We'll figure it out.

Oh, okay. I see Kirby came in, but not sure if that was part—

someone in Mark's office. Yeah. Okay. Get them back and get this party continued. 2 more sessions, people. Hang with us 2 more hours. You could do it.

And we're going to share that these sessions are going to be turned into a book. I'm very excited about that. And wait till you see— all the speakers will see a manuscript, and I think they'll all be impressed.

Yes, there will be a book made out of this summit so you can read it later.

Welcome, Dylan. If you want to, uh, come to the stage, please let me know. Candace, thank you for always supporting. Really appreciate you. Lauren, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the rocket. Really appreciate that too. Very nice. Share the room too for Mark.

Yep, I'm sure he'll be here in just a minute. It looks like they might have been having some tech issues.

Okay. Oh, I think— oh, exciting! Okay.

Hey, we ready to party? We are ready to party.

All right. Awesome. Can we turn your camera on?

Okay, we're still getting this yard thing figured out.

Yep, that's all right, take your time.

Yes, it's on, it's just choosing where—

oh, Blackmagic, is that it?

There we go. Okay, all right.

Oh, you look great, Mark. Oh my, yeah.

Oh, thank you. I need hair and makeup. I mean, this is all I got. I mean, I gotta work this. Okay, uh, yeah, you can shut that. Can you bring me a drink, please? Don't spike it, it's morning. Okay, so I'm just joking. Okay, let me see here too. We can switch. Okay, we can go here. That looks all right. Okay, good. I'm all yours. Sorry. All right, awesome, everybody.

Thank you so much. Now we're going to shift to a topic that can save you a lot of money. Our next speaker is Mark Kohler, one of the most trusted names in small business tax strategy, legal structure, and asset protection. His session is titled Critical Year-End Tax Strategies Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know. Mark's going to walk us through some tax moves, structural protections, and financial decisions you should put in place so you can keep more of what you earn and prepare intelligently for 2026. Mark, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. Did they see me doing my hair and audio check?

They did.

Oh my word. Hey, well, thanks everybody for your patience. I came in hot. It's been a busy Monday and just ran here into this, my office/studio. Well, let me ask a few questions because I want to tailor my conversation. Thanks, Kirby, to you guys. This is— I'm not going to freaking throw up a PowerPoint and bore the hell out of you guys. I want to talk about real strategies before year-end that are going to save you and make you money. Literally. Most accountants don't go here. They're afraid to open that Pandora's box because they're scared of their own shadow. For the most part, I train Hundreds. And I've got over 1,600 CPAs and registered certified tax advisors and enrolled agents around the country that I train. I am a CPA, attorney, author, blah, blah, blah. And I want you guys to rely on what I'm talking about. And also, I'm not selling some boot camp in Vegas next week. There's no freaking sales pitch here, guys. I want you to feel safe. I'm here just to educate you guys and be a resource. Any strategy I talk about, I will have a podcast for an hour on it. I will have an article on it. I will have one of my books that you can read. You could go to my YouTube channel and then you can go to your accountant and say, what the hell? Why are we not doing this? So that's what this is about. It's going to be super applicable and tailored to you. So, Seth, you're maintaining chat as well. So people can ask questions and you're going to say— I'm going to say, Seth, and you're going to say, Mark, we got a couple of questions. You want to roll like that?

Yes, we will interrupt you when we've got questions in the chat and on ChatterSocial. They can, and we'll open it up at the end for them to ask questions live.

Okay. And we have 1 hour till the top of the hour. Yes. Okay. Next, how many people are here now? Where's everybody from? Give me a little bit of the metrics on who I'm talking to.

Okay. So from, I would say the bulk of our folks are obviously from the US. I believe what I can see right now is probably about 330 folks online. Okay.

All over the U.S., real estate investors, business owners, small business owners, W-2 wage earners, a mix of the 2, 3, 4. What are we looking like?

Small business owners. And you probably have some who also invest in real estate. We shouldn't have too many W-2 folks. Okay.

I Okay, perfect. I'm just syncing my watch. I mean, I've got to pull an Ethan Hunt here and we are ready to go. I have accepted the mission. Awesome. So, all right, well, everybody, in my opinion, a real estate investor is always a business owner just because if you own a rental property, that's a micro-business and Number 2, business owners making money. One of the number 1 places to put that profit is into real estate and finding the balance of how much you inject back into your business and how much you deploy into real estate is a lifelong battle. There's been years of my life where I put money, too much money back in my business, which is high risk in some ways, but it's also a big payoff and can be. And then there's been times where I pulled out just the right amount to go buy more real estate. And then there's times I've been real estate rich, cash poor, you know, so you're trying to find that balance. But the reason why I bring that up is because as a business owner, when you start making money, putting every dollar back in your business is not a smart idea. We need to find ways to create more wealth in other buckets to create more sustainability and future wealth, because we don't want to be always having to work to make money. We want our assets working for us. So I would like to do this. I've got probably 5 to 10 year-end strategies. And let me just whet your whistle with what we're going to talk about. We need to talk about the S corporation and should you— and how much payroll should you be taking before year-end? Some of you with an LLC should be doing a retroactive S election. We'll talk about that for a minute. For any of you that have kids under age 18 or kids 18 and older, how do you compensate them before year-end if you've been supporting any family member? A parent, again, a child in any way, shape, or form. Any of you that are paying tuition for your kids' college, stop it. We're going to pay your kids for being on your board of directors, board of advisors, and they're going to pay for their own tuition. You just got 100% write-off. They're in a lower tax bracket, blah, blah, blah. So that's just— I just want to whet your whistle. We're going to talk about compensating kids. Should you put your spouse on payroll? 9 times out of 10, no, because they're going to— they don't need to. For Social Security, whole other strategy there. I want to talk about buying big equipment before year-end, maybe, maybe not, using bonus depreciation, the real estate professional or self-rental or Airbnb strategy. We're in our final 3 weeks of the year. Some of you that are close to closing on something, we're going to want to escalate that. But I don't want to spend too much time there because we don't have a big window. I want to talk about your board meeting that all of you are going to have before year-end. Healthcare. We've got the HSA enrollment period going on right now, and if you're going to do an HRA before year-end, we got to pull the trigger on that. Flexible spending accounts— use it or lose it. Medical expenses are not talked about enough, so we're going to hit medical a little bit. Dining, travel, uh, Roth conversions before year-end. Guys, I have a 25-point checklist of year-end tax tips that if you don't do you lose. Now, I will give you a link to a recording we did a week ago with my 10 lawyers, each taking 2 of those. And you can go watch that and get a little more information on that as well. Whew. Okay. That was a lot. Believe it or not, I have not mainlined any drug this morning. This is how I was born. And it drove my mom crazy. It's called hyperactivity. Back in the '80s, I think they call it A-something, B-whatever now. I don't know. Anyway, I'm going to keep this light. I want to keep it fun. I love accounting. I love tax. I love asset protection, the law, and I love building wealth. And so that's what I do for Main Street business owners all over the country. So let's dive into it now, Seth. I'm going to get a couple concepts out and you be ready for the first question or two. I want to go to— all right, I want to go to the whiteboard. All right, one concept that is going to build the foundation for all of you for this year before year-end and moving forward is what is called the trifecta. The trifecta is a visual representation of how I want you structuring your assets and your income for maximum tax savings and asset protection. I've literally trademarked this. It's in my books, the Tax and Legal Playbook being my bestseller, over 1,000 stars, 5 stars. You can get a copy of that audio Kindle, print, whatever. But this is stuff that really does move the needle in our lives. Here's what it looks like. Now, this is going to be the platform for our year-end tax tips that we're going to talk about. The foundation— you can see that. All right. That doesn't look bad, right? Okay. In fact, I'm going to wipe that up. There we go. I love my vibe board. Oh, this is so fun. Okay, so the trifecta is down here, your revocable Living Trust. Half of America doesn't even have a will, but we need to have some sort of trust structure at the bottom. Put it on the to-do list for 2026. Do not freak out. It's not a year-end strategy. You can add this later, but that's the foundation. Down here is your 1040. All of your money flows downhill. All of your write-offs, all of your income flows downhill into your 1040. That's where we're going to make a smoothie. Try to get the best tax benefits we can. On this side of the equation is your operations. On this side are your assets.

This is passive income.

This is ordinary income. Now, what income do we want more of? We would love more passive income means our assets are working for us. Ordinary income generates the fuel to build more assets. It's a machine that works together. I want a firewall between the two for asset protection. The basic trifecta would be an S corporation, which is typical for every small business owner making more than $50,000 a year. We can talk about that and debate it more here in a moment. This could be an LLC taxed as an S corp. If any, if any of you— there's probably 100 of you in here that are an LLC taxed as an S corp— you have an S corp. Do not call it an LLC, please, for the love of all that's holy, because you're, you're going to confuse your professionals. Yes, you have an LLC acronym at the end of your entity, but for IRS purposes, it is now an S corp. Corporation, which puts you in a tax filing status that is the best for small operators. C-corps, watch out. I write articles on I'm a small business owner and screwed up and set up a C-corp. What do I do? It's a scam strategy and it's for big companies and those going public, not for the Main Street American small business owner. I probably pissed off 5 people on this call by saying that, but get a second opinion and I'll stand behind it. Topic for another day. So we have our S corp. This is where our revenue comes in, expenses go out. We take as much profit as we can. It's called a K-1. We're going to do this little W-2 strategy. We'll talk about that in a moment. It's a year-end issue. And then we take our profit and we build up our LLCs over here. This is rental property. Let's say for an example, maybe it's crypto, maybe it's notes, Investments, assets, operations. My S corp doesn't own anything. It's got my laptop. Sue me, you can have my laptop. All of my assets are over here. I'm going to use privacy and asset protection to protect and build my assets over here. I'm going to make money and take as many freaking write-offs as I can. The trifecta: realtor, rental property, 1040. Dentist operations, rental property. I'm a landscaper. Landscaper, S corp, LLC for the commercial building warehouse, all owned by my trust. Trust holdings, operations. It's magical. I have clients that are $100 million clients that go, Why in the hell did my law firm that I get $50,000 a year teach me this? I have brand new business owners that are just getting started, and this is the platform that they can build from. It's amazing. So we are going to keep talking about this basic foundation the rest of today. And actually, I want to change this and I want to add another last variable over on the asset side. I actually split it into A and B. Now, any questions you guys are having, please hold them. We're going to bring it together here. Assets over here. Remember, ops over here. We're going to start with a sole proprietorship or maybe an LLC, and we're going to graduate to an S corp when the time is right. That's our first strategy we're going to talk about here in a moment. Over here on the A category, we're going to have our tax-free or tax-preferred buckets. And this is where we're going to build up our solo 401(k). In fact, I want to create a box for that. So I might have a 401(k), a Roth IRA, an HSA, a Roth for my spouse, a Roth for my kids, a Coverdell, a DB plan. All of this are tax-free buckets that are on the other side of the firewall. They create income. They are all owned by, or the beneficiary is my trust. It all comes together with my trust. Over here is going to be rental property or personal investments, my investment accounts, crypto, whatever we're doing over here. And I might have one LLC, I might have 5 LLCs, 10. I don't care. Your home is over here. Your home is owned by your trust. Your LLCs are owned by the trust. Your trust owns your S corp or LLC. It all comes together. You, personal name and personal address should be nowhere in public record. That's another level of privacy we're going to try to build as we build tax strategies on top of asset protection and wealth building. So far, so good.

