How Cutco Built an Army of High-Performing Entrepreneurs

We won five national titles when I was running an office is we simplified the selling position so much, we didn't necessarily even need to have good people sell the product because we gamified it. Where a lot of other offices were trying to teach them how to sell the knives, we just taught them how to take five good shots. Hey, if you sat down with five really good homeowners, two or three of them are going to buy. So we like really simplified the learning curve and broke it down into like smaller increments.

Do you think you spent more time on referral based training than you did on selling the actual knives or was it almost equal? So. Hey, Mike, great to see you again. Thank you very much for doing this and for agreeing to be on our YouTube channel and to share with all of our viewers and listeners. Really appreciate it.

Hey, thanks for having me. This is a pleasure.

Yeah, you and I were just chatting earlier before we went live and you had spoken to our co alliance earlier in the year, but you and I also met through a mutual friend of ours and through somebody. I guess that really is where you started off your career in the Cutco world through, through John Ruland. Can you maybe kind of give us some of the backstory as to how you. You learned about John and kind of the success that you had in the Cutco world and even tell people what Cutco is because it's like some people know and others have never heard of it.

Yeah. Well, the Cutco product is a kitchen knife. It's a kitchen knife company, American made, guaranteed forever. It's amazing. I spent 20 years there and when I was new to the business 2004, there was always the name John Rulin on all the sales reports. And he was the guy like he was the best of the best because he transitioned into business gifting when that was never something, anything ever thought about with the company. So he was selling hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. And we're like, he was, he him by himself was selling more than offices. So it was really just wild to be a fly on the wall and just learn from him from a distance, but then see him speak at conferences and whatnot. And then he wrote the giftology and that was transformative for me. So I spent 20 years, I trained over 5,000 sales representatives to do about $20 million of the Cutco sales. I paid my way through college selling Cutco. So it's. It's the largest student recruiting company in North America and they recruit anywhere from 50 to 100,000 students every year. And it's foundational. It's a foundational student leadership development program. So it was a privilege for me to, to be able to learn how to do that through college. But it was an also an honor to spend 20 years teaching and helping other students to be able to do that for themselves. So it was a great place for me.

So it's interesting when, when I first learned of Cutco, it was called vector marketing, or at least maybe it still is vector in a way. But I would got involved in a group called College Pro Painters and then I kind of never heard of Cutco again until I Met John in 2007. But what's really strange is I co authored a book with Hal Elrod, who was a Cutco guy. John Vrooman and I became very close friends and John was a former Cutco guy. Justin Donald and I became friends and Justin's had me on his podcast. He's a Cutco guy. Brad Weimert and I are very, very close friends. We're going cat skiing at the end of next month together and I've stayed at his home and he was at my wedding in Greece and a very small wedding in Greece. A former Cutco guy. I'm like, I'm surrounded by Cutco people and not college pro people. And I've been exceedingly impressed with the organization. What do you think it was that as you mentioned, it was a student development program, but what was it about Cutco that made so many successful business people? And I'm sure there were lots that failed. Right? So there is the cream definitely rose to the, to the top and you were on the right side of the bell curve. But what was it that made so many so successful? What were the skills that you learned and what were the, the character traits that I guess made some of the ones successful?

Yeah, there's, there are the Hal Elrods and the Justin Donalds and the John Berghoff's and you know, the rulings of the world. These, the, maybe it's just the name John or something, but they were, they were awesome and they had fast starts and rose to the hall of fame really quick. And then there were guys like me who never sold anything in their life. It was a little bit slow and steady, but the one thing that I think all of us have in common is that everyone above us was in the exact same position that we were in. So those of us that saw that there was an opportunity at growing as a person and what we put in is what we get out and someone above us was Kind of like there to like Sherpa us. We kind of like trusted that. And, and it was, it was, it was being young. And in most cases when we get our first commission check, we're like, holy crap. What I put in is what I get out. If I work harder, I get more and more. And then when we hit the low, it was like we already got a taste of the high. So it was like. And someone was there to like, kind of pull us out of that, pull us out of the struggles when we were young. There's something to that. And those that I think on the, the, the ones that quit that don't kind of make it through that on the bell curve that you said they probably were going to stop something whether it was cut go or something else. But those of us that kind of stuck with was probably because we had a mentor that we, we really trusted and that was there with us every step of the way. That's my, that's my hallucination.

