Business Growth Summit December 8th 9 am - 6 pm EST

We are live. Welcome. Today is a little different live. We are doing the Business Growth Summit 2025 with Market Domination, and we've got a song to share before we start. And let me pull it up. Here we go.

Minds ready, this is where the leaders go.

Welcome to the moment, get set, let the magic begin.

We have set green in the field and killed it. Getting lost through the scoggins, rock climbing, hunting and freedom. Riding side by side, rolling brings a vibe. Yeah, we're simple, slow, and chillin' takes the stage. Watch your friends come visit, turn it up, turn it up, follow the rhythm, feel the vibe. Every second, every beat, we are rising to our feet. It is showtime, showtime, let the whole room cheer. The song starts to play, best moment of the year. Turn the energy higher like the good vibes flow. 3, 2, 1, here we go! It is showtime, showtime, let the whole room unite. We are ready, we are rising into the light.

The show starts, let the whole room glow.

3, Every second, every beat, we are rising to our feet.

It is showtime, showtime, showtime. The whole room cheer, the sun across his face. It's only only year, turn the energy higher, let the good vibes glow.

3, 2, 1, here we go.

It is showtime, showtime, showtime.

Let the room unite, we are ready, we are rising.

Step into the light, let it shine. Let the whole room glow.

3, 2, 1, here we go!

Hands up! Leaders, leaders in the room, feel the spark, feel the obsession. This is the way, way you take the chance. It's showtime, showtime, let the whole gym cheer. It's time to take the moment, we are here, turn the energy higher. Good vibes flow. 3, 2, 1, let's go! Yeah, the moment is here, the spotlight is yours. The summit starts now.

Here we go.

Well, let's stop that right there. Let me go back. Wow, did that kick me off! Woo! Dance like in my chair is the funnest thing to do. Welcome everyone to the Business Growth Summit 2025, brought to you by Market Domination. And the most amazing business leader, owner, CEO, founder, Seth Green. Seth is a founder of Market Domination, LLC, Inc.'s 5,000 fastest growing marketing company, 9 best-selling marketing books, over 3 million podcast downloads, and 3-time Marketer of the Year nominee from Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson. And also, he's my boss. And you know what? I've never worked with anyone as great as Seth Green. So I am so excited. So let's welcome Seth to the stage. If you have questions on chat or social— Seth, how do you like your questions? Do you like being interrupted, or do you want to wait till the end?

Um, let's do— let's They can type them in and then we'll— yeah, they can. You can interrupt me.

Okay, because we've got live voices. We are live on Chatter Social where you can download the app, come into the room and join the conversation live. All right, Seth, I am handing it over to you. Thank you so much. And this is all being recorded live.

Awesome. All right, so let's dive in. Let's make sure— can everybody see my screen?

Let me add it to the stage. There we go.

Awesome. All right, so we're going to start talking about the State of the Union. What is coming for 2026? Don't know if you noticed this, but the king of search, Google, is finally slipping. 89.6% Google's market share has dipped below 90% for the first time in a decade. Why is that? Well, 42% of users say Google is less useful than before. And I know what you know, 800 million people are using ChatGPT every single week. 77% of ChatGPT users are treating it like a search engine. They are using it instead of Google. ChatGPT is now processing over a billion searches every day and growing. So 52% now of people say they use AI search instead of Google. It is growing 81% year over year and expected to increase. So if you are a business owner, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a sales professional, what do you do about that? Well, I am going to show you an invisible AI-powered podcast system which we believe is the next generation of lead flow. I'm going to show you how to use an invisible AI-powered podcast to get in front of your target market, crush objections, and close more deals. Now I know we have a ton of amazing speakers friends of mine, people I have been inspired by, get to work with, get to work from. It's absolutely amazing. And they're all going to share. Some of it's going to be psychological, some of it's going to be mindset, some of it's going to be specific marketing tactics, some of it's going to be philosophy of how you should approach something. I am super excited. I invited these speakers because I selfishly can't wait to take pages and pages of notes and learn from all of them. But let's share with you what I want to teach you is what I think is what is making a big difference for us and what's going to make a bigger difference in 2026. Is how to use an invisible AI podcast without showing your face, without recording episodes, without spending hours on technology. So you are going to learn in my session, my first session, real quick, you're going to learn you don't need to be the face of this, how to crush objections automatically even if you're not tech savvy at all, and how to get this to run on autopilot even if you don't have time. Now, we are not selling anything today. This is purely educational. So let me tell you really quick why I built this. Well, Market Domination has been helping professionals and business owners build authority and generate leads through podcasts and content marketing for decades. How many of you— you can answer in the chat, you can answer in chat, or you can answer in the comments on Facebook and LinkedIn and everywhere else that we're live— how many of you have employees or contractors in your business? Now, how many of them execute their jobs flawlessly, on time, every single time? Nobody, right? So I was frustrated one day with one of our team members, and I said, why can't my team members— why can't, why can't they just do the right thing every single time the right way? And we run on EOS, and we run on the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and our EOS implementer, when I asked him this question, he said, people are gonna people. So I, out of my own frustration at that point in time, I said, I wonder if there's a way to do all this podcast stuff, all this podcast production and marketing, without any people. So I went months of research down the rabbit hole until we finally built the first 100% all AI podcast. So what could you use an AI podcast for? Well, you're probably already maxed out, right? You're probably working too many hours in a day already, so the idea of starting something new sounds impossible. What if you had a podcast that created itself? An AI host can represent you or not represent you, we'll talk about the difference in just a minute. It says exactly what you want. It crushes objections for you. It positions you as the authority and it works in any industry. So here's an example. One of the other businesses, I am a serial entrepreneur. I own 4 businesses. One of them is in financial services and I had a prospect across the desk from me and the solution to their retirement income need, this particular prospect, this particular point in time was a financial product called an annuity. And I made the presentation. I thought I did a good job. And they said, but Ken Fisher says annuities are bad. Ken Fisher, tens of billions of dollars, registered investment advisory firm, advertises more than almost any other financial services firm, financial advisory firm on the planet, and is famous for his marketing campaigns about why he hates annuities. So they said, hey, isn't— aren't annuities bad? Doesn't Ken Fisher say annuities bad? And hey, doesn't Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey— don't all those people, all those gurus say annuities are bad? And I told them why Ken Fisher was wrong and why the annuity was perfect for them. And they said they would go home and think about it. And then they ghosted me. 3 phone calls. They did not return my messages. 3 emails. They did not return my emails and they disappeared. So I created— I sent them one of the very first episodes of the AI podcast I'm about to show you to them. And magically they replied, booked an appointment, and bought the product. And They said, wow, that woman you sent us, that episode about that annuity really makes a lot of sense. And they quoted her back to me and then filled out the paperwork. And I was really happy to get the sale. But part of me wanted to throttle them because I was like, I told you the exact same thing, but you didn't believe me. But this AI-powered stranger that you don't know is AI-powered, you believed her. So you don't need to be the face of this. In fact, in some cases, it's better not to be the face of it because they'll perceive you as being biased, right? If I had said it, it was the same thing as if me was saying it. So enter the AI podcast, and we're going to talk about how it's going to help you get found in ChatGPT and AI searches in just a minute. So again, imagine sending a prospect an episode titled Ken Fisher's Wrong About Annuities and Here's Why. You don't have to say it. Your AI podcast host says it for you objectively as a credible third party. So here's a pro tip: don't let the AI be 100% biased in your favor. It has to look objective. So when I show you the episode, you'll see that literally it says, here's why Ken Fisher is right and here's why Ken Fisher is wrong. Again, it's got to look objective. So number one, you don't need to be the face of this. In some cases, it's better if you don't. Most people think they need to be the expert voice. That's not entirely true. Prospects, data has shown, actually trust a neutral third-party voice more than a salesperson, all of us, pitching themselves, right? We're perceived as selling something. So that's why I've got now a small army of AI hosts like Erin Maxwell, who I'm going to show you. And she runs a show called The Truth About Annuities, and she takes down objections from Ken Fisher, Suzy Orman, Dave Ramsey, and anybody else standing in the way. And the best part, of course, Erin isn't real. She's an AI host, but she sounds real. And to prospects, she's a trusted third-party authority delivering your message. Here's the show itself, The Truth About Annuities: Pros, Cons, and Solutions. And there's Erin Maxwell. This is what she looks like. I made her up. She does not exist. And I don't know if our sound is going to work, but I'm going to try. This is what she sounds like. And you can hear the intro to the show, which also AI produced and wrote the music for. And then you can hear Aaron. Let's see if the audio is going to work. Welcome to The Truth About Annuities, the podcast that cuts through the confusion and brings you straight answers about one of the most— Can you hear the audio, Adrianne? Hopefully that's a yes. I misunderstood financial. Uh, can everybody hear the audio? Well, ah, my computer's out there. There we go. Join your host Erin Maxwell every week as she breaks down what works, what doesn't, and how annuities could fit into your retirement plan. It's time to plan smarter, retire stronger, and live with peace of mind. Welcome to The Truth About Annuities. I am Erin Maxwell, and today we are digging into the truth about Ken Fisher. There you go. Now, some of you say, hey, if you're sophisticated, if you're in the market, if you've played with some of the AI tools like Adrian has, you're like, hey, I could tell that voice is AI. But your target market doesn't know that, and the technology keeps getting better and better. So you can have an AI podcast where objections get crushed automatically even if you're not tech savvy. So how I figured this out, while my marketing, while my podcast production firm, we have produced almost 7,000 podcast episodes and I have personally hosted over 1,400 of them interviewing other people. I have not personally produced a podcast in over 10 years. My team does all the work, thankfully. So I don't even know what our current production process is. So I did not ask my team for help. I said, I want to learn this from scratch as if I know nothing, because technically I do. With no production experience. So how do our objections get crushed automatically even if you're not tech savvy? Some of you are thinking, this sounds cool, but I'm not tech savvy enough. I don't know if I could do that. Well, there's zero tech skills required because with our system that I'm teaching you, you don't touch the tech. AI builds the host, AI scripts the show, AI uploads and syndicates the episodes. AI does almost all of the work. If you can ask ChatGPT a question You can do this. Think about it. Instead of answering the same objection over and over and over, you answer it once and your AI podcast handles it forever. It's like hiring an employee to handle objections, but this one works 24/7 and never asks for a raise. So here's the best part. It runs on autopilot even if you don't have time to do it. I got here at 7. I dropped Ella off. We have 3 kids. I dropped my middle child off. At high school at 7 AM, and I work till 6 PM when I pick our youngest up from cheerleading. So I, and I have a hard stop at 6 Eastern time, so I can't work any more hours in the day, right? That's already 11 hours. I don't have time for any more. So it couldn't take much of my time to do this. The good news is it's a done-for-you system. The episodes are created automatically, they're distributed automatically, and they live forever. And the best part is we have a whole section— I don't know if I'll have time for— on how, A, on how AEO, answer engine optimization, as opposed to the old way of doing things with search engine optimization. Answer engine optimization is optimizing your business, your content, for to show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Manus, and all the other AI answer engines. AI, the, the AI like ChatGPT, are literally showing that if you look at what gets indexed when you do a search in ChatGPT, you'll see a lot of those answers our podcasts, they're the audio of podcasts, they're the video, they're the transcripts. So I could do a whole hour just on answer engine optimization and how podcasting is a huge component of how to get yourself ranked in ChatGPT as the best in your industry, as the best in your market. So let me give you a couple of examples really quick of what else you can use it for. Let's pretend that here I am in Buffalo, Western New York. And let's say we did an AI podcast about the beauty industry in Western New York. It could review local spas, it could review local salons, it could review beauty careers, it could talk about beauty schools. Why would I have an AI podcast that was doing all of those things? Because the Excurious Spa and Salon across the street is a client of mine, and the Salon Professional Academy down the street, where you can go to get your certification in cosmetology, aesthetics, and other things like that. Are clients of mine and they'd be the sponsor of the show. So there would now be an objective third-party podcast host reviewing local spas, salons, beauty careers, and beauty schools. And of course, the ads on the show would all drive to my client and the episodes about them would happen to endorse them the most. If you were a financial advisor or other type of business professional, you can have the show, your AI host, review centers of influence. So it could, if you're a financial advisor, could review like accountants and attorneys and insurance agents to build your relationships and get you access to their client base. How is an AI host that reviews another business going to get you access? Because when you tell that other business about, hey, I saw this episode about you, they're going to promote it to their own audience because they're bragging about themselves and introducing all of those people to you. Again, you could review any— you could have it review any type of local businesses that you wanted to get in front of or you wanted business from. So are your wheels spinning yet? Now, I know some of you are thinking, how big is this really? Well, the online ad spend marketplace, whether that's Facebook, Google, any digital ad spend in 2025 was $254 billion. That's how much was spent in online advertising this year, 2025. Podcast advertising was $2.4 billion. It's only 1% of the market. So it is the new, new ground floor. If you remember the good old days when Overture turned into Google AdWords and you could buy clicks for pennies, if you were around when Facebook ads launched in the first few years and you could buy clicks for pennies, this is the new good old days of audio podcast advertising. And the crazy thing is you can literally— the targeting data that used to be available for Facebook before they got in trouble with Congress, is available on podcast audio advertising. So for literally a fraction of the price of the Facebook or Google or whatever other ads you're paying for, I can have a 30-second audio commercial play in the ear of your ideal prospect while they're listening to a show like the New York Times or NPR or something else that they already know, like, and trust. And unlike Facebook and YouTube ads that a lot of times people scroll by, 72% of podcast listeners like ads and actually listen to them because they trust that show. So if you want to talk about how this could work in your business, if you're not on a mobile device, you can scan the QR code with your mobile device. If you are on a mobile device, just go to bookwithseth.com, go grab— I think we've got some time slots available in December, and I know we've got some available in January, and we can set up a time to walk through how an AI podcast could work for your business and what it— how could you use it to make it so that it helps grow your business. So does that make sense? Does everybody get how that could possibly work? Let's take some Q&A, um, before and, and see how long that takes before we decide if we're going into a step-by-step process of the exact step-by-step process to create this for you. Okay, do we have any questions in the chat?

Well, let's, let's ask our live audience first. So we have— welcome Lisa, Lauren, Danielle, glad you're here, Sheila, and, um, and those of you in the audience, if you want to come up and ask questions, please come on up. Lauren, did you have any questions for Seth?

No, I have no questions, but this is so interesting because I never thought about AI in a podcast.

So I am absolutely taking notes and excited about this.

Awesome. A lot of people think, hey, I don't have time. I'd love to have a podcast. I just don't have time. Now you don't need time because AI can do the work.

Anyone else have any questions? Okay, I know.

All right, I'll go in. I'll go into step 2. Okay. All right, so we're going to show you now how it's done. As soon as my computer cooperates. I can't get back to my browser here. Let's try this share. Share screen. There we go. Okay, hopefully. All right, you want to put my slides back up there so everybody can see it?

Seth, I don't see it actually.

Okay, hang on a second. All right, sorry about the tech issues, folks. All good. We're gonna get there in a second. Okay, share screen. Here we go. Take 2. Browser can't access it and access your screen. All right, so I'll tell you what, I'm just gonna tell it to you. All right, let's just walk through how it will work. And we just won't have slides and that's okay. Okay. So the first step is you've got to decide on your strategy. Do you want an AI podcast that is branded to you or do you want it to be a stealth invisible show? So for example, Erin Maxwell, The Truth About Annuities is invisible because she's not me, but she's out communicating the message the way I want in the marketplace. And I am using her as an invisible salesperson that I can send episodes to prospects to, to get them to believe her and then do what I want them to do. So that's an invisible show when you create a fictional AI persona and it's not branded to you. A branded show, it could be you, like you could clone your voice, or I could have a fictional persona, but it shows, hey, this is the Market Domination podcast. and then people can see that it's branded and that it's coming from my company. But again, I still get to control what they say. So it is totally up to you. Your first decision are do you want it to be branded to you or do you want to be stealth? Then you want to talk about your strategy. Are you business to consumer? Are you business to business and you want like a center of influence show, or are you business to business and you're doing like a review show to get your foot in the door? So are you B2C, B2B? And if you're B2B, do you want to do it for a center of influence show or to get your foot in the door? Once you've decided on do I want it branded or stealth, am I B2C or B2B, then you're going to name your show. So you are going to put in something like ChatGPT or our podcast AI software that we built that you want to create a podcast. This is your goal. This is how you want it done. And then you want it to create a title for you, which it will get— ask it for like 10 different titles of your show, and then you're going to pick one. After you've got a title, the next thing you're going to do is you need an introduction and an outro. Intro and outro. Those are like the commercials for the show that get people to listen. So you can again ask ChatGPT or our AI, create an intro and bump outro bumper scripts for my podcast that can be announced over our podcast theme music. Our host is named this, the podcast airs weekly, this is what the show's about, and it will write you the script. Then you're gonna go in, then you need art, you need a logo for the show. In our case, we like to use Canva's AI, which is at canva.com/ai. And we tell it, I need a logo for my podcast called this, and these are the colors that I want included in it. And then it will create art for you. Then Canva also has the ability to do audio, and it has AI voices built in. So you're going to pick one of the AI voices and then paste in your script for your intro, and it will literally voice it and produce the music for you. Now, I think what we have found is you should use the opposite gender voice of your show host. So for example, on The Truth About Annuities, Erin Maxwell is a woman, so the intro is a male voice. You want the difference. Then after you've got an intro and an outro, you're going to ask either ChatGPT, the continuing thread that you're using, or you're going to ask our AI, hey, now I need 10 episode ideas for the show and here's what the topics are. That's what you've gotta come up with. You've gotta say, these are the topics I want the show about. And then it will give you 10 ideas for episodes and then you can then tell it to go write all 10 of the episodes for you so that that way it's literally written your intro and outro, it's produced the audio and the music, it's given you your episode ideas, it's written the episodes for you, then we've even got a process where you can use it to voice the episodes and then syndicate them on the platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, Amazon Audible, and Pandora. So next break, let's stop for a second and see if we have any additional questions. Before we keep going. You can put them in the chat, you can ask them on Chatter, all the good places. And then we're going to go into answer engine optimization in just a minute. Okay. All right. I see. Any barriers you've had to overcome? That's a great question. So I had to figure out how to do all of this, and the barriers are— it's really, once you think about it, once you decide what you want to do, once you have, as Tony Robbins says, once you have your big enough why, The how becomes the easy part. So don't get hung up on the tech details. We can talk about all of that. But what you can do is I want you to think about what you really want it to do for you. If you had an employee that you could make do whatever you want, say whatever you want, and they're your podcast host, what would you do with them? So it's really limited just to your imagination. There are probably people who are going to come up with on the summit today who are going to come up with ideas that I haven't thought of yet. For it. Sandra says, can it also do video for YouTube? So thank you, Sandra. That's a really interesting point. So as of right now, we're doing audio only because in all honesty, most of the video simulate— the AI video I've seen isn't good enough. It's pretty good, but it's not perfect. And it's— if you look, it's kind of obvious that it's AI. Like, for example, even if you look at— we had one, I did AI video, but then you could see the pixels when their mouth was moving. So then I put a— I had the image, I said, put a microphone in front of their mouth so you can't see their mouth, like a big podcast microphone and put it right up front to cover it up. But you could still see the pixelation. I mean, even if you look at something like HeyGen, which is really good, like I could instantly speak 50— I would upload a video and it will instantly translate it into 50 languages and match my lips. It's good, but it's not perfect. The audio is much better than the video quality. So could you use it for video? I'm going to say yes, but I would probably wait to do the video for another 30 to 60 days because the quality of the AI just keeps getting better and better. And I think in the next 3 months at the latest, video will be good enough. So yes, you can use it for video for YouTube, Sandra, and it'll get even better. Which is why we're waiting just a little bit for the video quality to improve just a little bit more. What are the detriments? Okay, so I will tell you one thing I did, one backlash that I got. So I have on that annuity show, one of the episodes is the truth about Ken Fisher. And again, it's the one I use to close the deal with that prospect. But I got apparently Ken Fisher, his company sent me a— the legal department sent me a 3-page letter telling me I couldn't do that and that I needed to take the episode down. So we did delete the Ken Fisher episode. Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman haven't found us yet. Don't tell them. But Ken was like, you're violating our copyrights. We trademarked the name. You can't say the name. And I said, okay, so I redid the episode and now it says like, some people, some financial celebrities say that annuities are expensive or bad or whatever. So I had to get rid of the one with Ken Fisher's name on it. Um, so if you make episodes to overcome objections and those involve famous people, even though they're in the public domain, you do run the risk that you might piss off their legal department. And I did. I emailed them back and said, okay, I'm so sorry, I'll delete the episode right away. And they were like, okay, thanks, no problem. So thankfully nothing bad happened. That's the only detriment I ran into. You also have to think about who your target market is. So if your target market is relatively internet sophisticated, you might want to— you could disclose that it's an AI-powered podcast because— so for example, for my financial services firm, that target market, we're going after folks who are in their 70s and 80s. Primarily. So, um, when I have sent out podcasts, I got feedback like, oh, that lady sounds so nice, you should hire her, or that was really helpful. Because they're not— for whatever, those people that I happen to send it to weren't at the degree of internet sophistication where they would go, hey, that's AI, right? Now, if my target market was, let's say, 20 to 30-year-olds, I might disclose that it's an AI-powered host simply because they're more tech savvy and more likely to realize it. Now, I can't give you legal advice. I'm not an attorney and I don't play one on TV. However, one of the things that Ken Fisher yelled at us for— the first team, I actually got two emails. The first email said, you didn't disclose that your podcast host was AI, and according to Apple's terms of service, you have to say that. So I replied and said, okay, no problem, I'll put a disclaimer at the bottom of every show note that says Aaron Maxwell's powered by AI, um, which we did, and it did not affect the show at all. It didn't drop our numbers at all. Nobody cared. Um, and then I thought I was off the hook, and then their head of their legal department sent a 3-page, hey, you can't use our name, blah blah blah, take it down. So if you want to play it safe, disclose that it's an AI-powered host. Um, depends on your target market. Legally, on Apple, you have to disclose it. We haven't had anybody. I now have I think 5. I have 4 AI-powered shows of my own. And we're producing 5 or 6 for clients. And so far, there hasn't been any pushback. Nobody's complained other than Ken Fisher complaining to me. Other detriments, I can't really think of any. Okay, any other questions? Before we move on to how this works to get you found in ChatGPT and AI search results. Any questions from chatter? Okay, I don't see any yet.