Seth, does this feel great? This is awesome. First question, how do we— when is the time right to switch over to the S corp?

Perfect question. We're going to go there and I'm going to put this on my— the coolest thing is my desk is a whiteboard, so I'm not going to just start writing on my desk too. Okay. We're going to go over the S corp. I guess you're— you're in strategies. We're going to go to S corp first. But the overlying, overreaching strategy is all of you should set up a trifecta. My attorneys can meet with you whenever you're ready this year, next year. A tax lawyer tailored to small business. You'll spend a couple grand at most. And that trifecta gives you a tax strategy that will save you 10 times whatever you pay us. You can take it to your accountant, your insurance agent, your other legal professionals, but we want to just be that tax lawyer that helps build a plan that's affordable and effective for you. So the trifecta— I'll show you some images of them here in a minute. So on the S corp, everybody, Okay, let's go there. Seth, you tell me, you're telling me at least half of the people here, could we say 75% of the people listening today have a small business, side hustle, 1099 of some level? Yes. Okay, now I'm gonna go quickly on this, people, 'cause we've gotta move on our checklist. Okay, time-wise. Okay. Now, everybody take a breath. I, I can't tell you how much you could pay or would pay for this, this training right now. And take advantage of me and please pay attention. If you make a phone call or appointment with any of my tax lawyers, they're going to walk you through this. If you're not ready for this, you can read up more on this on YouTube, on my, in my books, YouTube, and my podcast. Okay. All of you out there, even if it was for a slight nanosecond, start out as a sole proprietorship, sole prop. And then I'm going to make this a little bigger and easier to see. So we've got sole proprietorship and then some of you have gone out and set up an LLC. And let's just take these two. In fact, I'll even take— let's throw the C— I don't want to get to the C corp. S corp level. Now this is going to give us the foundation for more write-offs today and before the end of year. If you go out and bring in $100,000, 1099, multiple 1099s, guys, I only have one S corp in my life and I can have as many as I want. Probably have 30 LLCs. There's a difference. We'll come back to that. But if I go out and make $100,000, I could have eBay, Etsy, services, consulting, sell a product, sell a service, whatever. I'm an anesthesiologist, I'm a landscaper, I'm a hairstylist, I'm a barber, I'm a limo driver, whatever. Over 40 million Americans have a side hustle now. 1 in 3 Americans have a 1099. That's this. If I bring in $100,000, it goes on a Schedule C and I write off $25,000 in expenses. I write off cell phone, phone, travel, dining, home office, my mileage on the vehicle, maybe my kids, maybe this, maybe that. Maybe I'm smart and write off more than the average person. I write off $25,000. I net $75,000. Pretty straightforward. You take home $75,000. Great. You're going to pay self-employment tax of 15.3%. That's going to be $10,000. Then you're going to pay federal and state income tax unless you're one of the 9 states where you get lucky and there's no state income tax. If we just take an average of 25% fed and 5% state, you might be a little lower on fed, a little higher on state. Let's just say 30%, 30% plus 45%, 45% is going into taxes off the top. Taxes are the number one cost in our lives, and people don't talk about it. They don't have an accountant that can speak English. They're a com— they think it's too complex. They're stressed, they're frustrated, they think it is what it is. All of that's wrong. You're in a safe place now. And if you like the way I'm talking, you're going to love my podcast because I've broken down over 15 years, 1,000 podcasts on topics like Okay, so you're going to be paying out the butt. We do not want to be a sole proprietor. So you go out and say, oh, Mark, I'll be an LLC. Okay, you make the same $100,000. You spend the same $25,000 on expenses and you net $75,000. Oh, and I heard from some workshop or some influencer on TikTok that if I set up an LLC, I save taxes. Wrong. LLCs do not save taxes. Period. Well, Mark, I have to have an LLC to have a lemonade stand. No, you don't. Go open a lemonade stand. I have clients that come right out of college and start a marketing business and they don't have an LLC. Can they make money? Yes. Do they get write-offs? Yes. Does the LLC save taxes? No. It gives us structure. It gives us protection. It gives us legitimacy and branding and some trademark-type benefits of a name reserved and URL ownership. But it does not save taxes. You'd pay the same $10,000 in self-employment tax. So that, my friends, brings us to the S corp when it makes sense and our year-end strategy. An S corporation, oh, so beautiful. And you can have an LLC taxed as an S corp. It could be an Inc., it could be a PC, it could be a limited. I don't care. You make the same $100,000 and you set these up in the state where you're operating, by the way, not effing Wyoming or Delaware or Nevada. Where you live and you're operating your business is where you set up your entity. Another scam out there. Now, I set up Wyoming entities all day long for protecting assets, but not operations. So, guys, we're talking about the operations side right now. We're talking about this side right here. I'm making money. We're not talking about rental property. We'll come to that in a minute. Okay. So you go set up, you take your LLC and you make an S election, or you make the same $100,000. You spend $25,000 on expenses because you get the same write-offs. I net $75,000. No self-employment tax, no Obamacare, no corporate tax, nothing. But— and I hear someone typing, that may be you, Seth, not sure— but anybody out there right now that has an S corp, is that true? Do you really get out of no self-employment tax, no Obamacare, no corporate, or do you have to take something? Write in the chat. What do you have to do? What do you have to take? Seth, what's our answer?

Not— doesn't it depend?

Nope. For all of you out there that are already an S corp, do you really get out of the self-employment tax or what do you have to take? Starts with an S, starts with a P. I know we have over 50 S corps in the room. Unless you guys are asleep or sitting on an island, what do you have to do with your S corp? Salary. Salary. Thank you. Whoever was bold enough. I need you involved here, people. This is $1,000 an hour and you're getting me for free. Take advantage of me. Pay attention. Okay, so I've got to take a salary. So if I took a salary in this example of even $37,500, I just split my self-employment tax bill in half. I just saved because I'm going to pay my FICA over here, my F-word. FICA, hate FICA. I'm going to pay my 15.3% on the $37,500, but I don't pay it on the K-1, the draw. So everybody, the goal of an S corporation is when you make that $75,000, we're splitting it. We're putting part into W-2 and part into K-1, and you pay your FICA here and you escape it over here. In this example of just splitting it 50/50, I saved $5,000. Now, for you in California, you're like, yeah, Mark, but if I do an LLC or an S corp, I got to pay minimum tax and I got to file a tax return and I got to do paperwork. Yeah, having an S corp is going to cost you around $1,500 to $2,000. So let me— but help me out with the math. Just on $75,000, spend $2,000, save $5,000. Okay, now I know this is hard math. I know. Work with me. Work with me. Spend 2, save 5. You think the S corp could be a good move? And by the way, our office is super expensive on setting up your S corp. I'm sorry. I'll tell you now, we charge $250. I know. Call it highway robbery. Now, if your accountant is not already talking to you about this, you have a terrible accountant. And don't call me aggressive. This reduces your chances of an audit. I teach other CPAs around the country. I teach continuing education on this. I'm licensed in multiple states as a lawyer and a CPA and on the board of the AICPA, and I help accountants pull their head out of their butt. So do not listen to your sister-in-law that's scared of her own shadow that doesn't tell you to do this. So the point with an S corp, to answer your question, everybody, if you're making more than $50,000 a year net, you should be an S corp. And here's the year-end strategy. I'm going to go light speed now. If this is 2025 and we're sitting right here and you've been an LLC all year long, you've been an LLC, you can backdate your LLC to an S corp to 1/1/25. Knock out the strategy and save thousands. You have to do this in the next 3 to 4 weeks because you've got to get it done and get your payroll done and get the process completed. If you try to pull it off in the spring, it's going to be a nightmare, pain in the butt, cost more, not worth it. You've got to do it now. So for any of you on this call that are an LLC and have made more than $50,000 net I'd even go as low as 40 in most states. You should be looking at electing an S corp. Number 2, I know there's probably 50 to 100 of you out here that have an S corp. Your problem is your accountant's probably telling you to take too much salary. See, if I have this S corp and I'm netting $100,000, my salary is probably going to be around 40. We're going to convert this into 60. I just saved 15.3%. on $60,000. That's $9,000. If your accountant is so scared that they make you take $60,000 in payroll and $40,000 in net, you just left $3,000 on the table. Not worth it. So strategy number 2 is in the next 3 weeks, you've got to nail your payroll. How much have you taken throughout the year? Have you not taken enough? Do you need to take more? Is your accountant going to be helpful or a pain in the butt? Now, what I've created— you guys can go out and I've got this in articles on Forbes and Entrepreneur magazine— the Kohler Payroll Matrix. This is a matrix that can help you peg that dollar amount. If we call this your profit and this your payroll percentage, the more money you make, the actual payroll you take is less as a percentage. So if you made, let's say, $50,000, $100,000, $200,000, $500,000, instead of taking 100% payroll, which is a sole proprietorship, we're going to drive this down. So at $100,000, we might be at 40%, $40,000 in payroll, $60,000 in K-1. The more money you make, I might drive it down to 20% or 15%. Freaking Joe Biden in 2016 did a book deal for $14 million. I've got a copy of his tax return here on my laptop with Donald Trump's in 2016. He took a payroll of $800,000 on $12 million of book deal. It was like a 2% allocation. If your accountant is not talking about pushing down your payroll to a reasonable comp that makes sense, you got the wrong accountant. All right, so strategy number 1, we've covered this. Now we can start adding more. I would not put your spouse on payroll unless we're going to fund a solo 401(k), and that has to be done in the next 2 weeks and to get a new tax credit of $1,500. We'll come to that in a moment, but I might put you on You're going to be on salary because you have to, but I might put your spouse on payroll and then zero out his or her payroll and fund their solo 401(k) up to $23,500 or $31,000. So now we blend into strategy number 2. But strategy number 1, in summary, everybody, and if you have a question, we're going to go quick, fast and hard here, Seth. If any of you are an LLC that made more than 40 or 50 grand this year, you need to be hard considering an S corporation retroactive to the first of the year. If you didn't have an LLC, you're screwed. SOL. And I don't mean statute of limitations. You need to set up a new entity by January 1st so you could be meeting with one of my tax lawyers if you need to get the retro done or get the new one done. And then if you already have an S corporation, you need to be meeting with your accountant to talk about payroll for yourself, payroll payroll for your spouse, payroll for your kids. And we're just getting started. We're on 3 strategies right now. We're not— we're just getting going. Seth, questions?

