Mike Campion: Bacon Wrapped Genius

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em 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.

It's been about three weeks, I think, since I graced you with my presence and I'm sure that every single one of you has been sitting by your podcast app just waiting, probably, you know, with bated breath, tears of anticipation for me to get back on the show. Well, it's been a busy February, but it's been a great one. I've got a lot of cool things to share with you guys and if you're on my newsletter, you've seen some of those because I have not been totally silent. And if you're not on my newsletter, you can get on that. Just go to baconwrappedbusiness.com sign up. That's where I share the real goodies, the stuff that we don't get a chance to talk to you on the podcast. That being said, I want to continue to thank everybody who listens, subscribes and shares this and even gives me feedback. I receive a ton of emails from folks with various questions and comments and I like the compliments the most. I gotta, I mean, that's just my ego talking here. But if you want to send me an email and you haven't yet, you can always send that to ask bradaconwrappedbusiness.com once more. That's askbradaconrappedbusiness.com send me your biggest challenges, your hopes, your dreams, your fears, all the other good stuff that you'd like for me to answer. And if you have anybody you'd love to see on the show, please feel free to tell me now. That being said, let's get into, let's get into today's episode. I've got with me today a guest named Mike Campion. Mike I met just recently. I was interviewed on his podcast, the freaking Genius podcast, which I'll tell you guys all about it, but I will want to introduce Mike here in just a second, but tell you a little bit about him. First of all, Mike and I know you're there. I love your about page on your website. You've got a great sense of humor. He's got, you know, you've got a lot of the writing styles that I Appreciate and I kind of do a lot with. But for those listeners, Mike has been a, is a 17 year veteran of entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurial. What do I want to call it? Chase and entrepreneur dream building businesses. But not just little businesses. I'm talking about real businesses. From a construction business to a car dealership. He's built them up successfully, sold them off for seven figures plus. And he's got a lot of, got a lot of experience in the trenches and knows what it takes to put your big boy pants on. Get out there, take a real risk, start a business, build it up, and most importantly, in my opinion, is exit it. Because that's where the real fun comes. As a person who sold a couple businesses in my life as well, I can really relate to that. So I had such fun being interviewed by Mike the other day on his show that I invited him to be on my show as well. So this way it's not such a one sided conversation all about little old me, but it's a little bit more about Mike. So, Mike, welcome to bacon wrapped business, my brother.

Thank you so much. I feel very welcome and I like it being all about me. I like that. It's a great way to start. I'm fired up now. I was just gonna mail it in before, but now it's on.

Well, here we go. Here's the only question I'm going to ask you. Business, your thoughts.

Well, with such a well crafted answer. Let me give you a well crafted answer. Exactly. Good stuff.

I'm in another mastermind.

And.

I kind of get this from the guy who runs a mastermind. He starts it off every time the Internet. Your thoughts?

Fantastic.

Anyway, once more, welcome to the show. I'm really, I'm excited to have you here for a couple reasons. A, you launched your podcast just recently, am I right?

Just over a month ago.

Just over a month ago. And I've noticed, you know, you're having some tremendous success and you're doing some cool stuff and I want to talk to you about that because a lot of my listeners are definitely interested in podcasting, starting it up, what this is all about. They hear me doing it, they think this is kind of cool. And they love to hear people who are just starting, especially the ones who are seen some success. I want to jump to that. But even more so, I want to talk a little bit about, you know, some of your previous business experience, what you learned from it, what some of your biggest, I want to say, takeaways were because you've, you've started, you sold you know, you've reinvented yourself a couple times now, am I right?

Same old guy, but definitely reinvented the business that I was. That I'm hanging out in.

Sure, exactly. And that's what I mean. So that can be really hard for people to take that step. And most of the people listening to this show are entrepreneurs by nature. By nature. So I'm sure they can relate. But let's. And this is a little bit different because I don't usually with most of my guests, go too deep into their background because. Okay, I don't really care, honestly, because. Oh, what did you do? I used to do this, that and the other. It's like, great. Get to the stuff that people can really use. However, I think in this case it's important to go into some of the background because of what you've done are going to. They're going to really play well towards where I want this conversation to go. So let's start off the first successful business because I'm sure you've had a bunch of stuff that's failed. We all have. But what's the first successful business that you started and sold? Did you say it was a car dealership before?

No, that was my most recent business. The first business. The first successful business I started, thank goodness, was actually my first business and I didn't start it. It was a service master franchise I bought when I was 22 years old. And you could fit what I knew about entrepreneurship in a thimble and have a ton of room left over.

Yeah, I can only imagine. I knew a lot about beer. At 22.

I didn't even know what I didn't know. I was a mess. So. But through. I kind of gambled everything I had and borrowed money to get into it. And through sheer. Actually, it was a good story. I started that thing as a service master franchise. So we did office cleaning and such and every one of my employees quit on day one. So yeah, 8 o' clock in the morning I, you know, had. It was only four or five employees. A tiny company that I bought, but they all quit. So now I got, you know, 30 toilets or 100 toilets to clean. Thirty accounts, you know, whatever. I forget what it was. But you know, five o' clock that night I was out cleaning them all myself to the best I could until 5 a or 6am in the morning when they opened up thinking, what did.