All right.

So what How does this help you get found not only in answer engine optimization, but it will also get you found in traditional, like Google searches as well, because every episode that you do will create 6 SEO and AEO boosting assets automatically. So number 1 is the transcript, the long-form transcript with keyword-rich content. And when you write your podcast episodes, when you have ChatGPT or whatever, write you the episodes, you can tell it when it writes each script, you can say, I want to optimize this for SEO for these keywords, make sure you include them in the script. So number one, ChatGPT and Google both love long-form text. So a 10-minute episode will give you like 1500 words of a transcript that is basically a blog post that you do not have to write. So that's number 1. Number 2, every episode title acts as like a mini search engine optimization headline. So if you structure titles around objections, around your frequently asked questions, around industry phrases, you will hit the exact queries that people search for. So for example, if I had an episode that says Ken Fisher Wrong About Annuities, it mirrors— or Ken Fisher Talks About Annuities, or Ken Fisher Hates Annuities. It mirrors real searches and thus will show up. Number 3, each episode, if you put it on your website, will help you build internal linking and site structure, both of which in the AI world, that's called schema. You can do a whole seminar on how schema makes your website rank better in ChatGPT searches. But if you publish both the episode audio and the transcript to your website, you add what's called a content cluster and you build depth on your topic of expertise where you are more likely to be cited by ChatGPT and the AI engines. And then you strengthen your site structure with internal links, which increases your whole site authority. Then the fourth thing every episode does for you is it creates backlinks from the podcast directories. So for example, Google ranks websites, it's called PageRank, from like, let's say 0 to 10, and 0 would be a website that your kid made that does not connect to any other website on the internet. Whereas a PageRank of 1 would be like cnn.com, has millions and millions of pages and millions of websites linked back to it. Well, if you publish your podcast to places like Apple, Spotify, Podchaser, etc., they link back to your website. So now every episode, if I do Apple, iTunes, YouTube, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Amazon, and Audible— if I put my podcast in 7 places every single week, that's 7 backlinks from PageRank 1 websites to my website. Backlinks are both Google and ChatGPT currency. Then if I embed the audio, or someday soon the video, on my site above the transcript, that audio, let's say it's 10 minutes long, if people hit the play button and listen to it for 10 minutes, that increases the time on my site. The more time people spend on your site, the higher it will rank. And then both search engines and answer engines rank websites with consistent new content higher. So it's called the content freshness signal. If you are putting out a new episode every single week and publishing it to your website, you now have content freshness. So those 6 pieces, those 6 parts that come from every single episode every week, hopefully that makes sense how that would help you rank higher. Now, Let's talk about how they also separately boost AI answer engine optimization and help you get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, etc. So every episode you do will improve your answer engine optimization in 7 critical ways. Number 1, the large language models, the AI programs all read the transcript. So that's number 1. Number 2, every episode will help you create what's called semantic authority. The AI tools will rank you as a source based on clarity, consistency, expertise, and structure. Podcast transcripts check all those boxes because they're focused, they're contextual, they're easy for the AI engine to read, and they're predictable. Then number 3, every episode becomes what's called an answer unit. That AI can cite. So if someone asks, are annuities good for retirement? Should I refinance my house? Whatever the question is, your episode on that topic becomes a source AI can pull from, and that's AEO, answer engine optimization, visibility. And then number 4, every episode builds an AI footprint across platforms because when you distribute it to all kinds of different places and post it all over social media, it has a deeper footprint. The more places it shows up, the higher chance it is of being referenced. And then number 5, your objection-based episodes will match AI search patterns. So most of the ways people are searching AI right now are, is this thing good or bad? Should I do this thing? Why questions? How do I do something questions? Comparison questions. And if your episodes mirror those structures, there is a higher probability that ChatGPT and the other answer engines will match them and thus list you. Number 6, reputation signals increase with each episode. The more content AI sees from a brand, consistent voice, consistent explanations, consistent expertise, the more AI trusts you as a source. And trust is the number one AEO ranking factor, and that's just talking about using trust to get ranked. Later today, one of our last presentations, my personal sales mentor, Ari Gelber, is gonna come on and talk about trust-based selling and how to communicate with your prospects and clients in a trust-based way that will get your sales process faster. People will buy more often, people will buy sooner, and your conversion rate will go way up. So make sure you stay the whole day, even if you have to jump off. 'cause you gotta go to work, you gotta take the kids somewhere, make sure you keep coming back and checking on that because we're gonna have some— we have some amazing guest speakers today. And then again, number 7, episodes create content clusters. AI uses what's called a content cluster to rank your expertise. So if you do multiple episodes on similar topics, then AI sees that as a content cluster of expertise and ranks it higher than just a single piece of content. So If you do one episode a week, get it syndicated everywhere, you will then have help for search engine optimization, answer engine optimization, AI visibility, credibility. It is absolutely incredible. I have looked, I have done this myself, and I asked ChatGPT the other day, I said I was super— I'm super excited that this happened. I asked ChatGPT and I said, just for the heck of it, Who is the number one, um, expert at marketing professional practices? Financial advisor, accountant, lawyer, doctor, chiropractor, etc. And it said there is no official number one, no governing body that ranks this, but if you narrow it specifically to using podcasts to market professional practices, Seth Green is very realistically at the top of the heap. And it cited 22 different places, what it used to put me at the top of that list, and a number of them were podcast interviews. So use this process in your own business. And I promise you will see absolutely amazing results. All right, other questions? Oh, I can't hear you.

Sorry, Seth, I'm just wondering if you would share about the fabulous Sharkpreneur podcast and some of the news, if you wouldn't mind, because that is very exciting and I would love everyone to know about it.

Oh, thank you. So, um, yes, I co-host the Sharkpreneur podcast with Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank. He was the original shark on Shark Tank. And we were recently, we recently got named to hang on, let me pull that. It was a list of the top 10 podcasts for small business owners. It's on USA Today. That was super exciting. And across our network of all this, I haven't even announced this yet. So we were going to put this, we were going to announce this on social later this week that across all the network of all the podcasts we produce, we just crossed 3 million downloads. So we are super excited about that. If you are a small business owner or professional and you'd like to grow and scale your business, we air the Sharkpreneur podcast 3 times a week. Kevin does 1 or 2 episodes a month because of his schedule, and I do all the rest. But we interview amazing hosts with, I think, almost, almost every single person here today except for maybe one has been on my podcast as a guest at least once. If not more than once. And I had them come speak today because selfishly, I wanted more of their time and expertise, which is why they're speaking and sharing with you today. Are there comments or questions? Now we do produce and have for decades human-to-human podcasts. I actually started Sharkpreneur before Kevin. It wasn't called Sharkpreneur. It was originally called Direct Response Marketing Magic, and I started it in 2007, which was 3 years after the very first audio podcast ever aired. So I was early and consistent, two things that absolutely help. Leah has a question. Awesome. Fire away.

Yeah, Leah, Leah, go ahead. Take it away. It may just be because I wasn't on the screen.

Okay. Can you hear me now?

Okay.

Yes.

Okay, perfect. So I'm completely pro-AI. So this is not an anti-AI question. How do you handle the pushback that you might get from people who say this is just all trickery?

This is all trickery.

Trickery, trickery, like it's not a real podcast, like, like this is just made up and things like that.

Okay, great question. So we, and I appreciate the disclaimer, we haven't had any. So number, you have the two choices. Number one, technically according to Apple's terms of service, you have to disclose that it's AI. So now, for example, at the end of every episode of the truth of our AI shows, like Aaron says, this is Aaron Maxwell, your AI powered host. So we're disclosing it and nobody's pushed back. So we have not, and we've been airing that for months, episodes every single week. Nobody has said this is trickery, this is not a real show, this is AI. Because one, we're disclosing it, and the shows that we haven't disclosed it on, um, nobody's complained. Like, there's— we honestly haven't seen any. And if someone said this is AI, you're absolutely right. Um, the content's correct. Like, as AI gets more and more popular and more and more mainstream, I don't really see that being an issue as people get more and more used to it.

Okay, I love that. Thank you. I, I was in a, I was in a little session the other day and it was anti-AI, and I was flabbergasted for one, but it just made me not doubt, but just like, how do I talk back to a guy like that? So, um, thank you for answering my question.

You're welcome. And I, I don't think— so forgive me, but I don't think you can be anti-AI at this point in time. I don't think the bus has already left the station, right? There's no putting the Pandora back in the box. I don't think— and there's a lot of top people are afraid of AI, or it's gonna take my job. So AI is not gonna replace humans, but humans who use AI will take the place of humans who don't. Right. It's an amazing tool. Do you want to use it and get better and be more productive and be able to do more with less effort? Or do you want to get left behind? Like when the internet came out, oh no, it's going to replace everything. When Google came out, no one's going to look, go to the encyclopedia anymore. The encyclopedia is now online. It made people, it didn't make people dumber. It made people smarter because now they could find all of the content of the world. So I think your choice is embrace it. And learn, start learning and use it to improve your life and your business, or someone else who does what you do is gonna do the same, do it, and you'll be left in the dust.

So Nuala, I see your hand up. Nuala is coming from across the pond and one of my favorite, favorite people and intelligent. So Nuala, take the mic.

This is really serendipitous. I jumped in here because I have a client who wants to put up um, podcasts that talk about their education programs. They're quite high scientific kind of education programs. Um, so he wants to create this kind of AI podcast with people talking about, like, putting it into plain English. And his question was, where do I host these podcasts?

Is—

do you just do it wherever you would host any podcast?

Yes. So great question. You're going to post them everywhere. So the audio goes to every place you listen to audio, like Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, Amazon, Audible, Pandora. If you're doing video, if you found a video source that's better than what I find, please let me know. Or if in a couple of months it gets good enough, then the video would go to YouTube. The long— the transcript would go as a blog, would go on your website. You'd embed the audio and video on your website. And then you'd post it all over on every social network you're on, all of which drive both search engine optimization and answer engine optimization. I want to tell you a story of someone who I interviewed last week. Their episode hasn't even aired yet, and he created a podcast which he sold. Are you ready for this? This blew me away. He sold the podcast for $70 million, and he wasn't Joe Rogan. It didn't go viral. It didn't have millions and millions of downloads. It was a very, very specific niche podcast. It's called the Precision Medicine Podcast, and NeoGenomics bought it for $70 million because he was talking to all of the PhDs and company leaders and pharmaceutical companies. Everybody involved in the precision medicine, DNA-based medicine world were all being interviewed on his show, and he had built up this community, small community, this small ecosystem of the top players in that space. And NeoGenomics bought it for $70 million because they wanted to access his audience that was hyper small but hyper focused. So it's amazing what's possible. Oh, I see there's a question on LinkedIn. What happens to all the, to the podcast if I can't handle all the new business? That would be a great problem to have. I would absolutely love to solve that, create that problem for you. What the podcast would— so are you saying you could stop airing episodes because you had so much business, or I would just keep airing because you want to dig a well before you're thirsty? When's the next— when's the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. When's the next best time? Today, right? I would keep airing and hire more people to handle all the business because you never know when it's going to dry up. So you wanna keep harvest— you wanna keep planting seeds because you never know when you're gonna be hungry.

And Nuala has another question, I think.

Nuala?

Oh, thank you.

Yeah.

So which—

this is amazing. So which— I don't know if the word is software or app, but which of these AI generating podcast things would you recommend? To create your podcast on?

I would— you— the easy way to do it yourself would be to use ChatGPT and Canva AI. And then if you wanted to talk about having us do it all, do all the work for you so you just get to reap the rewards, if you go to bookwithseth.com and grab a time on our calendar, we are happy to walk you through, mind map out how it would work in your business. There won't be any sales pressure on that call. That's not the way we do business. We'll just brainstorm about, hey, could this work for your business? And if so, how? Sandra says, so timely, just started my Trust Leaks podcast. Awesome, Sandy, congratulations! I can't wait to listen to it.

Anybody else have any other questions?

Could you put that focus—

I, I didn't pick it up. Could you put it in the chat somewhere or something.

Yes.

But what was it again?

Bookwithseph.com.

Okay.

I'll put it in the chatter.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Seth.

And Seth, what about the— okay. There we go. It's in there. And I'm curious about the show notes. What, what does that look like? And how that can be used?

Um, show notes, again, AI would write those for you after it had written the script. It could— you could also have it write the show notes, and I would make sure to have those show notes answer engine and search engine optimized by ChatGPT, um, for the keywords that you want to get, or the searches that you want to get found for.

Great, great. Wow, I've enjoyed this so much. I, I'm, I'm— I haven't gotten the pleasure to work on an AI podcast, so hopefully that's down the pike somewhere.

It is.

It is. Yes.

All right.

So share a little bit about your publishing too, just so that every— oh, I think we just lost Seth. So he'll probably just click the wrong button. We'll give him a second to come back.

Hiya, gorgeous.

How you doing while he's coming back?

Ah, Nuala, I'm doing great. Thank you so much. It's— I see our next speaker, Stephen Scoggins, is in the green room. Very excited for for Stephen to experience, uh, the live conversation. And to wait till you hear it. I think Seth hopefully should be back in a minute. Oh, he entered the studio, and I'm going to add him to the stage.

I'm so sorry.

Where did you go?

Gotta love technology.

No, all good, all good. Um, you know what, while we just have a few minutes, I know that Stephen is here, and I'm excited to have you introduce him, but Can you just share another— just an overall of Market Domination, uh, the books, the other things that you do, the paid ads, all of that, if you, if you wouldn't mind?

Sure, thank you. Um, so marketdominationllc.com. We are a direct response marketing agency. We have two divisions, one that produces a couple dozen podcasts a week on behalf of our clients that Adrian does a fabulous job for, and we also turn those podcasts in book into books and then publish and make those books bestsellers and use those as authority assets for our clients. Then on the other side is our traffic and conversion division where we run paid traffic. So whether that is Facebook ads, YouTube ads, TikTok ads, LinkedIn ads, or email ads or direct mail to drive traffic, your ideal prospects to whatever lead generation magnet funnel website you've got. So we drive traffic and then we optimize conversion to either fill your calendar with qualified appointments of qualified prospects, get people to raise their hand and consume your lead magnet, or for those of you who, you know, sell things online like e-commerce, our goal is to get them to go straight through and buy from you and make your cash register ring. And we've got some unique abilities that we don't have time to go into today about how we optimize those things. That I haven't seen any other marketing firm do yet. I'm sure we'll get copied at some point, but I haven't seen anybody do some of the things that we do yet. All right.

Let me just answer Sandra. We will have the replays. You could also find it live on Seth's LinkedIn, and we have a playlist on YouTube that'll be channeled to. Let me see if there's any more questions from the audience. Leah, take the mic.

Okay, I feel a tiny bit bad about asking this one, and I'm gonna ask Adrian this question. Seth, you can listen. Adrian, do you think we could convince Seth to come and maybe do another session on AI podcasts here on Chatter? And I mean, you guys could stream it everywhere like you do, but I would just like to learn more. And I know that people who missed this will definitely want to hear more as well. So shameless, uh, ask for—

I would be honored.

That'll be awesome. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, all right. So it's, uh, Seth, we are— let's—

I love that we're ahead of schedule. When does that ever happen?

At the SWAT and Order that I did in October for 2 days. So, um, okay, we are good. Stephen, I'm going to bring you to the stage. I'm very excited.

Oh, I can't wait. I am so excited that Stephen was one of the first people I asked to be here today, selfishly, because I want to take notes on everything he's going to teach us.

I'm excited too.

Do I get to kick it off? I'm so excited.

No, you need to stay on so you can—

No, I said, do I get to kick it off? Do I get to introduce Stephen?

Oh, you kick it off. Kick it with like the best soccer kick you can.

All right, so thank you everybody for, uh, spending the day with me. I appreciate you being here and being fully engaged. Now we're going to move on to a friend of mine who understands business transformation from the inside out. So Stephen Scoggins is the founder of Unstoppable Solutions. He is a respected authority on business and personal reinvention. Today he's going to talk about the 5 critical shifts to build a business that prints freedom. That's really important. Notice I didn't say money. I said something more important. I said Freedom. So Stephen's going to reveal what he calls the 5 constraints that keep businesses stalled, stuck, and not growing. And he's going to show you the shifts required to break free and build a company that truly supports your life. And again, if you got questions, drop them in the chat. Let us— let Adrian know on Chatter. I am super excited. I am ready to take pages and notes. Stephen, my friend, thank you so much for joining us.

Dude, love you, man. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity. I also appreciate your steadfast wisdom, bro. You work your butt off to stay ahead of the marketplace. I'm sitting here listening to the AI-generated podcast scenario, and I'm already thinking, okay, we already have a top-rated podcast. We already have amazing guests like yourself coming on and things of that nature. We already have like this community. I wonder if I could have an AI-generated podcast that does nothing but help pull apart and extrapolate the strategic insights, if you will, into a separate podcast that then can backfill, if nothing else, just getting to know people and building a broader audience.

I told you that people would come up with ideas I hadn't thought of yet. I absolutely love that idea. Yes, you totally can. That's a great idea.

Oh, bro, I just— I can't say thank you enough. Gosh, where do we start? So first of all, I do want to just reiterate some of the things that you've already shared, Seth, because what most people don't understand is right now in the marketplace, it doesn't matter if it's a service-based business, a digital marketing business, a speaker thought leader business, a professional services business, there is something called the trust decline. You alluded to it earlier. Trust is a lot harder to garble up, largely because people have been oversold and underdelivered numerous times over. So they have these really sophisticated landing pages and videos and concepts and running Facebook traffic and buying Google ads and SEO optimization. And, you know, so, you know, someone comes into their ecosystem, if you will, hoping to get transformation. Hoping to get a stable footing, hoping to have something to build from. And lo and behold, instead they, they get into whatever program or whatever system, whatever thing is there, and it unfortunately falls flat. Now, a case could be made from time to time that person has to put in the work, and I agree with that. There's also a case to be made about showing up with the heart, the genuine heart of service, uh, which is one of the things that I'd love to share with the audience today.

Awesome, let's do it. I'm ready.

