Building An Empire With Bedros Keuilian

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap them in bacon. For business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo. Alright, welcome back to Bacon Wrapped Business. This is Brad Costanzo and today we are going to jump into a very cool topic with a very cool guy. By the way, if you have not, if you have not subscribed to the show, I want to encourage you to do that. If you're listening on itunes, just hit subscribe. You can do the same thing on Stitcher. And as always, if you ever want to get a hold of me, if you want to reach out, if you want to ask me questions, recommend guests, recommend topics, you can shoot an email over to askbradaconwrappedbusiness.com I read every single email and I try to reply to all of them. You can also send me a review as I read those and get back with everybody who reviews the show. That being said, if this is the very first time you've ever tuned into this episode or this, this podcast, it's my platform to interview people that I am really excited to talk to. People that I have authentic curiosity about and I get to pick their brains. I get to do something that most people would just dream to do and I get to do it and share it with you. So if I treat you like a fly on the wall, where you get to hear some of the private conversations that I'm going to have because I'm going to go deep, I hope you enjoy that and I hope you get as much out of this interview as I'm going to. So today I am interviewing Bedros Kulian. And Bedros is a guy that I've known about for years, probably a lot longer than he knows that I knew about him. And I'll bring this up in just a second, but you know, Bedros is a very, very established player in the fitness and health market. And that's where I first found out about him years ago. Part of his bio talks about how as a child he ate out of dumpsters and he couldn't speak a word of English. But today he's a best selling author. He's the founder and CEO of the world's fastest growing fitness franchise, Fit Body Bootcamp. Let's let that sit in the world's Fastest growing fitness franchise and that is a very competitive market. He's also famous for helping 24 of his clients go from being in debt to growing seven figure, generating empires and helping thousands more turn their passions into multiple six figure businesses. Bedros, welcome to bacon wrap business.

Brad, thank you so much man. I appreciate the opportunity.

Absolutely. So I've got to tell you, the very first time I recall coming across your name, I think it was back, man. It may have been 2010 or it may have been something like it was like five, six something years ago. And I think I saw a funnel map that you had created for your business. I'm almost positive this was you. And it was the way you laid out the funnel and then underneath it was like, okay, here's the basic funnel and then here's the emails that go to each step. And it was just the way that it was laid out, almost like left to right and then top to bottom. Yeah, that was you, right? Does that sound familiar?

I know exactly what you're talking about. That was Yannick Silver asked me to speak at his underground event in Washington D.C. in 2010. And I think he still does this where the best speaker gets wins the best speaker award, blah blah blah. I was like, you know what, I'm not just going to come in there and explain my empire, my info business. At the time I didn't have a franchise. I said I'm going to come in here and actually show the entire mind map and then give them the mind map where once you click on it you get all the emails and autoresponders from that funnel that moves people into the next funnel and really how the whole automation of my and I called it the machine works. Yeah, yeah. I actually won the runner up.

Tell me you've got that somewhere. Because I was looking for it not too long ago, I couldn't find it. If you still have anything like that, shoot it back over. Because I do. That's where I first saw that. And I immediately did two things, is I immediately took that map and did it with my own business. But then I also created it as something to show my affiliates. This is back when I had an info product in a totally different market, but I would show that to my affiliates. And what I loved about it is the way that you laid out the email. Like how I could see not just the front end of the funnel because most people would say okay, here's the opt in page, sales page and upsells, etc. But I laid out based on your model. Here's the emails. Here's the content of the emails and here's where they go. Because most info product owners, especially if you're doing launches, you know, they, they don't necessarily love to send it to a, and this is an understatement, they don't love to send it to an opt in and a squeeze page because they're just like, okay, well, you're just going to list grab or how do I know you're going to nurture my leads? Very well. And what your map allowed me to do was show people how I was going to nurture their leads. And I had so many affiliates tell me that they promoted me because I laid that out like this and it gave them much more confidence that I really knew what I was doing. Thank you.

Seven years later, dude, my pleasure and brilliant idea of you to do that. I mean, I never thought that it could be used that way to show your affiliates the entire launch process, the nurture process, the backend process. Talk about alleviating any anxiety of how you're going to treat their leads and clients. That's genius.

Thanks. Yeah, I mean, it was one of the things. I know. I always hated to send them to squeeze pages because I know, okay, if you get a 30% or 50%, you know, opt in, you know, you know, what are you going to do with my leads? It's like, yeah, I'm going to show you. So anyway, fun little callback about how I first came across you and then we've got a lot of mutual friends and I've just kind of followed you from a distance over the past several years. But I really want to dive in today to a handful of things like you've grown so much beyond what you were doing seven years ago. And I want to kind of talk about that, how, you know, Fit Body Bootcamp kind of came around and how you got it to where it's now the fastest growing fitness franchise. That's amazing. And for my audiences, for my audience, just to foreshadow some of the stuff that I want to talk about prior to this, you know, you talked about, this is offline, how you're using Facebook Live. And it's been, it's been very effective for you as well as some things you're doing with helping people, experts, gurus and thought leaders create masterminds in their industries. And one of the reasons that's a very good topic for me is not only have I been members of Mastermind, I've had a $15,000 a year mastermind. So I've run one. And I know the fun part, the advantages. I also know the disadvantages. And I know how it can be a pain in the butt to set up, but how profitable it can be if you do it right. So I've got some very authentic questions that are going to come out about this. So that's for my audience's benefit, just to know some of the questions I'm going to ask you. But man, let's talk about a little bit about your journey. So, you know, tell me, how long you been at this entrepreneurial game?

