395: Scaling Your Business (and Your Revenue) with Chad Cannon

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Alexa here and you're listening to the YouTube Loverfield podcast. So excited you're here. Thanks for tuning in. Today's episode is a good one because we're talking about scaling up your business and your revenue with Chad Cannon. And as you start listening to this episode, I'm curious, you might have a similar experience that I did when I was editing this episode where I was like, wow, this is great advice, but I think it's for Future Alexa, like 3, 4, 5 year Alexa from this point. And I thought that, you know, some of the things that they were talking about, like how to scale a business and why founders might want to replace themselves and hire a team and all of that stuff, I just kind of felt like, wow, this is way in the future for me. But Bjork said something at the end of the episode that I'm just going to copy and tell you right now so you can keep it in mind as you're listening, is that as food bloggers, we really nail the offering content for free. You know, we. We publish recipes online, maybe on social media, maybe on our blogs, and then we maybe collect some email addresses for our email list, and then that's kind of where that relationship stops. But in this episode, you'll learn more about the process of scaling up your business through product. And. And that's kind of what I want you to think about as you're listening to this episode. What product or service can you offer your audience that will help them solve a need that they have? And that is what I want you to keep in mind as you're listening to this episode. So, with that said, without any further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Chad. Welcome to the podcast, Bjork.

I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's a fun conversation because we have had lots of conversations before. Uh, I was lucky enough to get invited into this group of really great guys, and there's been a few kind of meetups. The. There's a Colorado meetup, group of guys, and then there's kind of like a. It's like a TikTok cycle. There's also a group of guys and girls that. That are able to get together entrepreneurs. And I've learned so much from you. There's been a. A couple conversations specifically that I've come back and I've sat down and like, debriefed the conversation you and I had with Lindsey. It was like, here are the things that I learned from talking with Chad. And so it's really exciting for me now to have you on the podcast and really exciting for me to see you launching your own business scale factor, which we're going to talk about. But before we do that, we'd love to hear a little bit of your history and how you're able to gain all of this knowledge and insight that you have. So where did give us kind of the quick elevator pitch on your story and your career?

Yeah. Well, first off, thanks. I can say I've had similar of those conversations. One thing I love about you and probably why this podcast is so successful, is you are so great at asking very intentional questions with kind of being curious. I think you're one of the sharpest people I've ever met, but also one of the most curious, which. That's a one. It's an avid learner. I can tell you. You're an avid learner and it's just been, I've learned so much from you. So thank you, thank you for having me.

Yeah.

So a little bit about me, I don't want to go through, back through the whole story, but kind of the journey, genesis of that got me, I would say kind of plugged into this personality space or companies that are reliant upon maybe books or intellectual property around a personality. I started in book publishing, you know, early 2010 so you know, 10 plus years ago, helping, working directly with authors and brands, helping them build their tribe ultimately to sell a product. And in that sense it was a book. And ended up working on about 35 New York Times bestselling titles in about five years, which was really, really fun. And then a handful of kind of the A list authors said hey, what would it look like for you to come and work with me helping me kind of build my brand, grow my email list, do all the marketing funnels, all the stuff that requires to ultimately sell more products, not just the books, but how do we take this intellectual property and build a business off of it? And so I started a marketing agency serving many handful of authors and that really took off to the point where I had to kind of have a reckoning moment with my number one clients to say hey, agency has taken off. We either like basically came to this decision that hey, over the next six to nine months I've got to exit out because you're only 10% of the agency's revenue but 50% of my time and that's just not going to work long term. And had a great conversation, loved what they were doing. That person was Michael Hyatt. Two days later they came to me and said, hey, what would it look like for you, for us to hire you and kind of have you come in full time and really help us scale the company at that, at that point in time, which is about five years ago, they were a sub seven figure business and are in the mid eight figure business. I transitioned out of that last April. So we're coming up on a year which is just crazy. It feels like it was just yesterday. But I was with them almost a total of seven years between contract and full time and learned so much. You know, we pivoted that company twice from being just a, you know, when I joined it was a one product, low, low price point monthly membership site called Platform University and we had a course about around goal setting. You know, it was close to a seven figure business and 98% of the revenue was all membership and courses. Two or three years later we got rid of the core, you know, the membership and it becoming courses. And now Today, less than 2% of the company's revenue is related to courses. And we just had a different vision. You know, Michael wanted to step out, not to have a, you know, so we transitioned from a personality business to a brand business that is now full focus. That the full focus Planner, which is a product we rolled out maybe four years ago that's now sold 2 million plus copies and then a business coaching program called Business Accelerator, really kind of where my two babies to help grow and build that now equate to 98% of that company's revenue and kind of that mid eight figures and really have a vision and really they're set up to get to a nine figure, you know, business over the next probably five to 10 years, which is super exciting and love what they're doing. And then I've transitioned from there to consulting, helping small business owners. Kind of loved that like phase of helping, you know, kind of that sub seven figures, kind of helping them, okay, realize the vision and through tools and resources and kind of my experience to just get people through that. You know, sometimes it's a seven figure, you know, that block of seven figures, sometimes it's the eight figure mark, depending on kind of where the business is at.