Awesome. Well, first of all, understand that some of the things that Seth said, 11 touchpoints on 7 platforms is basically required to build any level of trust. Now, a lot of times I get a question of how did you go from homelessness to building upwards of a 9-figure company and exiting in 2023? And when I really sat with that question, you know, I wanted to say, well, it was you know, somehow something special I did, or somehow something special that I got lucky, or whatever. And the reality, the truth is, is it happened because of a second chance I didn't deserve. Which kind of leads me into understanding what really holds us back as business owners and entrepreneurs. And I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna be honest with you, it's not what you think. It really isn't. And it's also not anyone's particular fault. The trick is, is understanding what is at stake and then learning how to shift it. So I'll give you an example. Time Harris Poll did a study. Gosh, I think it was 2018, just before COVID And in that, in that study, they surveyed about 300,000+ people. Of the people they surveyed, 70% of them plus all said to their, essentially to their, to their respondents that they were living a life essentially that was unhappy, unfulfilled, and somehow missing joy. Okay. Now, I would argue after doing the work that I've now done, this entire time, that it's because they were trying to live someone else's life or build someone else's business. So let that sink in for a second. Not aligning with one's set gifts, with one's strategic values, with one's strategic vision to execute on a profitable and a peace-giving future. All right, so let's take that and let's move that over here to the side for just a second. The next thing you look at is statistically, a lot of times statistically, They say that businesses fail in the first 5 years for one of a handful of reasons. About 25 total reasons. The top 5 tend to shift places, and I'll just give you a few of them. One is lack of capital. They don't have enough capital to make the business work. Okay, well, when I took my thing, my life, and I said, okay, well, I started my company with no money, no credit. When I say no credit, I had terrible credit because of decisions I'd made a couple of years prior. So I didn't, I didn't know that that wasn't it. I didn't feel like that was it. Okay. Lack of product and market fit. Not doing a lot of due diligence and making sure that you're actually creating a solution for someone else's problem. Now, there's a little bit of truth to that. If you're creating products and services that are not a solution to someone else's problem, we'll give Seth another nod here because one of the problems that I see this AI-generated podcast platform solves is for people like myself who travel a great deal, speak a great deal, serve at high capacities, and try to build and scale companies. To say I have— I don't have a lot of time-time that, you know, that is—

is—

can be literally put in another initiatives. So I'm always looking to delegate, automate, or eliminate. And this AI platform kind of does that. So then we start looking at, okay, well, poor leadership is another strategic one that comes up a lot at the end of the year. Okay, for these businesses that, that don't make it. Now, I have faced numerous downturns. I have gotten by, by the skin of my teeth. And I've also had multimillion-dollar years. And I've also lost multimillion dollars in years at the same time. So I'm coming from a place of experience and love, not from a place of I've got it all figured out necessarily. But I do have experience in scaling companies. Now, when I went back and looked at what was at the heart What was at the heart of the decisions that I made that caused me to either lose momentum or profitability? They all came from reaction. How many times do we make a knee-jerk decision in an effort to solve a problem that's in front of us, to simply eliminate the discomfort that the problem is causing rather than taking the time to do due diligence and come up with a data-driven decision to shift it. And the reason I say that is because I'm going to share with you 5 core constraints and their counterbalance to help you come into further alignment. I believe in the principle called becoming one part lion and one part lamb. And before I share the constraints, let me give you a little bit of framework for that. My grandfather passed away in 2016. Now, from the day I was born to the day he passed away, didn't matter my— whatever my level of faith was or was not at the time, he referred to me as his little soul winner, as in I was somehow called to go and serve at scale. Now, and I went through all kinds of ups and downs. Inevitably, about 3 years before I was supposed to sell my company and exit— actually, I'm sorry, about 7 years before I was supposed to sell and exit my company, I went to him and I was like, well, you know, Granddad, I'm looking to speak more, and I feel like I want to write some more books, and I feel like I want to create content. But I'm over here running this company with 400 team members across multiple states. We're doing X number of dollars in top-line revenue on an annual basis. I just feel I'm crushed. Like, I just feel like I don't have enough time. I don't have enough energy, and I don't feel at peace. I feel like emotionally drained. I feel burned out, and I feel overwhelmed. And let's be honest, If you've been in business for any length of time or if you're starting your business, you've also felt those things. Because by definition, entrepreneurship and business creation by definition is creating something from nothing. There's a friction there that cannot be articulated and fully explained until someone steps in, puts on the mantle, and keeps walking forward. So as I'm having this conversation with my grandfather, another thing pops up. He's like, well, if you're going to live a life of congruence, of alignment, of truth, of peace, then you need to learn you're gonna have to become one part lion and one part lamb. Now, he used a biblical example of that, and this doesn't have to be your faith, and I'm not claiming that. I'm not proselytizing any stretch of the way, but I do find some truth in it. We'll use a character from history. We'll use it from that perspective and a little bit of faith and just borrow out of mind for just a minute for the illustration. Uh, the Bible talks a little bit about a time where Jesus is standing in front of a crowd of people and he's teaching. About this time, Pharisees and Sadducees go out to bring a woman and throw them down in front of her, caught in the act of adultery. In this moment, to me, we get to see complete congruence and alignment. Alignment with the lion preservation when he says, hey, 'He who is without sin cast the first stone.' And moments later, some translations say 'woman,' some translations say 'daughter.' He looks at this woman with peace and compassion and he says, 'Where are your accusers?' He goes from one extreme to the other without actually breaking identity. Okay, so how does that play out into the business world? Well, the way it's played out for me is every single financial mistake I've made— leadership, hiring, not giving presence where presence was needed, not being present for my family. All of this came out of trying to self-serve, self-sacrifice, over-function, and largely chase identity. One thing most entrepreneurs and business leaders share more than anything else is it starts off in a kind of a whole way and kind of can turn into something along the way, which is this chase or the sense of worth. Now, when you go to look at this as, as an encapsulation, I want to give you a contrast. So an immature lion in, in the workplace, in the family place, in the relationships, all of it, will be controlling, domineering, and egocentric.

Okay?

However, a mature lion is very different. A mature lion will be courageous, bold, and protective. And at any moment in time, we have to look at ourselves to determine the switch. Let's contrast with, with the lamb methodology. On the lamb side, if we're immature lamb, then you'll have elements of people pleasing, being overrun, making decisions because everybody else wants to go this direction, but yet your instincts, your gut say no, we need to go this direction, and you self-abandon. Okay, on the mature side when you can come into alignment, now you can actually lead with empathy, compassion, integrity, mercy, grace, without self-abandoning, without letting people run over top of you. Because business by definition requires stable leadership, stable vision, scalable systems that actually give you over time the peace because of the system. That's why I love— I actually love this. I am very pro-AI. Yes, I'm like everybody else. I have some concerns about how it's going to shape up, but it's up to us in this day and time to essentially program it or teach it the best of our world and not the worst of our world.

All right.

So how does this take us to the 5 constraints? Again, when I look at every major decision that I made that caused me to have to undo, rework, and that includes going through my exit. When I went through my exit, I had to go back and rebuild certain elements of my company and my structure for about 3 years before I got it back to where I could actually put it in front of people and actually sell it in a reasonable, authentic way as a bit of a machine. Now, in order to do that, I began pulling apart myself. You know, I'll also share with you, a lot of times, at least for years, I thought my worst time of my life was actually when I was sleeping out under the stars and trying to figure life out. And essentially, I got there out of arrogance and pride, which we'll cover in a second. But I'll tell you what was actually more interesting was getting to the mountaintop, the literal mountaintop. I had bought a home after exit in Utah for a while and actually was sitting on a corner of a mountain, um, and realizing that I had everything that we all chase. I had money in the bank. I had a very nice home that was paid for. I could travel and go do what I wanted. I could mentor and teach. But in my quietness of quietness, when nobody was there, when nobody was there for applause or whatever, I got to face Stephen. And Stephen, when I faced him after he had gotten all the things that he wanted, still felt empty. I felt empty because I wasn't facing the truth about how important a self-identity is, because your business will never outgrow you. You can't lead past your capacity, which means if you want your company to scale You have to increase your capacity. I'll also tell you that all of us share similarities. And here's where we jump into the 5 constraints. There are 5 core constraints that I've identified after walking back through my journey. A lot of this was done in the quietness of the Utah home while facing an uncertain future, even though I thought I had everything that I wanted. I discovered that at every major breakpoint, these 5 constraints are there. And as I've worked with countless entrepreneurs, from 7-figure entrepreneurs to 8-figure entrepreneurs, 9-figure entrepreneurs, and one of a couple of my clients were 10-figure entrepreneurs, they all shared the same ones at different times. They could all share their stories at different times. So the first constraint I want you to jot down is the word called arrogance. Arrogance judges past successes for future possibilities. You all heard Seth mention earlier that like sometimes in business, like, you are, you are crushing it, and sometimes it's, it's time. When you're crushing it, you want to, you want to go ahead and pull it together because there will be times when you're not crushing it. You can't control economic influences, you can't control global influences, you know. So at different times, you want to be the opposite of arrogance, which is humility. You want to be honest. You want to have integrity. You want to really think through things. You don't want to hurt people along the way. And arrogance, by definition, is essentially walking away from the truth that humility is required in order to build a magnetic frequency that allows you to be followed in the first place. And the only way you build that magnetic frequency to be followed in the first place is by actually taking the time to do the work internally to then get the reward externally. The second constraint I want you to jot down is ignorance. Now, I don't mean ignorance as in you're stupid or I'm stupid or anyone's stupid. I mean ignorance and you don't know what you don't know, and you're actually repelling or pushing away or not searching for answers for what you know. This is the power of questions. I'm a big believer that questions open hearts and statements close them. A person who is actually operating the opposite of ignorance is operating as something called teachability. A lot of times people say, well, how did you go from X to Z, or A to Z? I would like to think that over the course of my lifetime, um, the humility and the arrogance side work were crushed and purified. I've went through many crushing moments that forced me into different levels of humility, and I now see them as a forging fire that you have to walk into willingly. But on top of that, on the ignorant side, I realized that I've always had a hunger to learn. I've always— I've always— whether it's an adversity, whether it's a blessing, whether it's a relationship, whether it's a friendship. I've always wanted to know how to become the best version of myself continually, and then take the best version of myself continually and put that into every element of my life continually. Okay, the opposite of ignorance is teachability. It's being teachable. It's being hungry enough to learn and grow and mature on a consistent basis. Again, you could probably— if you're paying close attention, you can probably see how just those two behaviors alone, if we're honest with ourselves, come up every so often for all of us. They still come up with me from time to time, and I still have to be wary of them, which is where the integrated alignment comes in. Okay, the third constraint I want to share with you guys is the one called impatience. Now, The best thing I know how to illustrate this is something I've done numerous times with entrepreneurs and business leaders all over the place. I've been known to stand up in front, and if you ever come to an actual physical event that I'm at and I'm speaking, don't let this dissuade you from being honest. But I had this epiphany. So one time I was on stage, I was speaking for the large Chamber of Commerce, about 600 folks. Down in Florida, and I said, by a show of hands, how many of you think you should be further ahead than you already are? Every single hand went up. Every single hand. We all think we should be further ahead than we already are. We all operate on this, this mindset to a certain degree. And if you're the rare case and you don't, that's amazing. But my history, my my history is when I've seen this is that we all operate from that place, which means we're actually chasing worth. We're chasing if, if, and when, when I, rather than build. And you would think that, okay, well, if the, if the opposite of arrogance is humility and the opposite of ignorance is teachability, then sure, The opposite of impatience has to be patience. It's got to be.

It's not.

It's called presence. The opposite of impatience is presence. It's being where your feet are. I'm not saying not to set aspirations or goals. I would do those once, maybe do, maybe set the goals once a year, manage them by quarter, micro-step your way back to by-month actions, and actually create a strategy to move forward. But I want you to fully understand that presence is where the power's at. The presence to be in the moment, to be focused, anchored in, lasered in on the most important thing that moves your life, your relationships, and your business forward that you can focus on. And I'm gonna tell you a personal secret that I've discovered along the way. Here's it is, here it is. The personal secret is this: It's probably the thing you're avoiding doing right now. The most important thing that you need to face, that you need to do to create leverage— historically, not always, but historically, with a high percentage— is actually not doing the thing that you know you need to do. You keep pushing it off because of fear, because of bias, because of shame, because of guilt. It's, it's like, it's a conversation you don't want to have. It's the system you don't want to invest in. It's, in my case, I'll just give you a personal example. I went through a divorce in 2020, late 2022, early '23. Not something of my choice, not something I wanted. But my son, by marriage, you know, we notified the kids. I'm just being honest with you guys because life is real, right? So life is real. So let's just be honest. Um, my, my oldest son Tyler pulls me to the side and on a Zoom because we told— we had to tell him in Zoom because one was in college, one was living in Charlotte where I'm now at. And, um, and the oldest one Tyler said, can we have dinner tonight? And of course Campbell University, which is where he went to school at, was about 30 minutes from where I was living at the time. So I went up there and I sat down with him and, um, clearly he had weight on his— he had something he wanted to get off his chest. It Clearly he was facing a fear. He didn't— it was a conversation he didn't really feel like he wanted to have. And he said, Stephen, I want you to know, because obviously I wasn't bio dad, I was stepdad, um, you know, Stephen, I want you to know you were an amazing husband from my perspective, and you were a great father. But if there's one thing you can work on, just one thing that would mean the world to us, is to be more present when you're present. Let that sink in for a second. Sometimes we can fall in this trap or this lie, and this is where impatience comes into play, that everything needs to happen now. The email needs to go out now, the text has to be out now, the chaotic customer that you're trying to solve and try to work with has to be somehow passively-aggressively solved, or people-pleasing, or whatever. Like, we've fallen into this trap that it has to happen now. We tell ourselves that The reason it has to happen now is because I'm protecting— I'm protecting us, I'm protecting things, I'm protecting our lifestyle, I'm protecting how much food we have. Like, and the reality is, I discovered this by completely by accident. My kids had the ability to do some pretty amazing things and go some pretty amazing places and meet some pretty amazing people. I want you to know flat out that it mattered less about that than it did about having 1 hour of my focus time with with them? How would 1 hour of focused time change your relationship with those that you love most? How would 1 hour of focused time change the way you lead your team? How would 1 hour of focused time with yourself change you? All of these are related to presence. I'll give you another example. When I was sitting atop that house in Utah and I was going through a bit of a life shakeup that I didn't fully anticipate or expect. With, again, everything that you perceive that most people were happy with and pursue in their life. I remember in the quietness of the morning, I got up one morning. I had done a practice or a bit of a meditation practice with a friend of mine named Henry Amaro, who's amazing, who I actually need to introduce Seth to, actually. And essentially, he took me to a 5-minute brief meditation. I came out, he says, just journal whatever you hear. Okay, okay, so cool. All right, now it's probably clear that I'm a person of faith, so this is not a faith-based practice. This is a truth-based practice I'm about to share with you. But for the first time in my life, rather than praying and asking and like trying to attract and be magnetic and all the things, I grabbed a journal. I woke up, walked over to the, to the couch very first thing in the morning, turned the light on. It was cold, kind of like it is now. It's actually about to snow here in Charlotte. And sat there, and I wrote at the top of the page for the first time, 'What I hear you say is—' 'What I hear you say is—' I wrote the date, and then I just sat there. I sat with myself. I sat in presence. I opened my heart. I opened my mind to receive rather than to put out noise and chatter. Now, there is absolutely a time to pray into something, whatever your belief system is, and there's a time to just simply listen. I made this an effective practice, and what I'll share with you is this became a very, very beautiful, very peaceful, very blissful experience because sometimes I would sit there for a couple seconds and it would just flow out. I'd What I hear you say is— I just, I would just write what I felt like my soul was saying or what I was hearing from the God. And obviously a person of faith. So sometimes I would sit there for 10 minutes, not hear anything. And sometimes in that 10 minutes I would have one word, and as I finished the first, that first word, I went to the second word, all of a sudden a sentence formed. And then a sentence would form another sentence, and next thing you know, I had 3 paragraphs of information or 3 pages of information. I'm saying this because we can lose ourself in the pursuit of that in which we want to achieve, which is what creates the overwhelm, the burnout, and the feelings that come are byproducts of that. So sit with the fact that the opposite of impatience is presence. Be more present where you are. Have a presence practice for yourself. Have a presence practice for your business. Have a presence practice practice for your family. Have a presence practice for your community if you feel called to serve the community at large. Okay, fourth constraint. This one is probably the anchor of all other constraints, and it's different forms of insecurity. Insecurity, when we chase it because we're trying to prove our worth, because we're trying to be something someone else told us we couldn't be, or we're trying to avoid, um, or have we had, you know, a lot of, a lot of times when I work with folks, a lot of, a lot of stuff comes up from childhood. And I don't mean like, sometimes I, I want to be careful here because I want to honor the fact that we all have our own journeys. I also want to honor the truth that sometimes facing the journey means understanding the lessons made earlier. A lot of us take on if you will, the limiting beliefs that other people cast on us, especially if they were people that we loved or loved us or trusted us. In some cases, I'll give you an example. My father, who I love, who missed a good chunk of the first part of my life to about 13, 11, 12, 13 years old, had lost his business when I was about 12. Moved in with him. He lost his business shortly thereafter. And I'll never forget this. He looks at me, looks in my eyes. He's crying, you know. They— the, the, the home had just gotten foreclosed, uh, the two cars that between my mom— between him and my stepmother had, they got repossessed. Um, we're moving in essentially with his parents, and this guy, he was probably mid-late 30s at that time. He's got myself and my little brother with him. Um, never really had a lot of experience raising children up to that point. I'd see him on weekends and different things along the way for first 11, 12 years. But he looks at me with tears in his eyes and he says, I always want you to remember something. Scoggins never get ahead. They always get by. Now, in that moment, he thought he was giving me a truth of love. But in that moment, he was also casting on me what he discovered or what he felt was a generational truth that turned out to be a generational lie. Elements like that cause our nervous system, our psyche if you will, our elements to basically push away good things when they happen. We become mechanisms of self-sabotage because we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. And when your nervous system operates like that, sure enough, you can have big cycles of winning and you're— it's followed by a big catastrophic Boom. And this happens in relationships and finances and business and personal identity. And the only way to stop it is to go back to what I just got through discussing, which is getting present, getting centered, getting grounded, getting regulated. That's the area you want to make strategic decisions from. That's the area where, whether you believe in the universe, a God, or none of the above, it speaks to you and it shares with you your next step is X. 9 times out of 10, you don't get 15 steps, you get 1. But when you have to face insecurity, which we all have— some— I'm like, guys, I'm 5 foot nothing. I want to tell you that I turned 50 in January, 50 years old in January, and I think I just became okay with being short 2 years ago. That's a form of an insecurity. It's a physiological insecurity, driven by an emotional insecurity, driven by a mental insecurity, which made me early on, made me very much not a great leader. My first decade of leading businesses, I was not great because I felt like I had to prove myself to everybody that had CPA and MBA and all these different things past their names. I have a high— I didn't graduate high school because I dropped out to help my family pay the bills. These are forms of insecurities, and they have to be addressed as soon as your nervous systems will tackle them. All right. Final constraint. And this is— this gets us all kind of looped in here. It's a word called fear. Now, I forgot to give you the opposite of insecurity. I probably should give you that, huh? The opposite of insecurity is rooted confidence, grounded confidence. It's building confidence by making one decision well and then building momentum from there. All right, back to fear. Fear steals a lot of things. It steals your sleep. It steals your relationships. Um, it can steal your finances. It creates chaos. Creates overwhelm and it creates burnout. Now, all those negative things there— I've also discovered that fear only gets strong when you repel it consistently. So when you go to repel your fear consistently, inevitably what happens is you end up pushing off what you should kind of tackle. I believe fear is nothing more than an emotional indicator that something needs your attention. And letting go of the things you can't control. So I actually have some, some solid business meetings I have to do the remainder of this week. Some are— some I actually look at being fun, some are going to be more, more tricky. And I got two choices right now. Even as I sit here, I can either let the unknown scare me to death and come up with the what-if scenarios— what if, what if, what if, what if, what if— or I can let go and lean in to the fire willingly, which means no matter what happens, there's a lesson here that's going to grow and mature and develop me. Now, when you understand that these constraints at the end of the day are rooted in the behavior pattern— so these are the emotional triggers, large times tied to things that have happened earlier. So you have— it's not like your, your ego system has a a lack of basis of self-worth, but instead they actually bring it forward. And then that behavior system, that thought, that emotion creates the behavior, the behavior creates the result. Well, how do you find this stuff? Okay, how do you actually uproot and bring it backwards? Well, if we look at the opposite of fear, the opposite of fear, some would say faith, some could say trust. Both of them are true. Trusting that whatever is happening will ultimately bring you to your good and leaning into it that direction. Okay. When we understand all of those 5 constraints, we understand the opposites. We understand how we can have maturity in kind of bold behaviors like a lion, or we can have maturities in compassion behaviors like a lamb. Then essentially, we want to come begin the process of what we call integration. We want to bring the best qualities of both of those that will, by definition, dilute and one day overcome those 5 constraints. You become more magnetic, your business becomes more responsible, your systems become stronger, your scalability becomes easier, and your family life and your personal life all get a major boost, if not living in peace. I wake up every morning now and I start each and every day with these words, and I welcome you to Jot them down as well. I am healthy. I am wealthy. I am wise. I am a steward of the Most High. And the one that scared me to death was, I love you, Stephen. It took a long time to look at myself in the eyes, in the mirror, and say those words. And if you are in a situation right now where you are in your life, in your business relationships, beyond, And that, just that phrasing, looking at your own eyes in the mirror and saying, I love you, and insert your name, that tells you that the constraints are present. That tells you that they're there. And if you really want to scale, you really want to grow, that's a good way to pull them together. Okay, so lean from arrogance. Towards humility. And again, it's possible to have these 5 constraints at any given moment, a balance of multiple ones at different times, but the process of presence helps identify them and helps you shift them or reframe them in the moment. I am healthy, I am wealthy, I am wise, I'm a steward of the Most High, and I love you, Stephen. Now you may or may not be thinking and feeling right now that, okay, so he built a very sizable company with a lot of team members, a lot of systems, a lot of processes, multiple-state venture, and exited. And he could have talked about SOPs, he could have talked about delegation, he could have talked about team member behavior, he could have talked about leadership, he could have talked about the AI revolution, how to put those AI systems in place for your own business for operational excellence. There's a lot of things I could have talked about and that I have a lot of experience in. This is the one that's the most important, and here's why. No matter how hard you try, no matter how hard you want it, you can't scale dysfunction. You can't have dysfunctional teams. You can't have dysfunctional systems. You can't have a dysfunctional sense of identity. You have to come into alignment so your teams, your systems, and your scalability all come into alignment. Because everything, everything in business that you experience, your external life as a business owner, is a byproduct of who you are on the inside. Your internal, your Your external world is a byproduct of your internal world. And when you lean into that and you begin to do practices like the identity inventory, you begin to become more aware of the next step. You set your anchor. You're able to anchor into truth. When you anchor into truth, everything else behind it comes easier. Right? How you choose your, how you choose your ERPs, how you choose your CRMs, what platforms you do, all of these types of things, all of these types of things become cleaner and more consistent. So with that, I want to tell you I love you all. I'm very grateful that you allowed me to join you today and be part of this. I'm more than happy to answer questions on anything that I've either shared or didn't share that you're interested in. And I can't thank Seth and the team enough, um, for this time with you guys, because God willing, something shifted today for you. To help you build and scale yourself and your business. Thanks, guys.