Yeah, so, you know, I realized I've technically been an entrepreneur since the age of six, since we came to the United States. My father and my family, we escaped Russia, Communist Russia, came to the United States after about three years of suffering, struggling, eating out of dumpsters because we were just poor, broke, didn't speak the language. My dad was able to pull together enough money to open up a little tailor shop in Anaheim, California. And he just became an entrepreneur because he was unemployable. He didn't have any other skill that people wanted. So he figured, well, I know how to be a tailor. I'll open up a tailor shop. Which automatically meant that I. We were poor, so I don't get a nanny after school, I would go to my dad's shop and just loiter there for hours. Learning how to be an entrepreneur, not intentionally, but just through environmental exposure. But really, I didn't dive into the entrepreneurial space until 1997 when I took this fascination with the Internet. EarthLink and AOL had just come around. You know, they were sending those. AOL was sending those CDs with 10,000 free hours and there was dial up modems.

Oh yeah.

And let's just say that a friend gave me a laptop that had fallen off the back of a truck. That's all I'll say about that. But so I took this CD and I put it in the laptop, connected to the Internet and holy smokes, my mind went wild. I was in my early twenties then, but I knew that what I'm seeing right now, which was just a whole bunch of discussion groups on AOL and earthlink, that what I'm seeing right now is going to somehow change the world. This isn't just some fun little thing. And so that was 1997. By late 1998, I had my first online business called totalmuscle.com, which was an online supplement store, which failed miserably. In fact, it failed so bad, and I had maxed out both of my credit cards that I had at the time. Because as it turns out, there's no Google, there's no advertising, there's no Facebook. So how are people going to find your website and give you money? And so supplements expire. So as they would expire, I would eat or drink whatever protein and creatine I could and then throw the rest out and then buy more. And so very bad business model at the time. Ultimately, after maxing out my credit cards and not being able to pay rent, I got kicked out of my apartment and had to live out of a Toyota pickup for a while. So that was my first attempt as an entrepreneur in the late 90s. But that taught me a lesson that the Internet can give me reach, but to sell things that don't expire and that I don't have to put money out for and then try and sell later. And so my second round at that was in 2000 and 22,001 when I decided I'm going to create a software called High Tech Trainer. So I'm not going to sell product anymore. I'm going to sell information. I don't have to ship anything, I don't have to store anything. I don't have to let things expire. So one of my personal training clients was a software programmer. And so we put our heads together, we created High Tech Trainer. It didn't sell well to personal trainers, and it was for personal trainers to use with their clients who were maybe traveling or people outside of their local distance, their local area. But Sprint reached out to me and, dude, this is nuts. Sprint reached out to me and said, hey, we got this thing called a jukebox, and we're wondering if you want to put your high tech trainer workouts in our jukebox. Well, years later, that ended up being, you know, iPhone and an app store. And so I had one of the first work, actually I might have had the first workout app on the planet on the Sprint jukebox. And we were getting more money from Sprint than I was getting from personal trainers selling my software, which was pretty cool. And so I go, okay, information works, recurring income works. And I started creating, you know, digital products, etc. And it really gave me a tremendous insight into what the Internet can do. Now there's Google, now there's Facebook. And I realized, like, holy smokes, I can be on unstoppable if I just come up with the right product or service.

That's. That's awesome. And I love how the journey kind of, you know, you got to see multiple sides of it as opposed to like, like you said, like almost, I guess. Was it a licensing deal with Sprint? Is that how that worked?

Yeah, exactly. Right. It was a licensing deal with Sprint.

I love licensing deals.

Yeah. And you know, they had the audience. We had to just retweak our code and tada. They put on their jukebox and they were sending us checks of like $25,000 a month. Dude. And I was like, is this for real? Are they gonna stop? Yeah.

Tell me about Fit Body Bootcamp. When did that come about?

Yeah, so, you know, in that time I started coaching and consulting personal trainers because I knew that, you know, I was successful as a personal trainer. I had five personal training gyms right there in your hometown, San Diego. And. But I was more North County. I don't know where you live. Where do you live in San Diego?

I was in downtown for four years and I just moved to Mission Valley.

Okay, all right, so then you're probably, you know, from downtown Mission Valley, so you're familiar with the areas I was at. I was in San Marcos, Escondido Vista. My furthest south personal training studio was in Kearny Mesa. So I had small personal training studios. I was successful. I sold those and started coaching and consulting personal trainers. And I really enjoyed that. And the way I looked at it is, hey, I'm still doing personal training, but not now. Through other personal trainers, I get to change lives and impact people. And I had so many coaching clients. You know, some sold one on one on one personal training. Others did small group. Others did boot camps and parks. And I liked the bootcamp model because you could leverage it. It's more affordable for a larger part of the population, convenient times. And I like the idea of one on many, because one trainer, many clients, means higher profit margins for the entrepreneur. But I also saw a lot of problems with running these things in parks and parking lots and the city kicking you out. And I noticed Santa Monica led the charge with kicking trainers out of parks. And I knew if Santa Monica does it, everyone else is gonna start doing it. And sure enough. And so I said, well, what if I just run the same model I did as a personal trainer? You know, in other words, a 2,000 square foot space, light industrial or commercial. But Instead of having 12 trainers in my gym training one on one, if I just have two or three trainers, total training, one on 20, one on 30 in a group boot camp model, and sure enough, man, it took off. My coaching clients were the first ones to adopt that. And in the beginning, in 2011, 2010, it was a licensing program, and I just tested out with my coaching clients and it took off. So in 2012, we turned the model, the Fit Body Bootcamp model, into a franchise. January of 2012. And in that five years, we went from some 90 locations to just over 500 locations today. And now we're adding an average of 17 to 20 new locations per month.