Yeah, I think, I think it's that you actually were, were driven and tenacious. Right. So they had the tenacity to grind it out. The ones that were successful, goal oriented. So you were chasing the people on the leaderboard and going after the best, but also very receptive to coaching. It seemed like you were very receptive to, to growth and being mentored and learning from others. Does that kind of add up?

I guess I think so. I think, I think you, you pair some of that in and you, you trickle in a little bit of wins, you know, strikes the ego a little bit. And then the personal growth aspect. Like, I failed reading in middle school because I didn't want to read the books. But then my mentor gives me a book, how to win friends and influence people. And I read that book and reading became learning. And then, you know, now I wrote nine books and like, I love reading and I love learning. So the mentorship and the gu of like what these people were, they were compensated. So they, like our mentors made money when we made money. So they were incentivized to help us succeed. Where, like teachers, they were paid the same whether I get an A or an F. So it was just like a whole different paradigm and of like a job that we probably had before, like working, bagging groceries or something.

Do you think that's carried forward now in your career and in the business that you've built today? Like in the business that you work with business leaders on today? Do you think you carry some of those same, I guess, tenants with you 100%.

It's all, I mean everything is people. So like being able to have a people focus, like I sometimes I go to places and I'm like man, how, how are they still in business or how are they functioning? Because they treat their people like, like you know, we'll go duty. I don't know if there's a clean show. Like they sometimes they're just like they don't really think from the user experience standpoint. And I think that's something that Cutco and Vector did a really, really good job with us is they raised us in a healthy environment. They to help us have a people centered focus. And then I kind of added on along with other names that you said where it's like you add the people and then you have a good product which we have at Cut Go and then we started learning about processes and like huh, how can we develop a process that's even better? And some of the great minds of Cutco like the ones you listed, the Hows, the Johns and Danes, Begaard and Justin Donald and like some of these great names, it's like we can make the process a little bit better. So it's like people process product and then you know that leads to higher revenue or profits and then we start seeing the success and it's almost like this really beautiful circle of like creating successful business people.

It feels like I've always felt like business is quite simple but people tend to overcomplicate it. You know that I've always kind of followed the path of least resistance. And it sounds like you kind of followed some of those tenants as well. What do you. I want to ask one more question about Cutco and then I want to pivot a little bit to ask about what you're working on today and kind of even what you worked with our co alliance members on. But what do you think makes salespeople successful today?

I will say from what I learned from Tony Robbins is swapping out the word sales for influence. And as a seven time firewalker and traveling with Tony and being on his crew, he breaks it down to four things that I've taught my salespeop. I still to this day hold on, hold that I hold true is number one is rapport. Without rapport connection, there's no there. Nothing exists. Yeah. So that's number one. And then number two is our state management. How our focus. Our focus, our words and our body, our physiology. Like the triad that he talks about, our state management. So what we're focusing on what we're saying and how, what, what we're doing with our body is number two. Number three is personal congruency that we must believe that it's in the best interest of the other person to buy our product. More so than me. They win more than I win. So personal congruency with our product and service. And then number four, our questions, deep penetrating questions that we can ask that we can uncover the real pain and the real situation that the other person has so we can make sure that our product or service can actually solve whatever pain that they're in. So between rapport questions, personal congruency, state management, I really think those four are still true to this day. And Tony has been talking about that for 50 years of what can help make a person of influence influential.

It's interesting you talk about the personal congruency. Like I used to tease John ruling about Cutco knives and he just wouldn't let it go. Like he, it was obsessed with them. Like he just. There was nothing better on the planet than these knives. Like you had to have them. And he couldn't even comprehend why you couldn't understand and why you wouldn't need a whole block of them and maybe even a couple blocks like one outside my door. Like he really did believe in that stuff. So another. Sorry, one other question about Cutco because there is so much that's good.

Yeah, there's lots of years.

