Creating An Online Programme With David Miles

If you've ever dreamt about earning passive income, that is money that isn't directly connected to selling your time, then this episode is going to be one that you don't want to miss. Now, if you've ever thought about taking what you deliver for your clients and turning it into an online program, a course or a membership site, then that's what we're talking about today. I'm excited to have David Marles from the PPC Machine, who is actually our second repeat guest and we're talking all about how he's taken his PPC services, turn them into an online membership program. We'll talk about why he decided to do this, why he picked a membership program over a different model, and some of the tech and things that he's had to get in place in order to make sure that he can run the program and talk about how he launched and how successful he's been and some of the pitfalls and some of the things that he would do differently if he was starting again. So as I say, if you've ever thought about taking what you teach and, and turning it into an online program, then this episode is one that you won't want to miss. So let's get on with the show.

Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob Da Costa.

So welcome to today's episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast. I'm really excited to have back with me, in fact David Miles from the PPC machine. David is a long standing client of mine and he runs, as I said, the PPC Machine, an agency that helps mortgage brokers generate high quality leads from their website using PPC and website optimization. Now, David was actually one of my first guests on the podcast in episode six six where we talked about niching and David shared the benefits he's seen since niching into the mortgage broker sector. So welcome David. And welcome back David. And is there anything else you wanted to add to my introduction?

No, I think you, you obviously know me quite well, Rob. You summed it up, summed it all up quite nicely. So yeah, good to be back.

Excellent. Well, it's what it's good to have you back. Now you've been running your agency for a number of years in its current form and today we are talking about taking kind of like the bricks and mortar work that we do and moving it into some kind of online program. So I was really interested to hear from you what the catalyst was for you to begin exploring, creating some kind of Online program or online community for your audience?

Yeah, well, to be honest, it's one of those things I talked about, thought about doing for years and lots of people have said to me over the years, oh, you should take your training and you know, move it online because then it's more scalable, you can reach more people and all that kind of thing. And I suppose as with a lot of people, the, the sort of catalyst for doing something that you've talked about for a long while was when the pandemic hit last year, because obviously, well, that did two things. Firstly, in that initial four or six weeks when the business world just kind of stopped, you know, regardless of what kind of business you're in, everyone seems to stop and no one wanted to commit to anything and the world ground to a halt. So that obviously gave people like me a lot more time to think about, okay, well, now I've got the time to do X, Y and Z that I've talked about for years. And of course the other thing was I physically couldn't deliver one to one training to people anymore. Which, you know, that wasn't solely what the business was about, it was, it was a significant part of it. So those things together really gave me the opportunity and the kick up the bum to actually get on and start things thinking, right, how can I take what I've been doing in training rooms and one to one with people over the years and turn that into an online offering?

Yeah, I guess it's sort of panacea that many people see with an online program in that they are limited by their time when they're doing what you and I do, which is typically one to one work with clients, whether that be training or coaching or actually doing the work for them as a consultant, like you do when you're running a PPC campaign for a client. And if we take it online, then there's this promise of kind of making money in your sleep and being much more scalable. And I guess you and I both know that that promise is a bit of a misnomer really. So I think the first thing I would say to people, to our listeners, is that if you've ever dreamt about creating an online program, then absolutely go for it, but realize that, you know, it's a different kind of effort and work that you need to put in to get the revenue as opposed to the one to one work. So now you settled on a membership model in the end. So I'm interested to know why that was and what other models you explored. Because I Guess if someone is thinking about taking their consultative work that they do and creating an online program, then they will be thinking about these different models. So how did you explore and conclude that a membership model was the right thing for you?