Wow, that's amazing. That's fantastic growth.

So.

So it's a franchise model, right?

Yes, sir. It's a franchise. Like 7 11, like subway, like Anytime Fitness.

Was that when you started going down that path? Was that. I mean, because franchising can be a very complex legal thing to navigate. Is it. Has it been a big learning curve, a lot of complexities, or is it easier than you thought?

Brad, being from the info space, you're going to understand this. I mean, info is relatively simple once you make the right connections with affiliates.

Yes.

Understands that sales copy has to move people into taking action. You got to have upsells in place because once someone buys, they're in that buying behavior, and your goal is to get them to buy more frequently as they go through your funnel, etc. Like, easy enough, but it's all digital stuff that we sell. We solve problems through our info products. Well, easy enough. And you can outsource people from the Philippines to your customer support and whatever. Some kids are running ads. Franchising now you're being watched by the Federal Trade Commission, man, and you're being. 11 times a year, there's 11 states that force an audit on us on all franchises 11 times a year. And so, you know, talk about. People are worried about getting audited by, you know, the IRS. You know, 11 different states put us through the same audit, and we have to pay to get that audit done every single year. So I was so afraid of the idea, but I knew that this was something big, that this was something that couldn't be knocked off easily, that this was something that could literally be a global brand and change the way the industry serves its clients. Personal training works. And so I was committed to the idea so much that I went out and I started hiring consultants. One pair of consultants. I was paying $21,000 a month for six months to just feed me through the fire hydrant of knowledge on how does a franchise work? What are the things that will get me in jail? For example, as an info marketer, you can say, Look, I've got 24 clients that I've helped them become seven figure earners and here they are, here's their names, here's a picture of their bank accounts, all this proof, and then. So if you want to also be a seven figure earner, enter your email address and on this application, we'll get on the phone. Great. You can do that as an info marketer, as a franchise dude, you can't go out and say, meet Brad. He owns three fit body boot camps. Each one does $40,000 a month with profit margins of 29%. Even if you've given me your P and L reports. Because by saying that, I'm now implying to any prospective franchisee that you too can make that kind of money. And that's how a class action lawsuit can happen. All right, so you got all these limitations. You can't say, but I can say. Brad has been a fit by the bootcamp owner for 16 months. And in that time, he's opened up two locations. He charges one 67amonth, and he's got 300 clients in one location, 400 in another. You know, you can let them come to the. So you really have to walk gingerly and by the way, talk about making a sale. You can't just get people to click and buy off a website because you have to send every prospective franchisee an FDD franchise disclosure document that the Federal Trade Commission wants you to write. Everything and anything that can go wrong in this thing, including number of locations that have shut down, number of locations that you have open with their contact info so that you can contact them. So you really have to run a clean, tight, transparent ship. Otherwise you're screwed. I mean, look at Quiznos. Quiznos is shut left and right. Curbs are shutting down left and right. Cold Stone Creamery. I study about two franchises every month. Why two failed and why two succeeded. And so I learned so quickly from these consultants, from my own research, I just went OCD on franchising, and rest was history. I became so good at it simply because of sets and reps, sets and reps, night and day. My wife and kids hated me for it. In five short years, I've created an amazing life and brand and impact.

So was the reason behind going the franchise model, knowing that it's like, man, this is like sitting down at the base camp of Everest about the climb, right? Was the reason behind that just because. Well, I don't want to put in your mouth, like, what was the reason behind that? When there could have been a lot of other easier paths to follow? Is it just that you think that's where you could add the most impact and value on both sides of the equation or something else.

It had gotten to a point where I was making enough money as a consultant, you know, coaching personal trainers in their business. But I kept chomping at the bits where I want to help more people. And I remember even as back then when I was a personal trainer, people would go, hey, man, is that gym across the way your competition? I'm like, hell, no. See that other place next to them? They go, what? The Kentucky Fried Chicken? I go, yeah, that's my competition. McDonald's is my competition. Coca Cola, Frito Lay is my competition. And so I still. Dude, I'm starting to break into a sweat now just talking about it. But they walking has become known as that. Walking is just a form of going from one room to the next. People shouldn't count 10,000 steps. Walking is not exercise. Walking is just how we move from one seat to the next. And so exercise has now become walking. We get fooled that we can go to McDonald's and buy healthy food or Subway and buy healthy food. And it's just everything has been dumbed down so much. And by the way, I don't know if you know this, and I know I'm going way off the topic of business, but you opened up this door, so, by God, we're going through it.

Absolutely.