Yeah, it's one of the things I that's so great about your story is that, you know, I think similar to players, like I think of players and coaches and that analogy, it's like, who do you want to be your coach? And you could, I could be your football coach and I would maybe be able to like learn some stuff, teach some stuff or like Tom Brady could be your coach and he would probably have a lot more insight than I would. And for you having the experience of going into a business at a point where, you know it's at in, in this case seven figures and then scaling it up, you have the ex. The have gone through that experience in a really intimate way to then step back and be able to look at another business and say, hey, I can see how you can have a similar experience in a way that probably they can't because you've been through it. You know what, it looks like you've seen it. One of the questions that I have for you about that experience was, and it might seem like a simplistic question, but was it harder than you thought it would be or easier than you thought it would be to take a company and grow it to mid 8 figures? Which I think to Most people just seems like unimaginable.

Yeah. You know, I think the first kind of the. From seven figures to kind of the beginning of eight figures, it's like, it was easier than I thought. And then after that to kind of getting into the mid eight figures, that was extremely challenging because that's, you know, in our business model, that's where we really started to have. Need a lot more headcounts. You know, you started to have division of labor and layers of leadership and direct, you know, teams and things of that nature became just a totally different ballgame. You know, we were, most of the executives and, you know, were quick starts, you know, so we.

And we were explaining what that means. Yeah, yeah.

So there's an assessment called the Colby assessment. One of the, you know, there's breaks down to four things. Quick starts are typically highly entrepreneurial, high risk. You know, when you've got an idea, you just go. And you're. You're quick to make it happen because you've already thought through all of the things that have gone wrong, could go wrong, and you have a plan for it pretty quickly. So we could easily just sit in a room and agree, hey, we're going to go make all this happen and go do it. But then when you've got layers of teams and starting to communicate, there'd be a breakdown. It was like, man, we can't move this ship as fast as we once did when you kind of get to that size. And we saw this play out, I mentioned Business Accelerator, our business coaching program, and I got the insight not only in what we did with Michael Hyatt, and full focus is we helped thousands of other businesses kind of grow and scale as well. And so I got the front seat.

Not only did you see it by growing that company, but you also saw it. What you did was help other companies grow.

Exactly. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it's really fun. You know, I've seen this. We. We kind of saw this law of thirds and we built content around this. You know, if you're a startup and you're kind of in this phase of trying to generate, you know, your first little bit of money, or maybe you hit that six figures kind. There's a. There's something that happens at 300k that just evolutionary things have to change in your business. You know, most people, as a solopreneur, you can kind of, if you've got the right business model and the great. The right product, you can 300k pretty easily. And then from 300k to a million you know, depending on who the business owner, again, what your product is, that's where the biggest leap is. You know, a lot of people, once they get to 300, they've got their site set on 5 or 700. But really your site should be set on a million. It's just, there's something about this kind of law of thirds, the domino. And then once you're at a million, it's 3 million and then 10 million, then 30 and then 100. And there's just some different layers that you have to kind of do. You know, I would say from 300k to a million, it's. You've got to become Matt. If you're, if you're the main rainmaker, your product is kind of the primary salesperson prime. Like if you've got a widget or different things like that, you're not needing to sell it. It ends up being that you need to delegate and go and move to a different level. You know, there's always this layer, if you're the founder of replacing yourself, you know, and so if you get involved too much in the weeds, you're going to become, you know, John Maxwell says this, that, you know, you ultimately become the lid on your business. So there's the law and every business is different. You know, that may be at a million that you become the lid. It may be 3 million. You know, the thing that we always said for ourselves at some point, you know, everything we do from here on out as a business is unchartered territory.

Yeah.

Because it's. If we're growing, we've never done this, we've never been there before. So we were always about who, not how, who's been there before us, how do we learn from them, you know, and so finding those resources, that's great.

I want to put a pin and come back to that 300k being easy thing, because I think for a lot of people listening, especially in the early stages, they would think that sounds fantastic. How do I do that? And we're going to talk about that with the first kind of three steps of scale, the scale factors that you talk about in your system. But before we do that, I would, I'd be interested to hear a little bit more about your own journey. So one of my favorite things to do is have conversations with people like yourself who have, have, have some level of repetition in a specific area. So like, as boring as it might sound, like accountants, or like if we're talking to people who specialize in advertising or like somebody who does Due diligence on, like, businesses or somebody in SEO who's really good at that. In your case, you know, we talked about having grown the business that you're working within. Michael Hyatt now, full focus. They had a. Had a rebrand, but you also had probably hundreds of businesses that you were able to see inside of those businesses. I want to know, now that you're starting your business, you're a year into it, what did you take away from those experiences that you're saying, I'm definitely doing this or I'm definitely not doing this?