Well. And you trained 5,000 people on this. The thing that I was also very amazed with Cutco was they didn't do cold calling for sales and they really didn't do any marketing for sales. It was all referral based selling. And it's, it was like. I'm, I'm correct with that, right? Like everybody.

That is correct.

Yeah. And it was something like every person you talk to, you tried to generate 10 referrals from that.

Oh yeah, not try. That's what we did.

So.

Or more.

Yeah. So can you teach us that system? If I was running the COO alliance today and I have, you know, members from 17 countries, all of our members do on average about 30 million in revenue. The COOs don't tend to know other COOs, but I understand what I might ask them to generate some referrals. What would you ask a COO who you were talking to and you wanted to generate some leads to other companies to maybe get more members for the CEO alliance. You were doing some coaching with Nicole Pham, who is the CEO alliance member. What kind of questions would you ask Nicole to generate 10 referrals of companies that you could then reach out to and, and hopefully explain the CEO alliance to them.

Perfect. I will 100% answer, answer the question. And I just want to make sure that there's a little bit of context because there's two different types of referrals in the Cutco business model. See, I recruited over 5,000 students to work with the company. 80% of that was through word of mouth as well. So there's recruiting people to my team through word of mouth. So there's talent word of mouth advertising and then there's customer word of mouth advertising, which is I personally sold over a thousand customers cut go that they bought from me as I was a college kid. And all thousand of those people were also word of mouth. And all those 5,000 people that generated $20 million worth of Cutco sales, it was word of mouth from a customer standpoint too. So there's two different types. Let's start with the word of mouth.

Yeah, let's start with the employee one first. How do we take a great employee and generate more employees from them and then we'll go the customer side second.

Cool, cool. I'm, I appreciate you letting me kind of give that context. So from a talent side.

Well, and on the talent side, I've always believed that a players hang out with a players. Right. So this, this if you got one really good employee hire, hire five of their friends.

That, that, that is true. And 100%. And what we did at Vector and Cutco, it's understanding the demographic. We're, we're working with students. So I'm going to answer this. I will explain what we did inside my office that gen that recruited the people and then I'll also answer the question of like what I would coach like a Nicole fam to do.

Yeah, perfect.

All right, so as far as what we did when we were recruiting students, and then I'll explain what I would do with like Nicole Pham or COO to recruit more members because they're going to be very similar, but there's going to be slight nuance. So when we were recruiting students, starting with the interview process, we let them know you're a part of, you know, if we choose to work with you, we'll role play. Hey, Cameron, if we choose to work with you, just want to let you know that you're going to be a part of a championship team. And then one of the reasons why we're a championship team is because we attract really good people and then those people tell other good people about working with us. So how did you hear about the position? Oh, you saw it on Indeed. Oh, okay, cool. That's. That's cool. We have a bunch of ads coming from Indeed. Most people hear about us from friends telling friends. So, like, the concept here is that we are indoctrinating them from the interview. That it is friends telling friends at the end of the interview before we even offer them the position. Cameron, here's another stump speech, by the way. That's all the information I have for you today. I'm going to meet with you here in a moment. I just want you to answer a couple questions here at the bottom, you'll see there's a space for you to introduce a couple of people who might be a good fit. The more people you recommend, the better. Again, this is just an introduction and it's an invitation, not an obligation. But if you know someone that could be a potential good fit for our team, you know, there's space for you to fill out 10 names. You could always flip it over to the back if you think of other people. Again, not necessarily people that are looking for a job, just people we could introduce ourselves to and tell them what we're offering. I'll meet with you here and shortly once you're finished with this questionnaire.

So then that's, that's literally, that's literally scripted. It's into the form. But then you don't even, like, you didn't even stop with just the form. You're like, you can even flip the page over and keep going. If you got more names like, oh.