Okay. Questions. Looking for questions. Can I— I understand what you're saying about not paying my spouse or zeroing out her pay. If I don't pay her anything and she doesn't make money anyplace else, then wouldn't that negatively affect her credit if she's not showing any income?

Interesting. I expected you to say, isn't she going to get Social Security? That's the common mistake people make. I have a whole chapter on that in my Financial Freedom book. So let me answer that. Everybody think through this. Sometimes people think I got to put my spouse on payroll because they want him or her to get Social Security someday. There's already a law called the spousal benefit that stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads do not get screwed because they didn't have a career for 30 years. So they get half— half of the income of the spouse they were married to is attributed to them automatically. Do you know how much more payroll we would have to pay them out of your company to exceed You would be losing money to put them on pay because their Social Security is already half of yours, no questions asked. You would have to increase their payroll to a level where you'd be paying to get less. So do not put your spouse on payroll to get Social Security. Number 2, you're saying, well, my spouse needs credit. Okay, first of all, you're married and your joint income is attributed to both of you on a 1040. And yes, he or she may not have a W-2, but if you're giving them a salary for them to get loans, you, you're already getting the loans under your social and you're co-signing each other. And if you're saying, well, Mark, you only get 10 loans under Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, I want 10 loans under my spouse and I want him to have a big fat W-2, you're chasing And something I don't like, and you can see I'm a little concerned here, is doing something bad tax-wise to keep a bank happy. Right there in the sentence when I said it, you already know that doesn't make sense. Bankers cannot think out of a box. You need creative mortgage lenders. Pace Morby, who I was just on a stage with him last week, he is against going to get a bank loan altogether. Seller financing is such a great strategy where I'm not trying to get credit for my spouse and paying taxes out the butt to get it. Please do not do that. Get a second opinion. Meet with one of our team members too. Paying your spouse so they can get a loan is— I would not think in the long run is sustainable and good.

Okay, Seth, next question. If I pay my son to pay his college tuition, doesn't that cost him his financial aid if he's suddenly showing a bunch of money?

Oh, I love this. This is such a good question. Oh my gosh, guys, I'm a little spicy because I tell you how I really think. And a lot of accountants and lawyers, first of all, can't talk fast as I do on all these topics. But anyway, um, okay, first of all, let's go to paying kids. All right, everybody, between now and December 31st, if you do not pay your kids the proper method, you do not get a write-off for it. And so what happens is millions of Americans— this is your adjusted gross income. This is your 1040. You're making money, making money, making money. And then when you're done, you pay taxes and then support your kids under age 18. School, music lessons, soccer, clothes, whatever. Then they turn 18 and you're paying for tuition, cars, rent. You pay taxes at this terrible percentage and then just give your kids money. Now let's just think about that. You're paying more tax so they can get— we'll come back to financial aid— so they can— when they're in a bracket that is zero up to $15,000, that's their standard deduction. If they go work at McDonald's, they don't pay tax on the first $15,000. If they work for you, they do not pay tax on the first $15,000. I have a whole chapter on how to pay your family members legitimately and honestly. So what we want to do is quit giving our kids money and put them on the payroll per se. And I'm not saying a W-2, but you're going to pay your kids and take a write-off above the line and let them file their own tax returns. Now, if you want to talk about building credit, my kids have been building credit because they have a real 1040 with real income. And I'm sorry, I'm going to be blunt. I do not need my kid getting financial aid with a zero 1040 and then try to go out and buy a home and make— even get an apartment. Have you ever tried that? To help one of your 23-year-olds go get an apartment and they have a zero 1040 because we've been trying to get them financial aid. And can I just tell you what financial aid is? A student effing loan. We've got a trillion-dollar crisis in student loans and we think financial aid is something special. No, it's a fast track to my kid going in debt. I told my 4 kids, you want to go to college, we'll go to college, but you're going to come out with a business and you're going to come out with no student debt. Oh, that means you're going to community college. That's damn straight. Unless you get a scholarship, I'm not paying for some Big Ten, SEC, Pac-12 bullshit. The student loan crisis is real. And so I'm talking tough here. Please think twice before we have our kids have a zero 1040 so they can get financial aid to go in debt. Let's put them in our business on the board of directors, board of advisors, teach them entrepreneurship, pay them for helping in the business, get a tax write-off, and they don't even pay tax on the majority of that income. They build credit. They learn entrepreneurship. This is what the wealthy do. This is what wealthy parents do. I want my kids going to college but not going into debt. And I want them to have a business while they're going to college. I told them I don't care what their grades are unless they want to become a doctor. Just graduate and learn life skills while you're at college. So how we pay the kids. In our trifecta, there's a new bubble. If you have an S corporation, you never pay your kids under age 18. Never, never out of the S corp. We have a support company. It's a sole proprietorship. I call it a family management company. It's going to be on a Schedule C. You pay that for all the kids' efforts that are helping in the business. And when I was paying my kids under age 18, I paid Dylan, I think most years, 8 or the two girls, 6, and, and then Molly, 4. So there's $24,000. Instead of me paying tax on $24,000, I paid a management fee to a Schedule C for services like office cleaning, social media, helping with the rental properties, going to events. Any business you have, if I can get the kids helping in the business, then I can take a write-off. So I put $24K in $24K out. I'd zero it out. No tax. My kids would file their own tax returns, pay zero tax because they were under the standard deduction. And I got a write-off for $24,000. And now that they have earned income, every one of those kids now have Roth IRAs. And those Roth IRAs are partners in LLCs of mine that own rental property. Now, I can do that all the time. I'm not rolling in cash over here either, people. I'm a parent. But there was years where I had to use all that money to support the kids, and there was years where I could drop it into a Roth IRA. And then there was years when I was going to go buy a rental and I had $20,000, $30,000 sitting in the kids' Roth IRAs, and I made them partners in the LLC. That's called self-directing, a whole other strategy. So before year-end, we want to convert any money in traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs. The deadline's December 31st. Other major topic. So when you pay kids under age 18, we use the support company. For kids 18 and older, they get a 1099. Every one of my kids get a 1099. Now, if we go to our trifecta, everybody, this is super important. You've got your— and I know I'm talking fast here because I only have 1 hour. I teach 2-day courses. I get 1 hour with you. I'm trying to throw in as much as I can. I'll take a breath. Let's go to the basic trifecta. You've got your trust, you've got your LLC/S corp, you've got a business, and you're going to buy a rental property and you're going to fund your 401(k) and you're going to fund your Roth. Basics. This is what we want to be doing. Trifecta. Boom. Boom. My kids, if they help with the rentals, but they all serve on my board of directors, board of advisors. And all of you should have a board set up before the end of the year. All of you can have a family office. It's the bedroom down the hall with a hide-a-bed. I am so sick of financial advisors saying, oh, you have to have $100 million before you can have a family office. Bullshit. All of you need a family office. All of you should have your corporate book and you should be doing your annual minutes. Do I have a corporate book in here? Okay, so that is our annual meeting that we will be holding before Christmas, writing off travel and dining and bringing family members together for Christmas and having a board meeting talking about wealth and business and real estate and everything we're trying to accomplish. And then I'm going to give my guy, my kids, a 1099. For any money I gave them throughout the year. I joke about it all the time. Some of you have heard it on my social. I love it. At Christmas time, my kids come down to this, to their Christmas stocking, and they get a 1099. It's so special. They love it. But anyway, I'm getting a tax write-off for giving my kids money. I don't pay taxes and give my kids money. They all earn it by being a part of the business on the board. Have you seen the show Succession? Do those kids do anything? No, they're on the board. Whole other topic. Okay, this is the structure. We're going to 1099 kids 18 and older. We're going to pay our kids under age 18 through a support company or out of our LLCs with the real estate. So topic number 1, convert to an S corp if you're making more than $40,000 to $50,000. Topic number 2, do not pay your spouse unless you want to fund a 401(k), a solo 401(k). Need to go there for a minute. Pay your kids properly. Pay them out of the right entity before year-end.

They can turn around and pay you.

Go ahead. We got 19 minutes left, just so you know.

I think I had this question too long.

I think it might be frozen. If you can mute them off, Seth. Thanks. Next question, Seth. Uh, we got 19 minutes.

Let's keep going. Oh, okay.

All right. So S corp, pay your spouse, pay the kids. I'm going to say number 4. And let me just point this out again, everyone. You should be having an annual board meeting every year for your LLCs and S corp. If you don't, your LLC and S corp will not protect you in a lawsuit. Also in an audit with the IRS, if you don't have an annual meeting with your accountable plan provisions, you will lose an audit. And we have a service. We've helped thousands of clients every year do their annual board meeting. We give them a questionnaire and help them do it. We make sure they're good with the state. Again, we charge way, way too much. It's super expensive. $200 a year. So go to MainStreetBusiness.com if you want to get your minutes done before year-end. Put your family members on the board, and when they fly in for Christmas, you're having a board meeting and you're able to write that off. So I want all of you, as strategy number 4, is to have a board meeting before year end. Now, I've got articles on this. I've got YouTube videos on this. There's so much out there on this. And if you guys can apply yourself here, you're the captain of your ship. Do not wait for your accountant to do this. Your lawyer is not going to do this. You guys have to take control of your tax future. This is easy stuff. I'm going to get an S corp if I make more than $40,000 or $50,000. I'm going to nail the payroll to a 30% allocation or less. I'm going to pay my spouse when they want to fund a solo 401(k). I'm going to pay my kids through paperwork if I'm giving them money. If I'm not giving my kids money, I'm not paying them. I don't want to, like, manufacture a write-off that's not legitimate. But if I'm helping my kids financially, they're going to earn it by serving on the board, which is strategy number 4. I'm going to have a board meeting before year-end. Now, number 5 is a solo 401(k). We held a whole podcast on this a week ago, and you can get to it at Main Street Business Podcast, Main Street Business Podcast, and also MainStreetBusiness.com is where you can get your minutes done. The solo 401(k) in the one big beautiful bill legislation was created where if you set up a solo 401(k) where you auto-enroll and start to play with your 401(k) and start putting some money away, even if it's $100, the government will give you a tax credit of $500 for 3 years in a row. So you get $1,500 for setting up a solo 401(k). We charge $1,000 to have a self-directed Solo 401(k), and you get a write-off for the $1,000. So you're getting a $1,500 tax credit, which is equivalent to $2,500 write-off, plus the $1,000 to set it up. You're getting a $3,500 write-off to set up a Solo 401(k). And if you're going to do it, you have to do it by December 15th. If we don't have your paperwork work by the 15th, we cannot process it because the IRS shuts down from the 26th to the 1st. You have to have your Social, your SS-4 in by then. If you want to learn more about that, go to the Mainstream Business Podcast and listen to our Solo 401(k) presentation last week. If you want to learn more about these 25 tax strategies, go to KKOSlawyers.com, KKOSlawyers.com, and you can watch our 25-year-end tax tips. And I've got 10 lawyers talking a little slower than me, going through those 25 tips in 1 hour. And you can go listen to it, watch it on KKOSlawyers.com. Normally, I've got a laundry list of questions a mile long and I'm not allowed to keep talking. So I'm going to ask one more time. You're like, Seth, seriously, there's no questions from anybody. I'm like, I didn't say there wasn't any.