Great question. You know, I think one of the, you know, to touch on a little bit around kind of that 300,000 being an easy number. You know, I'm not trying to discount, you know, the work. There's. There's hard work to get there. But one of the things that when you talk to thousands of businesses and you see across every. You know, I think at one point we collected. We had over 300 industries kind of recognized in our coaching program. So it wasn't like we specialized in, you know, serving financial services or H vac companies, which. There's companies out there that, you know, own that vertical. You know, that was not kind of our approach is that one of the things I realized is there is people with all types of backgrounds, all types of educations, making a lot of money with very little know how. How to run a business. Sure. You know, they're passionate. You know, so. So one of those things, you know, this kind of. This imposter syndrome of like, hey, fake it till you make it. And, you know, when's my team going to realize I have no idea what I'm doing? You know, when we ask those questions, you know, in a room, every CEO raises their hands to be like, man, I'm kind of making it up as. So if you're listening, it's okay. You know, you probably fit that bill. But I think the bit to come back to your question, around what. Which I think kind of plays into what we, you know, these first three factors, you know, we've. In trying to diagnose what made these companies successful, we. Me and my business partner said, hey, what are these seven factors? We're not gonna have time to jump into all seven of those. But what are the three factors? You know, what, like, what's the. What's the most important? Which, first and foremost is how to find your buyer. You know, we may be jumping ahead here, but I think I can't answer this question without, like, really wrestling this to the ground.

Well, it's a good transition into it is these, My guess is the factors came from you pulling out some of the things that you recognized and then now applying it to what you're doing. 100. Yeah, like you're dog fooding it. And for those who aren't familiar, the idea of being like you're eating your own dog food, meaning like you're probably using the system that you're teaching to build your own business.

Totally. You know, and I would say you can't. Most businesses start with a product, you know, and they may intuitively know who could buy that product, but it's typically product driven, which that's not that that factor isn't until the third factor. But you, you know, and for us, and again, this is about scale. This isn't necessarily about bringing something to market, you know, like a go to market strategy. There's, there's other things. You could argue that maybe product is before your buyer, whatever, but this is saying you've got a business, you've got kind of proof of concept, you've started to generate some type of revenue. But to really scale that and take it to the next level, you have to be really clear. This first factor is all about who is your buyer. We call it find your buyer. So it's not just important about who your buyer is, but where are they, how do you communicate to them, where, where can they, where do they meet? And so get really clear about that because you can't get clear on the product or how to communicate about the product until you first know who your buyer is. What are their pain points, what are the challenges, what are the things that they're getting caught up on? And is our product solving that, that need? Because what a lot of times if it's, we see this, if it's a CEO or the founders kind of generating most of the sales, they are winning sales by sheer founder story or their own just kind of charisma. And that's only going to get you so far, you know, and so you've got to be really clear. And there's nothing, you know, we have this all the time where, you know, man, I hired talk to the CEOs, I hired a salesperson. It just didn't work. You know, that's a big red flag that the founder did. Never figured out how to, how to really articulate the founder story where someone else could tell that and really do the magic of selling. That was just so natural to them because they saw the need, all that, but they didn't Actually deprogram kind of their process. And so.

And that's not. Yeah, go ahead, finish that thought. And then I have.

Yeah, I said that's where it comes down to, like, first in that process, you've got to know who your buyer is.

Yeah.

Because then it articulates how you communicate, et cetera, et cetera.

And it's probably not in and of itself an issue if the founder is kind of making everything happen, but it is an issue if you don't want to be the one making things happen forever. Like.

Correct.

And it's. And it's the difference between potentially, like, a really a job that pays really well and a business that runs really well. And if you have a job that pays really well, it's kind of like you continue to be the salesperson, or in our world, you are forever the content creator. Like, you're the one doing all of the content creation. And again, it's not that that's bad. Like, in some scenarios, you see that, and it's like, that's what people actually want, is they want to kind of be that and not necessarily to scale. But if you do want to scale and that's what you're all about, and that's what you talk about, you need to figure out how to step away from that. So you aren't the main person. Yep. Making everything. Yeah.

I would even say for your business. You know, and this is like kind of going around some memory based on some conversations we've had.

Yeah.

You know, you started out, you know, your wife kind of had this personality of doing recipes online and, you know, built an audience and a following. You know, accidentally, slash, purpose. Purposefully, you know, at some point it became, oh, like this could become a business. And, you know, if I remember right, advertising was kind of the first place where it's like, hey, this is potentially where the money. You know, but you guys ultimately decided to do a membership site and other things that, you know, you had to get clear on, hey, who do you want to serve?

Yeah.

But, you know, you didn't start out that way because it was just like, hey, we were, you know, maybe I'm, you know.

No, that's. That's making. Yep, yep, that's right. And with. So we kind of have these different buckets, you know, different audiences that we focus on. One of the things that I think is really important, it's actually I do these. We've just started doing these coaching calls within Food Blogger Pro. And one of the things that's been interesting for me to reflect on as I've done these is one of the through lines in those calls is kind of this idea of find your buyer and, and, and it's a little bit antithetical to what a site like Pinch of Yum would be. Because Pinch of Yum is kind of has a broad reach. It's not very specific we like, but we do have. Like when Lindsay creates content, she thinks, okay, this is somebody who is probably busy. Like they're not going to be somebody who wants to create like a three hour meal for the sake of creating a three hour meal. She wants to make sure that she's creating recipes that are good but also accessible. And like you could get all the ingredients at Super Target, like to understand and narrow that down so it's not trying to be everything to everybody. But that's still a pretty broad focus where it's more specific and maybe the example gets to be a little bit easier is with Food Blogger Pro, like, oh, we know really specifically who that is that we're after and who we're focused on and can get really specific with that. And in those coaching calls, yeah, to finish that thought real quick, in those coaching calls, one of the things that I come back to is for somebody who's just starting out in year one, in year two, who is it that you are doing this for? Don't just like create a recipe because you see an opportunity to rank for it in a key in keyword research and you can get 2,000 additional clicks. You need to be first and foremost hyper focused foundationally on what it is that you're offering to somebody in order to then use those skills like keyword research, content creation to build on. But that one of the things I come back to is this idea of like an H1. And for those who aren't familiar, it's like, what is your header? Like when you land on your site, what are you saying to somebody so they can look at it and be like, oh, this is for me, or like this isn't for me. And I think if somebody's in those early stages of content creation, that's what you need to be doing. So how do people figure that out?