Some of these, some of these students in the interview, they would recommend 20 or 25 or 30 of their friends right there in the interview. And a lot of the interview itself is seeding about friends telling friends. We love working with friends of other people. We love it. We build our championship team because friends are telling friends. That's how we attract a players, right? Like, a lot of that is weaved in to the entire interview process itself. So then they get into training. So that'll be like the next phase. Now there's training. During the training seminar itself, we're training these new talented recruits for three days. Day one, we're talking about, hey, by the way, on the third day of training, we're going to give you an opportunity to introduce us to some of your friends. Day two, by the way, on the third day of training, I'm going to tell you a little bit about our incentive and team builder program. We have a team builder program and I'll tell you A little bit about that on day three. So then it's like day three of training comes around. We hype up this team builder program and we say, all right, are you guys ready to hear about our team builder program? We say, yes. Then we have all this is again, I'll give you a version of the stump speech. Okay, so. All right, team, new training class. We're super excited to have you on our team. Have any of you guys ever seen the movie 300? Yeah. It's a great movie, right? Great movie. However, there's one thing. They had 300 solid strong soldiers. But what happened at the end of the movie, they lost. Do you know why? Because there's a 100,000 deep Persian army that can that tackle them. So even though they had 300 really good people they couldn't take down. So what am I saying? The larger army is the one that's going to win the sales trophy at the end of the year. And we're looking for more soldiers. We don't want to just stop at 300. I love my team, but we want more. And that's why we have our team builder program.

Wow.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about our team builder program here. And that's like the opening of our stump speech and then that another part of the stump speech is this. Cameron, I want to tell you a story about a friend of. Of mine. My friend was addicted to blank. He had a. He had a tough time in his home. He had this. That going on with him. He was having a tough time and he got a random call of awesome. And a random call of awesome was I wrote a random name on a sheet of paper because I was just trying to win a contest. And that call that he got letting him know about a job opportunity changed his life. So you never know what you could be doing for a friend. You never know what their situation is. So you think you're just writing down a name on a sheet of paper trying to win a cool prize I'll tell you about. But what you're really doing is giving someone else an opportunity that could potentially change their life.

Oh, my God.

So this is so.

In our world, that would be like, you don't even know there's going to be other CEOs that because you make that intro, the CEO alliance could change the trajectory of their marriage, of their relationship with their kids, of their. Their success in business. But. But if you don't make that intro, you're robbing them of that opportunity.

Correct.

Oh, my gosh you guys are really talented at this. Do you think you spent more time on referral based training than you did on selling the actual knives or was it almost equal?

See this is, this is where my office, why we were a nationally ranked, in my opinion, I mean we won five national titles when I was running an office is we simplified the selling position so much so that way we didn't necessarily even need to have good people sell the product because we, we gamified it. The short answer is we gamified it. Where we made it winnable. Where a lot of other offices were trying to teach them how to sell the knives. We just taught them how to take five good shots. Hey, if you sat down with five really good homeowners who are married, that have kids, they have a family, you sit down with those five people, two or three of them are going to buy. So let's just figure out how do we take five good shots. A lot of the other company, a lot of the other organizations were training their team. How do you go out and sell ten grand? Where we would do that for a couple, like to keep people, but majority was just like take five good shots, see how many you make and then come back for another training and then we'll teach you how to take the next five good shots. So we like really simplified the learning curve and broke it down into like smaller increments. So we only trained them to take five good shots. With your friends and family. Go take those five good shots, see what happens. Then we'll teach you to take the next five good shots.

Okay. So the success really was acting very, very focused prospecting, very focused training, niche market really found, but very foundational stuff around sales as well. You know, we don't even need to talk about, about the referral base for clients because it's going to be effectively the same. You wove it into different parts of the process and you triggered them in the right ways and, and kind of got them to want to help you. I'm more, I'm almost more curious now what you're doing for clients and companies with your business today.

I will say there's one small nuance though that might be a value add.

Yeah, go for it.