I was in my doctor, I was snowboarding last year, and I fell and I broke a bone in my hand. And so, you know, whatever, it healed. But I was going there for a checkup last week, and they put the blood pressure cuff around my arm, and they do the blood pressure and I go, hey, how's my blood pressure? It's 120 over 80, right? They go, oh, no, no. The new stats is 130 over 80. I go, why 130? She goes, huh? Right? So I got out, got to my car, Googled. Why is it now the systolic and diastolic 130 over 80 instead of 120 over 80? Well, it's because the world is getting fatter, more obese, more out of shape and all. It's not ideal body. It's not ideal.

Average is just rising, right?

Because of fucking average is rising, man. And when the average blood pressure is rising, instead of us doing something about it, we go, all right, we'll just set the bar lower medically. And that's my competition is incompetent doctors, incompetent politicians who don't feed the population the information that they need. Restaurants that charge pennies because they put rubber and soy into your food and call it beef and all this shit. And so I knew that I wasn't so much after the money anymore. I wanted to make an impact with a brand so big and educate people. So our running joke at Fit by the Boot Camp locations are ta da. Welcome aboard, Mrs. Jones. You're not just going to work out here. We're going to work on your mindset. We're going to educate you. You're going to be like your family's nutritionist and dietitian. You're going to know how to shop at your grocery store. And she goes, what have I gotten myself into? Oh, you have no idea. We are more than just personal training. And so I'm really trying to educate the world the best I can through fitbody.

Well, you know, and you bring up a good point. Like in the past, I've had personal trainers at good gyms where they're very knowledgeable, but the only thing they ever did was the only thing they would ever talk about besides, they would give me a precursory thing on diet nutrition, but they would just jump right into the here's what workout we're going to do today. And they could care less about just holistically the rest of my life. And it was just, I mean, these were not cheap personal trainers either. So it's just they're doing the absolute bare minimum to kind of get through, which is what I think most people in life unfortunately end up doing at the bare minimum. What, as far as switching gears kind of the marketing side. Coming from the side of information marketing and digital marketing and coaching, I guarantee, I know that you come with a much wider range of tactics and marketing strategies than the average person who just decides to start a franchise. What have been some of the things that you've done to help your franchisees grow their business using a lot of the tactics that you've developed over the years?

Yeah. So I don't remember if it was Entrepreneur magazine or Inc. Magazine that said this in an article, but one of those publications wrote that Fit Body Boot Camp is proving itself to be the anti franchise franchise. And I don't know how they meant it, but I took it as a badge of honor. I keep our buy in fee low. I don't do a percentage of gross revenue as royalties. I just have a flat dollar amount for royalties. When you go buy location number two or three, you pay half of what you paid the first time. And my whole thing was I'm gonna create a franchise where me and the franchisees are not adversarial. We're actually, you know, going towards the same goal, the same mission. And so where that was concerned, I go, all right, I'm gonna take this anti franchise model to a whole new level. How do franchises advertise? Oh, okay, they run full page ads or half page ads and Inc. And Fast Company and Franchise Models magazine, Entrepreneur. So I did, I paid my $17,000 and I ran a half page ad in one of those publications. Dude, we got like four leads and converted one person. All right, so we broke even. Big deal. Then I go, you know what, As a marketer, I chase people on, I retarget to them. I chase people on Facebook. When I do an info marketing product, what am I doing? If I want readers of Entrepreneur or Inc. Magazine, then how about I just go on Facebook, take that $17,000 and say, show me readers of Inc. And Entrepreneur Magazine. Show it to these particular states. Texas, Florida, California, Washington, the states that are franchise friendly, where we have more franchises. Show it only to people who read these magazines and who are into fitness, have some kind of fitness in their profile. That same $17,000 got us five franchises. And I realized, holy smokes, I'm fishing with dynamite, you know? And I never ran another ad in publications again. I just started to target their readers and audience exactly how I wanted with the message, using videos, you know, and the videos are very grimy. They're not all perfect. Some of them are just me with a selfie stick walking through a Fit Body Boot Camp location and saying who I am, why I created this. And others are, you know, pretty nicely cut commercials for Fit Body Boot Camp. A case study of an owner who went from a school teacher to a, to a Fit Body Boot Camp franchisee or a personal trainer who was struggling to make ends meet and also had a side job and now has three Fit Body boot camps and is rocking. And so I decided, well, if we could do this to grow our franchise, why am I going to follow the franchise model again and charge a marketing fee to my franchisees? And they run bus bench ads and billboards and coupons sent to their house? Forget it. Everyone's on their phone and everyone's on their computer. So we said, what if we end up actually running low barrier offers on our website, fitbodybootcamp.com and if you're a Mrs. Jones or Mr. Jones and you're looking for a personal trainer, our website that's optimized pops up, you're sold or sold a 14 day fat furnace or a 21 day rapid fat loss program for 67 bucks. We at corporate keep the money because we do the SEO and the marketing for it. You, the franchisee, get that lead, you train them for 14 or 21 days, convert them into a paying client over the next 12 months and you're golden. So we're just doing everything the opposite of what a franchise does and we're using mainly Facebook and video to drive our business both on the franchise location side and also the franchisee side.

That's great. So are you able to, I don't know the way. If there's any regulations, are you able to tell me in general? Like what? Like if I wanted to buy a franchise, like a single franchise, what, what are the startup costs? Like what's that look like financially?

Sure, sure. And you know, I kind of don't like this because. But I'm gonna answer it, but here's someone to qualify myself. People who listen to this podcast later and our price has gone up, don't go, hey, I listened to it on Brad less because that's happened to us before.