I just get into?

It was awful.

Oh man, I can't imagine. So how long, how long were you in that business?

I only had it for about two and a half years and again it was off to a rough start and I just, I literally didn't know what, I didn't know if I could go back and just have like a day with that kid and tell him what's going on. Oh my gosh. I could, I'd say I'd be, I'd look 20 years younger now. I'd say, well, a headache.

What would you tell him?

What's that?

What are, what are a couple of the bigger things you would tell that 22 year old version of Mike?

Oh my goodness. I would have said pay your people more. Don't pay minimum. You know, we had cleaners, I was paying minimum wage and a lot of my headache was that, yeah, I would have said charge more, create a brand. And you're really in the business of marketing janitorial services, not in the business of providing janitorial services.

That's a great, great difference. And I've, I don't know if I've mentioned that concept on the show or not, but it's so true. Like, you know, I was talking to a good friend of mine who's in the, he's in a estate planner and he's like, you know, I do estate planning, but I'm in the mar. I own a marketing company. We happen to sell estate plans.

Exactly.

That's a, that's a fundamental shift that I believe that most entrepreneurs and business owners have to have to take. Is that, yeah, you're in the marketing business, otherwise you're not in business.

Yeah, you don't want to keep your business a secret for sure.

Bingo. So that, that's, that's profound. Did you did the business when you got out of it, did you, did you sell that franchise?

Yeah, we, I worked at it for about two and a half years and we went from literally five to zero employees. And when I sold it, we had about 30 and I sold it for like three times what I paid. And again, it was sheer, just determination, not even unwillingness to give up, just like I have no, no other options and just working my tail off that, that got it done. So the encouragement I would give is to young people or people that feel like I don't have the experience, I don't have the advantage, I don't have this, I don't have that. I can assure you I had, I was born poor and raised poor and didn't know any rich people, didn't know any entrepreneurs and just sheer 100% I will by force of will make this Successful. It was successful. And again, I could have made it a thousand times better. So coaching, There's a thousand things that would have made it easier. But if I'm coaching somebody, I'll take somebody that has no experience and no nothing and is illiterate, but just refuses to fail over a Harvard grad that's had everything in the world, knows everything, but doesn't want to do the work and gives up at the first sign of actual work or something going wrong.

Yep. Every single time. So that the success of that business, would you say then it was by brute force and will and determination versus any genius marketing things that you did or was there anything that you did there that was like, man, this. This made a huge difference.

Let me. I'm for your audience only. I will share exclusively, never before shared, My 100% of my marketing strategy for that janitorial business that I can remember, because that was like 18 years ago. So I apologize if I leave somehow. But this is all I can remember. I'm pretty sure this was it.

Facebook advertising, right? No.

What's that?

Facebook advertising.

Okay. This is like 1990 something. There was no Facebook advertising.

Mark Zuckerberg was in diapers.

Yeah, exactly. I was. I was excited to get rid of my beeper and move up to a cell phone. Like a ball or Facebook wasn't even a thing.

That's awesome.

But yeah, my whole. My whole marketing strategy was I would literally sit at my desk and print off 10 letters and I would literally, as I drove around, I was in a small town, Grand Junction, Colorado, at the time was about 50,000 population, and we did commercial cleaning. So basically just any, you know, my only potential clients were businesses that owned buildings or governments that owned buildings in town. So as I drive around and see a large building, I'd kind of take note of it. And then every week I would literally print off a letter, sign it by hand, hand address the envelope, hand stick a. Lick the envelope and put it on, put it in the mail and call those 10 people and say, hey, I'd like to. Did you get my letter? I'd like to come out and give you a bid. That was all I did to grow the business. So again, you don't have to be smart. If you're willing to be stupid and work hard, it's better to be smart. But if hard work will get you there too, even though, you know, it was such a brute force, silly way looking back, but it got the job done. I made money.

That's awesome. So skipping ahead a few years you sold that business. So was the next thing you did was start a car dealership?

No, I had. That was. I sold that when I was like 25. And I sold my car dealership just last year. I was like 39 or 40. So the next thing I did, I kind of spent the next eight years, I bought a fabric company that manufactured and designed bags and covers and awnings and tents and things like that and just kind of built that up, was doing well. And then I got age 30, I got divorced. I had spent so much time with my business and got just totally out of whack in terms of where my passion was and my focus and my attention and my love was all towards my business and not good for a marriage. So that's. I always, whenever I have the opportunity to talk to entrepreneurs, I always say, don't, don't do that. Because I realized once I got divorced that all the effort I was putting in was so I could have a nice house with my family, so I could have nice things for my family, so I could have security for my family. And when you take away the security or the family, none of that stuff really made any difference.

You're absolutely right. And it's probably the biggest trap that I'd say most entrepreneurs get in and fail to realize that until it's too late.

Well, and even if you're just a cold hearted bastard that doesn't have any feelings for your family, I lost all my money too. I was absolutely bankrupt.

So. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So you spend eight years, or in my case, I spent eight years focusing on this thing I thought was super important. And then I got a real cold ice bucket of water to the face and I had to start over.