Yeah, so obviously there's two ways you can, you can sell online training or online courses. Yet there's the, there's for selling it as a one off thing, here's my course, give me a thousand pounds, have my course. Or there's the membership model which is what I went for. But as, as you know Rob, obviously initially I went down the more traditional sell it as a, as a standalone course. And the, the reason, there are a few reasons I transitioned to the membership model really firstly the biggest reason I think is it. But the membership model allows me to offer more support and ongoing help to the people who buy the, who buy the course or buy, well, what is now a program that includes for courses as one of its elements. And the reason why I think that's so important is one thing I, I learned very early on when I was doing face to face training and you know, I was running public training courses where on things like Google Ads and social media and stuff and we'd have 10 to 20 delegates on each course and the busiest point in the day for me as the trainer on a full day course was always the lunch break. Because the lunch break was when the people who had a question that perhaps they were too shy to ask in front of everyone else or you know, they'd reflected on something while they were having their sandwich and thought actually I didn't understand that bit. That would be when they'd all come over and want to talk to the trainer. So you know, if anyone listening to this has ever run public training, you'll know as well as I do you don't really get to eat lunch. That's your, that's your full on part of the day, you can relax when you get back into the training room. And I thought, well that's, that's something that the online courses, you know, that bit doesn't exist. The lunch break doesn't happen. And so what I didn't want was people to buy a course and then never do it or never finish it because, you know, I suppose, you know, you could argue either way I've got their money, so why do I care? Well actually because my, my reason for doing this is I want to actually have people learn new skills and be able to do this stuff themselves. And so I actually want people to finish. But yes, I want the money, but I want them to finish the course as well. And so that's why if I turn it into a membership, then I can offer that ongoing support and hand holding and coaching to help them through the courses. That was one reason for it. And the other reason was I felt if I sell it as a standalone course, it's kind of set in stone that this is what you get. Whereas I know that the nature of what I train on, you have a digital marketing world is always changing and evolving and new things are coming along. So I wanted to be able to say, well, this is, this is the training you get as a, you know, as a bare minimum. But I'll be adding new stuff as time goes on, as new things happen, as I learn new things, as new things come out, whatever. And of course that only works if people are on a membership model because otherwise you're just obviously giving people new content for free all the time.

Yeah.

So yeah, there are two main reasons.

Really and just share with the listeners the sort of structure of your overall program. So when someone signs up, what do they get? What are the various component parts?

Yeah, so it's aimed at mortgage brokers and financial advisors who want to generate more inquiries, more leads from their own websites, basically. So when someone first joins the program, they get what I call a road mapping call with me, where it's a half hour call to work out where they're at at the moment. Because that's the other thing people join the program. Some have done no online marketing, some have done a fair bit. And that's why again, with a membership you can flex it around what fits each individual. So I help them work out where they're at at the moment, what their priority should be. And then they've got access to a whole library of online courses covering all the different things. And the road mapping call allows me to recommend to them, you should start with this course or that course. Because I don't expect people to work through from course number one to course number 20 or whatever necessarily in that order. You know, it might be that I talk to one person and it's clear that they don't have a good value proposition on their website. So I would say to them, like, go and do the course on value propositions or maybe, you know, they've got a great website but they're trying to run some Google Ads. So I'll say, right, go and start with this course on Google Ads so I can point people in a different direction. So they can, they've got that whole Library of courses. But the, the most important thing they get as part of the program is once a fortnight they get a group coaching call online with me and the other brokers. And the idea of that is each time of our long call and each time I have a sort of starter topic that I talk about for 20, 25 minutes, a bit of live training. So like the one we did a week or so ago, I was talking all about how to use email marketing. A couple of weeks before that we were talking about how to, how to write better copy for your website. And then the second half of the call is people asking questions either on what I've just spoken about or whatever they're working on at that moment. So you know, we had someone on the call last time who'd been setting up some Google Ads campaigns, wasn't getting as much traffic from it as they thought they should do. And I sort of looked at it live on air with them and said, right, if you change this and this and this. So obviously all the others are learning from that as well. And that's what I think sets it apart from just paying a thousand pounds for an online course. And there's a community as well, online community who can ask questions, get support and answers from me and other brokers and everything.

Yeah, so some good structure and obviously that's a similar structure to my coaching program, the self running agency. I think people buy courses and people buy books with great intention of reading them or completing the course and then life gets in the way and they never do it. And there's this whole group of kind of course collectors that probably you and I have both been guilty of and I know lots of listeners will relate to that. And so whatever we can do to encourage people to actually, you know, follow the content and implement the content and participate in the forums and the group calls and so on the better because at the end of the day this is about, you know, like you say, people making a difference in their business through the content you, that you offer.