I was trying to let you keep talking. I apologize. Adrian, do we have any questions on chatter?

Hey guys, anyone have any questions on chatter? I do. I'm sorry, Mark. Okay, can you hear? Introduce yourself, please. Go ahead. I heard, I do, but then take the mic. Oh, Sheila, take the mic. Introduce yourself. I just raised it. Hi, I'm Sheila Slick. I have found this so educational. So thank you for giving us your time today. So as an LLC owner, one of the things that we normally try and do at the end of the year without taking into account all of this advice that you did is try to spend our profit. OK, so that we don't pay taxes. So what do you think about that strategy?

Well, when you say spend our profit, spend it on what? What would be some examples?

Reinvesting in equipment. Like, that's a great time to see, well, how can I reinvest back into the LLC? But the reason that I'm asking is because you made the point earlier where you said that you should be investing that profit in real estate or other things rather than investing it back into the business to continue to grow the business?

Great question. It's a balancing act. And I'm not saying there's a perfect answer because every business is a little different. But Sheila, I appreciate your boldness asking this. Typically what we see is this with farmers. Farmers who hate paying taxes have land rich, cash poor, and any money they make before year end, rather than pay the IRS, They go buy another John Deere or they go buy another truck. Did they need another John Deere? Did they need another truck? 9 times out of 10, they did not. And so they end up buying shiz. And we drive by farms all the time, don't we, people? If you live in your rural area anywhere where you see it littered with equipment that is not making them money, it was used as a write-off. And if I don't get 100% write-off and I have 100% tax rate, then I'm spending money to only get a 30% benefit. Now, Sheila, if you need a piece of equipment and it's going to make you a frickin' ton of money and you need it to grow your business, go buy it. But if you don't need that equipment, take the effing profit, pay 30% on it, take the 70% that's not now sitting in a piece of equipment equipment you're not using. Take that 70% and go buy a rental property. Put it in your solo 401(k) and buy some crypto, buy some XRP, buy some Bitcoin. Go loan it to someone. Take that 70 cents that would have been locked down with something dumb and go make more money with it. Now, do we need to reinvest into our businesses? Yes, but we don't want to do it to save taxes. Let's do it because it makes us freaking money. I think a good earmark is I'm going to— if I make profit, I'm going to take 30%, set it aside for the IRS. I'm going to take 30%, reinvest in my business, and I'm going to take 30% and go build more wealth. Now, this is after I pay myself. We're talking about profit. I mean, I'm going to be paying myself throughout the year that I've got to live on, but the profit What am I doing with that? I'm going to take 30% and pay the IRS, 30% maybe reinvest in the business, and 30% to go buy something else that's going to make me money outside of the business. So that's my take on it, Sheila. Hopefully that helps anyone else on these. Thank you so much.

Thank you. You went above and beyond. You even broke it down in a way that I could understand. 30-30-30. So filter to ask myself, will this equipment or this investment make me more money?

Otherwise use the 30-30-30 rule. On the profit.

Yeah. And then meanwhile you should be using your S election because when you make money in your LLC, I got to peel off the, the what I'm going to really live on. And, I want to make sure I'm peeling off an amount, I'm paying my FICA on it, and I'm living on that. Everything else is to either pay taxes, reinvest, or redeploy. And, and so if I can get in this mindset, that's why the S corp is so powerful, because I'm only paying FICA on what I'm living on and everything else I'm redeploying. And that works like a machine, and you get into a rhythm, and it just— that's the way rich people get rich. And it's perfect for a landscaper, a small business owner, and any restaurant owner, food truck owner, lawyer, accountant, engineer, architect, dentist. I mean, this is what we all do. If any of you are— seriously, everybody, I don't know what the method is. I use Zoom and a few other platforms. I don't know on this one. I'd love to see your questions, but just me dropping the bomb on 300 business owners that have LLCs that maybe have not got an S election, your brain should be exploding on what do I do next. So any other questions or thoughts?

Anyone? Yes, yes, yes, there is.

Where does cash value life insurance play a role for tax-free?

Cash value life insurance is a tool that is, uh, effective. It's a valid strategy. I like the strategy of cash value life insurance. The issue is, when do you do it, and when does it fit the best profile of a small business owner? I see a problem with cash value life insurance a lot of times because it's sold to people that are still building their business. They do not have a lot of financial wherewithal depth per se. They may still be buying a home. They haven't even funded their Roth IRA, haven't funded their 401(k). They may have college savings accounts that aren't full, and some life insurance agent rolls in and sells them a big fat life insurance policy. And if they can't keep the premiums up, it disappears. It's happened to me twice. In my lifetime.

Now Maria has a question. Oops, sorry.

Oh, let me say, but if I have a client that's making $500,000 a year, they've got their rental property for the year, they funded their 401(k) for the year, they funded their Roth for the year, they're paying, they're building wealth, and now they're looking for extra strategies. Now we talk cash value life insurance. So if you're making a buttload of money, let's talk about cash value life insurance. If you're not I'm going to term and invest until I can get there. Term and invest. Okay, next question.

Maria, take the mic. Thank you, Adrian. Thank you so much. Lots of value here. Thank you, Mark. I am an independent— you're welcome. So I, I'm an independent broker, um, and I did hire my son because I, I, you know, he needed a job. He's in college and I needed an admin. So I figured he would be a write-off for me as a— for the business, I should say. Uh, he currently does not work for me. He has another job. This was just to help each other out. Like, he needed money and I figured let him earn it, um, which he did very well. Um, so at this point you said after, after 18, older, 18 or older. Uh, you 1099 them, right? Your children, uh, hire them in one, what capacity, and two, since he was already a W-2 employee of the company, do I now need to hire him as a, as an employee of an entity I have not formed yet? For example, the Maria family. Company, LLC, tax it as an S corp. I got it.

I would love to ask how many people in the room have kids under age 18 and how many people here have kids 18 or older that act like they're under age 18. I would suspect 60% from my— I speak everywhere. 60% of you in the room have children, half of which are under age 18, half are above. So listen, you 60% And your question is phenomenal. Let's talk about the 18 and older. If a kid is working in our business and you're a real estate brokerage, right? You're a broker agent, real estate. Correct. Okay. If our kids are helping in the business and they act like an employee, show up like an employee, and they're 8 to 5, 1 to 5, and they work alongside all the other employees, then you are required to give them a W-2 if they look like a duck, quack like a duck, and fly like a duck. Okay.

Which I did. I did. Which they did before.

But now this son of yours is just helping here and there, project-based. He's off doing this. He's off doing that. He's on your board of advisors, board of directors. He's an outside consultant, comes and goes, right? 1099. Never set him up on a W-2 again. You don't need to set up some new freaking entity. Just start paying him out of your primary company, which is be your S corp, and you're going to just 1099 him. He's a subcontractor just like me. I'd be a subcontractor to you. So you just 1099 him. Now, for any of you out there that have kids under age 18 that you're still obviously supporting, they need to have their own bank account. Wells Fargo has a teen checking account for this very purpose. You do not pay them out of the S corp. You set up a family management company. You would not do that because your kid's over age 18. You don't need it. You're just going to pay them out of the S corp. But for those of you that kids under age 18, then you have to set up a management company because an S corp has to withhold taxes on a kid, not a sole proprietor. So you set up the support company. That's a sole proprietorship. Pay that, that pays the kids, guys. This is, this is not audit risk. This is normal American small business with small families. This has never been— in 25 years, I've helped thousands and thousands of clients do this and not had one issue. I've taught thousands of accountants that have not had an issue with this. If your accountant starts to push back on this, fire your effing accountant and level up. And if you want to learn more about— I have a whole chapter on how to do this in my book, Tax and Legal Playbook. Podcasts, it's on YouTube channels on this. Please learn more about it. But you're handling it properly with your son. Just do not give him a W-2 at this juncture. Stick with the 1099.

Okay, thank you. Yeah, he's not hourly, so I wouldn't W-2 him at this point. I'd have all those other, you know, payroll and all that other fun stuff. But 1099 sounds like a good way to go because he is helping with some things. So thank you. Appreciate you. You bet.

Nice knowing you. Thank you. A couple of— and see, here's the thing, Seth. I could just keep rambling on about 10 other strategies, but I'd be throwing darts hoping someone liked it. I'm here for you guys. If you've heard of a crazy strategy or heard of a good strategy or something I've already talked about, people ask me now. I'm all yours.

Adrian, we have any more for chatter?

I do not see any more questions. If everyone— there was one.

Yes, there's a question in the chat from—

yes. Oh, okay, great. What about CSR? When is making donations to nonprofits beneficial?

Interesting. When you've got so much money coming out of your butt, you want to give some money to charity and you're going to get a small write-off for go for it, enjoy the ride. You've got to be itemizing. If under the new standard deduction levels of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the one big beautiful bill, you got to be a pretty wealthy person to enjoy giving money to charity and getting a tax write-off. So I would say this to everybody. If you want to give money to charity, do it because you want to be a great person and get a benefit of feeling good inside. The tax benefit could very well be non-existent. So don't think of charity— you're doing— don't give money to charity because you're getting a tax benefit. Give money to charity because you want to. If we get a tax benefit, we'll enjoy it. Now, I could— if I had your tax return, I could model it and tell you what you might get. But do not think it's worth it. Giving money to charity is not worth it for tax purposes, people. It's because you want to be a good Any other questions? Anyone?

I think that is it for chatter. This has been amazing.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Mark. We greatly, greatly appreciate your time. A fire hose of amazing content. Tell everybody one more time where they should go to learn more about Main Street and how they can work with you and your various teams.

Okay. The first place to start, if any of you want a year-end consult in the next 2.5 weeks, 2 weeks to literally save tens of thousands of dollars. I'm not kidding. And if you're a small business owner making $100,000 or more, we, we always find problems. Go to KKOSlawyers.com. KKOS as in Sam, lawyers, L-A-W-Y-E-R-S dot com. Mark J. Kohler. Just Google it. You'll see my website. You'll see my YouTube channel. You'll see my social media. You can pick up my book on Amazon, but I would start with a consult at KKOS Lawyers. If you just want to get your minutes done for your LLC before year-end, go to MainStreetBusiness.com. MainStreetBusiness.com. Thanks, Seth. I appreciate it.