Yeah, well, everything you just said is actually the process we take people through through these first three steps. So it's like it proves just kind of the business model just like, you know, find your buyer, which you don't. You say that that's kind of broad, but what I would say you kind of hit on, hey, it's Super Target, it's They're busy, they're overwhelmed. It's moms, you know, like, are. Is your customer target customer, a Walmart customer? Those are different. You know, it's just the reality, like, disposable. Like, by definition, disposable income is going to be different. Their look, their feel, a taste, all the things that they see, you know, and it comes into your brand. So second, you know, the second factor, A is align your brand so you know that, you know, there's more detail than that. But I'm just kind of going off of what you just shared. You know, it's like, it feels broad, but it's where we start with every one of our clients because you can't do anything else until you really get that crystal clear. And the thing is, like, you've got such a proven business model and you've done it over and over, so it feels broad to you. But that is the sign of a really good business model is that the top of the funnel is broad. And then as you get to the third factor, which is C, is create the products, and there's a layer of products, you know, so, like, you can't. The riches are in the niches, as Amy Porterfield says is. Okay, so out of that slice of, you know, the pinch of yum is this big audience that we have that we're attracting that are busy, you know, but guess what? Every one of them needs to make dinner every night or maybe four or five nights a week, because maybe they don't have the budget. They're not the type of people that go out to eat, you know, again, this is all definition around. Find your buyer. You know, more than likely, they're eating at home the majority of the nights and, you know, cooking and all of that. And maybe they enjoy it, maybe they don't. But it's something that has to happen. If their kids are going to eat, they have to do it. And then, you know, you've got this ability to create the product, okay, out of that, who. Who is going to buy? And then, you know, for each product, there's a. There's another layer of who that person is, you know, and so again, the three factors I think we can dive into is one, find your buyer, which I think we've really hit the nail, you know, like, you know, it could become. We hit it too much. It could be like, okay, move on.

Sure.

Second is align your brand. You know, she just talked about H1, you know, okay, now you know who that is. What's the. What's the message you're gonna say to make sure that that person knows, like, hey, this is. They get me. This is my home. I, like, I, I can, I can trust them. They've got authority, et cetera, et cetera. And that means that's your website, that's your social. It's kind of your color scheme. All of those types of things are dependent upon obviously who your buyer is, and then create products, which. That's the fun part to talk about that I'll nerd out on. So I don't want to jump too far ahead and just kind of give it back to you to kind of see if there's any, any thought.

That's great. I think my first thought to spend a little bit more time with find your buyer is how much of that is. I want my buyer to be this versus here's realistically, after doing some research, who my buyer should be.

Yeah, it's a great question. One of the things we always do is we come up with what we think it is based on historical data. But then we'll also justify that with an audience survey to make sure we're not totally, totally off base before we make any big changes under that second factor of a, aligning your brand. You know, if we're going to make website changes and big messaging changes or things like that, we're going to, we're going to, you know, really do the work to make sure that we're not just going. More times than not, it's pretty, you know, you know your business really, really well. And more than anything, it's not the audience that you want to serve. It's more, is the audience have a need and do they have bud to buy your product? You know, is the question you should be asking more than. And is it. Is. Is this a big enough need that someone will pay for and that there's not a free competitor?

Yep.

You know, like, can someone get the same amount of information? Like, and, you know, your, your, your product's case in point, like, how many free apps are there with recipes and YouTube and all of those things? Yes, there's a competitor that's free, but you guys have figured out a way to do it better, more organized, simple. You know, you probably know what, what that, what those key things are to get people to buy, you know.