Exactly. The way I view it is. Sorry, the way I view it is if, if, if you've got those fortnightly coaching calls, if all you do, as you know, the bare minimum is come to those, at least it means once a fortnight you're spending an hour working on your business and working on your marketing. But you know, some. So however much life gets in the way, you've got that kind of rock in my diary and often you only have to do one, one thing. We did a coaching call a couple of months ago about the importance of social proof and online reviews. And one of the guys on the call took one idea that I'd given, actually went away and implemented it and got an extra 80 odd reviews on his Google reviews within 24 hours. Whereas if he hadn't come to that call, he could have done that at any time. And the idea I gave wasn't rocket science, but if he hadn't come to that call, he'd never got around to doing that.

Yeah, that's fantastic. And of course, you know, we do this like you said, we want to make money, but we do it because we want to make a difference and we know that we can help people. You know, for me, the catalyst of creating my course, the self running agency implementation group, was because I was having so many of the same conversations over and over again with my private coaching clients that I thought is there a way we can expedite this and we can actually save some time on our private calls by me saying well actually go watch module three, lesson four because that you can dig into that in your own time at your own pace. There's lots of associated downloads. So that was my, my catalyst and I call my group an implementation group because it is all about doing, it's not just about watching. In fact, I don't want people to watch these programs from A to Z because a lot of people do watch courses from A to Z. They have great intentions of implementing what they've learned and then they don't implement it. So I'm much more like watch a 10 minute lesson, go, stop, go and implement it and then move on to the next thing. So tell me, so you've launched this program.

Sorry, go on. That's not unique to the online world either. I mean I, going back to the days when I, when I ran a traditional training company, we found the same thing there that people would come on a course and they would leave with all good intentions, but they would, they would have what we call FTI failure to implement. And one of the things I actually did there to try to address that was I remember doing it with a Google Ads course and saying right, you come on, if you've come on my full day Google Ads training course, if you want you can, you can upgrade and come back for a half day implementation workshop, you know, a few days later, a week and that people found that really useful because they turned up to our offices with their laptop and we spent half an hour putting into practice what they'd learned. And it did two things. It meant A, they'd got that time blocked out to do it. But also, crucially, I and the other trainers were on hand, so if they got stuck or needed reminding something, you could, you could do it. And that's kind of what. What I'm trying to recreate here, really, in the online world.

Yeah, that's great. I think, you know, anything we can do to encourage people to take action, not just learn, is really good. So now I think you've been running this program for about, what, six months now. So tell us how it's going.

Yeah, so we launched beginning of November, and yeah, I'm. It's going really well. The numbers of, the numbers of members are growing, are growing month by month. We've not as yet done huge amounts of marketing around it. I'm just starting to have a bit more of a kind of push to get. To get more people on board. But primarily the people who've joined so far have been people who were, you know, already aware of me and what I do were already on my mailing list, you know, perhaps come some of my free Facebook lives and stuff like that. And yeah, they're, you know, the people who said, yes, we, you know, we'd like, we'd like more of this, basically. So they're the ones who've joined.

Right. And what would you say, like, reflecting back on the last six months, what would you say the hardest part of putting this kind of program together, Launching it and then marketing it is.

Funny enough, I don't think creating the content is the hardest part, even though that's probably what most people. Yeah, if there are people listening to this, thinking of doing this, I bet the thing that's putting them off is thinking, oh, my God, I've got to create a whole load of online courses. I can't possibly do that. I don't have the skills, I don't have the time, I don't have the whatever. I don't think that is the hardest part. And again, another beauty of the membership is you don't have to launch with everything completely finished if you've got your core offering of courses there. And again, if it's a membership like mine where it's not all about the courses, it's more about the fortnightly coaching, then you don't need to have this huge finished product before you launch. So I, I think that's one thing I've learned is the thing I thought would be the biggest challenge or the biggest hurdle actually wasn't, I would say the, the. The hardest thing is probably, you know, is getting people to, to engage, getting them sort of join in the community and come to the things because I know that those who do turn up to the, to the coaching love it and get great value from it. But as with always, there's always some who you know, aren't able to make it or don't turn up. And you know that that's the hardest thing is, is you can take a horse to water, can't you?