Thank you very much. We greatly appreciate you joining us. All right, um, Adrian is on the fabulous Ari Gelber here.

Yes, I see the handsome face of Ari right there. Let me just tuck Mark away and add Ari. There he is in his glory.

We are ready for our final presentation of today. Thank you all for staying with us all day long. Um, Mark, that was incredibly valuable. We got some clear guidance on how to protect what we're building and keep more of our money. Um, we're going to close the summit out with the lifeblood of every business— sales.

More real quick, Seth, how do I share a screen from here, just so I know, to get my slides?

There's a button at the bottom that looks like a monitor with a plus on it.

Oh, okay, thank you.

All right, so more specifically, trust in the sales process. Our final speaker of today is Ari Gelber. He is the world's number one authority on trust-based selling, the author of 7 bestselling books, and the founder and CEO of Unlock the Game. For more than 20 years, he's helped entrepreneurs and sales teams escape the pressure-based sales model that leads to free consulting chasing and stalled deals. Today he's going to talk about how to thrive in the trust recession with trust-based selling and the one-call sale. Ari, full disclosure, is my personal sales mentor. I have the good fortune of working with him almost every single week, and he's been transformative in changing our sales process to work faster and better, reduce our time to get a sale, increase our sales conversion rate. I'm excited for him to share that with you now.

Thank you so much, Seth. Can you see my screen?

Okay, we can see your screen. Okay, beautiful.

So, uh, welcome everybody, and thanks, Seth, for having me and been great working with you on your business. And thank you for having me as well here. This is very timely because the world's in a new place. And I'm going to talk to you a little about today about how to bring on new clients without having to sell the way you're used to in a whole different way to think about this from a trust perspective. So I warn you in advance, a lot of my work is very contrarian. It's the opposite what you're probably used to, what you probably heard of, what you're doing now. I wouldn't be surprised if some of you don't like the act of selling itself. And there's a different way of doing this. I've been at this for a long, long time, 25 years now. So hopefully this will be a game changer for you for the new year to really grow your company from a different perspective in terms of the sales side. So if you don't know much about me, uh, briefly, I'm the author of 7 different bestselling books. Uh, they're all about the concept of not chasing leads, not following up with people, how to shorten your sales cycle down, how to position yourself as what I call a trust authority so they trust you at hello. You don't have to sell yourself anymore. Um, have a large following as well over the last 20 years, 25 years. But the one book I'm most excited about, always have been, is this one here. This is called Lessons from Toby. When my son was born, his name is Toby, we were told that he had Down syndrome. And at first, we had no idea what that meant to our lives. Then we realized we had a gift on our hands. If anyone knows anybody with Down syndrome, you know they're beautiful people. They're loving, they're giving, they're transparent. They're just so present, you know? And so I'm learning so much about him being his dad. I wrote a book about him called Lessons from Toby. And the way he is with people. And I said to myself, gosh, if we could all be like this in the sales environment, what a successful life we'd all have. No more tension, no more lost opportunity, people working together, a better, better, better world. So a lot of my, my work is from his view of the world. So giving you a bit of a glimpse of my personal life there. But I think it's important to understand where I'm coming from and what I'll be sharing with you today. So let me tell you briefly about the story behind my pivot, my shift that happened about 2 decades ago that got me to this point where I am today. You might resonate with this. I used to be a sales manager in a software company. It was a high-tech business, and we launched the first website tracking tools back then, years ago. It's now called Google Analytics. You've probably heard of that. But we, we launched the first, uh, the tech tool to track website behavior. And I'll never forget, I was managing at the time time, 18 salespeople. The big leads came across my desk first. I remember getting a phone call from a website. I picked the phone up and it was a gentleman for the huge company, you recognize the name, the hundreds of websites. And honestly, if I close this one sale, it will double the revenue in one transaction. That's how big it was. So the gentleman was a nice guy, he asked me a couple questions, we agreed to a conference call and a demo. To show him what it looked like, how our tool worked in real time. So we installed it on one of his websites. And the day finally came Friday at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. I'll never forget this. I was in my conference room with my CEO, we closed the door behind me, big long conference table. In the middle of the table was the old school speakerphone, remember the Star Trek looking ones, like 3 legs on it, Starship Enterprise type of conference lines. So I hit the dial tone, Dial the number. And he picks the phone up. And he's like, hey, Ari, how's it going? Is it good? He says to me, Ari, let me share with you, or let us tell you who's with us today on the phone call. I said, great. Next thing I hear is, my name is Mike, I'm CEO. I was like, oh, this is good. My name is Julie, I'm head of global marketing. Perfect. My name is Chris, I'm head of global IT. Amazing. Everybody on this call was a decision maker. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen today. So I had them all log into a rudimentary webinar-style tool we had back then, start showing them live how our system worked, how they can log in, see some real-time data of their users going through pages. This is all new back then. And so I'm showing this to them live. And I start hearing this noise on the phone call, like, wow. This is great. This is amazing. I can't believe we can see this. They start asking me all kinds of questions. How do we use it? How do we install it? How does the tech work? And of course, I had all the answers. I was competent and they had the questions. I had the answers. It was like a love fest on the phone. You know what I'm talking about? I'm sure you've been there before. Honestly, there was no resistance. They were loving this product. They were— could not believe impossible to do what they saw on the screen. So an hour goes by, they ask me tons of questions, great chemistry. I'm getting the high five from my boss in the corner there. He's like, Ari, nice job. I'm like, oh my God, if I can make this sale, this is gonna be like, make my year. So the call comes to a close. And my contact says to me, Ari, we love this. This is great. Look, give us a call a couple of weeks, follow up with us, and we'll move this thing forward. I'm like, oh, thank you, God. Amazing. So I said my goodbyes. I took my hand, reached for the speakerphone in the middle of the table. As I'm reaching for the speakerphone, I hit the off button by complete accident. Now I said divine intervention. My thumb hit the mute button instead of the off button. And a click happened. And they thought I hung up the phone. And a voice inside of me says, Ari, Go to the dark side, be a fly on the wall, go where no one's ever gone before in the world of selling. So I pulled my thumb back for a couple of moments. They started talking amongst themselves, thinking I had left the call. Now, what would you imagine that they would have said after a call like that? That's not a trick question. But I want to think that you would probably say to yourself, well, they probably said good things like, hey, this is incredible. Let's work with this guy. Let's do this right away. How do we deploy this? I was waiting to hear these things. But what I heard and said was this, I'll never forget it. It's why we're all here today, is what they said. They said, we're not going to go with him. Keep using him for more information. And make sure we shop someplace else cheaper. Knife in heart twist. I was in a state of shock. I could not believe it. I snapped out of it, hit the off button, looked at the wall and said to myself, What did I do wrong? I was friendly. I was relationship-oriented. I was competent. I answered their questions. I did everything I was taught to do by the sales gurus, the books on my shelf at home I was reading, the seminars I went to. I did everything a salesperson should do the right way. And here they lied to me. They didn't tell me the truth. I said to myself, this is all wrong. The whole sales process is wrong. Why were they comfortable not telling me the truth? And I realized was because my goal in the process was to make the sale. My goal was not to build trust. And I realized I've got to shift the whole trajectory, the whole framework, the whole mindset, and throw everything out I learned from the past and build my own way of thinking around this, my own mindset shift, where the goal of the process is not the the sale. The goal instead is trust, deep trust, where they tell you the truth from the beginning. So you're not playing a game with them and being lied to and rejected and playing the numbers game. And that became my whole trust-based selling platform, my whole model around the idea of not having to chase ghosts, follow up with people, and to boost your conversion rate, shorten your sales cycle, all based on trust building and not based on selling. That's a big shift because we've been taught to sell, and I'm telling you, stop selling, build trust instead. And that which leads us now to why more than ever this is so relevant, because I believe I've coined a term called the trust recession. We are now in a trust recession as it comes to a buyer and seller where you are being, uh, compared to other people You're being shocked and now trust is the lowest point ever in the sales process for most businesses and they have to play the numbers game chasing people. So what I did was I put together a visual process map to show you what I mean by what the trust recession looks like and hopefully this resonates with you. You're probably experiencing it yourself right now, wouldn't be surprised. So here's how I define the trust recession. First is we are now living in what I call a commoditized world. Where others do what you do. Services are now ubiquitous, commoditized, and because of that, your potential clients are now in shopping mode. They're shopping you over someone else. They go online, look at your website, go to social media, go to your LinkedIn profile, and you're— you sell X, and they go, okay, I want X. I'm going to shop around and see which X I like better, who's cheaper, or whatever their criteria is. So they're shot— they're, they're calling you inbound. You get a lead, They're in shopping mode. That's their mindset. While they're in shopping mode, we feel it's our job to educate them, to deliver value. So we end up doing what I call free consulting. Free consulting is just like it sounds. We give away the farm, we share information, brainstorm, give ideas, case studies. We feel our job is to overdeliver on value to prove to them that we can do the job. And the irony is they're not, but they don't, they're not questioning whether you can do the job or not, because they don't know if you do the job or not until after they're a client, not before. So we end up giving our heart and soul out to people, then they want to think about it. And then we end up in what we call a shot and chasing mode, we're going to chase them, follow up with them, use CRM emails to get them later on when they're ready. And we're like, we're deflated. We're like, well, I don't understand, they're perfect fit for me. They have a problem I can solve. I can help them solve it. And now they want to think about it. And off they go. That's the trust recession. And I wouldn't be surprised right now, most of you are stuck in this cycle somewhere in your sales process, chasing leads who are not converting. And in many cases, you could be losing twice as much as your company's making in this process by not converting at a higher number than you should be. And that's the premise of today's conversation. So let me kind of show you on the screen briefly a very basic sales model that most businesses operate within. Now, yours might be more complex or simple, but it's pretty, it's pretty common to have a model like this. If you're in a business where you're talking to human beings, not e-commerce business or anything like that. Here's how the typical sales model works right now. Either someone contacts you, or you contact someone, right? That's kind of step 1. Then from there, you schedule a conversation with them. Pretty basic so far. Then they agree to meet with you either on Zoom or Teams or live or however you meet with somebody. It might be virtual in some way. Then you discuss their problems, their issues, their needs. Then there clearly is a space for you to discuss how you can help them, right? All is going well, good chemistry. Then from there, you follow up with them, hopefully to help them make the decision. And hopefully, if all goes well, at the end of your process, what's supposed to happen? Hopefully every time. What's supposed to happen is they onboard, they become a new client. Now, if I ask you all to raise your hand and ask you how many people right now on this call or listening or watching this, this call have a bunch of people right now stuck at the 7 o'clock position where you're chasing leads, they're not calling you back, and they want to think about it— how many would that be? I wouldn't be surprised a lot of you on this call are in that spot right now and not hitting the last spot, which is making sale. Now the reason why it's happening is because somewhere along your process, there's trust missing between each step of your model. There was not trust built deep enough for them to feel comfortable telling you where they stood with you, they give you a yes or no. So what needs to happen here is we have to help you build trust overlaid on top of your process. You're not selling anymore, but you're only focused on getting the truth with them. They trust you enough to to say a yes or no and work with you. It's not about closing or pressuring them, because keep in mind, they're entering your cycle with you. They're thinking their job is to shop you, but really your job is to help them trust you. And that's the whole shift today. So I'm zooming in— I was zooming out for the moment, and I'm gonna zoom in a second to help you get closer and closer to how to crack the code on this trust recession. Now, What happens a lot of times, you meet with someone, you say to yourself, man, we had a great meeting, great chemistry, perfect fit for us. They fit my profile, my ICP, however you want to call it. You're super excited, right? You delivered value, you gave them your best you could, you poured your heart out, you gave them a demo, whatever you do. And then you get this opium drug and go through your body like super excited, like, oh man, yeah, I've had great meetings and They just drop off right now. Why does this happen? Let me walk you through some of the myths to help break some of the constructs in the back of your mind as to why this is happening for you and why you might be doing this on certain behaviors unknowingly, not even knowing it. It's causing this to happen. First, I hear a lot about is this. People say to me, Ari, I'm really good at relationship building. And I focused on that right from the beginning of my process. I said to them, Your goal is not to build a relationship at first. Your goal is to create trust with them because you don't— you can create trust with someone and not a relationship. They're two separate concepts altogether. And I'll break that down for you in a few minutes, how they're different. Then I hear this a lot. I hear people say to me, oh, Ari, I usually fact find first. I want to qualify them, ask some questions, and see if they're qualified or not. Well, you— what you don't want to do is build— is fact-find with them before you build trust with them. You only fact-find with them after you build trust with them, right? Otherwise, you become a human calculator, getting information, processing it, according to output. That's a whole shift you have to think about as well in your process. Then people say to me, well, Ari, I gotta ask about their goals, what they're trying to achieve, what their objectives are, what their vision is. The irony of this is people cannot, in this day and age, are so fragmented mentally, they can't think past tomorrow. Your goal is not to focus on their future. Your goal is to focus on their current problems now. That's where trust is built, not trying to future sell them. The last one's a big one, and that's the whole idea that they have to like you first. Like, we feel like, oh, they gotta like me, we gotta get along. We got to have chemistry. That's the whole rapport building, the sales model from the '80s. And I'll tell you right now, here's the irony of this. They don't even have to like you to trust you. Which blows a hole in the whole concept of you first trying to build a relationship with them. Look, you— yes, you do build a relationship with them after they're a client, but not before they're a client, because I'll tell you why in a few minutes, what the problem is with that. Now, based upon this premise, we have to now drop a bomb in the whole sales and marketing model that we're used to. After so many years, we have to flip it. So what I want to do is talk to you for a second about the typical mental model that people have in marketing and sales, and what they think they should be doing. Now, I'm sure most of you know what what a sales funnel looks like, right? A sales funnel looks like this. You're, you're wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, right? What's our goal with the sales funnel? What do we put at the top of the sales funnel? We put as much as we can— leads, contacts, social media opportunities, marketing, podcasts— as much as we can, during as much activity. In the middle of the funnel, we spend all of our time doing what? Qualifying, chasing, following up, more meetings. At the bottom, what do we get? A marble comes out, right? It's what I call a high-volume, low-margin model, low-conversion model. This is the construct that's embedded in the back of our brains for years. And it no longer fits if you're in a low-volume, high-margin model. So we built our own visual tool called a sales cylinder to replace a sales funnel. And the way it works is you only put at the top your ideal clients, and in that process you don't qualify them or chase them. You only build trust with them. If you get this right, at the end you end up with a low-volume, high-conversion business. Do you know anybody wasting all that money on marketing that doesn't convert? And that's the focus of today, how to really execute this in an elegant way so you're not wasting all your time and energy with a hopeium drug and chasing leads that never convert. So to debunk the whole sales funnel, let's go through some quick myths around that. People say to me, Ari, we just need more leads. We had more leads, we'd do great. I say, no, you don't need more leads. You need a higher conversion rate. See, most businesses don't focus on that. They focus on more activity. And the irony of all this is that the biggest opportunity you have right now is sitting right outside your CRM in your own funnel that you're not converting. You have a huge hole above your bucket where your leads are going into aren't converting. The second thing I hear a lot about is, well, Ari, we're different. We have a long sales cycle. This is a long time to get a yes. Well, guess what? The reason for long sales cycles are typically because of a lack of trust. They don't trust you enough to say to you, okay, I'm in, let's do this. That took me about half a second to tell you that. Why does it take months and lunches and meetings and PDFs and proposals to get it to a yes? It's because of a lack of trust typically in your process. Then there's this too. I hear, oh, but I, I, I give a lot of value. I overdeliver on value. And I help people understand value in itself has been commoditized. If value delivery is seen as selling, oftentimes, if you're educating them, and what I call doing free consulting, where you end up in a situation where you give them so much value, they take that and they say to you, thank you so much. I'm gonna think about it and get back to you. And what do they do with your information? They shop and compare to somebody else, and you've given them free consulting of your time and devalue what you're doing. So I want to bust open the whole idea of a sales funnel to help you understand that is dead, and you must shift to a trust-based model that really is more elegant and helps you become the authority in what you do. Now here's the big— here's the— here's— there, zooming in. I want to help you shift from this self-image, from the act of selling, being a salesperson, delivering value, relationship building, all the things you're used to in your subconscious, to anointing you and shifting you to becoming this, which is a doctor. Congratulations, you're now officially doctors. You can tell your parents about this, they'll be excited. It's what they always wanted. Sorry. What I want to do is help you all become in your mind a doctor, a different way of thinking about this process. So what is the process right now that you have to go through to go see a doctor? What's the first step? Step number 1, schedule an appointment, right? That's step number 1 in the process. Then you go to your calendar and you schedule on your calendar and you schedule extra half an hour on each side in case of traffic, just in case you don't want to be late. That's your time, right? Then you drive your car, you show up at the doctor's office, you walk in the waiting room, and he's running late.