Yeah, I don't, I don't. This is one of those quotes that I feel like has been attributed to multiple people in multiple different ways. And I just googled it in real time here. Frederick Buchner. It's this quote that the place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and your world's and the world's deep hunger meet. I feel like there's other versions of that quote, like, this is the one, maybe a different version of it. Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world's greatest need. And what I like about that is it's kind of trying to find the cross point for that. Where what you said is, you can't just do anything and just say, this is what it's going to be. Here's what my buyer is going to be like. There has to be a need there. And within that, if it's going to be a business, right? This. We're not talking about nonprofits, which you could have a conversation around that, and that would be also worthwhile conversation. But if it's just strictly business, where there's a need in the world, and that would mean that people have the ability in some ways to compensate or to pay for that. And your great joy or your great desire overlap. There is opportunity there, and it feels like what you're doing is a great example of that. You naturally have this ability to see inside of a business, to see opportunities for growth, to understand how people can unlock that, and there's a need for that. Business owners want that and can pay for it. So I love that as maybe kind of a final thought that we can have around that. Find your buyer. There is some decisions that you can make as a founder and a creator to say, like, here's who I want it to be. But you also then have to make sure that it's something that hasn't been, like, there isn't something out there on the market that's free. Right. And that people that you are serving have the ability to pay for it and they're available as customers. So love that. We can wrap up on find your buyer, align your brand. Why is that? Step number two. Sometimes you'd hear people say, like, you don't want to get into, like, tweaking your logo. Just get to work. How much of this is like logo tweaking versus more like contemplations around the greater meaning of what a brand is.

Yeah, great question. You know, I'm one that believes in minimal viable products and ship it before it's perfect. So this is definitely not, you know, hey, getting everything perfect before we roll, roll an update out to the market. You know, I think why I say it's aligning again, this framework is really meant for people that already have proven some type of market fit and they have some version of customers that want something. You know, this isn't something. This isn't like going and helping startups.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, this framework is that we've got something, we know we're winning, but maybe it's not winning at the level that, you know, it could be. And so we have to sometimes go back and be like, okay, who you thought the buyer is. And this idea of what got us here isn't going to get us there. That you then have to. There may be some tweaks you need to make, which means we have to then align our brand, otherwise we're going to miss the boat in. In who we're communicating to. And so a lot of times that's some simple tweaks to websites. Sometimes that's like what that does is then it says, okay in social media. It's going to change our content. If we have a podcast, that means we probably may need to change our intro, it may need to change the guests we bring on, the questions we ask. All of those things is really what I talk about kind of alignment. It's. You think about a car, you know, over time, every. Your car has to be aligned every 30, 60, 90,000 miles. You know, it's not something that happens every month or whatever, whatever, but it, over time, things just get out of whack.

Yeah.

You know, you do business, you, oh, let's do this. Or you talk to someone and someone gave you this piece of advice so you went and did something. And then over, just over time it gets misaligned. And so it's just that exercise to say, okay, what needs to be aligned now that this is true about who our buyer is.

So your point that you made earlier is like, this isn't for somebody who's just starting necessarily. This is for somebody when you talk about scale factor and the factors. So maybe we're bearing the lead here, but the seven factors spells out factors. So find your buyer, align your brand. We're going to talk about create products as well, but we're just going to talk about those first three. People can follow along with. You have a podcast that we can talk about where they can hear more about that. Obviously work with you. But the factors, the seven factors are for a business that's having some success, people are buying stuff. They're maybe able, you know, in our world, they're maybe able to get some sponsor content deals here and there. Maybe they have an actual product that they've. That they're selling and getting some traction with that. But what you're saying is this is about coming in and saying, is it simplification? Like, is it. Is it cutting stuff out? Like subtractive or additive? Usually when, when, when you think about aligning your brand.

Nine times out of ten, it's subtractive. More. More times than not, people do more than they need to do. And so it is. And it's like a lot of times, I mean, when someone brings me in or we have a discovery call, you know, they think they've got a product problem or we've got a team problem or, you know, or, you know, depending on what it is. But I come back, nine times out of 10, it's that they can't clearly articulate who their buyer is, which means they can't do it downstream. So the marketing team is not on the same page, all of those types of things. So this is why me and my business partner, we really fought over kind of which factor goes first. And if, you know, just to be candid, I was in the product, you know, as a quick start, I'm like, let's just get the product, let's get it to market, let's see if it works, blah, blah, blah. But the reality is every, you know, when I went back and looked at the companies that really scaled successfully, and even in our own, it always came back to really wrestling down this question around finding your buyer, which then meant if there were changes to that, we had to then align our brand before we could actually develop a product or tweak our product to make sense. And, you know, to your question, it's more about simplification and subtracting than adding, which is typically refreshing, you know, and sometimes it's big changes to the business model, you know, in companies. You know, I would also say, like, companies that really get scale, they aren't afraid to change their business model. You know, like, and that doesn't mean that you're, like, totally getting away from food, you know, all these people in here and this. It's more about, you know, hey, like, maybe there's a totally new product because we've learned and we've gotten the feedback and all this thing, or it's a different shift. It's like, hey, we're. We're actually trying to hit too many people, but if we really focus down our niche, we would actually be more successful. We wouldn't have to do as much.

Yeah. And I think that's one of the things they see in this industry often is People trying to, like, reach the masses. And one thing I often come back to is Kevin Kelly, this famous 1000 true fans. And I think there's varying levels that you can apply that to, but especially if you do have product that you can sell, which is another thing that I think is important for me as a podcaster in this genre to remind people of is the importance of product. Not just content monetized through ads, but actually having a product that you're able to sell. The importance of being specific enough where you're not going to maybe have a million fans. But if you have a thousand true fans, that Kevin Kelly post is all about, like musicians. Like, if you have a thousand true fans that buy an album and go to your show whenever you have one, you can have a sustainable career. Now, the question then is around scale, which is what you talk about, and being able to scale that. But it makes sense when you think then about aligning your brand to say, great, you have, you've identified your desire and the world's need and people who are able to then to pay in some way for that. And then you look at the next level and say, knowing what I know then about the buyer, how do I create a brand that speaks to them? Like if you were to say in a sentence what align your brand is, is that what it is? Is something that your buyer, once you've identified them, connect with it, resonate with it. And people who aren't your buyer then say, this isn't for me. Is that at its core what you're trying to do?