But yeah, I, I would completely, and.

I know I completely. Owners, yeah, they have, they have similar problems.

So yeah, I completely agree. I mean I always makes me laugh that the hardest thing the way I run my program is like people have to submit their questions in advance of our. And it's sometimes like getting blood out. So I always get the questions and they always come in at the last minute but sometimes they're literally coming in at 9 o' clock when the calls at 10, even though I stop sort of reminding everybody the week before. I think a really good bit of advice that you just shared there is that you don't need to have everything ready. In fact, if you're launching a program yourself, you need to create a minimum viable offer which is something that you can start selling and is the bare bones of your program. Because the input you get from your members is really going to help you shape what the future of it is and what new content you need to create. So like you said, a lot of people probably thinking I've got to create this massive compendium of A to Z of all this content and it's going to take me months and months and months and therefore they never get going. But the truth of it is you don't need to have everything ready. And actually, you know, my program isn't a membership program, it's a sort of like a nine month program and I still am adding content and I've been running my program for a year and a half now and I still adding new content as I feel it's relevant. I think another piece of advice I would give is that no one is going to judge how good your program is by the quantity of content. You don't need content about everything, you just need to have good quality content. Talk to us a little bit about the tech because I think the other thing that puts a lot of people off is all of the component parts that they need to put in place to make this work. So tell us a little bit about the tech that you're using and what you explored.

You're right. I think that can be because there's so many different choices of tech. But I think part of the problem can be it's not even getting your head around how to use it. It's that potential overwhelm of there's just too much, too much choice. The system that I'm using is probably not the most straightforward, to be honest, because I'm one of those people who likes to kind of take the best bit of software for this job and combine it with the best bit of software for this job. And I liken it to, you know, back, back in the days when, when before mp3s and people listen to music on proper, proper hi Fi's and whatever. There were some people who would like to go out and just buy the Amstrad all in one system because it was simple and you plugged it in and it worked. And then there were others like me who would like to go out and buy, you know, the Marantz CD player and the name amp and all the different, and then connect them all together. And I'm similar with software so my setup is perhaps not the most simple, but I. But it works for me. So I use a system called Thrive Apprentice which is part of the Thrive suite of products that my whole website is built on. So Thrive Apprentice is their module for creating online courses. All my courses are created on that. I use Vimeo for my video hosting. So if I want to create a course, basically I create a PowerPoint slide deck to go with it like you would for know for a real world training course. And I go through that. I'm screen recording it. I use a bit of software called Screencast O Matic for doing the screen recording which is really great. It's. It's a low costing. It cost me, I don't know, something like £70 a year I think, if I had to guess. But it, it's not a significant amount of money. And that does all the screen recording, it's got a video editor built into it afterwards. So afterwards you can take the recording you've done, you can top and tail it, you can edit out the ums and the R's. If you've screwed up a bit of it, you can, you know, re record a narration over the bit that you've messed up. It's dead easy to use. It's not got tons of video editing features, but that's nice because then it's not confusing. But it's got all the ones you need for doing a course creation. I then upload that to Vimeo and then I can create my lesson in Thrive Apprentice and say, you know, pull this video in, I can put the lesson notes in there. So that's what I use for creating that kind of online content. My group coaching calls, no fancy tech involved there. It's, it's a paid Zoom account, you know, and I, I set it up as a Zoom meeting. I send the link out and the agenda to people beforehand and may join the call. And what I do with all of those coaching calls is because they themselves are, you know, are an ever growing library of useful stuff. So I record them all via Zoom's record function and I just turn those into a video that's available to the members afterwards. And for my community I use a platform called Mighty Networks which is kind of like, it's basically where you can create your own private version of Facebook, really. And yeah, so I use that to host the, to host the community. So that's sort of how I did with all different components and bits. Oh, and the other, the other main component is to actually sell the membership and take people's monthly payments. I use Strive Cart and my plugin for WordPress that runs the member database is called, is called wishlist member. That's what it's called. So I'm using different bits of everything. I know, you know the other extreme. Well, I know you use Kartra, don't you? Which is basically it has all those components all in one package. So you know, if, if people like fiddling with the tech look, you know, then you can do what I've done. If you just want an off the shelf thing, something like Kartra or. I've heard people speak highly of member mouse as another thing that kind of does, does the whole lot. But one of the, one of the things I did, you know, early on was, did quite a bit of reading around different membership systems and you know, and then I think that's, it's important to get that right because obviously migrating from one membership system to another is quite a pain. So I would say definitely get, get that right. But with the other stuff, you know, if I suddenly decided I didn't like Vimeo anymore or I wanted to put my course in a different thing, it wouldn't be that difficult to move the videos from one platform to another or something like that, but moving all your members off one checkout system and one member system to another, that's a bit more of a headache. So put the time and effort into getting that right.