So thank you so much, Stephen. That was absolutely incredible. Um, even just if all we did was change our first few minutes in the morning, that would make a huge impact on our lives. I absolutely love that. Um, Adrian, do we have questions in the chatter on Chatter?

I just want to say I don't know, Stephen, what you were saying that touched my heart. I am sorry, but nothing to be sorry about. You really said some things that I just want to share with you. Thank you so much, because I just— how can I do it? I do debate the news, true crime, and I talk about the worst.

Joseph, here's a big virtual hug for you.

It's just you— thank you so much for everything. I think one of the things that I love the most and, and so important is be more present when you're present. Maybe I'm sad that I wasn't growing up in the family business being so involved, but definitely, Stephen, thank you so much. It's the first time I've ever got to hear you speak, and I can see why Seth sings so highly of you. We are live on Chatter Social, so I'll see if anyone has any questions. In the meantime, I see a couple There's Sandra said, ooh, Steven, I love that. Oh, thank you, Sandra. I agree with Sandra. And greetings from HOD Radio World Network. Beautiful name. I don't know, I can't pronounce it.

And even do you want— Adrian looks for questions on chatter. Um, I think if you— what would inspire people even more than you already did, I think if you could share a little bit about, because I think we glossed over it. I barely met— I, I— it was one sentence I think if you talk about a lot of times, like for example, you and I both know Tony Robbins and he has a day during Date with Destiny that's the you don't have any problems day because you put someone on stage and you go, oh my God, I don't have any problems in comparison to that. And you feel better. Yeah. I think if you could talk a little bit about— and folks, go check out the Sharkpreneur podcast episode with Stephen where we went into more detail. But if you could talk a little bit about how you went from literally homeless. Yeah. To building what would become a $100 million-plus company. I mean, that is an incredible, like, rags-to-riches overcoming adversity challenge. Thank you.

I mean, it's, it's funny, um, I've realized that life is, if we live it well, it's a, it's a roll-up of amazing experiences. Most of the, most of the biggest growth moments came immediately following the hardest battles, because it's the hardest battle that refines you to take on the new mantle, the new capacity, if you will. So I'll try not to go into too, too much crazy detail, but, um, I grew up, I think, like a lot of people, uh, in the U.S. and I assume all over the world, in, um, a little bit of a broken home. Um, you know, parents I'm sure meant well when they got married, but they hadn't dealt with their own, what I call, inner work. And when you have inner work and inner work and they don't align or they're in conflict, then that creates separation. And their inner work that they needed, that they've actually worked through now largely— they're actually very healthy people and fantastic grandparents now— they unfortunately couldn't handle the kids. So we went to go live with my grandmother, my brother and I, for a good chunk of my early adolescence. When we were there, about 9 years old, my grandmother comes to me. And I remember like it was yesterday, I had a Transformer in one hand and a GI Joe in the other. I had Bumblebee and I had Snake Eyes, right? And they were having a battle royale just minutes before. And I have to admit, Snake Eyes was handing it to Bumblebee. But she comes to me, she sits me down, and these— we had this little 900-square-foot home in Wendell, North Carolina, that's still there. In fact, one of these days I want to buy it. Um, like, it was decorated in the '70s kind of like vibe. Like, the linoleum on the floor was like orange and greens and stuff like that. And she sits me on the— in the black chair, and she proceeds to essentially ask me to be the man of the house, not even having a clue what that meant. Um, all I saw was— I saw pain, discomfort in her eyes, fear. And as a result, I began making meals for my little brother and myself. She taught me how to do it. I'd pull the chair over to the stove and I would get up and I would make the meals, and then I would get my brother up and get him kind of— we would both walk to school. It wasn't too far from the house. My grandmother began her chemotherapy because she was essentially the reason we had the conversation. She was diagnosed with cancer. This is the early part of the '80s where the chemo was just as dangerous as the cancer. Obviously, it's come a long way since then. And essentially used me to literally be the physical crutch to walk around the house. She would hold my shoulder and move around the house. And I love this woman more than anything else. She was the only— and growing up, she was where I felt safe. I felt seen, heard, valued, and appreciated, all of which we all want to feel. And we need to give those elements to other people in our teams, our leaders, and beyond. But essentially, that started a bit of an anchor process of needing to overfunction, needing to self-abandon, needed to people-please to a certain extent. Father comes back in the picture, and long story short is literally, I think he picked us up on a Thursday. I think I was on a job site on a Saturday carrying lumber, 25 cents a stud, until he realized I moved the entire pile and it was cheaper to pay me $1.50 an hour. Car. Go figure. Um, so I've always had a sense of strong work ethic, but I grew up around him in the construction industry, uh, for a while. I met my first mentor, um, that I talk a lot about called Old Man Myrick. Steve Myrick, beautiful man, um, very astute businessman, very generous. And I remember this one time specifically, we were at a restaurant. Um, my dad used to kind of follow him around like a little bit of a puppy dog, like he was like his little— kind of like a father figure meets an idol. If that makes any sense. And lo and behold, uh, Steve leaves a $1,000 tip under a bag of hush puppies, um, because that's what we do in North Carolina. We had barbecue and hush puppies. And, uh, he just walks out the door. Meanwhile, waitress comes over, picks up the hush puppies, looks down, sees $1,000, and is wrecked. Like, I can— she just— I can pay my bills. I can— she had 2 kids, single mom, working her butt off. And I just, I just remember seeing those moments. I was I want to be able to do that. And, you know, and the contrast was in that season, that was not something my family would ever thought about doing. We lived in scarcity. We live in this, this element of rich man evil, poor man great. Um, you know, I was literally taught that wealth was evil, which is bonkers, because every time we had a need, we went to Steve, and Steve would find a way, whether it was creating something for my dad to do or whatever. And so I had this weird contrast. Long story short is, um, 17 years old, uh, Steve comes to me and he begins pulling— well, he gives— he's already pulling me down with the framing crew, putting me in the, in the car and riding me around, giving me all kinds of nuggets. Most of it I didn't fully understand or appreciate. What I didn't realize is that my grandfather used to— actually, Steve used to work for my grandfather who survived Pearl Harbor, got into alcoholism and some other stuff, um, and then roles shifted. So Steve always took a liking to me, I think as an admiration to my grandfather because my grandfather loved Steve and took care of Steve earlier days. All right. Steve puts me in business for myself just so I can speed this up a little bit. And 19 years old, 18 and a half, 19 years old, I— he puts me in business for myself, gets me everything I need, handles my back office, everything. All I had to do was show up and work. And I did that and I killed it. Made a bunch of money super duper fast. Got super arrogant, super prideful, super, super full of myself, as if I was the person that had built it, and like, like there was no help or whatever. And it was complete farce. And proceeded to get humbled pretty, pretty rapidly by life. Got involved in a relationship I shouldn't have necessarily, but ultimately taught me a lot of things. That opened the door to homelessness. That was about a 4.5 to 6 month journey. I don't remember the exact time frame because it's kind of all the blur. I had a gym membership that I paid for the year earlier, so I would shower at a gym. But one day I locked eyes with the mirror and I was like, dude, what the hell are you doing? You literally had a multi-multi-millionaire with a good heart teaching you day after day, hour after hour. I mean, he was the definition of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I mean, my life is that story in many ways. And sure enough, I had this epiphany, and then I had my spiritual experience, which would just take way too long to get into. But let's just say I found my faith with a very organic and very deliberate way. Um, and 2 days later, my father gets me back on the framing crew for Steve. 3 days later, um, the gentleman that took over from me the year prior, uh, had said they were leaving. Um, I go into much more detail in the podcast, some other stuff. Long story short is Steve gives me a second chance I didn't deserve. Um, I knock on his window, window comes down. He says, what kind of do you for? Kind of country boy, kind of slang. And I began to say, hey, look, if they leave, I'll take advantage of them— or not take advantage of them, I'll replace— you know, I want to do— I want to take it, replace them. And he kind of laughed. He said, with what? Tools? Like, you don't have any. Insurance? You don't have any. Money? You don't have any. Credit? Don't have any. And I just told him, I said, if you'll give me this, if you'll just give me the chance, I'll figure it out. My dad thought I was crazy because he's walking back the other way, he's like, what the hell did you just do, right? And lo and behold, as we're kind of moving down the pipeline, um, I just said, this is something I have to do. My father showed up for the first time, first time I remember my father actually showing up as a dad, as a father. He says, start pulling tools out of the truck, we're gonna— we got stuff to build. Because essentially we went to the trash piles, put all the leftover lumber out began nailing that stuff together to create ladders and walk boards and pump jacks and all kinds of stuff. And, um, come Monday, the guys didn't show up. Steve put me back to work. I did the first 5 or 6 homes by myself and slowly built the company piece by piece. And that's the company that I sold in 2023, um, on that sheer faith and resilience. But when I talk about the constraints, I had to battle all of those constraints. Some of those constraints are programmed in us early on from experiences. Some of those constraints are influenced or, um, otherwise exacerbated because of existing choices and experience. So that's why, to me, the heart of the entrepreneur is the most important thing, because it's what drives the decisions.

Amen to that. All right, well, thank you for sharing in a little bit more detail. Um, Adrian, do we have any questions? All right, while we wait for that to get taken care of, um, tell people a little bit about where they can go to learn more about you, your events, your programs, all of the Stephen amazingness.

I appreciate that, brother. Yeah, I think the, uh, I'm most active on Instagram. I will be fully transparent. My team has access to my social media accounts to make sure that we do a good job in relaying our heart towards service to everybody. We have— probably the easiest thing I would encourage people to do is like, sometimes you hear a word like, hey, come into alignment or come into a new level of awareness, and we kind of resist it. What I'd want to invite everybody to do is to go to Stephen Scoggins. That's S-T-E-V-E-N p-h-e-n-s-c-o-g-g-i-n-s.com/leader. And that will give you access to a free assessment, totally free, nothing being sold, nothing like that, to understand where you are in each of those constraints, what's in front of you, what may need to shift. And there are a couple different ways to continue doing that. Seth, I want to go ahead and just re-acknowledge you on how innovative and strategic I think you are, brother. You tend to be at the cutting edge of everything. And I think your AI podcast scenario is gonna do a lot of good, especially if it can reinforce systems and processes that are already built, dude. So congratulations on that.

Well, thank you very much. I greatly appreciate it. We greatly appreciate your time and your lending us your expertise today. And Adrian, do we have any questions in Cheddar?

Let's see any— oh, Leah, take the mic. Hey, Leah.

Hey, thank you, Stephen. Thank you so much for being here. It was great. I loved learning more about you and what you do, and, uh, we can't wait to see you next time around.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks, Leah. Absolutely.

I like, I like the faith, um, aspect a lot, so not everybody does that. It's, it's good.

It's— I have to be authentic and congruent, right? So it's, it's, it's a, it's a key piece of who I am, but I also recognize where everybody else is on their own journey. And if they can at least take the principles away, um, I believe, I believe that, uh, their businesses and lives will be stronger and better.

Amen to that.

Stephen, can you share, like, where— so I love that you mentioned the Chamber of Commerce, and where else can people find where you're speaking and give us all the juice of Stephen's—

Yeah, so I'll tell you, my most recent one was actually FounderCon in Virginia Beach.

I was there for 2.5 days.

A lot of times when I go do speaking events, I'll not just do a keynote. I show up and serve. Like, I fly in the morning of, even if I talk in the afternoon or the evening, I stay the extra day to spend time with people and answer questions. My next event is actually going to be the Create Conference. Hosted by Growth Stack Drive. I'll be speaking live on stage with several other folks, including Gary Brecka, Ken Joslin, who's the host of the event, Troy Hoffman, a lot of other really amazing leaders. That is a faith-based business conference, for what it's worth. And we'll be there for about 3.5 days live. We're expecting about 1,200 people live. I think they're still trying to work out the virtual aspect, but that's the very next one coming up. That's January 27th, 28th, 29th, I believe. You can look it up online, but Growth Stack Drive and the Create Conference from Ken Jocelyn. So another person I got to connect Seth to.

So I appreciate it.

And you do a lot with social media. Are you on the different platforms?

Yeah. Yeah. So in fact, if you're looking for just like additional content, because again, we talked about this a little bit earlier when Seth was speaking and sharing, I kind of wanted to reiterate it. 11 different touchpoints on 7 different platforms is required to build any level of trust and authority in a congruent way. So I'm on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or what used to be Twitter. It's like we still call it a tweet, but we call it X. I don't understand how that happens. Should we call it Xing? I don't know. Anyway, LinkedIn, of course, YouTube. We put out a lot of content on YouTube. We have the Build podcast. Which also has a tremendous amount of downloads, uh, amazing thought leaders. Um, you know, we got— I think we got Seth already kind of lined up to come on the show. Ed Mylett's been on the show. Uh, Amy Porterfield's a good friend, she's been on the show. We've got about 300 episodes, so there's lots. We just started filming it here live at Safe Haven. Oh, I didn't talk about Safe Haven. Please do. All right, so moved back to North Carolina and acquired a property right here on Lake Norman. I'm actually sitting here staring at 200 degrees of lake in front of me. It's a large home that we are bringing entrepreneurs to that have made money but lost meaning, and we call it Safe Haven because I want it to be a safe place. So once they cross the threshold of this property, they'll go through a 3.5-day experience. I have become aligned, congruent with self, and then we also really— we also get into business strategy and tactics too. So I want to give them the best of both worlds. We'll be launching that officially in the spring of 2026. We just did a beta test with Ken Josslyn's group here. They loved it. We had the most amazing time. We got testimonies about transformation. It's amazing. So super excited about that. Always invited you guys to come out there. It's also where we film the podcast. We film all of our episodes live now. And I always try to be really strategic with what I put in the room so great people can get to know more great people.

I love that, Stephen. We do have— just so you understand, you're hearing other voices. We are actually live on Chatter Social. It is a new app. One of my favorite, favorite people out of California, Diana, has raised her hand. So Diana, take the mic.

Thank you very much. This was a great experience, Stephen.

I would love to know a little bit more about your spiritual experience and how you made that your drive. I had my own spiritual confirmation that made the decision to leave my business to the side and take care of my grandmother through her transition.

And it then became my comfort zone when she passed.

And I'm looking to make that my drive again. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that.

And thank you again for sharing. Oh, my pleasure.

Well, first of all, thank you. Um, for showing up and asking the question. Also, thank you for honoring your soul and stewarding your grandmother's transition. That's a big decision that doesn't come lightly, and I'm sure during that season it was tough. So I want to send you love and light for that. As far as my spiritual experience, I grew up like most kids did, um, you know, largely influenced by parents or grandparents and faith. Um, 9 years old was formally baptized into the Christian faith specifically. Uh, after that, with the passing of my grandmother, all the trauma that my dad was going through with the business failure and all the homelessness and all that during that period, I was a very, very staunch atheist. Um, I had a, uh, without going into too much because it would literally take an hour to tell you the whole story, um, I fell so far that the only place, the only way for me to get to get some money was to clean my brother's litter box. And at this litter box, I'm scooping and the handle breaks off of the scooper, so that feels nasty. Um, tear a hole in the bag, there's stuff like stuff, Tootsie Rolls everywhere, that was nasty. And I just found myself yelling. Here's, here's what's really interesting. I threw everything down, I started yelling at the top my lungs at a quote-unquote God or divinity I didn't believe in, and I hurled obscenities. I, I was just honest. And that's the cool thing about spirituality for me, is honesty is the best potion, if you will, the best piece. Um, I don't think the Divine wants us to be any less, uh, authentic. Um, or anger— if we feel anger, I think the Divine wants us to release that anger. And the divine is big enough and strong enough to deal with it, which is pretty interesting. But the last words I remember saying were something along the lines of, 'If you're so blankety-blank real, why don't you prove it?' Because I'm kind of wired that way. That's— remember I told you earlier, I've been both the immature lion and the mature lion and lamb kind of thing. I've vacillated back and forth to find a balance. But I was pinned to the floor. I couldn't move. And a hush came over the— it's almost like all sounds outside of the room completely disappeared, and it was the most quiet I've ever experienced in my entire life, even to this date. And inside of that moment, um, a voice, if you will, or urging or a nuance or whatever, I said, are you prepared to surrender? Are you ready to surrender? And I was not expecting a response in truth. So I was not, you know, it was gonna be just another day at Stephen's anger world. And, um, sure enough, I got a response and was given an opportunity. And, um, I surrendered back, um, to my divinity, which is God through the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, Jesus specifically. I have a hard time calling myself a Christian sometimes because I find that, um, sometimes that word now illustrates how humans have harmed other humans under the guise of God. So I struggle with that. So now I just refer to myself as a bit of a disciple of Jesus, and I try to live love and light accordingly. And, you know, essentially that— when I look about that, a lot of times I'll get like, well, is— how can that possibly be true? Like, that, that's— that experience sounds like something out of the movie. All I can say is 3 days later is when I started the company from the trash piles of a construction site. That, you know what I'm saying? So it's like there's there's divine grounding and, and protection. It's also where I actually learned the, the elements of one part lion and one part lamb, because you have King David, who is both the worshiper and the warrior, contrast with King Saul, who sought to be served or sought to people-please at every turn out of insecurity. But yet in biblical scripture, the Torah even, it says that David was a man after God's own heart. So it's like, if that's the, if that's the bar, the benchmark, then what I can do is I can learn from those experiences, even if I don't necessarily share in every element. So, um, I believe that there's divinity inside of all of us. I believe that divinity can either be suppressed by ego or, um, by some element of us getting in our own way, or released to move forward. So I would say that I went from ego— my, my girlfriend Katie would say I went from, um, ego man to spirit man. And when spirit man's leading, Stephen's more magnetic and more authentic and more true and more grounded and tends to have people gravitate towards him. When he's operating ego, it tends to have the opposite effect because, again, we, we as souls have a frequency coursing through our veins, and much like a magnet, you can reverse a pole shift on a magnet to make it more attracting versus more repelling. So that's That's a little bit of my spiritual journey. Um, so I don't know if that was helpful or not, but that was my honest, honest take.