100%, you know, is that when they hit your website, you know, the first 20 or 30 words they read, they. They say, this is. This is for me, or it's not for me. Because there's nothing more frustrating than someone getting into your funnel that isn't for you. And you get, you know, you've got these kind of vanity metrics around, you know, but then if you've got a sales process and you get on the phone and you know, and it's like, oh, they weren't warmed up or they're not even in that. Like, they don't even understand what we do, or they're. There's someone that doesn't even make sense to be on the phone with normally, because upstream, the communication wasn't right. And that's what alignment is all about, is to kind of separate those of who. Who should be our buyers and who should be, you know, maybe our, you know, like, fans that someone that can talk about it, you Know, like if you go, our website is scale dash factor co. I think we try to be really clear about who we are, but we also try to add value in that sense that if it's not for you, maybe you know, someone that is for. And pass it along. You know, ultimately that's, that's ultimately the goal.

Yeah. That somebody. It's still okay if somebody comes in, they're not for you. Because if you're clear enough, somebody else could look at it. In our world, maybe it's somebody with who like eats in a specific way, like a specific diet or something. I might go to that and be like, oh, that's not for me. But then I might have a friend who's trying to like eat like keto. Yeah. Or keto. Yeah, whatever.

Yeah.

And then if somebody is that, I would be like, oh my gosh, I found this great site, like, let me exactly introduce you to it or pass you along. And I think, you know, when, when in your world, getting on the phone, people you'd be like, yeah, for sure. Like you have this process. One of the things you do is get on the phone. I think for some listeners, they might be like getting on the phone, like, wait, that's a part of the business. But I think where it would translate is if you are somebody who's doing sponsor content or working with brands in any capacity, you're going to be able to have those conversations a lot easier if you have a really clear alignment of your brand and you don't know who your buyer is, because good brands are also going to know that. And the best match is going to come from when a brand sees somebody who's similarly aligned. Like a company sees somebody who's similar aligned. And they can come to you and say, oh, it makes a lot of sense for me to connect with you and work with you because you are focused on real food and that's what you do. Or you are focused on like CSA cooking, like whatever it might be. Totally. And those conversations suddenly become much easier because you have a really aligned brand that makes it clear that somebody can work with you. And, and yeah, so case in point.

What you just said, you know, I, I actually did an all day kind of strategy session with the company that really creates these little book, basically baby books. And you know, every mom wants to create a baby book, but everyone's got, you know, they're overwhelmed, they don't have the time. And you know, you, your kid's two or three years old and every mom has this guilt of man I wish I would have done that then. Yeah, you built an app, got really clear, did this and they really struggled around the alignment piece. Once we kind of got clear on who their buyer was, like, we really niched it down and immediately it was like, I've got three or four friends that now they understand who the buyer is. That are great brand deals for them. And I introduced them just last week and I just got this text as we're talking. Hey, thanks again for the introductions. Everyone seems super excited working together and I appreciate, appreciate you setting it all up for us. And we would have never gotten there real time.

Yeah.

If they would, they would have never gotten there if they weren't willing to do that work of even saying, man, I think this is actually going to make our product, you know, revenue smaller, not bigger. And it, you know, my guess is that like the business we just passed along their way with the brand deals and just kind of looking at their size of audience is probably going to generate 100 to 150k in their business, which, which would be a 10% increase in what they're doing right now.

Yeah. You know, the interesting thing for me, even in that converse little conversation is I hear you say, like, there's these moms who feel guilty about it and I'm like, wait, or dads, it could be dads too. But it's like, that's not their buyer. That's not their buyer. Like, and they've gone through the work of saying like, this is who we're focused on, is this specific individual in this specific situation. And it probably, it could, you know, it's obviously there's dads out there who, myself being one of them, like feel guilty for not doing a better job of documenting my kids younger years or whatever it is. But probably what happens is the way that they align their brand, build their messaging, pick their copy, like, whatever it might be is around that specific buyer. And like you said, there might be like a reduction in some ways around revenue from a certain category, but it results in long term alignment to be able to build and scale.

And yeah, I mean you think about, like, I mean I talked, we talked about this in the podcast when we kind of talk about aligning your brand. There's a company called Duluth Trading Company out there. You know, if you've seen those commercials, it's, you know, the voice is extremely manly. They're going after the rough and tough, the hunters, the people that are out, you know, like, and their products are all geared towards those people. But can you imagine If a female where the voiceover and it was soft and it wasn't as, you know, punchy. You know, granted we're talking stereotypes here, but there's stereotypes or stereotypes for a reason that, you know, like if someone isn't that manly, man, they're just going to tune it out. But those that are like, man, that's me, they're going to lean in, you know, and that's, that's an example around aligning that plays out. You know, they decided to do TV advertising, which means their TV ads need to align with who their buyer is.