Yeah, good advice. And I will put links in the show notes to all of the tools that David just mentioned in case you want to look at them. And as David said, you know, I think we both went through a fairly thorough assessment. In fact, prior to me moving to Kartra, I used to host some individual training courses on Teachable, which is a specific course platform. So it's a really good platform for taking payments and delivering the content. But it didn't do enough from a, from a membership perspective, I guess. So I decided to move to Kartra and as David said, Kartra is an all in one platform. So I host my videos there, I host my, my course programs there, I all take all the payments there. I, all my email marketing's hosted in one platform. The advantage of that is it integrates really well and it's more straightforward. The disadvantage is it's not as flexible. So the way what David sort of talked about was like picking best of breed tools and then connecting together. And what I do is making the connection piece really easy but perhaps compromising in some aspects. Although things like Karter are getting better all the time. And as you said, there's other tools like membership mouse and Kajabi is another well known, well known tool. So what advice would you give, give to somebody else if they were thinking about, they're listening to this and they're listening because they thought about how can I stop selling one to one work? How can I take what I know and put it online? What advice would you give them?

I think the two things I would say, one you've touched on already is, is go with the minimum viable product. So don't, don't feel you've got to spend, you know, six months or a year creating something huge before you launch. Because the, the big risk if you do that is you might create something that nobody wants and then you've, you've wasted a year of your life. So decide what your minimum viable product is for launch and, and commit to launching when you have that level of, of product, that level of membership available. The, the second thing I would say is really important is create a waiting list. And this is something that I, that I did when I launched mine. If I were going back in time, I would maybe spend longer launching the waiting list. But I'm impatient so I, so I didn't. And, but the beauty of having a waiting list, so what I'm talking about here is you start telling people, you know, people on your existing mailing list, you know, existing clients, contacts, prospects, whatever your database of, of contacts is you start telling Them. This is what I'm, this is what I'm working on. This is coming. Are you interested in it? Do you want to join the waiting list? And I, I did that and it, it's totally no obligation, you know, I said to people on a number of occasions, I'm creating this program. This is the outline of what it's going to look like, what the components of it will be. If you're interested in being one of the first to know when it launches, you know, and getting in at a special founder members price and all that kind of thing, then just click here and that added them a waiting list. And that meant that at the time when I actually launched, I forget how many I had on the waiting list, but it, it wasn't a vast number. It was like, I don't know, 50 to 100 people maybe. It meant I had that core of people who basically already committed they were going to do it. They knew roughly what's going to be in the program, they knew what it was going to cost them. And so I sent the thing out saying, right, it's launching on this date. You know, that was like a week before beforehand. So you're building up that anticipation. And when I sort of actually opened the doors as it were, and said, right, this is it, I, you know, that got me my first 10 sign ups within the first hour. And you know that that is a, I mean, you know, it's good from the commercial point of view, but it gets some money coming in for the membership straight away. But more importantly than that, it immediately validates that you've, you've done something good because you've told people what it is you're going to be selling. Okay, They've not actually parted with money yet, but they've said, we're on the way to this, we will do as soon as you launch it. And then a decent percentage of those actually do do it when the time comes, you think, right, yes, I have got something here which is, which is, which is, right, I've got a viable product. And that gives you the impetus to then say right now we're into phase two, how do I, how do I grow the membership, how do I get more people into it, you know, and whatever. But I think that's really important. What you don't want is a membership where you've got two members, particularly if you're doing things like group coaching calls or whatever because, you know, it doesn't, doesn't have much energy, does it? If actually it's only, it's you and two people.