It was helpful.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you using the word surrender and how you compared ego versus spirit. And, and what came through was either you lead or spirit leads, but when, when both try to lead at the same time, it can become a little bit tricky. So I appreciate you Stephen, and as always, Adrian, and thank you so much, Seth, as well. My pleasure.

Thank you. All right, thank you, Diana.

Stephen, thank you. I mean that— oh, sorry, go ahead, Adrian.

No, no, no, no, you're fine. I'll just do one last call. I have some people in the audience, so just in case anyone wants to come up, I'm going to invite you guys, raise your hand. Otherwise, Stephen, I just want to say my own personal thank you.

My pleasure. Thank you.

You've really touched my heart. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I want to see all you guys win. I really want to see you guys win. I want to see 2026 be the absolute best year ever. Be the best version of yourself. Go out and win this game called life. And Seth can help you get there. Seth, I love you, man.

Thank you again, bro. Thank you. Appreciate you being here. That was powerful and practical. The idea of building a business that prints freedom instead of stress is something everybody needs to hear. Now we're gonna move on to the revenue driver engine offers and promotions that actually convert. Our next speaker is Adam Nolan. Adam is the creator of a proven system that has helped clients create 7-figure promotions without relying on complicated funnels or endless sales calls. His session is aptly titled The Simple Offer System: How to Create 7-Figure Promotions Without Sales Calls, Webinars, or Complex Funnels. Adam's gonna take you inside the psychology and structure behind simple offers that convert, and he'll show you how to use a focused sequence of messages to create some serious revenue. Please welcome my friend Adam Nolan.