Yeah, yeah, there's a, there's a couple car commercials that I've watched recently. I wish I could remember what they were, but it was almost like a parody at how extreme it was like and I don't know, it was like Ronaldo or like some soccer player and it was like, oh, this is like so over the top obvious. But I'm sure as like a really established brand with smart people working on the marketing, they've made that, that decision intentionally. So, yeah, we've talked about finding your buyer, aligning your brand. I think those make sense. And then the product part, this is the exciting one. How do you know what product looks like? You know, you talked about mvp. How much of that is having conversations with those buyers that you've identified to like pull a product out of them versus kind of guessing what a product might be and then developing it. What. What does the create your product stage look like?

Yeah, so we, we typically try to start by just kind of giving a big 30,000foot view around what's possible if we have the right product around. Unique value proposition. Because when we say you as the business owner are going to know your customer and the products you can create better than anyone. But a lot of times what people can't picture is an ascension model for their customers. You know, maybe it's just one product, but the easiest thing to do is to create multiple products for the same customer. And so what if that were to be true? So we have this thing called the revenue expansion model, if you don't mind. I mean there's, it's really going to dive into three. You know, if you go to seven factors of scale.com, the number seven factors of scale.com, this visual is in here. I'm going to try to bring it to life audibly, but it's in there. And you know, there's actually exercises for each of these factors to kind of give you just the taste of if you were to kind of play this out. You can, you can do it for yourself if you're listening. But we use this expansion model through the lens of a hotel, everyone knows, kind of a hotel. You know, there's this lobby piece, which, you know, in a hotel lobby, you know, I always say on a hot summer day in New York, I always try to find a hotel because I can bum wi fi, I can go to the bathroom, I can get ac. All those things are free. And there's a. There's a hotel brand that I typically look for. I'm not going to look for, you know, any. Like, I'm not a Holiday Inn Express person. You know, I'm more like a JW Marriott. So I'm gonna go look for that. You know, there's a. A brand association there.

Yep.

And I would say anyone that's listening, you know, or even you, Bjork, like, what you're doing with the podcast, this is a lobby activity. You know, you are trying to build an audience, bring people into what you're doing by free, you know, social media. And free means not even giving away an email address. It's just straight free content. The more people you have in the lobby, the more likely they are to ascend.

Yeah.

You know, then there's the mezzanine. And in your type of business, you know, kind of this intellectual property business, typically a mezzanine product is something in exchange for an email address. This could be a webinar, it could be a PDF, it could be anything that adds. What I always say is solve someone's problem in 10 or 15 minutes and they can read it. You know, granted, webinars to be longer than 10 or 15 minutes, but that's a. That's a little. That's a more advanced mezzanine activity for people. And it's really as much of a sales activity as is a marketing legion activity. And then you've got the standard floor. So this is where you first. That's your first product. Okay. In a hotel, 80%, you know, probably only 20 to 30% of the revenue comes from this, but it makes up the majority of the landscape of the hotel. You know, it's, you know, gener. Like, maybe it's 50% of the revenue, depending on your business, but this is like the biggest part of the hotel. And then you've got the premium floor, obviously, it's more access, it's more expensive, and then you've got the penthouse, you know, so if we were to have three products, one of the things I always Tell people is, okay, what's your standard floor? What's your premium? What's your penthouse? You know, kind of thinking about this and I'm fast tracking this. This could be a whole day workshop with someone, but just to kind of get the big picture. And what we found in coaching thousands of businesses and actually this was something I learned from Jeff Walker, you know, who author of Launch and Creative, the product launch formula and online launches Prob probably this formula equates to billions of dollars sold of products online is 10% of your current customers will pay 10x what they're currently paying. So, you know, Bjork, I don't know what's the. What would you say your standard floor product is and what do they pay for it?

Yeah, so I would say in what's. As a quick aside here, I think this is really valuable. And if people take away anything from this, I feel like this can be one of the takeaways because I think what happens in our industry is we have those first two steps. Content, everybody's coming, it's free, and then exchanging your email to like get on a list and then that's it. Like, that's where it stops. And I think there's so much untapped opportunity, not even in like Penthouse, but like just that level three of figuring out what is that next thing that you could offer that would be helpful, valuable, make a difference in somebody's life. And so I think it's exciting, exciting to think about that for Food Blogger Pro. You know, I think it's the membership site. So it's. You could do annual or yearly, and it would be depending on like when somebody signed up, it would be 99 a quarter or 350 a year. But that's what the pricing is right now. So.

Yeah, yeah. So 350. And let's just say, you know, I don't know if you share these numbers. Let's just say there's a thousand of those buyers. You know, kind of the formula playing it out, you know, 10% will pay 10x that. Which means a hundred people would pay you $3,500.

Yeah.

And 10 people would pay you $35,000.

Yeah.