Yeah. And really good advice that I think the thing I would say to anybody that's thinking about doing this is do your research and do your validation. And the only way you really validate a program is by someone buying it. Because someone might tell you that they're interested, but telling you they're interested in parting with their cash are two different things. So as part of your research and your validation, you need to pre sell your program using a minimum viable offer. And at that stage you probably don't have any content created, you've just mapped out what it, what it will look like. And I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a guide that I've created on validation and research to help people go through those steps. Because, you know, I've launched at least seven programs in the past without doing this and they've all been failure to one degree or another. So it was only after literally seven courses over the last probably six or seven years that I realized I needed to do this validation properly before I launch course. There's a big difference between you thinking you know what your audience wants and your audience actually wanting something. So I think that's really good advice, sort of.

Sorry I spoke over you. I think something else to say there as well is that that validation idea you, that isn't unique to just memberships. So if you were doing the more traditional launching a one off online course, you can still do that validation and that minimum viable product. So if you'd say you were doing, you know, a course that was ultimately going to have 30 lessons in it, you could launch it and start selling it. When you've created, say the first five or ten lessons and you just say to those people, you know, the other lessons will be delivered over the next two months or something, because again, that means you can actually, you know, test out the actual idea by getting some people on board. And if, you know, if you've created your first 10 lessons and you're starting to lag a bit and thinking, oh, this is hard work, well, nothing motivates you like having a load of people who've paid for the other 20 lessons and who are waiting to receive them, so don't think about those things as just applying to memberships, it can be transferred to ordinary one off courses as well.

Yeah, for sure. And like you said, there's nothing like putting something live to motivate you to get stuff done. Is there anything you would do differently if you were going to start again? Would you do anything Differently that you've done so far?

Well, I think the thing I said about, about making the waiting list period a bit longer, I would probably, I would probably do that differently next time. And I suppose another thing I would do would do differently. Well, one of the things in my case course was I did try and create this as a one off course and then transitioned it to a membership. So knowing what I know now, I would have done it as a membership from day one and that would automatically have made the waiting list period longer because the waiting list would have been building up while I was creating, you know, all the, all the courses from scratch. Whereas by the time I did my waiting list, I'd already got a lot of the stuff I needed ready to launch. So, yeah, I think extending that phase would be something I would, I would do differently. But other than that, no, I think that that's the main, the main thing I've changed. That's the beauty of a membership. You could, you could tweak it and change it as you go through, you know, and if suddenly you've got members saying, oh, it'd be really nice if the program included this or, you know, this hasn't happened to me. But if people said, oh, we'd rather only have a coaching call once a month rather than once a fortnight, well, you can, you know, you can make those changes as you go. So I don't think you have to have everything set in stone right from day one.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Let me ask you a massive question and see if you can answer it in one minute. Just because I'm conscious of time. One, one aspect, and maybe this is a separate podcast altogether, but one aspect that we haven't discussed is pricing. Like how on earth do you work out how much to charge? Whether it be a one off fee, several payment fee like I have in my program, or a monthly reoccurring membership fee. How, how did you start figuring out the pricing?

I have no idea. This is the short answer. It's, it's a, you're right, it's a massive, massive question and you can. I've read so many different theories on pricing and what you should do and shouldn't do with it. The, the route I've gone for with it is to try and keep it as something where it's, it's a low monthly amount because I don't want people to be thinking too hard about A, whether to join in the first place or B, whether to keep their membership going. I don't want price to be a barrier to them, to them coming on board. What I would say is don't get obsessed with what each individual person is paying because if I looked at, you know, what someone on my membership gets for the monthly membership they pay, I'm selling myself way too cheap. What I do instead is look at what is my total revenue from the membership. And then I think actually yeah, that, that works. So you know, when I look at the time it takes me to go and do two group coaching calls per month, for example, I think yeah, that's actually I'm content with that as an hourly rate or whatever, you know, whatever you want to call it. So I would say price it such that people don't have to think too hard about joining and don't have to think too hard about staying. Think about the value that they're getting from it. But the problem with it is, you know, memberships cover a huge range of things. Some people run memberships and online courses where what you're teaching someone is something to do with their hobby, you know, so maybe you've got a membership about I know how to play the guitar better. Well, that's for most people only going to be their hobby. They'll never get a return on that investment other than the pleasure they get from playing the guitar better. With something like my membership, I can price it at the higher end because you know, if you're a mortgage broker joining this, if it gets you just one extra client per month from what you learn from this, you know, that's put another thousand pounds a month on your, on your bottom line. So I think that's what you need to think about when you're pricing thing. What's the actual value to the kind of people who are joining this? How much could it change their business or change their life and therefore what will they be willing to pay for it? But I would rather any membership have a lot of people paying a lower amount of money than have, you know, 10 people paying me £500amonth because I want that community, you know.