Yes.

But currently it's a $25,000 buy in. The typical franchise is 50,000 to $300,000 to buy in.

Absolutely.

Yeah. And we're $25,000 to buy in. $695 a month for our franchise fee. Instead of taking 6 to 8% of your gross revenue, which would be somewhere between 1200 to $1,500 a month for your franchise royalty fee, we charge you half of your buy in fee. So 12,500 for location, 2, 3 and 4. We don't have any marketing fees, fees that we charge you. Typically franchises charge a 1% marketing fee. We don't charge that. I'm smart enough to know that. I'm an information marketer. If I optimize all of our local Fit Body bootcamp pages to rank for personal trainer, fitness, boot camp, health club, gym, etc. And our locations pop up when Mrs. Jones does a search locally and we're going to sell them a low barrier offer. I'm going to keep that money and then send that lead to that franchisee. So really it's just $25,000 to buy, buy in. $695 a month for the monthly royalty fees. And then a typical build out ranges from on the low end, 15,000 if you go kind of bootstrap to as much as 50,000 if you go really high end, like amazing spa like feel. Yeah.

Okay, so somebody's looking at like you said like about 25k to buy in, maybe another 15 to 20.25k. I mean, for $50,000 total, it sounds like they can get going and have their own franchise and work with somebody who's obviously helped a lot of people in the fitness industry build their businesses in multiple ways. Not just franchises, but individual personal trainers. I think that's really cool. And I think that's a. It's a. I can only imagine how kind of nerve wracking that was, stepping out of the comfort zone of information marketing and consulting into the world of franchise sales and whatnot. You know, speaking about out of your comfort zone, what is. What has been one of the biggest steps you've taken outside of your comfort zone that you can remember?

Well, I can give you two. One of them was not business related. I took this. Do you know Craig Valentine?

I do, yeah. Craig is a former guest on the show and a friend.

Okay, perfect. So Craig, one time he and I run a Mastermind together, and he's ranting to our Mastermind members about, you know, you guys are taking too long to launch your products. You're taking too long to make your website, create a logo, do all the things that don't matter. You need to cut all your deadlines in half and focus on the things that matter. And he's ranting to them. And I'm sitting next to him and I'm getting so pumped up that I was getting ready to run through a wall. Brad. And so I text my wife. I go, Hey, 10 years ago when we got married, I said, if you marry me, I'd run a marathon with you. Because she was a marathon runner. And so I never ran the damn marathon. So I go, when's your next marathon? She goes, in six weeks. I go, great, sign me up. She goes, no, no, no. It's in six weeks, not 60 weeks. I just lift weights. Put it down. Right? I'm that meathead guy. And so I had sold myself on the idea that this is what I do. I'm a meathead. I lift weights. Put it down. God's given me fast twitch fibers and I can build muscle all day long. I don't want to run. I'd rather just talk my way out of a fight. And so I like that. I hired a running coach for those six weeks. And the running coach now goes, hey, thank you for the money, but I highly encourage you to do the half marathon. Every marathon has a half marathon attached to it. I go, say that again and I'm going to fire you. So she goes, all right. Here's your program. My bones literally hurt for four and a half months after I finished that marathon. But in six weeks I trained and ran 26.2 miles and I beat Oprah Winfrey's time, which was my only goal in life. And so that was a big personal hurdle and challenge. And after that I ended up doing all these different six week challenges. I hired a professional MMA fighter and had him teach me for six weeks and then fought him in the cage. Tore my bicep as a byproduct, rock climbing because I'm afraid of heights, surfing, all this stuff. But where business is concerned, the most recent, biggest thing that gave me anxiety and made me want to just end it all, I'm being very honest here. I'm gonna give them their money back. I reached out to a publisher, I got, hey, I got this idea for a book. And of course they go, hey, it's a great book. In fact, I've heard of you. And you know, my friend Lewis House vouched for me and JJ Virgin and they're New York Times best selling authors. And so, you know, they gave me a big advance and man, I did not know how to write a book. I write email copy, I write sales copy, I write blog posts that are 1500 words, I don't know how to write a 50,000 word book. And then go, okay, I'm going to give this to you and this is going to be my story and I can't change it again. I can't hit edit. And so that had been. That was giving me such anxiety that I had to ask for an extension twice from my publisher. And I was actually having a conversation with my wife. I go, you know what, I'm just going to say, here's your advance back, here's your money back. Tear up the contract, I'm done. But I said, if I do that, I quit. And then I do exactly what I tell my clients not to do. So I did it. It's off to the publisher now. The manuscript and the book. Man up comes out July 2018.

Man up. I love that by the way. I'm going through the same thing right now. I'm probably about halfway through the book writing process and it's absolutely different than anything else I've ever done. And what's funny is I've always found this is funny about a book is they usually take more work than any info product you're going to sell, even a product you're going to sell and launch for $2,000, right? A book takes Much more time. And yet it's oftentimes the cheapest thing you actually sell, dollar wise.

Absolutely. I think by the time I'm done with it, whether it becomes a best selling book or not, by the time I'm done and it's sold and I look back five years from now, I'm going, I made 12 cents an hour on that.

Absolutely. But there's just something about it that just, you know, I think the fact.

That it makes us immortal and we die and there's some piece of legacy and message we leave behind.