Client facing standpoint, we want to help a client. If I'm. When we're sitting down with a, you know, doing the sales conversation on a client, a lot of them care more about the friend than the incentive and they care more about the friend than the company. Whereas when we're talent, we're tying them into the vision of the company because they're a representative of our company. But when they're a customer, they really aren't bought into the brand that much. They just want to make sure that you're going to treat my friend well, more so than what they're representing as far as the company or the product or the service. So one of the things that we would teach them this was the script again, the little stump speech. So, Mrs. Jones, how did you like my presentation today? It was great. Well, there's one more very important part, and here's. You could really help me out. I get paid every time I do an appointment like this, but I only do appointments like this through introductions. So here's a pen and a piece of paper. I'm just looking to write down as many people as you could introduce me to. These are not necessarily people looking to buy. These are more just people that you could introduce me to that. That I could just give them a text or a call and just let them know what I'm working on. And then they could feel free to say yes or no that they want to sit down with me. And it's really simple. If you fill out five right here, I'm going to give you this ice cream scoop today for free. And if you could get to 10 right here, then I'll give you this fishing knife for free as well on top of the ice cream scoop. It's just my way of saying thank you for trusting me. And at the same time, if any of the people that you do introduce me to, they decide to buy Cutgo, obviously I will always give you some hookups as well. So again, not necessarily people looking to buy, just introductions. Truly appreciate your help here. And then pass them a sheet of paper. I go clean up the knives. So it's very much like the approach that I would take.

Whoa, hang on, hang on. Two things. You actually hand them the piece of paper and then stand up and go do something to allow them to have the space to write down names. You don't sit there. It's uncomfortable for them if you're sitting there waiting. Right. Hovering over them.

Correct. And when we shifted to Covid, when we shifted our vert to virtual, when we were doing this on Zoom.

Yeah.

We had. We had like a sheet that we would set, like, full up. Like a form.

Yeah.

And we would send them the Google form and say I have to just type in some stuff on my end.

Yeah.

So you could work on your end. Just while I'm doing this, while I'm doing this over here.

So at college Pro Painters, they taught us when the husband or the wife said, I need to talk to my spouse about this before I can sign. I'd say, perfect. And I'd literally stand up and go, let me go out to the car and get some paint colors and I'll be back in a couple minutes. You can talk right now. And I would always leave the paint colors in the car just to be able to like. It was all scripted. It was all by design. So you guys literally designed this and trained this?

Yes, yes. And that's the client. That's like the customer facing for referrals, for introductions. But again, if you notice the key word, there is a lot of times when a salesperson is asking for referrals, they're saying, who would buy my product? But when we're asking for referrals, we taught them, hey, just introduce me. This is not even about the company. It's not even about the product or service. It's just an introduction. It's an introduction of me. And that's why, if you notice, I let in with, how was my presentation? How did you like me today? Oh my God, you did so great. Awesome. Well, this is most important part where you could help me out. Right? So it's more of that, that feel versus on the talent side, it's our team, the company. We're looking to grow, we're evolving. We want to be the best. We're right. So that's the little bit of a nuance that I just want to make sure I click on during this conversation with you.

Okay. Hugely powerful. And it's not even the core of what I wanted to talk to you about. I gotta be a little bit, a little bit mindful of time because we got a hard stop in about 18 minutes, but we'll be able to get right to the end. And by the way, a quick side note. I need you or I would like you or I gotta. I wish I had the stump speech to pitch. Find me a former Cutco person that can do referral based sales for us and generate. Because we got all these clients and we don't have this like, I don't even want to train our team to do it. I just want to hire somebody to do all referral based sales for us and pay them for every lead or every. Every client we get. Somebody would have a really great fun time scaling the CO alliance. It could be huge.

Yeah, 100%.

And we have such a blue ocean. It's crazy. Like.