Right. You know, there's an exercise that I learned years ago and it's pretty appropriate for this, man, it makes so much more impact visually. But just imagine a square with four grids, like, you know, four boxes right beside each other and you've got four parts of your life. You know, you got health in one corner, you've got money, you know, your health, your money. You've got your family in another corner, and then you've got your friends in another corner. And if I were to ask you that, you know, tell you, Mike, you absolutely have to get, you know, give up one of these boxes right now and start from zero. Family, friends, lose all your family, lose all your friends, lose all your health, or lose all your money. What would you, what would you pick to lose?

Man, I hate to say it because all My friends are going to hate me. But it either be money or fan or friends for sure. Definitely. Sure wouldn't be family, sure wouldn't be health.

Right. Well, and most people will say money, and I mean, friends may have been. It may have been, I don't know, best friends. I don't remember exactly what it was. But most people end up saying, well, money, because it's. The other things are so much more valuable like family, relationships, health and all of that stuff. And most people say, well, I give up money. And yet most of us, especially entrepreneurs, but everybody else as well, focuses so much on making the money to the detriment of family, to the detriment of health, to the detriment of other relationships, everything else. So it's. Talk about hypocrisy. We value one thing, but then we end up giving up that thing that we value to get the thing that we value least.

It's something that is unique to humans. I don't know, this whole, like, our beliefs and what we truly believe, and it's not that we don't really care about our family more than our business, but somehow we get into this trap where our beliefs don't line up with our actions. And that's never a healthy way to live. Not just because of the consequences. It just doesn't work.

Right, right. And it strains everything. You strain that part of the system and things fall apart. So it's a big entrepreneurial trap. But you said, okay, so you went through that trap. You had to probably start over again. So at what point did you start the car dealership?

So the. So, well, fast forward. So when I got divorced when I was 30, I started a whole new business at that point and then sold it six, seven years later. And then we were doing a bunch of work and I kind of told my wife, hey, we're going to take a break, we're going to step back. And we really didn't start the car dealership with visions of grandeur. We're just going to buy like five or ten cars and kind of sell to friends and family, just have it be a super lifestyle business, make a couple bucks and have fun. And apparently I don't do well with that. So, you know, two years later, we got a big building and 100 cars on the lot, and employees run around all sorts of nonsense. So that's why we kind of sold it. And it moved into something with less brick, less mortar, less headache, less investment, less inventory, less rigging, regulation for the government, and on and on and on.

Okay, Cool. So anyway, when you say you moved into that, that was still the car business or that was something else?

Yeah, no, the car business was. Yeah. When I sold my. Yeah, I moved into the car business when I was about 36, 37 and just that kind of built really quickly.

Okay, what kind of cars were you selling?

I didn't take on a franchise because my only franchise I ever had was a service master and I was not a big fan of the power and control they have. So we just did an independent dealership and we'd, you know, average car was 10, 15 grand. So we weren't selling pre owned cars. What's that?

Pre owned cars?

Yeah, all used cars, different brands, you know, anything from Hyundai's to Porsches.

Nice. Let me ask you this curiosity, what's it typically? What did it cost you to open up a car dealership? Because a lot of folks, you know, myself, I've never personally looked into that type of business and I don't know what I don't know.

Right.

I'd be in your situation. So what kind of capital did you need to start car dealership?

Well, that's a good question and I'll tell you what I needed. But that doesn't mean you couldn't do it for a lot less and you could absolutely spend a lot more. So it really depends on what you're going to do. The space, you know, if you're just going to rent a small space, then, you know, you might want to have four, five or six months of rent saved up. The cars you can either do. We just exited our other business and had cash so we didn't need flooring, which is what they call the financing for floors or for cars. So we, you know, we had quite a bit of money there. But you don't need that. If you can get a flooring line from your bank, you know you can. If you get a flooring line from your bank, it's really not much more or less capital intensive than any other business. If you can't get a flooring line, then just add what a regular business will cost plus whatever your inventory is going to cost.

Right, okay. And then out of the gate, how did you, I mean, you set up shop, you've got some cars, you put your sign up. What did you do to market your car dealership?

Well, the better thing is, so what happened? I did exactly that. I bought some cars, I put my sign up and you know, ready to go. And nothing happened for. We didn't sell any cars like two or three months it was devastating.

Yikes.

Yeah, it was awful. And that was. That was. If I could go back, I would definitely. I wish I could coach myself even in that business. I just sold it less than a year ago. If I could go back, I would really say the same thing. You are. You're not in the car business. You're in the market. You own a marketing company that markets car business or car businesses or sell cars. Because we did the auto trader and the cars.com, we kind of did what everybody else did, and it worked to a degree. But it's like the Yellow Pages when you're an autotradercars.com and your 2011 Honda Accord with 60,000 miles is amongst all 12 other Honda Accords of 60,000 miles. So it's kind of a price game at that point. There's not going back. I wouldn't market it like that. I would have tried to find those people on my own, invest the money, not the money the auto trader invested, but just invest on my own so I could have a conversation outside of that realm with people looking to buy cars, not just be one of a thousand dealers in autotradercars.com and so on.