I agree completely on that. Okay, so those are great. You answered the comfort zone questions, by the way, a couple since you went live. And by the way, so the people. Because I'm watching on Facebook, it's on mute, so I can see you on there.

Oh, cool.

Because can people hear me as well? Have you got that piped in like that or.

No, I don't think they can hear you. I mean, if they can hear you, some people can, but others always put like, hey, I can't hear the guy on the podcast. So we're working on finding technology where they can hear you and me.

I've been trying to kind of do that myself, by the way, because I've kind of gone live a couple times using Belive and some other stuff, and it just didn't quite do the exact quality that I wanted, so. So if you figure that out in a good way, let me know because I'm definitely interested in borrowing that brilliance.

If you figure it out for me, please let us know. We're trying to figure this out.

100%. That being said, so I posted, I shared your live video on my Facebook wall. And then a couple people had a couple questions. I said, you guys got any questions for Bedros? So Ed o'. Keefe.

Oh, I love Ed.

Yeah, he goes, I love Bedros. Ask him about his 3% theory. What is the 3% theory?

Well, so he said, see, Damn it, Ed is good. He's. See, I'm a slow study. So he's brought it down to 3%. It's actually called the 5% rule, but I bet ED is down to 3%. My goal is down to get the 1% one.

It's almost like I came out with 7 minute abs. And then the guy goes, I'm gonna come out with six minute abs.

We're gonna be rich. Six minute abs. So here, here's how the 5% rule works. And the lesson that I learned from this was nuts, dude. So when I first started coaching and consulting personal trainers. I was working out of my guest house, in my house. And, and, and I only had one assistant. I didn't have a big team like I do today. And you know, we'd send out an email broadcast, hey, if you're looking for a business coaching, you know, send us an email. I'll get on the phone with you. Typically, I would ask some questions and then I would sell them on my coaching program, which is the time was like $5,000. And so my wife sends me a text message and she goes, hey, the sprinkler down here is busted and it's shooting up like a geyser. And I go, okay, hun, I'll be right down. Because I was handy. So I came downstairs and I'm elbow deep, dude, in fixing, fricking a sprinkler pipe. I just want to punch myself right now, telling the story. A sprinkler pipe. Well, that morning I had sent out an email broadcast. And guess what happens next? People actually send in an application. And my assistant comes running down, she goes, hey, dude, some guy wants to talk to you right now. He's ready to buy if it makes sense to him. I'm like, amanda, look, I've got mud all over me. I'm fixing this thing. Look, you've heard me do the sales pitch over and over again. You got this girl I believe in, you go sell. And so by the time I wash up and go back upstairs, 25, 30 minutes later, I go, well, how'd it go? Where's the five GS? And back then, like, that was a lot of money to me. She goes, well, he said he needs to think about it. And what I learned in that very second is that there's a certain amount of things that are within my 5%. And it's to delegate, motivate, and sell and sell. The number one thing of it. And that was the thing that I offloaded to someone else to fix a damn $20 an hour job. I could have paid someone $20 an hour to fix that pipe and made 5G. So now I literally, after that, I walked around the house. My wife goes, hey, the light bulbs burnt out. I go, it's not on my 5%. Hey, you got, my oil light is on. It's not on my 5%.

And by the way, my wife, my wife is going to hate you for influencing me to do this up to her.

But here's, let me tell you the second piece so that your wife loves you. Because I used to say that. And people would walk around their house saying, it's not on my 5%. I would get hate mail from wives of my male coaching clients. And so now let me give you the second piece. I go, hey, hey fellas, now you're making enough money. Go hire a housekeeper who can change the light bulb, take out the trash and do all the things that you were going to do. And so it's not on my 5%, it's in someone else's 5%. My 5% is to delegate, motivate, sell, and the other 95% of the things that have to get done in my business, in my household and everywhere else get outsourced because they're the trivial many and not the critical few.

I love that. You know my, I got, I got a really great reframe on this whole thing from a close friend and former client of mine. I don't know if you know Kent Clothier by any chance. No, but he's big in the real estate investment marketing space. That being said, he. So my background with my father was always the type of guy who, it's like, well, it was the exact opposite. It's, well, if you can, if you can do it, why would you pay somebody else to go do it? Like, I'm going to mow the lawn. Like, I can mow the lawn. I'm still able bodied. Why would you do that just to go do something else? So that was kind of ingrained in me for a long time. Even though, like, so it was hard for me to get into the delegation mode. It was just like I was wired a different way. But then one of the big, the thing that really reframed it was, so can Kent makes a lot of money, right? Does very, very well. He's got two small children and his wife does not work outside the home. He was hiring a full time nanny housekeeper for the exact same reason, I think for like 15 or 20 bucks an hour. And you know, they're not uber rich to where it's, you know, just, you know, whatever. And she's like, yeah, we don't need to pay this woman 15 bucks an hour to do this stuff. I don't mind doing it. I'm home. Like, I don't mind it. He goes, no, no, no, you don't understand. I'm not paying her $15 an hour for her time. I'm buying your time for $15 an hour, honey, I'm buying an hour of my wife's time where she's not stressed out, where she's not preoccupied, where she's not, you know, running all around to where not only can you have your time to yourself so you're in a better mood for you with me, but you can be with with me. So I mean, I've heard of people reframing it where it's like, yeah, I'm buying my time at a discount. But that was kind of a really interesting thing when I started to think, yeah, I'm not paying this person for their time. I'm literally buying my time at an absolute discount back. And even if that means I've got two hours to sit around on the couch, you know, with my finger in my nose, that might be the downtime I need to get over some decision fatigue so that I'm not completely, you know, blown away. So those were some big things that I had to get over. And I'm still trying to become a better delegator and eliminator in my life and it's, it's hard as heck to do.