To the point you were just saying about just coming back to like a Nicole or someone. I want to make sure I capture this because I do have a thread here and then obviously we could go in whatever direction, but I want to capture this for you because you asked if I were to do. We. We called this. We called it and like, it's like an A player recruiting. I can't remember what it was called, but we, we had a name for it, but it was very much a targeted recruiting approach. So what I would do with a Nicole as an example, if I were in your seat or someone in your company, I sit down with her one on one, whether it's on Zoom or in person, whatever, and I just say, how have you liked your experience? I'll role play this conversation. This is what it sound like. How have you liked your experience so far with working with us? What have been some wins for you? Great. If there was anything that you could change about your experience with us, what would you suggest we could do to make it even better for you? Great. Do you mind if I get a testimonial from you about you saying what you just said? Great. I'm going to just click record. This is what I'd like for you to say. These are just some talking points. She speaks into the camera, says what she says. That's perfect. Thank you so much for the review. Thank you for the testimony. Thank you for the feedback. We really appreciate that. Since you're having a good experience with us, I do have one other thing to ask you, so I'll call a timeout for a moment first. What am I doing? I'm getting them into a positive frame before I come in for an ask. Because if they're not having a good experience, they're not going to give any referrals. But if we're anchoring them into a positive experience, now I have a pathway towards asking for referrals. So I just want to make sure that's noted. Okay. So now what I want to do with you, Nicole, since you're having a great experience, since you gave us a review, we have this testimonial. I wanted to tell you a little bit about our team you could call a team builder program what we you could call a referral program. Simple. I want to tell you a little bit of a referral program. Now, a referral program is not about the incentive. Obviously the incentive is cool, but you're not going to like introduce us to 10 other people like you because of an insurance, because of a referral program. Although I Will tell you about it. The most important thing I'm looking for right now is we're looking to build the COO alliance from where we are at a thousand members, and we want to grow this thing to 10,000 members over the course of the next five years. And in order for us to do that, we're placing ads, we have social media, we have the podcast. But the best way to do that is going to be if. If each of our current hundred members all introduce us to 10 more people. That's how we're going to 10x. And I, if I could put you in a copy machine, Nicole, I would want to build the entire COO alliance with more people like you. So we know birds from a feather flock together, and we know that you probably know other really awesome people like you. And now I want to make sure you understand these are not 100% they're going to say, yes, they want to be a part of the community. These are just people I or someone from my team could have a conversation with.

Wow.

Not again, not necessarily people that are looking to be a part of it.

It's a conversation.

It's a conversation. And just by making an introduction to three people right now, we're going to give you. Again, you're not going to do it for the incentive, but we're going to give you $250 off of your month, month of subscription for us. If you make six introductions or for every three, we'll give you $250 up to $1,000. So if you give 12 right now, it's $1,000 that to you again, just me making an introduction, even if they don't talk to us, just by writing down the names right now and giving it to us. And if any of them do sign up, then we'll give you another thousand dollars for each person that signs up. So if you recommend 12, you got $1,000 today plus up to another $12,000 if they sign up. So it's 13 grand a year. I know you're not going to do this for the incentive, but you're going to do this because you want to help us, you want to help grow, and you want to help change other people's lives, which, which is why I love, you know, having people like you in our community. So I'm going to ask real quick, while we're here together, would you mind just going out, going to your phone, going to your social media real quick, and just seeing which first three might make the most sense. And if you decide that you Build some momentum and you want to get to 12, that'd be great. But who would be the first three that you might want to introduce?

I love, I love that you lead them. Like go to your phone, go to social media, look up some names instead of. Because they'll go, I don't know anybody. Well, you're showing them where they'll see some names of people they will know. And I was going to ask when, when you were doing it with Cutco, did they make the referrals to get the ice cream scoop and the, and the fish knife? Or did they make the referrals because you did it in such an elegant ask and they just wanted to help? Or was it a bit of both?

Maybe it was a bit of both, but I did it that way because I had, I would buy my inventory and then have it with me. We would use the peeler a lot because it was at least less expensive and a lot of clients liked it. So we would use the vegetable peeler. But the concept is the same.

Sure.

So the concept is giving. We want to give a multi tiered approach as to why they would want to. We don't know what their hot button is. And even within the Nicole example, it's helping me the incentive, you know, helping of helping a friend. So you just figure out for any listener who's listening right now, what are, what is your avatar most inspired by? And you just want to build your ask that hits on every one of those reasons. And that way whatever's in their psychological because they're like, I don't care about the gift, I don't care about you, but I care about my friend. You check that box or whatever it might be.

You work with organizations now and help them. I want you to explain to us what you work with them on specifically. And then also talk about how you actually were able to scale up your company when you weren't even running it for about six months because your son was so ill. What do you work with companies on this kind of skill or do you work with them on stuff that's completely different? Because this is, this is gold. Really, really big. This is like her Mosey gold, Dan Martell gold, Tony Robbins gold. Like, this is really. You probably go, oh, it's no big deal. But like this is massive, that skill of referral based sales.