Right. That makes sense. Now, what's the biggest problem or challenge you faced when it came to the marketing of your business? And I want to preface that with something. So I know there's people who listen to my. Who listen to my podcast, who are marketing consultants, and they work with local businesses. And there's one former business partner of mine that I started off with, like eight years ago, and he lives in Dallas now, and he specifically works with car dealerships, does everything from SEO to reputation management, pay per click, and all this stuff. You know, he's like a digital marketing agency with a lot of focus on car dealerships. And he may be listening to this. He better be. But tell me, from the perspective of somebody who owned a car dealership, what are some of the biggest challenges that you faced that people could help them out with?

Well, oddly enough, the challenges there were just so many. So definitely getting, you know, interested buyers into the lot was huge. So I would say that would probably be one of my biggest frustrations, but the others would be not having anything to do with marketing at all. So much regulation is why I got out of the business. There's literally, I think we had eight or nine government agencies that we answered to, and they all had different rules and regulations, and sometimes they would conflict with one another, and oftentimes they just made no business sense. So you're either, you know, stupid stuff. Like to give you an example, just a few people interested in the car business. When you buy a car in Arizona, at least you may not get the title because you buy it from an auction or wherever. You may not get the title for two or three weeks. And the car business all about turn. You got to sell that thing quick. If it's been on your lot for a month, it's old. You got to get out of there. So by law, you can't sell that car if you don't have the title in hand. But it was just such a ridiculous law. Nobody just. You couldn't possibly stay in business if you did that. But there were so many laws like that. And obviously you're not doing anything selling a car without the title in hand. You're not trying to screw anyone or take advantage. Of course you get in the title, but you're breaking the law. So you're kind of in a spot where you could just literally any government agency could walk in and hit you with a half a million dollars worth of fines or a million dollars worth of fines any day that they wanted, which is just a heavy hammer to have overhead trying to run a business.

Yeah, I can see why you got out of there. That would have made me head for the doors. Did you do any Internet or direct Internet marketing or direct response marketing?

Well, I got to tell you that we didn't do any direct. We did. No, not really. Very little direct response marketing. We obviously had a website with all of our cars and things like that. But the problem is with car dealerships, there's so many out there and, you know, each unit might be worth 2,000 bucks. So everybody's trying to help car dealers sell cars because, you know, if you're trying to get, you know, $5,000 a month in service, which is pretty good if you're going to, you know, if you're trying to sell something, hey, I've got this $5,000 product. You don't have to have to have many of those $5,000 a month contracts to have a very good living for yourself. And to a car dealer, it's like, well, that's only two or three cars, if I can say three cars. It's worth it. So there's. There's just an influx of experts. And I'm doing the air quotes, which you can't see, but I'm doing them in there trying to take your money as a car dealer. Like I've got this new, new and improved greatest and you know, you just. A lot of it's just learning by trial and error.

Oh, okay, that's great. So did you, did you, was there anything that was more effective than others? Whether, whether it was just having it up there? I mean, did you do all the. Tell me you did some of those cheesy TV commercials that you see with you out in the parking lot. Tell you what I'm going to do. Come on down to Mike's.

Yeah, that was the nice thing is we didn't do any of that nonsense. So the people that came in had a very good experience. We spent a lot of time on reputation management for car dealers. And I'd imagine many of the businesses out there, that is huge. You got to make sure Yelp and Google and there was something called dealerrater, which is kind of a, you know, any sort of place that, that is a warehouse for reviews and customer opinion. You got to be all over that in a car, in the car business, 1,000% and in most businesses only 800%. But that, that was huge for us. Cool.

Tell me more about that. Did you hire somebody to help you with reputation management or did you guys do that yourself?

No, we did it all ourselves. And it was not really a hot, like a segmented thing. Like you make sure that our, our reputation is good. We all had to make sure our reputation is good. I could have hired a guy, pay him a half a million dollars a year. But if we're out there pissing off customers, we what's he gonna do? Whereas if we're doing a kick ass job and killing with our customers and they love us and we say, hey, the way we make business, if you look at our dealership, it's little we make, we make a lot of money from referrals. So if we did you good, tell the world and if we did bad, tell us, we'll fix it, right? So it was really a thing. We had to live day by day by day by day.

Hey, an ounce of prevention, right? Worth.

We put a pound of prevention. Can't be too, you know, because car dealers, they don't, they don't trust you at all. We did a lot of what we did was to open up that trust. We spent a lot of time on, you know, managing our name out in the world. We had our dog, we bring to the dealership, we had a popcorn machine. We wouldn't go out to the people. We just yell from across the lot, hey, if you need anything, let us know. We're not gonna come bug you. So we went over the top to make people feel really comfortable. That's great.

Yeah, I love that alone, because, you know, everybody can relate to that moment. You just walk up, you're kind of browsing around, you don't know what you want, and then here he comes doing the slow walk right over to you.

Well, and it's so funny because cardio or not, if you're in any business where you've got people physically in your location, it's so funny. I never tested the, hey, how you doing? How can I help you? But I gotta imagine it's well over 80% now. I'm just looking, you know. You know, some sort of get the hell away from me response.

Yeah.

But I did test. It was probably. It was about 75% when we yell from across the dealership, because first we just wouldn't come out at all. And then people would be like, hey, you never came out and serviced us. We felt like, you know, you're being rude.