You know, it always is a work in progress because again, you know, I grew up with tremendous work ethic from my, from my dad. And so just like you, well, I'm able bodied, I'm capable. Why am I not doing it? And, but I have to go back to, like you said, I'm buying back my time and I need to, need to recharge so that I can do the things that the handyman can't do, that the lawn guy can't do, that the maid can't do.

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So the a couple, I want to switch gears a little bit. You know, I just mentioned you're doing Facebook Live right now as we're doing this and kind of on the pre interview survey, I was asking what are some of the cool things that you, you're taking advantage of marketing wise, tactical wise, that people who are listening to this could potentially go put into action. And one of those was how Facebook Live is doing wonders for both your clients and yourself. Explain how you're using it and some of the results you're getting.

Yeah, yeah. So I love doing Facebook Live. Like you said, I'm doing one right now. And the way I look at it is I want omnipresence. And Grant Cardone talks about this in his book the 10x rule. I always tell people I can get you on cbs, NBC, you know, your local TV affiliate for the morning news show for them to interview. Would you want that? They go, hell yeah, I would want that. I go, why would you want that? They go, because it would give Me, Exposure. And what would that exposure do for you? It would make me give me more money and help build my authority and what else? And then I would make a bigger impact. Okay, great. But let's say I put you on the morning news show and I was able to get the hookup for you on the local ABC affiliate. What are the odds that your ideal client was watching you at that time on that network? It's pretty rare. And so with Facebook Live, I can build a fan page of my exact demographic that I want watching me. I can speak to them as often as I want. I can be fully transparent. I'm not limited to like, okay, you got a six minute segment, go. What are the three most fastest way for people to make money? I don't know, go rob a bank. You know, if you give me six minutes, that's what I'm gonna tell you. But if you give me some time, I'll be explaining to you many different models depending on how much staff you want to have, how committed you want to be to the, to the longevity of this business. Do you want fast cash or do you want long term cash, etc. And so do I. Look at it is Facebook has allowed me to build an audience. Now Instagram also YouTube and so we oftentimes will go. So we've got actually, what is it? It's a giant mic stand and I bought these different clips that hold many different iPhones. So some run three or four iPhones at the same time. Where we're broadcasting live on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube at the same time. And I'm everywhere all the time in front of the right market. And I'm giving so much value, I'm coming to them with such a giving hand that I position myself as the expert, the authority, the person who, you know, is there to save the day when no one else can. So that when I do put out a product, it's a buying frenzy. Same with my franchise.

I love that.

The way I look at it is you'll fall over yourself to go and end up on your ABC affiliate for the morning show for six minute segment. Well, how about you go live four times a day with value and content and see what that does for your business.

Exactly. I'll share a strategy with you that I just had learned this weekend on this. Do you know Keith Krantz by any chance?

No, sir.

So Keith Krantz is a. He's one of the top like Facebook and media buyers out there. And I was at a mastermind this past weekend and he was talking about one of the strategies he and some of his clients are using. Using this exact same strategy with one tweak and you may already be doing this. So but he even. He was talking about, you know, the, the ipod. I'm not the ipod. The tripod with the multiple clips on it. So you know, you may have two or three or four phones on it all taking videos of you. And he said, so one video might be coming from your Facebook fan page, or it might be going live from your fan page just like this one is here. But you also may have a private group for customers and members only that is also going live on Facebook. So there's two things going live on Facebook. One of them is inside your members area, one of them is out publicly. And he said what some of his clients are doing is they'll get to a point like right now, if we were doing this, I'd say, okay, guys, we're gonna continue this interview, but I'm gonna go ahead and close down the public feed and if you want access to this video and more, you want to go over and join my members only group. Whether you have to buy something or it's, you know, an opt in only. Right? So he's like stopping the feed and it's like. But he's giving them a way to go get it. So you understand what I'm saying?

I do. And I'm gonna do that from now on.

Kind of cool, isn't it?

Brilliant, man. I love that. Thank you for sharing and thank you. His name was Keith.

Keith Krantz. Yeah, Keith Krantz and Ralph Burns. I think they own dominate web media. I think that's the.

Holy cow, dude. We pay them like $500 a month on their service because we run our own Facebook ads and all that stuff here. So all of our media buyers learn from that platform they have.

That's cool. Well, email them and say, tell me more about this strategy.

What else do I need to do? That was awesome.

So anyway, I thought that might help you. I think Facebook Live is a tremendous or just live video. Live social video is an amazing thing to do. By the way, I just had another friend of mine, I heard this was coming, but I didn't know how to do it. And I just saw a friend of mine this morning say, hey, I'm doing a test on Facebook Live and he's using his phone and he went. Now you may already know this, he went live. And then supposedly if you swipe maybe left or right while you're live, on your phone, you can see the people who are listening, and if you click on one of them, you can give them the option to come on live with you to where it's the two of you looking like you're doing a Facebook. I'm sorry, like a FaceTime call, and it broadcasts like a picture in picture of you two talking.