That being said, you know, you still got to have a unique value proposition. You know, the value's got to be there, all of it. But when you get in a room and say, hey, that means there's 10 people in your ecosystem that would pay you $35,000. Okay, if that were the case, what would. What could we dream up that could be that Price point. Point again, you know, that may be too far advanced for some people right now. But, like, even coming back to. And someone that's got a podcast, we've seen this play out. And even if they don't even have a product quite yet is like, time is money. So, like, if someone's a podcast listener, you know, kind of unique podcast listeners, or even in my space, this is like, if someone has bought your book, you know, someone that sold 100,000 copies of a book at $20, that we can say, okay, that's standard for. We can start to think about, you know, hey, that means you've got 10,000 people that are willing to pay you $200, you know, and then you've got a thousand willing to pay, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So that kind of just goes up. And even we've seen that book sales and podcast listeners can be the same. You know, for me, you know, being in the publishing business, we never thought about, hey, how do we justify someone buying $20 for a book? It's always about justifying the time that someone thinks that this. That the problem this book is going to solve, they have enough time to actually read it.

Yeah.

Because the reality is the cost, it's.

How long it's going to take to read it.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And so in a podcast, you know, people are consuming, spending 45 minutes, you know, on this, that means it's. It's something extremely important to them. You know, what other things do someone sit, you know, do granted because they can do something else while they're listening To a degree, which is why podcasts are so successful. It's not like. Whereas a book, it's like, dedicated. You have to be fully present.

But.

It allows for this trust building and authority that's so important for your customer to ultimately become a prospect to become a customer or a buyer. It's all about kind of building trust and authority from the outset.

Yeah, that's great. We covered a lot. I know that you have a hard stop here, so I want to wrap up and make sure to respect that. And that's only the first three, and there's seven more. So first of all, I'd be interested to hear you talk a little bit about if somebody is interested in working with you, what does that look like? Like, who would those people be? My guess is you have a good understanding of who your buyer is. But also, like, if people just want to learn more, if they're fascinated by this, if they think there might be some nuggets there. I know you've also started to create some content around it. So we'd love for you to just share a little bit about where people can find you and potentially work with you as well.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, if you want to just get a PDF, it's a robust, I think it's like almost 40 pages where we really dive into these seven factors. Just go to seven factors of scale.com and seven is the number factors of scale.com and you know, opt in to get that and within five minutes you'll get that. We have a podcast that Also, you know, 40 to 50 minutes on each factor, going deeper into it. And then if you're someone you know, again, this is for someone that's got a product and I would say probably minimum revenue of half a million dollars and that you maybe are frustrated that the business isn't growing at the level that you think it is and that you know that seven figures is something you can do, but there's just something missing. Maybe, maybe you're not clear who the buyer is, maybe you're not sure about the product, maybe you're not sure around kind of sales and marketing kind of factor 6 is repeatable sales motion, something that we don't, we didn't get into. But that's really where does sales and marketing combine? How do we leverage that? How is that something that is consistent and we know when a lead comes in, what's the percentages that come on the, you know, out. And again, that's the sixth factor. It's not, it's not even in the first three because you got to get these other things dialed in before that. And so that's, I would say those are the best ways, you know, download the resource, listen to the podcast for free. And then you go to Scale Dash Factor Co, that's the website and you can find out more information. If you are kind of looking to say, you know, what we do is we always schedule a discovery call. There's a button there that says schedule call, takes you to a form you can schedule. And again at that time it's all about adding value, helping you grow and scale. And normally the first engagement is typically an all day strategy session where we'll come in and work on the business and go and just go through these seven factors or maybe three or four of them. But in that discovery call we get clear to say, hey, here's the three or four factors that I think are really missing in your business that we're going to really hone in and Knock out of the park.

Yeah. That's awesome. We'll link to those in the show notes as well. Chad, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Thanks Bjork. Appreciate it. Take care.

Hi.

Hi. Alexa here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the podcast. And if you want to go even deeper into to learning how to monetize, grow your food, blog your food business, we highly suggest you check out our Food Blogger pro membership@foodbloggerpro.com join. It's there that we share all of our course content about monetizing, photography, video and everything that food creators need to know in order to move the needle on their business. We also hold live Q&As every single month, as well as study halls where we get a chance to break into small breakout groups and connect with each other in really intentional way, talking about specific topics like creating recipes, keyword research, and more. It is just one of the most positive places on the Internet in my opinion and we have a ton of testimonials from some of our members. We've helped over 10,000 bloggers do what they want to do better and that just feels so good. So this testimonial from Tammy from Organize Yourself Skinny says this month, after 12 years working full time in higher education, I I resigned from my position to become a full time professional blogger. This was a decision I did not take lightly, but in the last seven months I made more money blogging than I made in my real job and I decided it was time to take the leap. I strongly believe that because of the knowledge you share within your income reports and also on Food Blogger Pro that I was able to take my blog to a professional level. I have been and continue to be inspired, motivated and educated by the information you so selflessly and graciously share with all of us. Thanks for that awesome testimonial, Tammy, and we just so appreciate learning about your journeys and being able to just be a small part in helping you get to where you want to go. So if you're interested in becoming a Food Blogger Pro member and getting access to all of the content we currently have for our members, which is a lot, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com join to learn a little bit more and get signed up there if you're interested. But otherwise we'll see you here next week on the podcast and until then, make it a great week.