Well, thank you very much for the very warm welcome. I really appreciate that. I'm looking forward to being here. We got a really great workshop today. So if you don't mind, I am just going to shuffle my screen around, share some slides. And we will get the show on the road. There we go. And if there are questions that come in or anything like that, please do let me know. I'm going to go full screen just because it allows me to— I've got a couple of monitors here. It allows me to see, you know, the slides that are coming up next and how's the presentation go a little bit more fluidly. But if there's— if there are any emergencies, if the audio cuts out or anything like that, do let me know and we'll take it as it goes. So thank you very, very much for, again, for the warm introduction. And like Seth said, my workshop today is called How to Sell High-Ticket Offers Without Webinars, Without Funnels, Without Sales Calls, Without VSLs, Without Long-Form Letters, Without Any of That Stuff. So this is absolutely perfect for coaches, for consultants, for course creators. Works really well for service providers, really anybody with a transformational offer. So people in health, people in finance, people in relationships, that kind of stuff. If you're working in that market, this is absolutely perfect for you. Uh, really it's for anyone that's tired of complex funnels, low conversions, and people who want to sell high-ticket stuff without the high-ticket headaches. So specifically what we're doing today is I'm going to be breaking down a brand new way of selling high-ticket services. Um, I've been in direct response for nearly 20 years now, and I can count on one hand the number of people that are doing something similar to this. And truthfully, we actually stumbled onto this by accident, and I'll tell you a little bit about that shortly. But, uh, I'll explain to you why this works, and it is so incredibly simple. Uh, I'm going to give you the step-by-step instructions on how to replicate this yourself in your business so that you can take what you learned today and go and apply— and go and apply it to your business. And really, it's— it'll take you maybe 5 to 10 days at the most to get everything up and running, and then you can keep using the same promotion model. We've used it for years without having to change the offer and it works every single time we run it. And then at the end, I'm going to invite you to partner with, with us on this and it's 100% free. Won't cost you anything upfront at all. So a little bit about my background. I traditionally got into this market as a copywriter with an executive with a knack for process optimization. So I started doing this stuff, this direct response stuff back in 2008. I was working in the finance space and 2008 wasn't really the best time to be in the finance space. My business was crumbling and we were hemorrhaging cash and I had to figure out a way to essentially save it. So I holed myself up in my apartment and started studying direct response stuff, you know, Dan Kennedy and Gary Halbert and Joe, what's his name? I was gonna say Joe Polish. A lot of our stuff is referenced from Joe Polish, but Joe Sugarman. That's who I was thinking of. As you can see, there's a library behind me. And so, started reading all that stuff and actually started implementing it and got pretty good at it and turned the business around. And from that, I had a lot of friends and colleagues and coworkers coming to me saying, Adam, how are you doing this? You know, you're growing your business in what is possibly one of the worst financial economies that we've had in the past 100 years. How are you doing? So, I started transitioning to marketing services and one thing led to another and here we are 20 years later giving this presentation. So I've sold everything from $1 tripwire offers, you know, PDFs, books, physical items, that kind of thing, all the way up to $35,000 consulting offers. I ran one of the largest marketing newsletters for over a decade, and my team and I have sold somewhere around $70 million of products and services in a variety of different niches and languages. Most recently, we scaled this brand new business that I'm going to be sharing with you guys today. To 7 figures in sales in about 5.5, 6 months or so. So, you know, I've been around the block a few times when it comes to this stuff. But my goal for today's workshop is to give you the same big aha moment that I had as to why most high-ticket sales systems are just fraught with difficulty. They are frustrating to run. They drain you. They're just— it's like pushing a big boulder up a hill. So I'm going to share a far more simple way to sell really, really expensive stuff, usually in the range of $5,000 $10,000 up to $20,000. That's about the kind of the golden range that we're working with here, and I'm going to share a few case studies with you so that you can see how to implement this in your business as well. And what I love about this is that it is, it's very, very simple. Really, this presentation probably could be summed up in about 10 minutes, but then, you know, we wouldn't have much to chat about. So let's go ahead and we'll dive into first of all why it is that most high-ticket offers fail. So it kind of breaks down into 4 different categories. So there are too many steps, things like webinars, sales calls, complex funnels. They create a lot of unnecessary friction, a lot of points where people can drop off, where they at the end won't see the primary thing that you're trying to sell, the expensive thing that you're trying to sell. A lot of these promotions have very little know, like, and trust built into them. You know, thankfully there are workshops like this today where if you know the presenters, you know the host, host, that really isn't so much of an issue. But when we're talking about things like paid media, that kind of stuff, know, like, and trust is a huge factor. And a lot of promotions that sell high-ticket services, phone calls, that kind of thing, they lack that a great deal. Another one that we've seen a ton of is very, very poor follow-up. Most webinars will have 3 days of follow-up, if that. Most abandoned cart sequences between 3 and 7 days, and that's it. And the truth is it takes somewhere between 7 and 14 days sometimes, or 7 and 14 touchpoints to get someone to even pay attention to what you're doing. And then oftentimes they go into this with the wrong mentality. You know, it's the whole Glengarry Glen Ross, you know, always be closing kind of deal where it's very adversarial. It's you against the prospect and you're trying to push and you're trying to close them when in reality, if you shift your perspective from that and look at it from the perspective of you two teaming up to solve the problem, that, that, you know, that wrong mentality, that adversarial conflict goes away entirely. So diving into each one of these specifically, webinars. I know I sold via webinar for the better part of a decade, and I love webinars, and they do work well under the right circumstances. But there are big issues that come into play here. So there's something that I like to call the the webinar half-life or 24-hour half-life for a webinar. So for— and we've seen this across, you know, a ton of different clients and a ton of different webinars. For every 24 hours that you make somebody wait to attend a webinar, you lose about 50% of the people that will show up. So if you're promoting a webinar and it's more than 3 days out, then you're losing the vast majority of the people that would potentially be interested in signing up. You know, life gets in the way. So let's just say you've got 1,000 people registered for your webinar. And they have to wait 3 days. So 1,000 people, then on day 2 drops down to 500 people, and then it drops down to 250 people, and then you've got them showing up on the webinar, which is why we see industry standards of, you know, 20% to 30% show rates on webinars. And when you're paying for this traffic, that's a huge kick in the teeth. You're losing 70% of the people. And when you don't have the follow-up behind that, you're not even reaching out to them. Then let's say, you know, we've got those people that attend the webinar. 250 people, then you've got maybe half of them that end up at pitch time, you know, whether it's an hour or 2 hours later or whatever it might be. So half of them will drop off. You're left with 125 people and then maybe a 5 to 10% close rate. So you're looking at 6 to 10 sales off of potentially 1,000 people that opted in. And the math behind that is just— it's atrocious. So it ends up being a problem because all these people have to wait. You have all these barriers that they have to go through. Before they even see the offer. You know, you've got to twist the knife, so, so to speak. You've got to, um, have them be on the, the presentation and, and walk them through this big long process of why they should purchase your thing, manufacture desire and all of that before they even see the offer, before they're even presented with the solution to the problem that they need to solve, that they're trying to solve by just attending that workshop. So the problem is that we live in a very short attention span society and to get someone to wait that long from the initial ad or the initial click or the initial opt-in all the way through 3.5 days or more to the webinar, it's just working against you time and time again and it's why webinars, especially lately, aren't converting nearly as well. If we were talking about this 10 years ago when webinars were a little bit more novel, the numbers were were much better, but now we're looking at 20-25% show-up rates, much lower conversion rates, and in a trust-based economy, it becomes really, really hard to do this well at scale. So moving on to funnels, it's kind of a similar problem with funnels, and I've seen this from working a lot in e-commerce as well, selling low-ticket products on the front end, working them through, you know, bump orders, upsell one, upsell two, upsell 2, all the way to call applications or a VSL to sell higher ticket services. Every time that they have to change the page, every time they, they go from the opt-in to the sales page to the upsell to upsell 2 to the thank you page to the booking page, all that stuff, you have a tremendous number of people drop off at every point. So to get just one call on a backend, on a, you know, an application on the thank you page or something like that, you're having to send just hordes of traffic through that. And while you might be breaking even, it's still cash going out of the bank to pay for these ads. You know, it's still all these steps that people can drop off on, all these steps that you have to optimize on. And, and we all know how difficult Facebook and Google is these days with running ads. Um, you know, you say the wrong thing, too many people don't like your ad, and boom, they get shut down and you have to start all over again. And it's just a really big pain. There's the high cost. There's also very, very little trust because people are buying these items off of impulse, you know, the tripwire items. They're buying them off of impulse. So you've got a very short time span from when they see the ad to when they click to when, you know, they go through the OTOs, if they finally make it to the application, to build up that trust. So it becomes very difficult to sell high-ticket stuff in both of those scenarios. Scenarios, whether it's on webinar or whether it's going through a funnel. And then, you combine that with poor follow-up. If it's an abandoned cart sequence trying to get people to purchase the tripwire to eventually work them through the follow-up sequence or working through the sales process to get that application call, most people stop that at 3, 4, 5 emails. Very, very few people go beyond a week of follow-up and then, same thing with webinars. Replay going out for 3, 4 days. I think the most we've seen is 7 days. Very few people will mail the replay beyond that. And when they do mail this out, it's always generic cookie cutter stuff. Hey, you forgot this in your cart, or it's the exact same reply, exact same, exact same email sequence that goes out to every single person. It's generic. It doesn't have that personal touch. And because of that, you end up in a scenario with a very, very low engagement from these people. And it ends up feeding this cycle that you just end up getting frustrated and you wonder why things aren't working and you see other people that it might be working for or they're bragging that it's working and you don't necessarily know, know the numbers behind the scenes. But all of this kind of leads into the whole know, like, and trust idea that people don't want to buy from strangers. They want to buy from friends. So the better the relationship you have with people through doing consistent workshops or through building a relationship through email is not just treating it as an ATM, but actually sending out content, actually replying individually to subscribers that write back to you to share their story. The more of a relationship you have with people, the easier it is to sell stuff. And on the flip side, the less of a relationship you have, the more difficult it is. I've worked with partners that have had lists of 4,000 people, and we've sold sold $100,000 worth of stuff in a week. On the flip side, I've worked with people that have rarely mailed their audience, had 100,000 subscribers, and, you know, we made $10,000, $15,000 from it. So the better the relationship that you have with your audience, the easier it is to sell stuff, which is why cold traffic is so difficult to do, because especially breaking even immediately, you know, it's great to build a list, but you have to nurture that list and warm it up and engage with them and all of that stuff. The mechanics can work, but it's very, very difficult to get it to work because ultimately the sales has always been about the relationships that you have with your audience, whether that's one-on-one or en masse with an email list or your YouTube subscribers or your Instagram. The more, the more of a relationship you have, the easier it is to sell, which is why you've got influencers who are able to hold up a product and say, this is really great. I went out and bought it yesterday. I think you should do. And that company, whoever they're promoting, just gets absolutely hammered with sales because they trust the influencer. They trust the person sharing the message far more than they trust the product itself. And if you've got that kind of relationship with your audience, it makes selling infinitely easier. So what ends up happening is you get trapped in this vicious cycle. You try webinars, you try funnels, you try setters, you try closers, you try complex tech stacks. And, and you run into obstacles at every single point. You run into these uphill battles and it starts getting in your head and you start wondering, you know, is this— do they not like me? Do they not like the offer I'm selling? Maybe my customers are just bad people and they won't buy. But the problem isn't with you and the problem's not with your product and the problem certainly isn't with your customers. It's the mechanics of how all this is done. It's a big problem. Big mismatch between how most people sell and the process that customers and clients naturally go through when they buy. So none of this is really your fault. This is what the industry has considered best practice for a very, very long time, for almost as long as I've been in direct response marketing, especially, you know, as long as the internet has been around doing this kind of stuff. I've done a little bit of direct mail, but that's before my time mostly. You know, the direct mail print world, but there hasn't been a significant shift in a very long time in how sales online are done, and very few people have mastered what I'm about to share with you today. I can count on one hand, you know, the number of people that are doing this at scale. So the big reasons why traditional methods don't work anymore is that a lot of people focus on high-pressure, urgency-based tactics. They don't have a relationship with their audience. Their sales process is far too long and complicated. Follow-up is limited and very bland, and this causes burnout and frustration, and you start to question all sorts of things like, why am I even doing this? You know, but here is what life looks like once you know this, once this new system is set up. And it is super duper easy to do, guys. We'll go through the whole thing today. But, uh, you know, I wanted to lead into this and give you the, the right mindset so that you understand the aha moment that I went through discovering this. So what life looks like when you get this right. Leads reach out to buy from you directly. You don't have to go out and prospect. You don't have to go and, quote, knock on doors or any of that stuff. Customers are happy to spend big money without or with you without ever having to get on the phone. It cuts the time to sale down dramatically. There is zero tech stuff. This is literally a Word doc and 7 emails. It's about the least tech thing that you can do, the lowest tech thing that you can do. The other cool thing is they rarely have objections because of the way this is set up. The only objections that you end up getting from this are, um, can I split the payments? Can I bring my partner in with this? Can we start next week? It's never, I don't trust you, or I think this is a scam or anything like that. It's not none of those negative, difficult to overcome objections. It's all logistics-based stuff. There are zero chargebacks, there are zero disputes, there are zero difficult customers because people are walking through this process on their own volition. They're not being hard sold to. They're finding, um, they're finding, they're finding your service and they're wanting to walk through it. And I've got an analogy I'll share with you later. I almost shared it now, but it's much better in the context of the presentation, so we'll get to that in a sec. And you rarely have to change the promotion either. I run these exact same promotions for years at a time. And what's great about it is that if people don't buy the first time, they'll often write to you and say, hey, you know, I'm going through some life events right now. I don't have the finances available right now, but next time you do this, I'm all in. I can't wait. And this will always work because it's not based on a fad. It's based on deeply ingrained psychology. It's based on the buying patterns that people use to buy things that they want to buy right now, whether that's the new iPhone, whether that's a car, whether it's a house. Anything that's a big, important purchase, people follow the exact same process. And when you follow that process, it doesn't feel like you're pushing that boulder uphill. People come to you wanting to buy rather than you having to sell them on what you're doing. So a little bit of context behind this. Like I mentioned earlier, I have been doing presentations like this one for a very, very long time, over a decade now. And we've been selling— I saw it for for since 2010, '11-ish, somewhere around there, I've been teaching people how to build subscription businesses. And actually because of that, I ran one of the longest, largest direct response marketing newsletters in our industry, and that eventually evolved into a $2,000 course and a $7,000 done-for-you service that we were selling. So I've been giving this presentation from 2011, '12 all the way up to about 2 or 3 years, about 3 years ago. Actually, 2022. And we were doing a big webinar push. We were running paid media, we're working with affiliates, we're doing live and automated webinars, live webinars 3 times a week, at least auto webinars every single day at 2 PM and at 7 PM. And at the end of the year, I just got absolutely burnt out. I did not want to do it anymore. It wasn't fun. Auto webinars were okay, but they were personal and the numbers, just like I explained earlier, they were not that great. We were profitable, but the amount of effort and time and tweaking and babysitting we had to do of those funnels, of those processes made it so it was not fun. So I was burning out. I didn't want to continue, but obviously bills to pay, staff to employ, all that great stuff. So got to figure out a way, right? We're the captain of these ships. We got to make sure that they stay afloat and that the, the crew stays fed. So out of frustration, I decided that, you know what, I am not going to do a webinar today. I am just going to email my list and see if they want what I have to purchase. And I sent an email out and it was literally just like a 2-word email, kind of like the whole Joe Polish has this 9-word email. Do you still need help with X? Very, very similar to that. So, hi, first name, do you still need help with X? Write back in and let me know. And I sent this to my list of about 10,000 people at the time, and I was absolutely flooded with responses. I had over 2,000 responses come back in. The response rate was fantastic. And all I did is I took that, the pitch at the end of the webinar, and I put it in a document and it was basically just a value stack or an offer stack. This is what you get: services, content, bonuses. If you're interested, write back in. And let me know. And I put the value in there for everything and I made sure not to inflate the value because if you do that, people don't believe you and everything else starts to be questioned. But we, you know, we went through it and we broke down the value of everything that was included in services, you know, $10,000 content, $5,000 bonuses, so on and so forth. And, you know, the total value of this offer was something like $27,000. And the response to that was absolutely huge. So we got a lot of these people writing back in, and I sent this document out. You know, when they wrote back in, I said, okay, well, here's what we're doing. Here's the link to this document. Go ahead and check it out. If you're interested, let me know. And I made a really, really big mistake. In my rush to get this put together so that I didn't have to do another webinar, I forgot to put the price in the document. And that one mistake was honestly one of the best things that I ever did, because when I did that, I forgot to put the pricing in. All these people wrote back in saying, Adam, this sounds absolutely fantastic, this is exactly what I want, but I can't afford $27,000, or that's too expensive for me right now, I can't. And then I had to write back to everybody manually and say, oh no, no, that's the value of it, the price is just $7,000, and I'm happy to split up the payments for you if you'd like. And the result of that is that we collected $104,000 in a day— or sorry, in a week. With double that on, on the back end over the next week and a half or so. And it became the best promotion that we'd ever done. So it was about $200,000 in sales in total from a webinar that would have likely pulled in about $40,000 or $50,000. And so I accidentally discovered this brand new paradigm, this brand new business model, and it became the most successful promo that we'd ever run to that date. So we stopped doing webinars entirely from that day forward. No more webinars, no more ads, no more funnels, no more sales calls, no more headaches. And we started running this brand new promo model where we would just ask them, hey, are you interested in having us help you solve this problem? If you are, write back in and let us know. We share the offer doc. It has the deliverables in there with the value. They write back in and share the price, and we share the price with them, and we make it easy for them to buy. And what we learned from this was that people don't like being sold to. But they love buying. And the best way that I can explain this, like I mentioned, I was in finance. I used to sell insurance and it was one of the most difficult things in the world to sell. People didn't want to be cold-called and sold insurance. It's not something you want to talk about on the best of days, let alone when some stranger calls you at 5 p.m. at night when you're in the middle of having dinner. So it was really, really hard to sell that kind of stuff. And contrast that with buying a car. Buying a new iPhone. You go online, you research it, you get excited about it, you read reviews about it. You know that you've got this problem— my phone is broken, my car doesn't work— I want to solve this, I'm excited about solving this problem. And then you go into the dealership, or you go into the Apple Store, and say, I want the black one, I want it to be 512 gigs, here's my $1,000, thank you very much. You're happy and you're excited to get it, and you're not going in there saying, Well, you know, Mr. Apple employee, I don't believe you that this iPhone is a great phone. You know, there are no objections. The only objection is cash or credit is making it easy for people to buy. So what we would do is we offered a solution to a problem that they already knew they had. We didn't have to manufacture desire. All we did is tap into an issue that they were already aware of. You know, does your relationship suck? Okay, here's how we can help you. With them. Do you need more sales for your business? Excellent. Here's a solution to that. Are you looking to lose weight? Great. We've got a plan for that. We made the solution easy, pain-free, and fast because people don't want more homework. The more that you can do for them, the more that you can take off their plate while also giving them a guarantee on the outcome, the easier it is to sell, the more viable it becomes. And then gasp, we actually had real conversations with people. You know, we ran a promotion a little while ago to an area that had been hit with a natural disaster. And, you know, people would write back in and say, well, we just lost our home. This isn't something that works for us right now. And so often in sales, especially with automation and things like that, that people don't acknowledge that. You know, they say, oh, well, I'm so sorry that happened. You know, would you like to sign up anyway? Or something, they just— it's cold-hearted. It's just not nice. But if you talk to people like you would talk to a friend, if you have a relationship with them, if you have a conversation with them and they know, like, and trust you, even though they might not buy today, they will buy at some point in the future because they are aware of the problem that they have. The timing just might not be perfect because of a natural disaster or some life event that happened But by actually having a real conversation with them, you build the rapport that will eventually lead to a very high-ticket sale— $7,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000— because they trust you. So then we made it easy for people to buy. We did split pays, we did financing. And because of that, this is the only promo that we've ever run since. So the format behind this is deceptively simple. It is a Word document. No fancy websites, no landing pages, no complex tech. We've got a headline, we've got a quick little introduction, and then it jumps right into the deliverables broken down as services because usually the service part is the most valuable aspect of this. You're doing the service where you're building them a sales funnel or you're helping them run the ads or you're creating the workout plan or whatever it might be. That hands-on approach, one, is usually what the best customers want. So if you've got a list of, you know, of people that have bought your, your $27 course, your $197 course, $500, whatever it might be. There is a percentage of those people, usually 15 to 20%, that want more of you and more of your time and more of your, um, your help. And they're very happy to pay premium prices for that. So we would put that in the document, and it would be services and then content and then bonuses. And the bonuses, uh, the content goes to support the services. So we've built you this machine. Here's how to run the machine. And that's usually guides and videos and all of that stuff that teaches them how to do it. And then you've got the bonuses and the bonuses are the anything that makes it easier, faster, or more enjoyable to do. It's the whole Steve Jobs one more thing moment tapping into my inner showmanship or showman here. It's got to solve a big core emotional problem. Problem. So typically this works for transformational stuff where you're helping them make big changes in their life. Coincidentally, that's also the stuff that you can charge the most for. Now we have done this in the software as a service market. It works okay. It works better if you're able to tie it to personalized coaching, one-on-one help, small group help, that kind of stuff where they're getting more of your one-on-one time. That's why done for you and done with you stuff tends to work best. And the guarantee should be service-based. And the reason why is because, well, one, we don't do money-back guarantees on this stuff because this is your personal time involved in this that can't be refunded. I've got one client who's crazy. I love him. We've done half a million in sales together who has a money-back guarantee. He's had to honor it once and that's it. And he's sold, I don't know, probably 50 to 70 units of his course at $10,000 each, and a few of them have had discounts and things like that, but he only had to offer one refund from that. But it should be service-based. And the great thing about this is that people generally tend to fall into two categories. If they want the outcome, which if they've walked through this process, they've spoken with you, you've talked to them for a while, they've agreed to pay, all that stuff, they want the outcome, especially if it's a fairly expensive service. At that point, if you're working with them for 2 or 3 months, the vast majority of the work is done. The machine is built. They have the content. They have the bonuses. They're starting to do it themselves. And the service-based guarantee is generally, with most of my clients and partners, is that we'll continue working with you until you achieve X result. Now, because these people want X result, it's a very, very strong guarantee. They want X result more than they want their money back. And for those types of clients, 9 times out of 10, the support they're requesting is, hey, can I get your opinion on this? Hey, what would you do in this circumstance? Can you give me a little bit of guidance? It's 5 minutes of emails once a week. So, it's a very easy-to-support guarantee. Now, the other group of people, the people that are going to be maybe a little bit more difficult and dragging their feet and not believe in themselves, what happens is, unfortunately, and we all know this being in the self-help industry, they will go and find a new project to start or something else, a new object, new shiny object, right? Shiny object syndrome. So at the end of the day, you end up with people that want the outcome that you don't really have to help a whole lot, but you're able to provide that guarantee. And then the people, the other group of people will find another, unfortunately, shiny object, because as much as we would love to help every single person, you know, what's the saying? You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Uh, also does apply here, and that's why we do service-based guarantees. Never ever do a money-back guarantee unless you're that one crazy client I have whose offer is just absolutely stellar. So the offer document details— it's really important that you list the non-inflated value of these deliverables. The reason why is because if you go in there and you say this PDF is worth $5,000 and you get access to all of my courses and that's $100,000 and so on and and so forth, it becomes unbelievable. It cracks the, the perception of this offer because they don't trust that. They don't believe that that offer is worth that much unless it truly is, unless they can actually see the value behind it. So as they go through this document and they see the values behind it, it needs to add up to something that they would see themselves paying in, in real time. And so the reason why we do this is because the value should be roughly 3 to 4 times what you're actually charging. So if you've got an offer that you're selling for $7,000, the value behind that, the real world non-inflated value should be $21,000 to $28,000. I think that's— yeah, that's 3 to 4 times. Hard to do math live on a presentation, live on a workshop. But the reason why these numbers work is, I mean, we just passed Black Friday, right? You've got 67% and 75% off sales, you know, in that range. Really, really big, awesome discounts on stuff. It's an event. And when you are presented with a solution to a problem that you really, really want to solve, that's a big, painful problem, and you're offered— and someone is offering to do the vast majority of the work for you or coach you one-on-one until you receive that result, and they're offering you 75% off, it becomes an absolute no-brainer. Imagine if you walked into the Apple store on Black Friday. Who would be crazy enough to do that? But you went to Black Friday and the sales associate says, "Wow, you know, I'm so glad that you're here. Just for today only, I know that you really want this iPhone. We're having a brand new sale. You can get it today for $250 instead of $1,000." You would trip over yourself pulling out your wallet. Now, the other analogy that I have with this that I've given before in presentations is, you know, imagine your favorite band is coming to town. I love live music. I've been a musician for 20-plus years now. And, you know, imagine this live band is coming to town, your favorite band in the world. Tickets have been sold out for months, and you're browsing around on Marketplace and you see somebody selling tickets to their concert, and it's front row center. And unfortunately, their kids are sick, so they can't go to the concert tonight. They want to make sure the tickets go to somebody who's really going to appreciate it. And, you know, tickets are, say, $400 each, and the guy just wants to unload the tickets because it's the day of and you can get them for $150, $200. You're going to— your fingers are going to fly typing a message out to him saying, oh, buy. You'll drive over there right now. That's the kind of the response that we want to elicit with this. We want to give them something that they really, really desperately want. We want to do as much of it for them as possible, and we want to make the offer as irresistible as possible. So we have to make sure that this offer stack justifies the value behind it. They can't look at that and say, I don't believe that that's worth $27,000, because if they do, the whole thing falls apart. So after we create the offer doc, we have these emails that go out, and these should be short, personal, impactful emails. We're going to talk about the end result, not the deliverables. People don't buy the mechanism. People buy the end result. So it doesn't matter necessarily. I mean, obviously, keeping ethics into consideration. It doesn't matter how you get them the end result as long as you're able to get them the end result. So I mentioned Joe Polish earlier, legendary marketer, really great guy. He had this, this idea called a 9-word email, and it literally is subject line, first name, body copy, hi, do you still need help with X? And then the idea behind this is that you get people to write back to you. And that spurs on sales conversations that you can eventually turn into sales. So Gary Halbert, hopefully a lot of you guys know who he is. If you don't, go look up Gary Halbert on YouTube after. He is the king of direct response marketing, and he came up with this concept called the A-Pile, B-Pile marketing strategy. This is way back in direct mail days. And what he would do is he had this— and this is also on YouTube, the speech. He would make sure his, his letters that he sent out looked like personal correspondence. It was a handwritten letter, handwritten envelope with an actual stamp on it, addressed to a specific person, not a generic message, not typed out or anything like that. And the more personal that you make these, the more it looks like communication that will come from one friend to another, the better it works. And this whole APOW, BPOW concept came from the idea that when people receive mail, they stand, they sort their mail standing over the garbage can. Anything that looks like a promotion, anything that looks like a flyer, anything that's not personal correspondence gets dropped in the garbage or, you know, put in the B pile. Anything that does look like personal correspondence or, you know, unfortunately a bill gets put in the A pile and read right away. The more that you can make your emails, the more that you can make your communications look like personal correspondence, the better they will do. So when we write these emails, it's really just a very plain email. So there's no header, there's no footer, um, there is, uh, no background colors, there's no logos, there's nothing like that. It looks like an email that you would send from one friend to another using Gmail. So subject line— and literally our subject line for the very first email that goes out in these sequences is first name And the body is, if I offered to do X, Y, and Z for you to help you solve this problem, would you be interested? Write back in and let us know. And they write back in droves and then we share the offer doc with them and then they go forward, ask for the price, and we continue the sales conversation. So you write to them as though they're your friend. Would you like help solving X problem? So when they write back in, all you do— and these emails can be templated, it can be templated up to about the third or fourth email. Great. Well, I'm looking to help 5 people generate more leads for their business. Great. I'm looking to help 10 people lose 30 pounds this coming year. Whatever it might be, I put all of the details here. Check it out. And if it seems like something you'd be interested in, write back and let me know. And an interesting thing is happening as you do this. You're building a yes ladder. Yes, I'm interested in solving this problem. Yes, I'm interested in the service. Yes, I'm okay with the pricing. Yes, I want to work together. And more— the more micro-commitments they make, the easier it is to sell these people. And it's not even selling. They're walking through this process. They're not being stuck on a 30-minute VSL or a 2-hour webinar or a sales call they don't want to be on. They're walking through this process on their own accord. So people read this offer doc, they get excited because it solves the number one problem that they're facing, that big painful thing that they want to get rid of. You write back in, you give them more details, you share the price with them, and then they buy. Now, as far as the conversations beyond these initial emails, be human. Talk to them like a real person. Empathize with their situation. Be a friend. We are starved for real connection. The more of a real connection that you can make, the more you actually become their friend and and talk with them, the more likely they are to buy from you because people want to buy from others that they know, like, and trust. So build that trust up, help them solve logistics. I've lost count of the number of times where people have written back and said, you know, I don't have the money for this. And one of the best responses to that, and I can't remember who I heard it from, it was either Kevin Nations or my friend Mike Bonatempo or You know, you pick up these things throughout the years. One of the best responses I've heard to that is, okay, what does that mean to you? What does I don't have enough money mean? Because that could mean I don't have enough in my checking account. It could mean, you know, I've got to move things from savings. I've had people tell me, well, you know, I don't have enough money. We ask them, what does that mean? And they say back, well, you know, I don't have the money in my checking account right now, but I'm actually selling my house. And it's going to be closing next week. I'll have all the money in a week from now. Fantastic. All right, well, let's get you signed up. We'll get things started, and then when the house closes, then we can take care of that. You know, we can take care of the finance side of things. If you trust your customers to pay the bill, 9 times out of 10, more often than not, they will, because they're trusting you to fulfill on the promise that you've made them. So most of the time, when people show interest, they buy within 7 to 10 emails communication back back and forth. And that usually extends across 1 to 2 weeks. And it's a very friendly, easy conversation. You can do this at scale because you're not having to sit on the phone one-on-one with the person for hours. You know, one was an hour-long sales call. You can, you can respond to 50 people within that 1-hour timeframe. So you're able to get much more volume much faster. And it flips the script. They're not being sold. They're buying. Like I said, it's like walking into a store to buy that iPhone saying, I'll take the black one. That's $549. 12 gigs. Here's my $1,000. It's probably not $1,000 anymore. I haven't bought an iPhone in a bit. They're probably a bit more now. But it follows the natural attention, interest, desire, action path that we all go through when buying things like a laptop or a phone or a new car or a house. We have— we— something gets our attention, a problem gets our attention, we, uh, we develop interest in that, we develop desire in that thing by reading about it, and then we take action, going in the store to buy. People rarely make impulse purchases for big expensive things. They have to talk to their wife or their partner or think about it first. I mean, when was the last time that you went out and you impulse bought a car? It rarely happens. It's got a built-in yes ladder and people are pre-sold by the time they even see the price. They would not be asking for the price if it wasn't something that they already wanted. So We ended up coining this system, calling this system the Simple Offer System. No webinars, no funnels, no sales calls, no VSLs, none of that nonsense. So a quick little case study here. I had a client who was in the online business space and she had mainly sold products in the range of $27 to $197. She had a list of about 4,500 people, relatively small, and she was absolutely certain that nobody would buy her, her $4,500 offer. So it was $4,500. And what we did is we put together an offer for her, an offer stack that basically took the books that she was selling right now and the courses she was selling and turned them into a done-for-you offer. And it had services, it had content, and it had bonuses. And we ended up selling about $90,000 in a little over 10 days from this. And it ended up getting her entirely out of debt and actually paid for a luxury vacation for her and her husband on their— it was either their 10th or their 20th anniversary. And almost every day they were sending me pictures of them on the beach and them out at a fancy restaurant, all because of this promotion that she didn't actually believe her list was even capable of doing because the psychology in this is so ingrained in how we naturally buy. So I had another client who had a relatively small list. His list was around, I think, 10,000 to 12,000 people. He had— he considered it dead. It was a combined list from a bunch of different sources, a bunch of different campaigns that he had run. He hadn't emailed it in months and he wanted to try this out. So what we did is we put together the offer for him. It was a high-ticket consulting offer. It was $7,500 and we sold it internally to his list and did about $45,000 in sales. Now, this guy is a smart guy, and what he did is he realized there was enough margin in his business that he'd go out and recruit partners to promote this. So he reached out to his partners and said, hey, you know, we've got this new method of selling the service. Our partners do all the work. Everything is closed by them. You don't have to do anything but send these 7 emails out. And he lined up a bunch of partners, and we did another $250,000 $300,000 so far. And we're running this— the next time we're running this is going to be in January, and he'll likely bring in $1 million from this next year from the promotion that we're doing. Another client in the finance space— this is the guy I mentioned earlier. He's in finance and investing. He had several high-ticket offers in the range of $2,000 to $2,500. We bundled everything together. We included a bunch of software and software Services, one-on-one help, bonuses, software, the whole deal, and promoted this to his list of about 19,000, 20,000 people or so. It was a $10,000 price and we did $500,000 in sales off of two promotions. And now he's literally retooling his entire business to have all lead sources, all, all communications pointing towards this one offer. And we did this in about 3 and a half months. You know, we did— we ran the promo and then waited about a month or two in between and then ran it again. So he's gonna be projected to do probably $1.5 million to $2 million next year from this. So again, why these work so well— yeah, my presentation decided to act up. There we go. Why these work so well is it solves existing problems. It doesn't try to convince people that they have a new problem. We're not manufacturing desire. It solves a problem that they already know they have. It works ideally with a very warm audience, people that already know, like, and trust you, because the more they know, like, and trust you, the easier it is to sell. It cuts through the noise. It looks like it's coming from a personal friend, so you're not getting lumped in with promotions. And it's got built-in psychology like that Yes Ladder, like AIDA principles that feel natural. They don't feel salesy. And this is very, very low-tech. Literally anybody can do this. It's 7 very ugly, plain emails and a Word document literally just done in Google Docs. So what this means for you is that there are no complex funnels to manage, to build, to fix or anything like that. No high-pressure sales tactics, tactics that make you feel uncomfortable. You get happy customers who actually want to work with you instead of hemming and hawing and dragging their feet and feeling like they were hard sold or forced to do something that they didn't want to do. No buyer's remorse, right? You're able to generate high-ticket sales even from a dead or small smallest, and you have peace of mind knowing that you can run this again and again and again. So like I promised, guys, you likely could take this, what we shared today, and go and run this on your own, and everything would probably be hunky-dory. And, you know, you might have to do a little bit of tweaking and testing and refining and all that, but it's very possible for anyone to take this model that I shared today and run with it. But if you want help with this, what we can do is we can actually build and launch and manage this entire thing for you. You'll be able to skip the learning curve. You can get immediate results and leverage our templates, our scripts, our proven strategy, our sales team, everything. So here's how we can help with this. We'll start off with a consultation. You and I will get on the phone and we'll talk one-on-one just like we're doing right now, you know, friendly little chat to figure out what your audience would like, whether we can help. You know, that will, will basically figure out if this is something that can work for you. Then we'll create the offer stack, which is the list of deliverables that you'll be providing, and then we'll turn that into an offer doc. You read through everything, you sign off on it, and then when it's good to go, we craft the emails that will get sent out to your audience. You schedule the emails. We design all the pages, the checkout pages. We build everything for you. We handle all the follow-up, all the communications in your voice. And if there's ever something we don't know how to answer, we can loop you in. We can ask you questions to make sure that it sounds authentic and that it's coming from you and gives your brand the recognition it deserves. We'll set up the payments, we'll, we'll collect all the payments for you. They go directly into your PayPal account, directly into your Stripe account, into your bank account. And the cost for all of this is 100% free. We don't want a penny from you upfront. There is zero upfront charge for this. All we do is a 75-25% split, 25% for us, 75% for you, and we invoice that 1 month after, after all the funds have settled. And the reason why we do this is that we are so confident that this will work that we're willing to saddle the risk up front. Now, it's not a huge risk for, for anyone involved, which is why we've actually been booked solid with these promotions since May and we're booked up for the next month as well. But if you don't make money from this, we don't make money for this. This aligns our goals so that we're working together as true partnerships. So if this is something you're interested in, head on over to our website at www.nolindirect.com. Book your discovery call. Um, I've got a few spots available this week, and then we're going to be off for the holidays, and then we're picking back up again in January. Uh, we'll go through the onboarding, we'll craft your offer doc, we'll run the promo, and on average, we're able to collect about $10, uh, cash collected in 7 to 10 days for every active subscriber that you have. So if you've got 10,000 people on your list then realistically our average is about $100,000 from that. If you've got 5,000 people on your list, we're going to be able to pull in a $50,000 promotion. So the numbers are, are pretty fantastic. Now do not wait. This is first come, first serve because it is— we're a smaller team. It's me, we've got our CMO, we've got writers, we've got our, our COO, a handful of closers, and that's it. So we realistically can only manage 6 to 8 promotions a month, just we can't, we don't have the capacity to handle more than that, which is also why we've been booked since May. But it is first come, first serve because we do all the work manually. So if this is something you're interested in, go ahead, reserve your spot at nolandirect.com. Doesn't cost anything at all to do this. And there's a very, very high chance that if your audience is receptive, if you've got a good relationship with them, that there is a 6-figure payday in your future. So So just, we'll jump into a few of the more commonly asked questions that I get from clients before we open it up to the greater public. But do I need an offer for this? No. So we'll actually create an offer with you from scratch. You don't need to have any offer. Now, if you've got something that you've already sold, fantastic. That does make it easier. But if not, that's okay too. So we'll look at your assets, we'll look at your expertise, we'll look at the services that you want to deliver. So, you know, you actually enjoy doing it. And we'll put something together. Do I need a list? Yes. This system works best with an email, with an existing email list that is mailed consistently, that you have a relationship with, that's at least 5,000 people. Our typical range is 5,000 to 15,000. We've done promos with audiences up to 150,000. It leverages your existing audience. So the more of a relationship you have with your existing audience, the better. The thought that my list doesn't buy high-ticket items. They probably do. As we've seen time and time and time again, this is usually the most common concern that people have is that my audience won't buy that. And in every single case that we've run this, it turns out that they do. People want more of you, especially if you've got a relationship with them. They want the one-on-one help. They want the handholding. They want the done-for-you aspect. They want you to solve their problems. Right? I mean, don't we all? So most lists have a hidden high-ticket buyers just waiting for a premium solution. So what kind of offers convert best? Usually done-for-you or done-with-you stuff. It all goes back to the idea that people don't want more homework. They're tired of courses. They want a, a result delivered to them on a silver platter where they have to do as little work as possible. Can I run it again? Yes, we encourage people to. Usually people run this every 60 to 90 days. If you've got a consistent stream of leads coming in, you could do it even more. We've had people that have bolted these onto the backend of, of ad campaigns of like, you know, front end low ticket offers where they'll build up the audience, build up the relationship, and then a week or two later have this set up as an auto or as an automatic promotion. So that works too. But generally the biggest payout immediately is if you've got a warm list. And what niches work best? Anything that's a, a quote unquote bleeding neck problem, a problem that they have to solve immediately, works the best. So anything in the B2B space, biz op, health, finance, relationships, anything along those lines, the 3 big ones work well. And the more of a transformational experience you can give them, the better. So head on over to www.nolandirect.com. That's N-O-L-A-N-D-I-R-E-C-T.com. Book your no-obligation call. Hopefully you can tell from this presentation I'm a pretty easygoing guy. This is not a sales call. There's nothing to sell. It's just, it's just to make sure that we can actually help you. No, because unfortunately this doesn't work with every audience. It doesn't work with every circumstance. And I want to make sure that I'm actually able to help you before we move forward. But if I am able to help you, if our team, you know, we think it's going to be a good fit, then we'll schedule the promotion, start working through creating the deliverables, all of that stuff, and in very short order, you'll end up with a new marketing asset that you'll be able to run 3, 4, 5, 6 times a year that puts 6 figures or more into your bank account. All right. Well, thank you so much for letting me share this today. This is a lot of fun. And let's go ahead and open the floor to any questions that might come in. Awesome.