And what do you do in the waiting room?

You wait. You wait. Look at your watch. Now, do you invoice him for your time or her for your time? No, that's not how it works. You comply with their process. You're not happy, but you still comply. Then they call your name. You're like, oh, it's about time. You go in there, sit down in the chair in their office in the clinic, and the first thing they say to you is, where does it hurt? Right? They don't try and become your friend and have lunch with you first and have a cup of coffee and chitchat. They're busy. They have things to do, other patients waiting for them. So the first thing they say to you is, where does it hurt? You say, my shoulder. They say, let me take a look. Yeah, that looks a little sore in there. What happened? He goes, well, I got injured last weekend in a football game, whatever. Well, let's take a look and see what's going on. Yes, the X-ray, MRI, and puts the light bulb and report says, here's the problem you've got. You've got a blood clot in your right, in your right calf, causing that left shoulder to, to be inflated and harming you. That's why it's all different colors. You're like, what? Really? I thought it was injury from the shoulder. No, you're, you're, you're amazed by the clarity you have what your actual problem is. Then he writes you a plan, a prescription of what to do to work on it. And then you thank him. You walk out his door, you go to the front desk, you do one more thing. What do you do? You pay, you pay the doctor, not for solving your problem, only for clarity on the problem and a plan to fix it. Now, you go to the pharmacist to get the medicine. The pharmacist dispenses the medicine, not the doctor. Now, I've spent some time right now breaking this down for you step by step, because I think a lot of you on this call might be the doctor and the pharmacist all in one. Even the front desk answering the call all in one, because we can't help ourselves but to— as experts, we have what we call the expert syndrome. We want to tell people what we do. Once we kind of quick diagnose the problem, we say, oh, here's how you solve it. We go into pharmacy mode. So I'm going to help you today separate you being the pharmacist, you be the doctor, because the doctor is where you're building trust with people. And I'm going to help you to stop dispensing the medicine, so to speak, too early in the process, which now puts you in sales mode, because I can see you haven't spent enough time with them to really unpack their situation. Deep dive inside their world, for them to say to themselves, wow, she or he gets me. She's helped me clarify my own problem. We oftentimes don't go deep enough with people to do that. So let me first take care of one concept. And I'm going to walk you through how to go about being the doctor live in an actual process map. Okay. So I want to deal with one concept here. And that's the concept of this big idea, which is relationship building is not the same as trust building. Now, what does that mean? Because it sounds a bit abstract, because usually, when you build a relationship with someone, you build trust at the same time. That's what we think we're doing. Let me show it to you in a graph so you can visually see what I'm talking about. Okay, so on one axis, we have trust. On the axis, we have time. Okay, so all of us know that to build real authentic relationships, relationships with someone, it takes a lot of what? It takes a lot of time. Right now, a lot of time to build a relationship with someone creates a long sales cycle, follow-up meetings, proposals, emails, videos. And with that process in mind, if you're focusing on that, creating a long sales cycle, you end up getting a lot of this: I want to think about it. Uh, follow up with them. The next step, leave a voicemail, have them call you back. And then it's a very poor use of your time if you're focused on relationship building to get the trust. It takes way too long. But what if you remove the relationship piece? Pre-sale, that is. You still have it post-sale, of course. Take it out and you only sympathize and focus on trust building only. That will collapse your sales cycle down to a short amount of time. There's no more chasing, you get a yes or no upfront, no more selling yourself, and you can do what you do best, help people. So this concept in itself is a mindset shift because we're so wedded to believe and conditioned to believe, brainwashed to believe that our job is to build a relationship first with a new prospect. That is wrong, and that leads you into this, into the trust recession, stuck in the sales cycle, which will break everything for you. Now, how do you execute this in a way that makes sense? How you do it is a model I developed and are now being used by my clients around the world called the One Call Sale. Now in this process, there is no chasing, there's no pressure, there's no closing. Now when I say the one call sale, I don't mean a signed contract in one meeting. What I mean is such a deep level of trust with them in one conversation that they agreed to work with you and go to a next step with you on your calendar. They don't drop off into a black hole, you have to chase them. They're now scheduled with you like a doctor's office, to move forward into your onboarding process from there. Okay. What I'm going to do right now is I'm going to walk you through a blueprint or roadmap of what the one-call sale process looks like. So you can see it in your mind and think about how do you shift your whole sales model to be the doctor in what you do with them, as I broke it out with you earlier to go see a doctor, what his process is. Okay. Okay, so it starts with 4 pillars. The first pillar is, of course, the doctor-patient mindset. And in that mindset, there's less socialization, less chitchat. Hey, let's be friends. I love your shoes. Where you from? How you heard about me? All that kind of goes away. Instead, you're going to use what I call bedside manner, empathy, caring, not the rapport building, which can be seen as BS and inauthentic. Okay, which is hard for us because a lot of us are are being trained to be that relationship builder in the beginning. Then from there, you have to shift your thinking from what I call solution-centric thinking to problem-centric thinking. Because we live inside the medicine every day, we love what we do. And the moment we hear someone we find who's got a problem, our instinct is to start talking about the solution. We can't help ourselves. That's called solution-centric thinking. But today, the doctor in this situation, which is you, has to shift to what I call problem-centric thinking, where you can deep dive, unpack their problem to a very deep level, to a level where no one's ever gone before. You're going to help them see it 360 versus 180. Here's a quick image, a visual picture of what I'm talking about. So most business owners, when they meet someone new, a lead, or have a first Zoom call with somebody, they do ask questions, obviously, what do you do? What's your challenge? What's your problem? It's very brief, though, they kind of in their mind sort of synthesize, oh, yep, I know this guy's problem. I've heard it before 100 times. And yep, I can help them solve it. After a few questions, you kind of size them up. And off you go to the solution mode, which is most of the conversation. And then that's the problem. Because then they can see them, see you as trying to just talk about the— you're the pharmacist here, not the doctor. You did some malpractice. You didn't analyze enough with it to figure out what the patient— what the core of the issue is. But our model is different, where our process is only problem-centric, no solution discussion at all in that first meeting. There's a skill set where you do a deep dive, and I'll show you this in a few minutes, to unpack their problem. If they say to themselves, wow, This gal or guy gets me. It's where you're problem-focused only. That's where trust is created. They say to themselves, wow, they are spending time with me here focusing on me and not their solution. So the next pillar is this one called going down the iceberg, right? So imagine iceberg for a moment. Most business owners are above the iceberg with their leads or prospects. They talk about their challenges, their issues, they accept them as the promise is true. And they go off and move them down their process to your next step. They're always at the surface level. We want to talk about how to go below the surface level to a deeper, deeper, vulnerable, emotional level around the problem. We can help them build a business case for this, help them see the downside, the upside to it, and why it's urgent to solve their problem. Otherwise, they will be in trouble at some point down the future. How you do that is, and I'll give you an example right now, is what we call using trust-based languaging. Okay, let's do it. Let's do an example right now. Let's say you have a lead coming in and they agreed to a conference call with you. Say, let's just say on Zoom, a virtual call, a LinkedIn lead or whatever. They show up on Zoom. First thing you say to them is this, you say, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. That's it. No more chitchat. No more, hey, how'd you ever heard about us? Or what do you do? No more of that conversational, how's it going today kind of thing. Okay, just nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. Then next thing you say is this, which that takes me down the iceberg. First question is, if it's okay with you, if you wouldn't mind, take a step back for a moment and walk me through your background, your situation, and up to your current current concerns you have with whatever you sell, your business, your sales process, your operations. And we'll go from there. Would that be okay with you? Now I'll say it again. Ask permission twice. If it's okay with you, John, if you wouldn't mind, take a step back for a moment. I'll get through your background situation and up to your current concerns you have with X, and we'll go from there. Would that be okay with you? Then take your fingers like this over your mouth, sit back in the chair like this, like a doctor, like a therapist, and go like this. I know I'm not joking. What does this do for yourself? It reminds you to stop, not to do what? Don't talk. The first rule is be quiet, shut up, don't talk. You train yourself not to engage. It's really harder for us because we're not used to this. Sit back like this. Now this physically tells them you're creating empty space here. To allow them to talk and download on you and you listen. You're not going to engage, you're not going to ask more questions, you're going to listen 100% and be present. So I learned from Toby, be present, don't have a hidden agenda. Don't try and solve the problem, just stay with them. So I'll say it again. If you wouldn't mind, take a step back for a moment, John. Walk me through your background situation, and after, current concerns you have. We'll go from there. Would that be okay with you? That silence tells them, wow, he wants to hear what I have to say. And they want to tell you what they want to tell you the story, but we don't often let them. So now of course, they'll start talking and talking and talking and talking. As you're listening to the problem, your instinct will be to do what in the back of your mind? Probably try and solve it, right? Because you've heard his scenario 100 times, not new to you. Now they gotta feel from you that their problem is unique. It's the first time you heard it. You gotta listen, ripping attention. If your brain's already gone to, oh yeah, I can help this guy with that, they can tell that you're dropping off and not building trust