Well, I appreciate that.

Do you know that or have you forgotten?

I do know that. So the short answer is we include this in our offer. It's a piece. It's a piece of what we do. But what I try to do, Cameron, is instead of training people like we mainly are working with like local service businesses. And it takes a lot of training to teach someone who is like a blue collar guy on how to like understand sales and how to understand how to do it. So what we specialize in is building processes. So that way there's a predictable process with where this isn't the conversation and the stump speech isn't the main thing. There's videos and automations and click buttons and sequences that pair with a lot of what I'm talking about because a lot of the skill piece does require a decent amount of role play and training and conversations and back and forth. So we're not doing that necessarily, but we're building the process behind it so that way someone with less skill could still generate referrals. And that's what I did with my company with my Cutco office. And that's how I had 20 year old kids running my organization for me and still doing seven figures in sales without me there during the eight and a half months my son was in the NICU as you alluded to, because I McDonald ified it. And that's what we do for our clients and businesses that trust us with their business is we McDonald ify their business if they're a 3 to 5 million dollars company and they're an owner operator, doing it all with the McDonald ify it so all the users and it's all really predictable. And that way it doesn't have to require such like an A player talent. We can almost plug in like C players into an A plus system and still generate solid results. And that's where we've kind of found our niche in the marketplace right now.

So I want you to explain what McDonald defying it means. I understand because I've built so many franchise organizations over the years and in many ways it's taking the system down to the most basic level that you can almost document it on a post it note. So the worst employee at the worst location could execute that system. But can you give us an example of the things that you McDonald fi that the systems that you put in place and where do you start? What are the most kind of critical areas of a business that you would put systems in place for first that are going to help the companies most?

I love this question, so I'll do my best to be concise with it. We'd like to start at the top of the funnel and then kind of walk through the client journey. So we want to Simplify the top of the funnel as much as possible. So when someone interacts with us, so whether it was my cut go office or businesses that we're working with right now, their first interaction, we want it to be conversion focused. So sometimes people build their website for like information or education, we want it to be conversion focused first. So it's like one very strong specific call to action that allows them to either do a call a text or fill out a form or book a call right there. But it's just like very specific, get in touch with us and then whatever that if then is so if they text we want to have a text line that has some sort of autoresponder after hours and some sort of person responding it right there during normal hours, same thing with the call. And if it's a form, we want to have automations on the other end of the form and we give them an opportunity to direct schedule right then and there. So optimizing the top of funnel with a predictable journey regardless of which path they're taking and then that leads into. Now we have four paths. Text, call, form or book book a book of time on my calendar. Each one of those if thens we want to make it a very predictable sequence where it's personalized, it's human. We like to add videos in there. I was adding videos back 2017. We were doing video messages and zoom meetings before. It was a cool thing to do because I wanted to work from home. I wanted to have an opportunity to have a little bit more flexibility in my lifestyle because my dad has a plumbing business and he wasn't there for me when I wanted him to be when I was a kid. So I was trying to overcompensate. So I wanted to create virtual components to create a real human experience without needing humans because humans are more expensive than technology. So then I also understood that offshore virtual assistants Tim Ferriss for our work week is much less expensive than stateside. So those people are answering those text messages or not facing, talking directly like on a phone. I could have them pushing some buttons and typing following scripts and templates. As before, AI was really relevant. Now we could use AI or whatever, but we plug them in. So a lot of following the journey of the if thens for now we have four different paths. Have videos, text. If it is someone answering a call, make sure they're following scripts that you build for them. That's top of funnel. When we talk about McDonald defying the next part of it, it's what do we want an Excellent user experience to feel like for your team. But also.

Well, let me, let me stop first with what the top of funnel. The reason it's so critical for companies to start there.

It's the most traffic.

Well, there's also. There's not a single problem that exists inside their company that writing a check can't solve. So if they're solving for revenue and they're getting more revenue and more gross margin, they can buy their way out of any problem. But if they're always fixing the back office stuff, if they're always fixing it and finance and operations, they're just, they're just building more expenses for themselves. They're not necessarily getting out of that hole. Is that, is that part of your mindset as to why revenue is the starting point?