Thank you so much. So full disclosure, everyone, I am a client of Adam. And I, he ran our first promotion. He and his team ran our first promotion recently. It worked incredibly well. I immediately said, hey, can we do another one this month? We ran out of time. We're doing our second one in January. So it worked so well, I'm doing it again. And I wanted him to speak at this event because the offer, like, I did not pay a dime upfront. He is telling the truth. There's no hidden fees. Like, I literally paid nothing. They get paid 100% on performance. They don't make any money until you make money, um, which is an irresistible offer if I've ever seen one. So take him up— if you own a business, take him up on the offer of chatting about how this could work for you, because again, it literally costs you nothing unless he and his team sell something for you. So Adam, thank you so much. Um, go to nolandirect.com. Do we have any questions in the chat or on Chatter, Adrianne.

So first of all, Adam, thank you so much. It's nice to meet you. I'm Adrianne Barker, so thank you. Uh, I have a question on the financing. I found that was interesting. So offering financing to the client, does that look like financing from like another company or internally financing or just finding another way way to invoice, like, you know, spreading it out. Could you share?

Yeah, absolutely. So we've actually done all of those. Um, what we usually do is, um, when we send these emails out and we send the pricing out, let's just say that it's a $7,000 offer. We'll say, um, you know, the, the investment today is only $6,997, and if it helps, we can also figure out financing options or arrange payment terms. And so you'll get about half the people that are fine paying up upfront, and then the other half would like to have that split. And so they'll write back in and say, okay, well, you know, I'm interested in, in the payment arrangements. And what we'll do is we'll drop down to the next level. Okay, well, we can do 2 payments of $3,750. So it ends up being $7,500 in total. So, you know, a little bit of a payment bump to account for, for the spread out payments, the accounting, the bookkeeping, that kind of stuff. And so we'll just split the payments out. And then if that's still too high, then they'll write back in and we'll do it over 3 months. Now, the reason why we do that is actually— this is something that we've been asked a lot— we structure it that way so that we collect as much cash upfront as possible from our partners, from our clients. Because if you take these payment options and you just put it all on the checkout page, inevitably the vast majority of people are going to spread it out over spread it out over the longest amount possible. So that's why we do that. And the other thing too is that never ever spread out your payments longer than the length of the deliverables that you're providing because unfortunately you end up in a scenario where once the service is provided, you may have people that are less inclined to make their final payments. So that is usually what we do in about 80% of cases. We've had a few people use things like Klarna or Affirm to split their payments out. The nice thing about that is that you get a larger chunk up front. The downside is that often these companies will take a percentage of whatever it is that you're selling. We have one partner that is doing this that we did about $80,000 in sales with from one promo, and they had a financing mechanism where the company would basically give you 70% of whatever it was that the, the financing was. So if it was $10,000, you get $7,000 up front, and then they would pay you the additional 15%, uh, 6 months later, and then they would keep 15%. So that was okay. Um, it wasn't ideal because you're losing 30% of your cash flow up front, but it can make a huge difference to people, especially if it's a zero financing offer and you're able to collect a lot more people, you're able to get a lot more sales. We're actually going to be partnering officially with JVZoo as a, a marketing platform, and they've got this kind of setup as well. And there we've seen from their data that you end up getting a huge number of sales in by offering this, so much so that it offsets the cost of the, the financing service. And then one other thing that we are actually just looking into this past week. We— I mean, this is just from our research. There are services out there that will actually buy the invoice from you, and they'll buy it from you for 2 to 3%, uh, so very, very minimal. Um, so what you do is you sign up with this company, and I, I would share the name, but I can't even remember what it's called. Um, and you create the invoice through this company, then you invoice the client through this company, you get paid out from the company 97%. That's— it's a 3% fee for every 30 days. And then they deal with the financing directly with the client. So your cash flow is fantastic from this. You're getting 97% immediately within 24 to 48 hours. And that's actually something that we're looking into for our partners as well as for ourselves, because the fees are just— I mean, it's the same fee as Stripe. 2.9%. So that works really, really well too. But at the end of the day, the easier that you can make it for them, the more pain-free that you can make it for them, the more sales you're going to get in. Great question.

Thank you so much. Well, we got a nice live audience on ChatterSocial, and I see Leah's hand is up. Take the mic, Leah. Hi, Leah.

Pleasure to meet you.

Oh wait, she's got an X. Maybe she's— No, I'm back.

I'm so sorry. I thought I wasn't able to talk, but I am. I just wanted to say thanks. And I'm so happy to know that this exists because I know some people are really good at like what their program is and what their thing is, but they're not good at the selling and the landing pages and all the other parts. So I love this and I think it's amazing. Oh, well, thank you so much.

Yeah, that's, that's what we've found as well, is that It's just, it's a big obstacle for a lot of people to have to create the tech setup, to have to do these presentations. It's a huge challenge to overcome, and the more that we can help remove that from people, the better. You know, we're happy to do that. And the nice thing is with this is that at the end of the day, everybody wins. We have this kind of this ethos within our company that when one of us makes money, everybody makes money. So it's a rising tide brings up all ships. And, uh, it's, uh, it's really nice to be able to do this kind of stuff and to help people out with it. Thanks for the comment.

And I love the fact about the 9 lines. Like, you know, we get all those crazy long emails, but you've made me think, go shorter. So the only thing is, is for people is, uh, build your email list, right? Because that's That's the big thing. Okay. Any other questions on Chatter?

All right. All right, Seth, I'll leave it to you. Awesome. Thank you, Adam. We greatly appreciate you sharing that offer with our audience. Again, no money up front. You only pay if you win. You only pay if they make sales for you. You can't make it any more irresistible than that. Adrian, is our next speaker here yet?

I am, I am so excited that our next speaker is here. Adam, do you know Jill? I don't know if Adam knows Jill, so bring Jill up and I will introduce you. Not in the room yet. Okay, but, um, very excited. Awesome, thank you.

My pleasure.

Outstanding. You made it clear that complexity is not a requirement for big results. Now we're gonna shift to our next driver of growth, which is visibility. Our next speaker is my friend Jill Lublin. Jill is a global authority in publicity and influence. She has helped thousands of entrepreneurs and companies get noticed, stay visible, and become the go-to choice in their market. Her session is titled How to Use Guerrilla Publicity to Grow Your Visibility, Leads, and Profits. Jill's gonna show us ways, practical ways to get in front of more people, turn that attention into opportunity, and build credibility that supports every other part of your business. Jill, thank you. And she's also a multiple-time bestselling author. Jill, thank you so much. Oh, we can't hear you yet. Hang on, folks, we'll get our tech issues sorted in just a second. We cannot hear you yet, right? It's not just me. Oh, you're muted. You gotta unmute. You're muted in StreamYard.

Seth, when I go to— I'm like, there we go. Yay, Jill! I'm a big fan. I can't wait. I'm so excited. I'm Adrian, so thank you.

Oh, you muted yourself again. Adrianne Wynne. There we go.

Are we good?

Yes.

Wonderful. I'm so glad to be here with all of you today and for the opportunity. And Seth, like, wow, visibility, it is so important, as we all know. Yes. And, and I think it's really a key that each one of you create that visibility and connection so that your message gets heard, seen, and viewed, right? And that you get paid for your visibility. So in today's presentation, I'd love to give you opportunities for getting things done in simple, easy ways so that you get guerrilla publicity, which is one of the books I authored— and get it done quickly, efficiently, and effectively. So with that, we'd love to show a video, and I think Mary Beth has the opportunity to be able to do that. You mean Adrian? Yes. Yes. Well, and Mary Beth is actually— should be here running slides for us.

Oh, Mary Beth for you. I apologize. I am so sorry. Yes.

No worries.

Okay, so Mary Beth, you should— I've given you access to be on. Oh, you know what I need to do? Sorry about that. Let me minimize this. Hi, Mary Beth, welcome.

She's working on it, folks. Bear with us for the tech challenges. Gotta love live productions.

Oh, the show always goes on though.

It does indeed. So, oh, I was gonna say, while we wait for the tech stuff, do you— well, you just— you want to tell people a little bit, tiny bit about the books that you've written in your background a little bit? Absolutely.

So, um, part of what I've done is written actually 4 books, which is the latest 2 that I really always help people is Guerrilla Publicity and The Profit of Kindness. And to that end, we support people with media mastery intensives as well as the opportunity for running kindness circles. So I know Mary Beth has that ready to go. Go for it.

Jill Lublin is called the media magnet for a reason. She's a force of nature in the powerful world of publicity. International speaker? Check. Coach, consultant, and trainer? Check. Author of 4 bestselling books? Check. Her books include Guerrilla Publicity: Get Noticed Get Referrals, Networking Magic, and The Profit of Kindness. She's featured in national and international media including ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CBC, Forbes, and Inc., just to name a few. And she's shared the stage with legends like Tony Robbins, Barbara Corcoran, T. Harv Eker, Jack Canfield, Lisa Nichols, Richard Simmons, Mark Victor Hansen, and John Gray. Jill Lublin is quite simply everything publicity, but she doesn't just talk publicity, networking, and referrals. Jill lives and breathes it so entrepreneurs and businesses can gain more visibility and profitability, and she spent over 2 decades leaving a trail of amazing success stories in her wake. And if that isn't inspirational enough, Jill's latest book, The Profit of Kindness, introduces the revolutionary concept of kindness as a competitive advantage. Now that's something worth talking about. Ready to learn about publicity and how you can rock the stage, own the page, burst onto the scene, and hit the screen? Please join me in welcoming the founder of Jill Lublin Publicity, Jill Lublin. Yay, Jill!

Thank you. And this is the part where I, I probably come dancing across your screen, across your stage, and, uh, so excited to be here with all of you. And you know what, I want you to see that not only for, of course, understanding background better, which of course Seth was asking about, but also to understand the power and the impact of publicity. You know, like the credibility it gives you, the visibility it gives you, the opportunity for all of you to really have your escalated trust in the marketplace. And that is such a key these days, is having everybody understand not only what you do and who you are, but really why it makes a difference for them. And then when the media is talking about you. Oh wow, what a difference that makes, and the opportunity to connect your message to them. So today I'm going to support you with figuring out that message formula and actually give that message formula to you and connect you to some very different and wonderful visibility building activities which will enable you to create an expand your reach in the marketplace. Because really what we're talking about is having influence and impact and having your message be seen and heard. And does anybody like M&M's? Give me a maybe thumbs up or, you know, show us that you like M&M's. Because really what I want to do today is give you the 3 M's, the power of what publicity does, and that is to to monetize you, to magnify you, and to multiply you, right? And that is what shows and why people care about your publicity. You know, I love to say it's kind of like the gift that keeps on giving, the gift that keeps on giving, and it gives to your audience so that they can be seen, heard, and helped, right? And so with that, That's what I'm talking about, is connecting your visibility to the opportunity to be seen, heard. And that way, those power of the M&Ms, and you know, I don't care what color they are, what matters is that the media cares most about you. And so with that, I want to know, and maybe, you know, Seth, I don't know if they can, but Can they make comments? And you can take the slide down. Can they make comments that I can see? I think they can, because I would love to see, um, what do you think publicity does for you? Do me a favor, put it in the chat. That would be super great if you can.

And, and Jill, I just want to let you know we are live on Chatter Social. We have a nice group here. So, if you guys have anything you want to share, please put it in the notes or on mic.

Beautiful. Well, that is perfect. And let's just see if they come in, and if not, we'll just keep moving, and, and, and that's no problem.

I don't see any hand raised yet, but I hear— see a lot of we love M&M's. So, it's all about the sugar.