with them. So you listen to them, they talking, they're done talking. When they're done talking, then you simply do this: you crystallize and summarize the core issue. So what I'm hearing from you, John, is your core problems are X, Y, and Z. Is that right? And he says, exactly. Checkbox number 1, the back of his mind, you're listening, you're a listener. That's the first step in knowing that you're trustworthy, is you're listening and not talking. Okay, which is so counterintuitive to sales processes, we're designed to engage and create momentum and create poor. Do not do that. Doctors don't do that. You shouldn't either. Have bedside manner and empathy. Okay. Now, next question that they ask for is this one. How long has that been an issue for you for? Sit back again. Let them now process this. Well, for the last 6 months, my team's not performing, we're not doing well, and Okay, what have you done so far on your own to try and resolve this? Well, we hired someone else. So they're now being comfortable, be vulnerable with you, opening up and telling you what their issues are at a very deep level. Then midway down, you do what I call cost of inaction, what I call COI, where you help them understand the impact of the problem itself. What's it costing them what's the impact economically, emotionally, not to solve the problem, reverse engineering it, doing a deep dive further inside their world. So you might use phrases like, have you considered, John, how much is costing you every month not to have this issue addressed? Are you aware of the impact to your team? Are they having to not have systems in place to be able to get their job done right? How is it impacting company? How's it impacting your ability to grow? Is it impacting you emotionally at home? What's the impact of the problem here? Because we have to build a business case with them to justify spending the money to solve the problem. Now, even though they may say they have a problem, doesn't mean they want to fix it. We get seduced so easily into someone saying, oh yeah, I'm looking for help with X, and we assume they want to solve their problem. Doesn't mean they want to solve it. Just means they want information about it. So on this conversation, you have to be the doctor, do a deep dive with the MRI and help them understand the full context and impact of the problem and help them build a business case for it. So on their own, they haven't done that yet. I can promise you that. Then, last question, you can ask this one. Is this a priority for you to address, resolve once and for overall? So you can fix this problem and turn things around? That's a very telling question. If they say no, then you gotta let them go. They don't want to solve it. You're a doctor, you solve problems, they don't want to solve it, then I can't help you. But they say to you, yeah, you're right, we got to work on this, then beautiful. They're in their mind sold on their own problem, not sold on you. They don't need to be sold on you. Believe it or not, they gotta sell themselves on the act of deciding whether it's a priority to work on or not. Then from there, you say this, you then roll out and show them your own roadmap just like this, a visual tool that walks them through what your process is for how you solve their problem, not your services, and how much you charge. It's a meta step. It's a visual way to show them your mental model framework for how you solve their problems. So you, you walk them through your— you say, may I walk you through our roadmap process? Guy says, sure. Remember, you've said zero about yourself so far, only spent time inside their problem. Okay, so you start to walk them through the process. Now it has to be visual. A lot of your processes now, you probably talk about it, verbalize it, does not work. We describe your processes, it goes inside one ear, out the other ear. When they see it, they believe it. You must show it in a visual way like this. And then they have to buy your process, they have to kind of be on board with you. So when you walk them through it step by step, you say to them this, you say, what are your thoughts on the roadmap process? Remember, sit back every time. Let them step into it. Don't ever say this question ever again. Don't ever say, do you have any questions about this? Don't ever use that again. It's like picking your brain for free, and off they go to someone else. Just say, what are your thoughts on the roadmap process? Probably, if it's done right, they'll say to you, makes sense. Then you go to the last stage, which is onboarding, where you then say, where would you like to go from here? There's no closing. There's no momentum. There's no pressure. You're nothing, you're just trust building. They're still testing you to make sure you're not going to try to sell yourself. You don't have to sell yourself here. Stop selling. Embed a process in place, replicatable, that can scale, that's already known to the human nature based upon the doctor model. Then from there, you slow down, they say to you, how do you work? You say, you know, however you work is a nominal fee of this, or we have a next step from here. And the most important part of all, you schedule them to a next step on your calendar. They don't drop off. If you lose them there and they want to think about it, you've done something wrong. Because the only decision they have to make on this meeting with you is one, do they want to solve this problem or not? Not they want to hire you. That's the only decision you have to help them make. They want to solve it, they'll schedule with you a next step on your calendar. And you, you now have built what I call a calendar-based business model where there is no more chasing, there is no more follow-up. Quick story for you. This is a real story happening this past— this past week. Haven't told Seth about this one yet on our sessions, but, uh, I spoke at a conference recently and the CEO approaches me, said to me— he has like a fleet leasing company— he says, Ari, man, I love what you're talking about, but it's crazy crazy, because I taught my team to chase leads. I have a CRM in place for that, emails, phone calls. We're all about chasing. You're telling me there's no more chasing? I said, exactly. He's like, I don't— well, I kind of believe you, but let's talk about it. So we had this call together. And he shows up with his sales managers, like 8 squares on the screen. I didn't know they were all going to show up. And I started taking down the iceberg. Asking how many leads they have coming in, how many they're losing, and the losses there. Same model I'm showing you. And they're telling me they're chasing leads, sending out proposals, not getting calls back, wasting time, uh, with people who aren't responding. Uh, they're in the buying process but not the selling process for the client. And, um, and they hate it. Absolutely. And they're losing twice as more in that process than they're actually making. And so the guy says to me, how do you work all right, told them my fee, how I work. He's like, sounds good. He says to me, send us a proposal and email and we'll go from there. And I started busting up laughing. I said, you guys did not hear me. Your problem that you're trying to solve is not chasing people, not doing follow-up with people, and not emailing people. I don't chase people. I don't do proposals. I don't email. I don't follow up. And they started cracking up also. They realized they were stuck in this mode of assuming that's the way people do business. I said, look, I'm gonna only send you one thing, okay? And that's the invoice. When you pay the invoice, then we'll solve your problem. And they all were cracking up on the phone line. They were like, oh my God, I can't believe this guy just did that. I said, I'm trying to teach you how to do the same. To make a long story short, they paid the invoice. They're a great client to work with. I love working with these guys. And they finally converted this— get— break their way of thinking. So I'm hoping today's breaking your way of thinking to realize we are in a new age, a new economy. You're being shopped. If you are sucked into their shopping mode process, it's over. You'll be commoditized by the numbers game. Flip it to this model. You can be very, very successful in the new economy as it comes around with AI and everything else. So here are the big ideas from today. Number 1, be the doctor and stop being the pharmacist too early in your process. Even though you can't help it, you've got to stop doing that. That's a mindset shift I have to help you with. Number 2, go down the iceberg. Don't cut out halfway through once you realize they're qualified. Go deeper down and spend time with them. Now, the call itself should not be more than 30 minutes, by the way. We're not talking about an hour call. 30 minutes, onboarded, offboarded. That's all you'll need to unpack their problem and do it right if you master this, the art of this. Also, they gotta feel the impact of their issues. Remember, COI, cost of an action. That's so important. They gotta monetize and qualify what their cost is, the problem is of. Otherwise, they cannot justify your fee, right? There has to be an ROI to their problem to justify investing in you to solve the problem. Now, one last tip for you. This is a big one. I'm going to ask all of you on this call to forever, never again use this phrase again in your sales process. Now, this might hurt just a bit, but here it comes. Don't ever again use the phrase follow-up ever again. Don't use emails, don't call somebody and say follow up with someone, I'm gonna follow up with you. Follow up is a sales word. Follow up triggers momentum. It tells them you're trying to move them towards a sale. Okay. So instead of using the word follow up, from now on, post ARI, only use this word. I'm just giving you a call to see if you have any feedback, any feedback on our previous conversation, any feedback on our last meeting. Any feedback on our proposal. Feedback's going backwards, not forwards. Okay, you have to change your languaging to not be in sales mode, because I can tell a mile away the minute you're in pursuit mode, even with one word alone. Okay, so the big picture today is this: you have to go through a wholesale transformation with you and your team to get out of the trust recession and differentiate your company not based upon your solution, because your solution's been commoditized. You win the game by differentiating your sales process by being a trust-based company, and you prove it to them from hello. So look, if this resonates with you, and you feel like this feels like you need to move this direction, I'm gonna give the opportunity today to get access to a copy of each of my best-selling books, my 3 best ones. I'll pay for it. I'll mail it to you in the mail. They'll be in a box, so not digital. I will send you a physical copy of the 3 books in the mail from my office. Um, just scan the code, go to the URL there, fill out the form if you want. On the back end, on the checkout page, you can schedule a time to talk with me privately, and I'll spend some time with you to deep, deep dive inside your sales process and figure out where the holes are. As you can see, the landscape view where the issues are. So I recommend that this resonates with you, great. If it doesn't, don't pursue it. But if it feels right to you, and it feels like natural to you, then grab the books, schedule a consultation. And we'll go from there. And that hopefully should be a shift for you to realize this is a wake-up call, the world's changed. And you have to shift your process to not carry over what you've been doing the solve your conversion issues. So hopefully it helps. And I'll bring it back to you, Seth.