So I think, yeah, I, I, so I agree with that. And of course one of the ways you can get some sense of pricing for whatever your program is going to be and whatever topic it's going to be and for whatever market is just to do some research and find out what other people are charging. That's a good starting point. I also think in the early days, because I know both you and I did this, is that you have a sort of founders rate and you almost use that as a way to get people through the door early because you tell them the price is going up. And what you need to do is start at a low rate and then increase the price until you reach a point where you've hit that sort of sweet spot, which is the right fee for you and the right fee for your market as well. So, like, like I said, like, it was probably an unfair question to ask you right at the end, but I just wanted to get that one in. So, as you know, the last question I ask all my guests, and I deliberately asked David not to go back and listen to episode six to see what he said before, but I'll do that after this is if you could go back in time and give your younger self a piece of advice, what would it be?

Well, I haven't been back and checked, but there are actually two bits of advice because I think since you asked me that on episode six, I think I got asked it on someone else's podcast and gave a different answer. So I'm going to give both.

Okay.

Advice I would give to my younger business self are niche. Your business. Because I didn't do that until about five or six years ago, and I wish I'd done it sooner. And the second piece of advice would be start building your email list, because again, that's something that I only really started focusing heavily on a few years ago. If I'd started doing that 10, 20 years ago, I'd have an even bigger. I mean, my email list is a massive asset and like I said, it was where the majority of my members have come from for my membership program. Imagine if I'd started building that 15 years ago. It would have been even, even bigger and better. So start building a list.

Yeah, two, yeah, two great pieces of advice. And you know, my listeners will know that I bang on the drum about both of those. And sometimes it's really hard to get people to figure out that actually building your email list is going to be one of your most valuable assets. And it'll be one of the most valuable assets if you want to sell your agency. And it's certainly going to be the sort of pool that you swim in and fish in, and if you can make that pool as big as possible. And of course, as we all know, niching your agency means higher prices, easier for your clients to find find you, and easier to look different to your competitors. So, good piece of advice. And I will go back and check out what you said on episode six to see if it's the same or it's something different. But I'm not sure if we, I don't think we've ever had either of those two pieces of advice before. So that's always great. David, if people are listening to this and they want to find out more about you and particularly check out your program, where would they go?

If I go to the website, which is theppcmachine.co.uk all the stuff's there. If they specifically want to know about the program, it's the PPCmachine.co.uk PPP because the program is called the Predictable Pipeline Program.

PPP.

And obviously if they want to connect with me, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter as Avid Miles. I'm, you know, all the usual, all the usual places.

Yeah. So we, I'm just scribbling this down. We will add all those links into the show notes and so people can check out what we've been talking about today, see what your sales page for your program looks like, get some other ideas. But I wanted to thank you today for joining us, David. This has been a topic that I haven't talked about before but it's interesting and I think like you said, the catalyst has been the pandemic that more people are starting to think about taking their agency work and moving it online in some form. But they often don't do it because they don't know where to start or it feels such a huge task. So I hope that, that the advice you've shared with people today will help them make that journey a little bit more pain free for them, hopefully.

Yeah, no, thank you very much, Ro. It's been a pleasure chatting to you as always and yeah, I hope it's, hope it's given people some useful advice.

We'll see you again soon.

Okay, cheers. Bye. Sa.