It's all about the sugar. I love that. Okay, good. Here's the thing about publicity. You need to plant your publicity garden. You need to plant your garden now, you know, and, and we'll talk about that for a moment. And of course, even 3 months from now, 6 months from now, 9 months from now, and then a year. I would tell you, if you think about publicity in a year-long format with 3-month increments, you're going to be good. People are going to know you, love you, see you. And the power of that is the power of your publicity ongoingly connected. And one of the things I really, really feel strongly about is your publicity needs to be connected. Your message needs to reflect who you are and be authentic to you, right? And be your personality. We all have our distinct personalities. So if you're a little more shy and introverted, your message can be that way. If you're kind of more gregarious and extroverted, outgoing, perfect. You know, have it reflect who you are. And, and I think that that's really important that you do that, and that in your creating your message, you keep all of that in mind, because the reality of your message is it's your script. And it is the very thing that the media is caring about, that the media is listening to. And so I'm talking— I just want you to clear— to clarify that I'm talking about the script that you are going to be using for the media. And this is the exact script that also you pitch the media with. And also, good news, you can use the message for networking for prospecting, for creating clients, and for being out there. So I think it's a great multi-use opportunity, and it really still starts with the media. Because here's the thing: if you start getting media, I promise you, whether you're a solo entrepreneur, you have a small team, or whatever, when you're in front in the media, that not only the trust factor that I mentioned before but really the elevation of your expertise. And because other people are featuring you and talking about you, you literally move to the front of the line. So that's a really beautiful thing. And let me just tell you, you're on your message, on your message. You know, if you, if you even think about the word message, the first 2 letters in the word message is me. That's you. The last 4 letters in the word message is sage, and that's you because you're a sage and you're the expert. And so in the word message is me sage. Isn't that interesting? I just thought that was fascinating when I took a look at that and a new look at that, like, wow, in the word message is me sage. In the word message is also mess. And so let's avoid that mess. And the specific formula for driving media to you is to answer this question: what's the problem today? What's the problem today? And I think that's really important that you look at What is the problem today? You know, and do it so that the focus is on statistics because what the media cares about is that the statistics matter and that you care about your, the problem today. So, here's the thing I want to say to you that a lot of people do and I don't want you doing this. Do not use I words. So you want to talk in you words when you're talking to the media. And when you're talking to the media, you say you— the problem today is you have, you know, whatever the problem is. So we want to look at focusing in on the problem today. And, you know, I remember when I wrote, um, Guerrilla Publicity, and I talked to media all around the world. Entrepreneur said to me, Entrepreneur Magazine, wouldn't that be great for you? Oh yeah. They said to me, you know, what we care about is what our readers care about. So one of the things I always want you to keep in mind is what does the media care about? What does the media care about and what will help their readers, their viewers, and their listeners? And so with that, when you're creating your message to pitch to the media, remember it's a pitch to the media that you're focusing in on. The problem today is— and then give 3 solutions. Why 3? People can remember in threes. It keeps it very simple and keeps it really easy. So I really want to encourage you to speak in 5-year-old language, right? 5-year-old language. And keep it so that it's really connected to your message. And so with that, I'll just demonstrate mine and show you how this is done. The problem today— this is my message, okay? The problem today is 4 out of 5 businesses will go out of business because you have no clue how to create publicity without spending a fortune. I want to give you 3 guerrilla publicity tips today for how to get your message in the media. The first way to get noticed is to create your ooh-ahh factor. The second way is to create the I've heard of you somewhere syndrome. And the third way is focus on networking magic and show up in your communities at least twice a month for name and face recognition. That, my friends, is my message. And if you noticed, I did it fast. It was simple. It was in 5-year-old language. And I just took 30 years of publicity experience and narrowed it down to 3 simple things that you can do. That's what I want from you as you're looking at how to create that today. And then with that, you want to be, well, you know, frankly, just memorizing this, keeping it in a way that's really simple. And I'm really big on success systems and, and actually things that are followed every 30, 60, and 90 days. And so success systems in publicity In your message piece, I want you to look at your message every 30 days and just make sure that it's consistent, that it's relevant for who you are right now. And then speaking of consistency, one of the keys in media is to be consistent and persistent. Be consistent and persistent, and that will get you great and wonderful opportunities to get your word out there. Okay, so, so that's, that's your main message, and, and the opportunity to really create that connection to who you are and what you do. Now, that's with your general expertise, getting in media. And I will tell you, most of you can do that with media. Like, I have a psychologist who is in the media now because there is so much anxiety and stress in the world today, and that's what she's talking about. She's also a military veteran, so for Veterans Day we were going out with that. She's also a woman, so for International Women's Day we were going out for that. She's also a Black woman, so for Black History Month we're able to talk through that. So do you see how it's relevant everywhere you go? Which leads me to another opportunity, which is the ability to use, well, another strategy that I like to call your ooh-ahh factor. And your ooh-ahh factor is about using everything you've got. How fun is that, right? What does that mean? Use everything you've got. And so what I mean by that is, like I just mentioned, a woman who served in the military, a woman who's a woman, a woman who's a Black woman, all of that is using everything she's got. And if you notice, it opens up 3 more opportunities: Veterans Day, Black History Month, and International Women's Day. To talk about what she does, being a psychologist, but really oriented toward veterans in that case, right? Or women. And put your topic based on using everything you've got. For instance, I have another woman, she is a business consultant and she has a son who's autistic. So we do a story for National Autism Month about how to be a mom and how to connect and help your kids and what to do in these cases. Now that is driving not only a great story for National Autism Month and mothers, but also it's always, and remember you're always, whatever your media, whatever you're in, you are going to drive people to your well, free gift or whatever you want to drive them to. So remember, about media, here's the good news: you're in control of your message. You're in control of your message. So I want to give you another example of using everything you've got, because this is a great strategy that is so helpful and actually gets a lot of people into media in really simple ways that most people don't use. And so you using will give you a wonderful advantage and support you with more opportunities than perhaps you ever knew before. Okay. So with that, I want to show you Ryan. And Ryan is one of my clients. He had heard me speak and he's like, Jill, I really want to work with you. And I said, Ryan, tell me, what do you do? He said he's an instructional designer. I have to admit, I did not know what that was. When I told him that and he told me what an instructional designer is, I said, "No offense, Ryan, but that's boring. We can't really have impact with that story. It's going to be too narrow." I told him to tell me his story. He had told me that he had been downsized from a corporate job, fired. He told me that his wife was pregnant with their third child on the way, and he had just bought a big house. Now again, you know, it's, it's, it's literally focused on the opportunity to tell his personal story. I'm like, Ryan, oh my gosh, all this stuff. You know, what did you do? He said, well, I started my own business online. Literally within 24 hours, he had 8 employees doing instructional design, all virtually. So I said, Ryan, you know what you are? And he said, what, what am I? I said, you are a virtual office warrior. Now, Interestingly enough, we're going to show the slide because if you look at the slide, you know what, if you look at the slide, what happened is Ryan got featured. Check that out, the front page of the San Francisco Business Times. Look at that. When fired, you too can vow never to work in an office again. And imagine Imagine this, you getting an Entrepreneur Magazine. Look at that. He not only got an Entrepreneur, Mac Home Journal, but literally so many magazines, newspapers, radio, literally over a 9-month period. Now check out his success results. He was featured in all major national magazines, radio, newspapers, and his business revenues increased over 40%. Using publicity marketing strategies. In fact, remember the part about using everything you've got? One placement in the Chinese Times got him over $7,000 in consulting income from just that one article. Now, do you think that might be good for you? I think that's really important that you look at the power of media for driving revenue, creating prospects, getting your trust factor. And look at his business, literally went from zero and, you know, to laid off to thriving and creating a powerful and connected publicity and consulting business. Now with that, I want to show you what we've done for the Profit of Kindness. This is my fourth book. And so, let's bring up the slide on that. And what we did, you know, as much as I'd love to tell you we got a ton of publicity, which we did, but really, it was about the power of the message. And the power of the message was that we have a divided States of America. And that's what the press release focused in on. And literally within a week of that, we got 7 major market TV interviews on Fox News Network, over 100 radio podcasts and counting. And if you look at the slide, that literally is one-third of— that is literally one-third of the press we got. And so with that, we've also been featured in Fortune magazine, Forbes magazine twice, Inc. magazine twice. And with that, also all kinds of places and spaces. And you know what, publicity is still going. So with that, we want to connect and create that consistency and persistency. And in fact, my friends, One of the things we did with the Prophet of Kindness is we created kindness circles, and we're inviting you, and I know we're going to post it in the public chat. It is completely free, and literally every month we bring people together from all around the world and have kindness circles. And, uh, and in fact, join us, come join us. It's jilllublin.com/kindnesscircles completely free, and it's the opportunity for you to practice kindness in business consistently every day. Okay, so with that, let's keep looking at how you can keep creating that visibility factor. And I want to talk to you about connecting with the next piece of what will support you. So we've got your message, we've got you using everything you've got, and now I want to give you some hot topics, hot topics, uh, that will support you to create that kind of visibility factor happening consistently. Okay, so take a picture of what's on the screen, and when when you're looking at those topics, maybe you can post in the chat as you're looking at these, like, what of these fit you? What of these might be the opportunity for you to be seen? You know, it could be as simple as you're a consultant or coach and you're going to talk to people about how to create their consulting and coaching business. Perhaps you're in the area of money or helping people make more money, right? And even somebody like Seth, who is brilliant in marketing, is always helping people make more money. He could be talking about that also. You know, as we're closing out the year, moving into a new year, you want to be looking at opportunities for using all aspects of that. That is a super great thing. And so with that, these are great hot topics and wonderful ways that you can get visibility simply, quickly, effectively, and right now. So keep looking because, you know, I, I just want to encourage you to how simple media is. A lot of you kind of think it's out here or for the big, you know, the big boys. It is for you. And in Guerrilla Publicity, we're very connected and keen to get you real publicity, keep you in front of anyone else doing what you do. And I'm going to tell you, there's no strategy more effective, more powerful, and frankly less expensive than publicity, because it gets you a one-to-many many opportunity, and it's earned media. And now you are seen, heard, and paid, and escalating that authority like we mentioned before, and elevating how people see you in the marketplace. So that is super helpful, I'm sure, for all of you. Now with that, I'd like to also give you some visibility building activities. This is opportunities to to, for instance, network in your community just like you're doing right now. I consider this, for many of you, a visibility building activity. So congratulations, you're doing it. Um, and, you know, take a look at the slide, please take a picture of it. But there's two other things on the slide I want to draw your attention to, and we're going to post in the chat some links for you, which is to reach Google Alerts. One of the things I think is really important, please, is put your name on Google Alerts as well as like a key phrase or, you know, maybe two words on what you offer, meaning, uh, you know, business consulting. Or when I wrote The Prophet of Kindness, I put in the word kindness. That's how I discovered that, hey, guess what, November 13th is World Kindness Day. Now I've been on Fox News multiple times for World Kindness Day specifically, but I'm going to tell you— and that's TV, by the way— I never would have known that had I not gone to Google Alerts and put in that word. So that's just really important. Also, I think nationaldaycalendar.com is such a great opportunity to also have that connection to what months of the year are working and appropriate, as well as when you could create a holiday. So for instance, I was working with a professional organizer. There is National Organizing Month, and we actually created her own holiday called Find Your Desk Day. I don't know, is it just me, or do other people maybe have that issue? Well, let me say that nationaldaycalendar.com will give you great ideas for excellent holidays that are appropriate for you, that are perfect for you, and that enable you to get seen and be featured in very particular months. Like I mentioned, the woman with the son who's autistic, being seen for National Autism Month, driving people to her consulting business. You saw Ryan using all kinds of things for who he was. That is what I'm talking about. So we have put in the chat wonderful ways that you can build your visibility. Featured.com is a wonderful resource. They're the new owner of what used to be called HARO. Many of you might have heard of that, Help a Reporter Out. So these are fabulous, new, and great and ongoing ways, because remember, it's about consistency and persistency. That's what we always want with you, consistency and persistency. And here's the other really important things: be concise and precise. What do I mean by that? In all of your language, in all of what you say, be concise and precise. What's important is that you speak, remember, in 5-year-old language. You make your, what you offer people, very simple. That's why they call them sound bites, bites of sound, right? So you heard me speak sound bites when I told you my message. About using everything you've got. That's a sound bite. Create your ooh-ahh factor. That's a sound bite. We want to be specific and connected with your sound bites ongoingly and make your sound bites simple and easy to digest. So let me just say, I definitely want to open it up for Q&A in just a bit. So get your questions ready, feel free to post in the comments. We and I would love to help you while I'm live with you and literally answer your PR questions. So please feel free to comment and connect, and we would love to hear from you, just saying. And so in the meanwhile, a couple different things I want to share. Something that Entrepreneur said to us when we wrote Guerrilla Publicity. So first of all, let me just say, imagine you being in Entrepreneur Magazine. Yes, yes, that would be amazing. Let me just say, everything matters and everything counts in publicity. And I was brought to Mark Victor Hansen— you've probably heard of him, Chicken Soup for the Soul fame— and they hired me, flew me out to Los Angeles for, in, in this case, a VIP day. And I was very focused with them on a strategic plan for a book that was not coming out for a year. Now I want you to hear this because one of the things, uh, is focusing in on the opportunity to create that visibility factor and be heard and seen way And so with that, he said, you are here because we know how important publicity is. And in fact, what we've done is we understand that we must be planning ahead. So now I want you to look at Entrepreneur Magazine and, and show you that for the June issue of Entrepreneur Magazine, okay, when I interviewed her for my book Gorilla Publicity, please note that for the June issue of that magazine, production is in March. For the June issue, the writer's deadline is January 15th. Now, let's, let's be honest. Now you're looking at ahead here, you know, 6 months, 9 months. So that was— remember in the beginning of the presentation I talked about planting your publicity garden. And so with that, we want to make sure that your publicity garden is consistently planted and that you are blooming your flowers, your garden, and also that you understand that no matter what you're launching, whether it's products or services, whether you're launching your career or relaunching or, shall we say, tapping into a theme that's going on right now, the media will make a huge difference for you, help your message matter, and get you in people's minds right now and stay there. So they choose you. And here's the thing about the media. No matter what the media asks you, you're gonna say, Wait for it, wait for it. Yes, you're gonna just say yes always to the media, and that's really important. So now you've got me in your front pocket, and you are going to be a big yes to the media. And you know, you're gonna see great results happening and your marketing multiplied because of your big yes. Yes and the opportunity. And just know that, uh, what I've noticed in working with thousands of people is that confidence grows. You grow by consistently saying yes. And so with that, Seth has asked me to let you know how you can continue the opportunity of working with me. And like I said before, I'm big on systems, right? You gotta have systems. And so what I created is a Media Mastery Intensive. And, and get this, can you picture this? The opportunity to be in front of media and actually pitch your wonderful product and service, right? And, and so with that, we are putting the connection with the Media Mastery Intensive right with you in short short, simple days. You're on Zoom with me, and, uh, with that, you're gonna have the opportunity to get your message done, to practice and be in small groups. It's highly interactive, it's, it's simple, and I'm going to keep publicity simple for you. And so we're gonna roll up our sleeves in this program and get it done and have you pitch to media. Like, how exciting is that? Plus, I'll be answering questions all throughout the event and anything you need done. We'll be practicing sound bites. And other really great thing, we'll have a joint venture circle where you'll be creating partnerships and connections right there at the event. Again, all on Zoom, all very short days, and it's $197. Now, Seth and I have been colleagues for a long time, I'm going to do another very special thing for you. I have a publicity crash course. You're going to receive that also. It's a bonus. It's live with me. Everything's live with me. And we're going to do 3 actual, actual wonderful pieces that you need for your publicity success. And they involve the message, and 2 other things that we're gonna again roll up sleeves, get them done. Like, imagine this, you don't have to think about it. I'm gonna do the work for you and with you, and we're gonna get your publicity done right there. So that's a super great thing. Plus you're gonna have 4 templates that you can use for any project anywhere anytime. And so that event is $197. The both of them together to really create the publicity you need, get it, have it, and it is done, which is wonderful, is only $97. It's a wonderful no-brainer. We're going to post it in the chat, how you can register. If the date doesn't work for you, just let us know at support@joelublin.com and we'll put you into the next event that does work. And the QR codes on the screen. You go to jilllublin.com/pbbundle. Okay, so a wonderful opportunity for you to get your publicity done at a very affordable price. Really no-brainer, and very excited to support you with that. All right, and then what I'd love to do now is answer questions, answer questions from you, and see how I can help you.

Awesome, thank you so much, Jill. That offer of $97 for all that is ridiculous. I didn't know you were— I didn't— I knew your offer was good, I didn't know you made it even better. So thank you, um, we'll be taking you up on that for sure. That is awesome. Um, a couple questions I see on the live stream. Um, how does publicity come into play now with all the helping us show up in AI search? Oh, very great question.

So here's the good news, and I think it's good news, and that is— and I've read article after article, Seth, about this, in fact— that AI is actually searching your publicity. Those with more publicity are being more featured, getting more attention. They're drawing AI, you know, like putting you in front because you've got publicity. And I have read some things, I didn't even understand the article because it was very technical. But bottom line, bottom line is the more publicity you have, you know, it's kind of like the searches, right? They will find you. So it's great. But I will tell you one thing, if I may, and that is that yes, AI is great. And what I would support you with is that you use AI as a jump-off point to write articles, even for your own bios, because I've discovered honestly that it's not always accurate. It has to be your voice, right? And that's important. And so you want to connect to the right, you know, you want to let's just say you want it as a jumping-off point. I think that that's a key, but absolutely it's important, and I like to use it as an ease, especially for article writing, which then you can place and get more publicity. That's always good. Awesome.

Oh, I got another comment. I am not African American or a woman. Can you still help me get publicity? Absolutely.

Well, you know what, Ryan is an African American or a woman, or a woman. But, um, you know, what I'm always listening for is what else is in your, your background, who you are personally, um, perhaps something in your story. You know, uh, like I have a, a woman who's a former nurse. She just somehow always forgot to tell people she was a nurse, you know. So we always like put that forward. But you know, what I've discovered is that everybody has something in their story that's interesting, that somehow we could connect. And you know, if not, then we go like what I might say, more the direct route that's related more to what you actually do. Listen, I've had CPAs, and we focus in on great money tips, you know, what to do to save more. I've had attorneys or my favorite are insurance brokers so that we can work through the maze of insurance. You know, we can do all kinds of regular stories, but the most important part is, does the regular story support what you want to promote?

Awesome. How do you feel about these services where you pay and they say they syndicate your press release all over the internet and magically your phone's going to start ringing off the hook?

Well, I do, I do like press release distribution services, which is what you're referring to. I do like them. I, you know, I don't guarantee it will ring off the hook, but what I do like— and make sure that they will give you the, the logos to use, and then you take those logos and you put them on your website, your front page, your social media, and that is a beautiful thing. And while we're on social media, I want to say one thing: social media is not publicity, okay? Please do not, do not confuse the two. Publicity is going to get you seen, heard. I, you know, I believe in social media. I think you can use LinkedIn Live, Instagram Live, TikTok, and all kinds of other things to create visibility. But please know it is it is not your publicity. You know, that's important, right?

That's not the same as saying you getting interviewed on NBC.

Exactly. And, and it's, it's not this— it's not all the, uh, same thing. And it's— I, I tend to say it's a one-hit wonder. You know, I hope and I pray somebody's going to see it. And let me say you control your message in publicity and you definitely don't in the area of social media. So I think that that's a key that all of you know, right? Um, but however, use your message that we told you about today and that we're going to do in our Media Mastery Intensives and the publicity course that I gave you. We're going to actually get it done and do it right there and practice it. Use that message in social media so that you're consistent.

That's a great thing. Awesome. Adrian, any questions on chatter?

Well, first of all, I need to cool off. You were on fire, as the 5-year-old in me wants to say. Oh, Jill, I have been a fan of yours for so long, and it is just— I just loved everything that you said. We do have anyone here? Maria, Laura, Leah, would you like to take the mic? Ask any questions. We're live on Chatter Social. I just love this. I'll jump in. Okay, great, great.

Introduce yourself too. Did I just interrupt with someone?

I'll— no, Leah will go next.

You go, Maria. Thank you, Leah. Um, hi, so, um, I just popped in and I like what you're saying. Um, you know, I'm, I'm in real estate and of course publicity, yes, absolutely, is, is different than social media. I just— what would you say to a realtor, or I own my company, so what would you say to a business owner who owns a real estate company with respect to promoting their, their, the company, which is an independent brokerage? So what would you say to a person like me who would want to have some publicity, you know, in the positive light, of course, with, with all the charity work that we do and, and all of the community activities we do. What would you say to, to someone like me?

So first of all, I have worked a lot with real estate agents and brokers and people in mortgage business. And because here's good news for you, there are real estate editors across the country, there are small business editors, there is lifestyle, although I think you're best in real estate. As well as maybe small business, right? And so with that, let me just— I think what's key is find the story that's going to support people the most. So what is that usually? You know, how to find your first home, right? How to connect at supporting with connecting to people. What do they want? Okay, they want to invest in how homes— they want real estate that works. Some may be interested in real estate connections, right? And you want to give people the opportunity, the opportunity to get connected to you. You want to be the voice and the main consultant for why people should care.

That is for sure. I do. Thank you.

Okay, so, so that's important. Okay, that's important.

Did Leah want to go next?

Yeah, and by the way, Maria, just take a second and introduce yourself to Jill because all she knows is you have a name, Maria, and you're owner of a real estate company. Let's give her a little more.

Okay, well, so, um, single mom for a lot of years now, and I started my company, uh, 15 years ago. Um, I did get my real estate license while I was teaching high school mathematics curriculum to 7th and 8th graders, which I love. So there's a big teacher in me. I do bring that into my real estate business. I do a lot of charity. I have a lot of giving back to do, uh, due to having a, you know, one of those difficult divorces, right? You could write a book about, I'm sure. And, um, yeah, lots of building, lots of growing. And I bring all of those experiences, uh, of divorce and foreclosure and single mom and new business owner— I bring all that into my business and how I serve people. So, um I always want to come from a spirit of serving because I am a servant, um, in this God— you know, you know what I'm talking about, you know, the God thing. Um, yeah, I love God. Um, matter of fact, today's the Immaculate Conception, by the way. I'm getting my tree today, can't wait. So yeah, so, so that's who, who I am. Um, there's more to me, but not to take a lot of time, I'll, I'll end it there.

Well, I want to start there with something else. That I heard a few things that you could be using. Christian, which I'm kind of assuming. Christian media is fabulous. And like, for instance, I have a client who's been in my Media Mastery. We're using Christian media, Christian women's media, and women's media, all three. So guess what? You can do the same. Number 2, I heard you want to serve and teach. Great, because in media, uh, it's all about giving and giving great value and benefit and dropping expertise and what I like to call golden nuggets on people. So you can be doing that and wonderfully promoting your real estate business and promoting all parts of everything you do. So, uh, that is beautiful. And definitely put in there the former a teacher, that should be in your bio. We'll be working on your bio in one of the courses, just FYI, but definitely you want that in your bio so that people know that and get that trust factor going.

Awesome. Wow. Uh, Leah, I think you were next.

Yeah, Jill, it's great to have you here. Um, my name is Leah Rosenberry. I'm head of community here on Chatter. I just wanted to say I appreciated the distinction you made between media and social media, because they're completely different things, of course. And social media is easy. You could just put your stuff out there and you think you're doing good and stuff like that. But this is a whole different thing. So thank you for kind of delineating that for us. You are welcome.

And I honestly, if I had to jump up and down about something, that would be it, because people go, oh, I'm doing my publicity. No, you aren't. You are— publicity is very specific. Please don't mistake, and it is a big mistake, to think that your social media will, um, uh, be the solution. Publicity is a great solution, free, and it's not a one-hit wonder. And it is, like I said before, the gift that keeps on giving. Because here's the thing about publicity, and I want to say this, that in the most positive way. It gives you a bragability factor that is beyond anything that you can have, and you can use it for the whole rest of your life. So if I may, I'm just going to tell another story. In my Media Mastery Intensive, I remember looking across the screen at a woman, and I said, you know, we were talking about using everything you've got. We were going deep on that. And she— I said, may I ask what ethnicity you are? She said, I'm Filipino. I said, great, I know you came in here— by the way, she came in there to build her digital marketing business, right? And she knew publicity would drive prospects and clients. And I said, I know you came in here to grow your business. Would you be open to using everything you've got? And let's go out with hashtag Stop Asian Hate. She said, of course, I'll do what it takes to grow my business and get more publicity. And guess what? That going out with that story generated literally 3— 90 days of powerful publicity, increased her web stats by 45%, got her in one case of an actual media source, got her 12 clients like boom, like that, for her digital marketing agency. And she also She was 28 at the time, got featured in the top 30 under 30 Filipino businesses, top 30 under 30 Filipino businesses, which by the way, she's 32 now and she can still use this forever in her life when she's 30 and 40 and 50. Because what that was and is, is an honor and a privilege, and media is an honor and a privilege. That, that really says who you are and the power of who you are, and you absolutely must keep using it. And she had a dream. One of her dreams was to speak on a stage with Les Brown, who's a wonderful motivational speaker. And guess what? She got so much publicity following my systems and integrating it and implementing it that guess who, when she sent her publicity to him, said She must be good. She got to speak on a stage with Les Brown, and her digital marketing agency has taken off and is very powerfully in business now, as she is, all using the power of publicity. So super excited about that. And that was a woman, by the way, who made her living with social media, using publicity to actually grow her business, seeing the power of that.

Oh, I love that. Sheila, did you want to unmike and share? I see that Sheila wrote, great presentation, signed up for the next circle. Oh, here, Sheila, take the mic. That was a great presentation. I absolutely loved everything that you said, especially about the media versus the social media.

I also am a firm believer that whenever we share our stories and they make that impact, you never know who's gonna read it. You may change a life, or that may just kind of continue and generate more media for you. And I think I— after hearing yours, I signed up for your circle, and I'm looking at the dates for the next two classes that you did because I just put that as a priority on my 2020 Basics.

So thank you. That's Sheila Slick with pod2book.ai. It's so funny, you guys gotta remember to introduce yourself. You got a one-time opportunity to talk to Jill. So awesome, awesome. I'm not sure if we lost Jill along the way, um, so—

or if her screen just got out. Jill, are you— screen just got out. You lost your camera.

Okay, well, let's just add her to the stage just so she has it. Oh, there she is again. Jill, I don't know if you heard what Sheila said to you. I think you had popped out. Did you get a chance to hear? Because she had signed up.

Yes, I actually did, and thank you. I did hear that, and then, you know, God popped me out somehow, but all good, and I'm back, and thank Thank you for those lovely comments. I appreciate that. And let me just do one more time.

Anyone else on chat or social that you would like to say anything? If you would like, just unmute. If not, we understand. Wow, fire! That was amazing. You know, right?

Thank you. And I just want to thank each one of you, of course, and appreciate you, Seth, for putting this on and everyone who's listening here. I, I want to say something to all of you, and that is that your message matters.

Let's get it out there. Awesome. All right, thank you so much. What a dream come true.

This is a dream come true for me. Thank you, Jill. I'm going to tuck you away. And thank you, and thank you to Mary Beth. You guys work great together. You know what, we're going to do something Oh wait, hold on for one second. What I need to do, unfortunately— hold on, Max— is that LinkedIn only allows for a 4-hour live stream. I mean, we really got to talk to LinkedIn about changing that. So I'm going to end the stream. Just stay right there. Don't move, Marketing Max. Don't move. We're going to end it and I'm going to reconnect it.

Just give me 2 seconds. Okay, we're ending LinkedIn and starting a new one on LinkedIn.