My mind, my mindset is, is the user experience, the relationship? Coming back to my. This is what I learned with Cutco is I want to make sure that I'm building a relationship with people that convert. So conversion is my most important piece. If I got someone that is on my site, I want to make it as easy as possible for them to raise their hand. I want to make it as easy as possible for me to respond. Respond. I want to respond to them as fast as possible in the simplest way. And I want to get on a conversation with them as easy as possible as well. Because conversion is the game that I want to play. I don't want to just throw dollars at a problem that puts them into a leaky funnel. I want to convert these people that are already there based on the dollars that I already spent. That's really what I did a good job with with our recruiting and that's what we do a good job with with our current businesses that we're working with as well. Is the conversion aspect of more so than let me just buy more leads aspect. Those are two different, Two different strategies.

Okay, that makes sense. So you did a bunch of work with a bunch of our COO alliance members. What do you think you noticed from working with them? That was maybe a common thread because their businesses are so vastly different. Did you notice some common threads with them that you were working with them on?

Yeah, they're all hella smart. I mean, my gosh, they are very much brains behind the operation and they're extremely technical and intelligent and they know their craft. Like, it was incredible having some of these conversations with how smart they are. And I was, I was just, I was thrilled to have intelligent conversations with intelligent humans. So that is 100 across the board. At the common theme.

Yeah, it's interesting. I, I've said more often than not over the last nine years of running the CO alliance that I would be vastly incapable of running 99% of my members companies. They're just, they're, they're operating in a different talent pool. So I don't teach them how to be coos. I just bring them all together so they can learn from each other. So Mike, if I had a piece of paper or an online form for you right now I'd just be saying that hey, one of the best things you could do for us would be to give us some 10 names of people I could talk to about the CEO alliance but I'm not going to do that. I just genuinely want to thank you for your time today and sharing your knowledge bombs. I think you're going to help our members and our community and our listeners more than making introductions for more people into the SEAL alliance. So I want to thank you for your time, for your ideas, for the wisdom you've shared. I'm going to wrap with one final question for you. If there was some advice you were going to give to the younger you, the 20 year old starting in Cutco, what advice would you give to the younger you today that now you know it to be true but you wish you'd known when you were 20 years old.

You'Re going to drop a loaded question like that? Cameron, before I answer this I just want to make sure it's known how grateful I am for you. I've followed you from the far, read your books and for me to be having a conversation with you and your listeners is just such a, just a grateful moment. So I just want to say thank you publicly and I really appreciate that. So for whatever I can do, I will get you referrals and I will help your business listeners and I'll help wherever because I'm just thrilled to be here to answer the question. I'm getting emotional because 20 year old Mike, his mom died. So when I was selling Cutco I, I, my mom, my mom passed and as the youngest of eight it was like a lot of pressure that I was putting on young Mike to figure out. Like I had three rental properties in college and I was just doing everything I can to just like be a success and like that was just so heavy for a college kid to try to hold on and it helped until it didn't market collapse, I was near bankrupt, lost the properties, I was in debt and like my, the valley of my 20s was really hard Because I was trying to control everything. So the wisdom that I would say is like, that was awesome. Like, they were really, really good. And my self worth was tied to my net worth. So I would try to encourage him to try to loosen up on that game that he was trying to play of retiring by 40 to be better than all the other siblings and whatever disillusionment that he had to make mom proud. I think if I could have just inspired him just a little bit to like, trust his intuition and his and his loving heart more than just like controlling and posturing and trying to, like, work really hard or maybe in addition to, we could have probably mitigated some consequences and pain potentially. Although the consequences and pain were needed to help me become a medical dad that I now am. So it's kind of like helped me create me. But, man, those are some painful times. So I know it's a loaded question. I just wanted to give it the honest intention that it needed.

Mike, your mom would be very proud of you. You're a wonderful human being, very talented business person. From the sounds of it, a wonderful father too. So. I lost my mom 23 years ago as well. I know the pain that you or I can appreciate the pain that you went through and your loss as well, but your mom would be very proud. Thank you for the conversation. Mike Abramovich from the Better than Rich, super appreciative of your time today.

Thank you.