Right.

So we come out and get 20 or 30ft away from them. So we're not screaming, but, you know, not where they feel like we're being approached. And we just go, hey, we don't come out and bug you. It's hot out here. We're lazy. So if you have any questions, come on in. And they would literally turn around and start walking. And 75% of the time they go, hold on, I have a question. So it changed from 80% of the time, the customer going, get the heck out of my face. And the salesperson trying to overcome that to the customer going, no, no, please come back and talk to me. Huge difference.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Now, Mike, you would use that in basically all of your marketing. You want your customer to be coming towards you as opposed to you coming towards them and them trying to get away.

Yeah, attract them, don't chase them.

Exactly. Hundred percent.

Works with, you know, trying to date women, too. You know, things that make them attracted to you as opposed to chasing them and cat calling them. One of them works way better than the other.

So for anyone that's seen a picture of my wife and myself, you know that I'm good at that too. Things I know. Business and ladies. That's it.

That's awesome. So what was your biggest fear in that business? You know, what was the thing that kept you up at night?

Honestly, it probably would break down to where my next customer was because, you know, I forget what my nut was. But it was 60, 70 grand, something like that, a month to open the doors so, and if you don't have 70 or $80,000 of business booked on, you know, the first of the month, you're kind of just hoping you have a good month. And some months we'd crush it and just make a ton of money, and some months we wouldn't, and I'd have to write a check for the privilege of doing all that work. And that was frustrating. So where. If I could just have a consistent stream of customers, that would have solved a lot. That would solve a lot of problems.

Perfect. So let's talk about. You sold that business, and that was what, like a year ago or something?

I'm sorry, say again?

You sold that business. And what was that roughly a year ago?

June 23, 2014.

Oh, wow. Not even a year ago, because this is February of 2015. So congratulations on that. Now you've got this podcast and you are talking to other freaking geniuses. It's the Freaking Genius podcast.

Yeah. Conversations with the Genius is the actual name, and you can find it atthefreaking Genius.com.

Okay. Yeah, perfect. So I kind of thought I knew there was one or the other, but Conversations with the Genius. And you're doing some very similar stuff to like, I'm doing, which is interviewing other people who have, you know, accomplished in business, have done cool things, having conversations with them. Tell me about what you just, you know, when you decided to launch this and what you've done in that time period in order to get this, you know, in order to get listeners, in order to get traction.

Yeah, for sure. Honestly, I'm. Right now, I'm still trying to find my niche because I've sold a couple businesses, both for seven figures in the last three years. So I'm not in a spot where, you know, man, if I don't get a customer of some sort, I can't pay my mortgage. So. That's lovely. So honestly, I'm just the kind of deal I had with myself and my wife when we sold the car dealership, because she really got screwed on that when we sold the construction company and cashed out. And it was like, hey, let's take a couple years and just be real low key. And that was the agreement. And then two and a half years later, like I said, 100 cars, a lot, bunch of employees, we owned our building. It's totally just not just like we talked about. Family is really important, but why aren't you spending time with your family? You know, for me, lifestyle is important, but I just couldn't help be in this business and not grow It, Right. So I've intentionally been in a business where it's all me. I can't hire any employee, you know, maybe an assistant, something like that, but I can't, I can't explode. It's just me and what I can do. So that's part of it. And the second part is just trying to find out who I know my niche is going to be small businesses. I want to help six figure businesses grow to seven, but I'm not sure exactly who I want to work with. I'm like, you know, I'm going to do this podcast and honestly, I don't even. I really just find people, they only have to meet two criteria and if they meet these two, I will literally have a hobo on the street on my podcast. They have to be of personal interest to me. So I have to be like, this is a dude I want to take to lunch and pick his brain and just go, what is going on in there? And they have to have some sort of value to my audience. So we've had a sommelier, we've had, what's his name, the hip guru swami. I can't, he's a monk. So we've had all sorts of people and they all can, I believe, bring back value to my. I interviewed my wife for Valentine's Day. That's awesome. Yeah. Is that what, what, what it looks like being married to an insane entrepreneur? So, yeah, that's what we talk about. We have a ton of fun and right now I'm not even trying to monetize it, but the audience is coming and growing. I'm sure I'll find a way to make a buck when the time comes, but as of now, I'm just having too damn much fun.

That's awesome. And that's, you know, very similar to my strategy as well or my criteria for being on the show. I've got a. I have to personally want to talk to you and I have to think that my audience, you know, you have something my audience wants to hear as well. And I think it's a great strategy to keep it up for you and the passion. And the more passionate you are, the more your audience can tell you launched it about a month ago. I'm on your site right now. It looks like about 15 episodes in the can and probably a lot more recorded and ready to be distributed. What have you done to get the word out so far? So for anybody interested in podcasting, thinking about it, or even the podcasters out there, new recent veteran or whatever, what's Worked well for you so far.

Well, first of all, let me just tell you where we're at. So, people. Because again, I'm so new to this. I'm gonna tell you my numbers. I have no idea if they're good or bad. But just so people know, if you're doing better than this, don't listen to me. Do what you're doing. If you're doing worse, you know, I'll tell you how I got there. We launched January 30th. Somewhere in there. 20th 30th. And it's March 4th, so is that a month and a week?