Dude, have you tried this?

No, but I show. Okay, so what I will do is I will send you a link to my buddy's video who did this today, and he explains what to do while he's doing it. And he was just testing it out. But yeah, so, like, you could potentially, when you're talking like somebody who's watching right now, you might be able to go swipe over and say, okay, we're going to bring in Keith Krantz. Right. If he was watching. And you might just be able to bring him in and then potentially send him out. Almost like a little conference call. But all done with your cell phone.

I love that. Gee, imagine that. Now you've got interaction going, which again, trumps what you would do on, let's say, the local ABC NBC affiliate. Holy smokes. I love that. Mm.

Absolutely. So do you know Rob Burns, by any chance?

Heard of the name? Don't know him personally.

He just commented on your thing and said, do it now.

I can't reach my. I can't reach. I'm trying to. Far away. Yeah, I'm not gonna.

Anyway, that being said, we're sharing some stuff that's working. I want to switch gears and talk about. You're putting together a program called Empire Mastermind, Is that right?

Yes, sir.

Tell me about that.

So the Empire Mastermind is really for people who are doing a million dollars or more in their current business and want to 5, 10, 20x that. And so it's really following the entire model that I went from 2014 when my business was struggling, I actually suffered through a massive anxiety attack, several of them, in that. In that time, and built my empire to what it is now with Fit Body Boot Camp and the awesome team that I have behind me and the. All the recognition that we're getting as a franchise. And so turns out there is a smart way to scale a business, and it's using scale and strategy and not hustle and grind. And I'm a big Gary Vaynerchuk fan. We've spoken on the same stage together, and there is a place for hustle and grind. And that's when you're really building that business, like a 747 goes into hustle and grind mode when they go into full throttle on that tarmac to take off. But once that 747 is up there 30,000ft, you can feel it, they pull back and now they're using GPS and they're making sure they have the a tailwind and not a headwind. You know, they're flying at the right altitude, stacking the odds strategically in their favor to spend the least amount of fuel to get to their destination the quickest. So they even a 747 goes from hustle and grind to scale and strategy. And so that's what we have to do as entrepreneurs. So the Empire Mastermind really is taking entrepreneurs who have hustled and grinded, I guess to a million dollars or so and are now in a place of what they want, a 5, 10, 15 exit. And whether they want to create a mastermind, they want to create a high level coaching program, they want to start a franchise, they want to create a chain out of their business, they want to replicate duplicate licensees. And so it's a really neat way a supplement line. One of my new Mastermind members in that group, he's a IFBB pro bodybuilder, has been on the Olympia stage many times. He just retired and his goal is to create a supplement line while his name is still popular before he becomes a nobody. And so how do you create a supplement line? Do you organically put it in the hands of influencers and just wait for a few years for it to go, or do you go on LinkedIn and use a strategy that I have where I find the right people in other supplement companies who are already experienced in what they're. And I recruit them, and I recruit them and I just feel it's time collapsing. Using Ed o' Keefe's model of time collapsing, I want to go find the experienced people, bring them into my organization, time collapse and grow my empire faster that way. And so when you look at it that way, you time collapse by either getting the right people or getting the right injection of money into your business and using scale and strategy to grow your empire by 5, 10, 20x.

Nice. So on that LinkedIn strategy and this kind of like strategic alliance kind of, it sounds like you're saying kind of an example would be give my listeners a little bit more of a concrete example there of what?

All right, I'll give you a great example. One of my private coaching clients, we'll call him Bob, as we do have to protect him, we'll call him Bob. He was In a different niche. We decided that he was going to go in this other niche now, less sleazy of a niche, and that he was going to grow quickly. Now we knew he was going to create a business similar to this other guy out there who's got a 60 million dollar a year business and it was going to be a better product with better service. And so he said, well what do I do? I said, well why do you want to go find inexperienced marketers to get on board and buy traffic and see if that was the right audience or not. So we went on LinkedIn, we typed in that other guy's name and we found all these different people who worked for that other guy. We sent, when you upgrade your LinkedIn account to the $99 a month program, the paid program, you can send an email directly to people. And so we said, hey, we noticed that you're a professional who does this. We didn't say that you do this for, you know, you do this in Brad's company, that you're a phone closer for Brad. And we similar company we're starting, we just, hey, we notice you do this. So if I'm creating a self development company and I want to compete against Tony Robbins, which I never would, you know, I would type, hey, who works for Tony Robbins on LinkedIn? What do they do? Do I need a recruiter? Do I need ad managers? Do I need salespeople, do I need phone coaches? Great. I'm going to recruit them, offer them a similar salary or a lower salary plus some equity in the business and entice them to come over. Now they come experienced, someone has already trained them and I get to time collapse the growth of my business. And we did that for Bob's business and in the last six months he went from whole brand new niche, no marketing collateral, no list, he went from literally $0 to now $1.2 million in sales in six months.

That's beautiful. So yeah, basically poach. I mean it is, there's nothing wrong with this. Not unethical, Go poach your clients. Not your clients, sorry. Go poach your best employees from your potential competitors.

Yeah, right.

There's nothing, I mean that's the nice part and the bad like as an employee, as an employer, that's I guess the bad part about LinkedIn is having your people on there telling them what to do, being able to be seen versus but if you're trying to hire, if you're trying to get.