All right, thank you so much, Ari. We can't— the little StreamYard link, it's— can you hide that thing? Because it's blocking the URL. Oh, sorry.

Let me, uh, yeah, uh, hide. Perfect.

There we go. So it is arigelber.com Seth, and, um, or scan the QR code. The link is in the chat, um, as well. Uh, we'll get to questions in just a second. I will just tell you from my own experience, it used to take us 4 calls to get what we're now getting in 1 call. We went from a 4-call sales process down to a 1-call sales process, and our conversion rate is a lot higher. We are getting more people to enroll in our services on 1 call than we were getting before at 4. So I am living proof this works, along with his hundreds of other testimonials. Um, so, um, Adrian, do we have any questions in chatter? While we wait for that, um, I see the first question in the chat, which was, um, I'm a financial advisor Do I need to get any of this through compliance?

I know, because this is not the marketing part of the process, only conversion. So this is just you changing your thinking on how you approach your potential client. Like, a lot of advisors do a lot of free consulting, free information. This is not any way deal with compliance. It's, it's compliance-free. It's just changing the way you are, what you say, how you handle that meeting. There's nothing you're changing here at ProcessWise at all.

Yeah, this is not external marketing. This is all just the conversations that you're having with your prospects, which presumably aren't scripted and aren't compliance approved at this point in time. Ari's not telling you how to make any investment recommendations or product recommendations. It's just literally how to get people to identify their problem, own their problem, and commit to solving it in one call, which again has been a game changer for us.

Yep.

Okay, um, Adrian, there's no L in the URL. It's Ari Gelber, not Ari L. Gelber. I think there's a typo. And do we have any questions from chatter, or I'll keep taking the text? Awesome.

Nope, we do, we do. Uh, Leah, you go first, and then Maria. All right, thanks. I just wanted to say that I I love the idea of only solidifying the problem in the first call. Because if you solve the problem in the first call, then they might think about it, try to fix it on their own, not show up to the second call. So I think it's genius to do it that way.

Thank you. Thank you. Now, the thing is, you're not going to solve it on that call. Okay, that's the, that's the distinction. The nuance of this, you're not solving the problem on that call, you're providing them clarity on their own depth and seriousness and gravity of their situation, because they will minimize it, because human nature is not to expose themselves, okay, to the actual ramifications of their issue. Your job as, quote, the therapist here is to help them understand the full picture of the problem and own it. You're the adult, they're the child. You're saying, Johnny, you got to pick up your clothes off your floor, otherwise I'm not going to have dinner tonight, whatever. You're trying to help these people. Believe it or not, they're adults, but they oftentimes cannot commit because they're indecisive about their own issues. So essentially, all we're doing here is helping them make the decision that, yes, I cannot procrastinate anymore. I got to do something about this. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. I love it. Beautiful. Maria.

All right.

Lots of gems today. I'm just sorry I missed an hour or two. I'm sure I missed a lot in that time. Lots of gems. So are you correct? Yes. Hi, Ari. I love what you say. I don't like the word follow-up myself, so we're aligned in that, in that factor. Uh, so I, just to give you, my name is Maria and I'm in real estate sales, residential, commercial, mainly residential. There's a lot of emotion involved with selling a home. Yes. So, um, you know, I, and I'm okay with that because, um, I can relate, number one, uh, on many levels, uh, aside from being a homeowner, I had to sell my family home after the passing of my mom. So there's, there's a lot of different circumstances that come into why people have to or decide to make a sale. It's not always, oh, we outgrew the house, we're happy-go-lucky, and blah, blah, blah. So how would you, uh, or what would you say to someone like me who, um, is dealing with the emotional side of making the quote sale. So, because for me it's more than that. For me it is a lot of love in there. So what would you say to a person like me who does things or selling something more personal and less, you know, like a— although trying to grow your business and selling a program is definitely personal, but I think more emotional is the word I'm looking for.

Well, this lines up so much with what you're doing because this requires you to have empathy, bedside manner, which sounds like you do. I can tell in your voice that you care about people. And I think what you have to do is lean into this, and you have to let people know that as an agent, you are not here to sell yourself. You are not here to promote your services. You're here to help them get through this process and this journey with the least amount of pain as possible and friction as possible. And I think very much roadmap applies to you also. Show them what your unique process is. I think you have room here to kind of let them know that your journey that you take people through is different than other people's agents, you know what I'm saying? Because I think in a way you, you have a different heart, uh, you're heart-centered, and I think that gives you a lot of leeway to work with this process around that.

I would also chime in, just as someone who has been through a lot of training one-on-one with Ari, and it's made a profound impact on our business. I would say you are not— he's absolutely right, you're not selling a home. You're there to help them identify what they want, what the cost is of not getting it, and do they want to move forward with your unique process as spelled out in the roadmap. Because Everybody knows at least 5 realtors, right? We all know somebody in our life who's a realtor. So it's no longer about— it's— and if you put 20 realtors in a room, they wouldn't be able to tell you apart. The roadmap differentiates you because even if you did exactly the same process just to list or sell a house, you're the only one who's got a visual description roadmap of that process. So even if everyone says they do it exactly the same way, your visual guide for the process will differentiate you all by itself and get more people to engage with you than you've ever had before.

You can even add some emotional stuff as part of your roadmap process, you know. I don't know, a couple layers. But yeah, yeah, Seth is right. Your, your unique offering is not your services. Others do what you do, like, but your process and how you go about doing it, that you have room to build a unique process for Yeah, I mean, think about it.

If you think about all of the amazing speakers we've had today, including myself, there have been 4 folks talking about marketing. There was me, there was Max Bidner, there was Eric Huberman, there was Partiv Shah, and we all come about it from different ways. So we could all get hired by the same business to grow their business in a different way with a different process. It doesn't mean you don't need all 4 of us, you would probably go one at a time in order. But if you think about it, you're a realtor. What will differentiate you isn't your 'I've got this whiz-bang way to get top dollar for your home that no one else has,' unless you've got that, and then I'll shut up. But your way— what differentiates you is you, and you gotta— got a way to communicate that. And a visual display like the roadmap that Ari's built for us would be a huge game changer.

I thank you so much. Yeah, I'm grateful. I'm great. I'm grateful that, uh, that you hear my heart. I like that. Thank you. I do hear it.

Thank you. All right, so we greatly appreciate your time. We've only been live for 9 hours today, so non-stop. Thank you all. Thank you, Ari, for being our closeout speaker. If you have been tuned in for at some point today and you said, hey, I want to, I have a business, I want to grow it. I don't know where to start. I don't know what I need first, second, third, or fourth. Go to bookwithseph.com, schedule a call, and we'll talk about, we'll take you through our roadmap process of how we can help you grow your business. If you've got the leads coming in, if you've got traffic and you just need a way to communicate your unique process or your unique personality to close more sales and build more relationships, then absolutely go to AriGelper.com/Seth. You can skip me and talk to Ari right away if that's the thing that you need the most help with, as in conversion, getting people to actually enroll in your service or hire you. If you need more people in the front end, if you need more leads in the door, go to BookWithSeth.com. We're happy to set up a time to talk about whether it's the AI podcast, whether it was the Facebook ads you heard about, whether it was a new whether it was any of the things you heard about today, we can help quarterback and say where you are in your business, this is the person that you need right now, and coordinate you getting over to them so that you don't get overwhelmed with 9 different choices and start with what you most need at this point in your business now. So thank you, Adrian, for doing a fabulous job putting this together and being our producer. Um, thank you all to all of my fabulous speakers and friends who presented. Thank you to all of you, to the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who attended live and participated in it, whether you were with us for 1 hour or all 9. Thank you so much. And I am— I can't wait till the book— we're turning every single— we're turning this whole thing into a book. So there will be a Business Growth Summit book for you to check out as well, for those of you who couldn't be here all day or who would prefer to read about it, read what we talked about. That's coming soon. There will be many more awesome things coming coming down the pike. So make sure you whitelist or safe sender or move us to important or star us in whatever email platform you got an email about this so that you continue to get our emails and notifications about our events. And we will see you all on the next Business Growth Summit. Thanks, everybody.