Something like that.

And it's been growing really fast. So it used to be our bit. A day would be like 50 downloads and then 100, and then we just had our first 500 day. So we're at 7,500 downloads since launch, but we're already tracking about 10,000 for the month of March. So it's been going pretty quick.

And it's only March 4th.

Yeah. Because we've been doing about 400 downloads per day. So it sounds like, wow, if you only did 7,500 in February, it was. Either way, we're tracking 10,000 because it's just been, you know, every. Just every third day will beat our former best day.

Nice. No, that's. I think you're doing really well. Especially you're only about a month. Little over a month in. So you. You put it out there. What did you do specifically to get it off the ground besides tell all your friends and family? You know, did you have a list of small business owners? Did you have a marketing list that you could blast this out to, you know, people?

Yeah, I'm glad you asked, because I wanted to highlight that. So no one out there goes, well, he's doing well, but he had this big list that I had no list.

So would you. What'd you do to immediately get it off the ground the first week or two?

Yeah. So first of all, just to be totally honest, exactly what you said. I did. Friends and family and I don't know how nitty gritty you want, but I'll start. I'll start getting the details.

As I said, we've got. We definitely have some other podcasters on here. And heck, I mean, I've been doing this for about eight months. I'm. Maybe there's something I could learn on there.

Okay. So the first thing I did get it out to friends and family. Second thing I did is, you've got to have. I focused all my energy on Itunes, the big kind of distributors are itunes and Stitcher, with itunes being the 800 pound gorilla on the market and then Stitcher being kind of the very, very small little brother, but still a legitimate platform. So instead of saying, hey, I'm going to focus on both of them and try and kill them both, I said, I'm going to totally ignore Stitcher for now and try and kill it on itunes because they've got this new and noteworthy thing. For the first eight weeks you can be featured and you kind of have a chance to compete because I'm never going to compete with Adam, Carolla or cereal or just massive. I can't compete with them. So they do this New and noteworthy. So I'm only competing with people that have launched within eight weeks. So you've got this beautiful two months where they're going to advertise your podcast on basically the front page of itunes at no charge in the New and noteworthy. So the key is to get on that thing and stay on it for the eight weeks. And we've been. Another thing is you can select up to three categories because there's the main new and noteworthy, and there's like 12 categories like arts, business, education, entertainment, technology, comedy. There's 10 or 15 of those categories. A lot of people only put themselves in one. Like, oh, I'm a business thing. So I just put it one. No, no, no, put it in all three. So I'm business, technology and education. Not because I think that those are perfect, but of the choices I had, those are the three best. And if they're going to give me the opportunity to be new and noteworthy on three pages, I'm dang well gonna take advantage of it. So we've been all over the new noteworthy and it's funny, it'll move hourly. We're number one in business and then we're off six hours later and then we're at number 15. And so. But that's huge. I can tell we're on new and noteworthy because you can just watch your downloads go up faster.

Oh, yeah. So. And I remember those days fondly. The first eight. What is it? The first eight weeks.

Eight weeks, two months.

Yeah. I wish that I could get back into that. I didn't exploit it as much as I should have, but that's awesome. So that, that was one step, which was just making sure you're. You're across. You've got multiple categories that you're in. Biz, tech and education. You told go ahead, make sure you're.

Getting lots of you've got to get because they what my understanding is a 48 hour look back. So say you do a huge launch with all your friends and family. Like we had day one we launched, it was like 240 downloads. That was just friends and family and stuff. But it wasn't. So we didn't have a lot. But I still got a new noteworthy because I had like 20 reviews or ratings of reviews. So on itunes you get a rating which is five star, four star, three star. Those are good. But you really want the reviews where they write in. You know, Mike's great, he's a genius. I love him. Listen, you know, blah, blah, blah. So the reviews is what you really want. So subscriptions rating reviews are in my understanding about 90% of what, what goes well. Which is good because you can't get downloads. Right. If you know Snoop Dogg is, I think launched his podcast when I launch mine. So I just, he's got a huge list. I can't keep up with him in terms of downloads. But ratings and reviews, I can still keep up. So that's a huge thing is you got to make sure people are subscribing, rating and reviewing. Second thing is I launched with four episodes. If you just launch with one, they can't subscribe, they can only download. I launched with my first three, which are just my first three regular episodes and then my episode 000. And episode 000 is just me talking for eight minutes saying hey, we're gonna go three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So going to be about. Here's who I am, just about me and the show and what they can expect. So everyone that starts have somewhere to go. So if you're going to start launch with episode 000 plus three episodes. So everybody that pushed to it when they subscribe, that's now four downloads because they're going to subscribe and download all four episodes onto their thing onto their whatever device they're using. And if you only have one, they can't subscribe and your downloads get cut in a quarter.

Yep, that's perfect. So now what about getting the word out and telling after afternoon noteworthy telling other people have you got, I mean I've seen you do this, I do this as well. So if you're on the, you know, if you're on the show, like for instance, I'm. I once my episode with you is live, I'll share it with my audience and with my, with my list and social media and you know, you'll do the same and I know you do that with your. Your other guests. So besides that, is there anything else you've done in order to encourage publicity? Have you bought any ads? Have you done anything really strategic or tactical there?

You know, the only thing I did is I had Russell Brunson, who's a big Internet guy. I don't know how many know that, but he's a mentor of mine and a bit of a friend. So he was kind enough to come on. And I thought, man, this guy's just got a huge following. So I ran ads on Facebook to people that liked runs Russell Brunson, and it really didn't do much good. Now I put like five or ten bucks a day because it was more testing the waters and just random to, hey, here's a free, free thing of Russell Brunson, right? And it really didn't blow up his. His. His downloads so much. So that was the only advertising I did, and that didn't really work.

Right. So was there anything else that you've done to achieve? Because those, as I said, those are. Those are numbers that most people might think, wow, that's. That'd be impossible for me to get, you know, so early. And you actually had a better start than I did my first. I don't remember what my numbers were, but I didn't have how many. What did you say, like, 7,500 downloads since.

Yeah, we're about 7, 500 on March 4th, and we started January 30th.

Yeah, I didn't do that my first month. So there's. There's some people out there who might think that that's impossible, but it sounds like you just. You put. You put out good content. You had people share it. You did a. You did a few of the things right in setting it up, and then the people found you. You didn't go out, am I correct, and do anything really.

It was. It was really the new and noteworthy. So just make sure you've got a plan to get, you know, two or three. You want two or three reviews every day for. For eight weeks. So figure out a plan for that.

What has been your plan to get the reviews?

Well, I was mna.

By the way, guys, if you're listening to this, go review. Not only my show, obviously, but go review conversations with a genius in itunes. Leave Mike.

Yeah, for sure. Subscribe, rate, and review is what. What you want to do. So throw Brad a bone and myself a bone if you like what you're hearing. Yeah. Subscribe, rate, and review. If you hate it, just do nothing. Right, Exactly.

So what do you do in order to encourage the reviews? Because it's hard to get people off their butts to go do that.

So hard. Super, super hard. So friends and family, that probably was my first 40 or 50 reviews, which is still tough, right? That doesn't mean I had 40, 50 friends. That probably meant I had 200. I reached out to, to, you know, because people just don't want to. I don't know what percentages were, but, you know, so my first 40 or 50 subscriptions rating reviews are that I'm in something called podcasters paradise, which is a paid. I don't know. Yep.

Johnny Dumas.

Yeah, Johnny Lee Dumas. Great thing. A lot of the stuff I'm telling you comes from there. So if you've got an extra thousand bucks or whatever he's charging and you're gonna do a podcast, it's a no brainer. Do it. I'm not an affiliate. I get nothing for it. It's just a great program. But he has something called Pay It Forward Fridays and it's a huge community. So you can kind of, instead of everybody spamming everybody all the time on Fridays, there's one post and you can go on and say, hey, I'd like to review. I want to learn about some new podcasts and check them out and I'll give a review. And I'd love you guys to check out my podcast and give a review. So depending on how diligent you are on that, you can usually get five or ten reviews from there. And again, you can try and scam the system, but I always said, hey, I want an honest review. I didn't listen to whole shows, but I listened to five or six minutes of a show before I gave reviews, rating, review. I always encourage people, hey, give me an honest review. Like if it's terrible, don't put it on itunes. Tell me and so I can get better. If you like it, put it on itunes. So that kind of community helped a lot.

That's great. That's great. So anything else you're working on? You've got this. I mean, this is recent. You're growing it. Is there anything, any other plans out there that you're making?

As of now, I've just got my blog and my podcast. I've got a book coming out. I'm a freaking genius. Why don't I have more money?

I love that.

Yeah, people seem to love it. So it's. Right now I'm just putting a lot of kind of good stuff into the world and I'VE always found if you give and serve money, money tends to show up pretty quick.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. So what is a. This is a question I like to ask all my guests, which is what is a nut that you're trying to crack right now in your business? You're trying to figure it out. You're actively searching for either education, skills, resources, people on it, and you'd like help either from me or from my listeners or whatever out there besides saying, I just trying to get more followers. That's fine, we know that. But is there any other nuts you're trying to crack in your business?

Yeah, there is a very specific one. Right. That's literally right now is my niche. We talked a little. Or niche. I don't know if you're classy. You say niche. I'm not. So I say niche. So yeah, I've got, you know, kind of this general idea of I'd like to help small business owners become not so small, six figures grow to seven. But that's not really a niche. That's a pretty broad market. Six figure businesses. Yeah. So I'm really trying to break that down into who do I want to work with? So that's my, that's what I'm working on, literally as we speak. Nice.

Have you made any progress with that? Have you started to whittle it away?

Yeah, right now I think I've got it. It's funny because, you know, I've got my experiences with car dealerships and construction and my cleaning company and some other stuff, but I'm like, well, marketing is the same or helping businesses grow is exactly the same. So instead of going to people that don't have money, I gotta go. People have money. So I'm thinking CPAs, plastic surgeons, attorneys, people where, you know, if I can help them, just like the car dealership, you know, people are drawn to that because if they can get, help them get three or four customers a month, that's. That's an $8,000 difference in their bottom line. So that's, Those are the kind of customers I'm looking to work with.

And if there's a CPA, a surgeon, etc. Somebody who actually fits that, if they're listening, what kind of stuff is it that you would do that you foresee yourself doing? And I'm actually not saying this to plug you, I'm trying to help you find that sweet spot, more of an exercise. But what is it that you would traditionally do for them? Is there a certain area of marketing you would Help them out with or business. I mean, is it more general business? Is it, is it more marketing? Is it.

The concept I've got now is I really, really enjoy the podcast. I meet some super cool people. I've gotten a lot of feedback. People just love it. So I was like, man, I'd love to just do this for. And I'm pretty sure I'll be able to at some point, you know, maybe six months, maybe a year, maybe two years, monetize my audience. But I, you know, I'd like to, I'd like to go a little quicker than that.

Yep.

So I was like, man, I'd love to help other people do podcasts, but I don't know that the people I want to work with, attorneys and all that, want to do podcasts. I was like, man, I do it for them, but I just can't charge enough because it's so stinking much work.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah. But so what I was thinking is, you know, maybe I could do some sort of thing where I do a podcast and a blog and maybe license it to multiple attorneys or multiple plastic surgeons. Obviously not in the same market. Right. So I would do three, three or four in the same market. Because then obviously. But if a guy in Boise, Idaho has got a podcast with his kind of intro and outro on it, and I license that same podcast speaking to the exact same audience to a guy in Seattle, Washington, with his intro and outro and call to action, I could sell that same, you know, piece of content 10 or 20 times. They get great value because I can put a lot of money and time into it because I'm getting paid well. And the only downside is it's going to be in other markets. But again, if you're in, if you're a family law attorney in Phoenix, you're not worried about some lady getting divorced in Tulsa. Just not. Bingo. Not in your universe now.

So, so, and then with the content, are. Are you saying that your stuff would be the content, but then they have the pre and post roll bumpers?

No, I'd have to do my. I'd have to do my, My podcast. My podcast. That's totally me. It's conversations with the genius that will continue. It would be a pod. That's why I got to pick a niche. So if I'm working with plastic surgeons, it would be all about looking good, feeling plastic surgery.

So it's. I got you. But you're not asking them to be the, to be the host or you are?

No, I would do everything that's literally done. I'll actually including, you know, making a blog, the show host notes, everything. It's just like you magically have all this content that's of value to your customers. You don't have to do anything other than write me a check every month.

That's great. That's great. I love it. And, you know, this has been an awesome conversation, Mike. I enjoyed the conversation we had the other day when I was in the hot seat. You've done a great job and you.

Killed it, by the way.

Thank you.

You haven't released yet, but I have high nothing but good expectations that you're going to get a ton of downloads.

Awesome. And same thing here. I think that. I think my folks are going to love this. It's a different twist than a lot of the digital marketing strategies that we've touched on. And it's good to hear about people who've done the more traditional businesses had the ups and downs. And I love the fact that you're like, look, some of this stuff wasn't even through because you're a business genius. It was just sheer willpower and getting out there and just, you know, everything from just, you know, rolling up your sleeves and cleaning the toilets yourself when you had to to just understanding the importance of reputation management. But it's actually, you know, preventive reputation management. Just giving awesome service and asking for those reviews and asking for people to reward you. And, you know, a lot of times I think business owners think that there is a secret sauce, and oftentimes it's just, if you do the fundamentals right, so many people don't. You know, there's a. The world is filled with mediocrity, and if you're simply a little bit above mediocre, you can stand out like the cream on top.

Hence, you're in my podcast. Going to the top of the world, my friend.

Boom. I love it. Well, Mike, if. If people want to listen to your show, Conversations with a Genius, and they're on their iPhone, machine or anything like that, what's the best way for them to find you?

Well, you can go to itunes and just search Conversations with a Genius, or you can go to the freaking genius dot com. Either way, you'll get hooked up.

Awesome, Mike, thank you very much for being on the show and my listeners. Thank you very much. Hey, as we just mentioned a minute ago, Mike was talking about reviews. I love to see them. Apple loves to see them. The more we get, the higher we go, and the more people listen to this That's a way to pay me back. I don't ask for money to do this. I do this partially out of because I love it and partially because I know you guys do as well. And one of the best ways you can thank me is just head over to baconratbusiness.com iTunes. It'll take you right to the itunes app or the podcast app, and you can leave me a review. Make sure you're subscribed to the show so you don't miss awesome episodes like this. And speaking of subscribed, go sign up for my newsletter@baconrantbusiness.com there's a link right there to get on. And I don't spam you. I don't market. I only share really cool stuff with you. You know, dude, I get it. I am a marketer and I'm out there. But I've been on newsletters where I get spammed every single day for different stuff that I didn't sign up with. You will not get that if you're on my list. I think of you as, you know, one of my people, and I treat you the way I want to be treated. So go sign up for that now so that I can and makes a whole bunch of money off of affiliate offers that you don't care about. Just kidding. Once more, I do appreciate you, Mike. I appreciate everybody listening. And until next time, if you got a problem, wrap it in bacon.