Business Advice for Today's Unpredictable Times | The War Room with Eric Siu

Oh, this is cool. Look, I can show messages. That's awesome. Hide message from stream. Cool. So hopefully I am streaming live to YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook group, Facebook. And yeah, I mean, basically we're gonna do some Q&A today, just kind of hang out for a little bit and then go straight into my day. But I want to make sure everything is working. Leave a comment, type one into the comments right now if you can hear me, and then we can kind of go from there. So let's see. I'm going to manage to stream right now. One second, and let's see. Yeah, as I as I get this set up, as we wait for some people to come in, tell me where you're coming from. But I wanted to talk about kind of the art of the pivot right now, because a lot of people right now are like, what do I do with my business? You know, I think people are trying to force a square peg into a round hole and it doesn't work during periods like this. And by the way, I'm kind of sweaty because I just did a ride. But yeah, I mean, think of it this way. If you run a restaurant right now and you're continuing to try to do the old business model, which is trying to get people to sit in, obviously that's not going to work. So, you know, can you pivot to delivery, right? And in some cases you can't pivot to delivery because if you're a fancy restaurant, you sell $60, $100 per meal, you can't do that. Now, same thing with, let's say you run a web design agency or something like that, and you're trying to force people to do designs right now. You're trying to get more clients right now. You think it's business as usual. Reality is business isn't as usual. And again, you're trying to force things, right? Yeah. So I think you kind of have to go skate to where the puck is right now. And, you know, the problem is, you know, people are just— they're so stuck with the old ways and they're like hanging on to it and they're not willing to adapt, right? So I think one of the things you can think about, kind of easy thing to think about right now is if you're just starting out, guess what? Now is a good time for you to start building your base, to start building your foundation, To start building content, right? You have a lot more time now to go live, to hang out with people. I'm doing a lot of these Zoom chats. I have more Zoom chats today. I'm going live like this. I'm still doing my podcasts and we're still recording the Marketing School podcast. So digital, I think anything digital makes a lot of sense right now. If you think about ads, digital is anywhere from 50 to 80% cheaper right now versus 30 days ago. Now, if you don't take advantage of that now, well, you know, that's ultimately on you. Yeah. On the content side, if you don't start building your base right now and come out of this stronger when we come out of it, that's also kind of on you. And you think about like the type of, you know, there's also different deals you can do too, right? Like with other people that are doing digital. So for example, it could be as simple as, you know, someone else that has your audience, okay, getting on other podcasts right now, getting on other email lists, right? And, you know, Chet Holmes calls this creating the Dream 100. Yeah. And the Dream 100 is basically, okay, for, you know, who has my audience? So maybe I start with YouTube first. Okay, who are all the YouTube influencers that have my audience? Maybe it's around marketing. And then I slide over to Instagram. Okay, who are all the Dream 100 Instagram people that I can follow up with, right? And this, by the way, this was explained really well in the book Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson from ClickFunnels. And I had him on the podcast last week. It's going to come out in the next couple of weeks on the Leveling Up podcast. The other thing too is I think about, okay, people right now are trying to learn, they're trying to get better. So, what I would basically do is say, you know what, look at the podcast I do, Leveling Up, and look at Marketing School. If we can have a premium version of the podcast that includes our courses, that includes a monthly ask me anything, maybe like a Slack group or a WhatsApp group, something like that, that's additional value. So, you can get our free one, but you can also pay $10 to $15, $30 a month. Yeah. And then from there, well, guess what? You can make more MRR on it, monthly recurring revenue, plus your audience is getting more value from it. And we actually have this going on right now. You can go to singlegrain.com/pro. If we can get to 20 paid subscribers or 25 paid subscribers, we're probably gonna roll this out for marketing school as well. So if you're interested in it, there's a free trial right now for 7 days, singlegrain.com/pro. Check it out because we're using SuperCast for this. And so you think about all the assets that you have, how can you monetize them right now? Like our website, our blog, you might have a YouTube channel, you might have a big blog, you might have something that gets good traffic. How can you better monetize that? So I'll give you an example. We rank number 1 for advertising-related keywords and a company rents that page out from us and they pay us a couple thousand dollars a month for that page. That's a creative way of doing things, right? Or, you know, you can think about, you know, if you get a lot of traffic to your website, let's say for example, we get decent traffic, about 250K visits a month. How can we, instead of trying to force people down, you know, getting these free marketing consultations, why don't we try to— try to not force them. Why don't we try to get them to fill out an application, find out what their needs are first, then get on a phone call with them, and then we can put the right offer in front of them, right? So that's a little different than just saying, oh, you should, you know, you got to have like a, I don't know, $50K, $100K, $200K a month budget on advertising. A lot of people don't have that right now and advertising costs are cut, right? So you have to be willing to, again, skate to where the puck is going. You can't rest on your laurels. And I'll tell you right now, we have some people that are— people I talk to on different teams, they're disappointed right now. They're disappointed that we're making changes. But you kind of have to make changes like this. If you are in any position of power, you got to be able to move very swiftly and then kind of go from there. All right, so I'm trying to look for— let's see, let's look at the chat real quick. Chat is ready to display. Click on this, blah, blah, blah. I just want to make sure chat's actually working. I don't actually want to leave that. I'm going to go to chat real quick. Open in browser. And I'm going to answer some questions right now. So yeah, start dropping some questions in. And then actually, I'm not even sure if I can see what's going on with With YouTube or Facebook. Usually I can. I'm trying to see, but I'm using this this app called Restream, which is pretty good. Restream allows me to push to again LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook. I can push to Twitch as well. So it's pretty cool. I just want to make sure the chat's working right now. Next time I'll make sure the chat's working better. But I just want to tell you kind of what I'm doing right now and and you know how I'm you know quote unquote adapting with the times. Because it's tough for me because when I talk to other, let's say, SaaS companies right now, or when I talk to other agency owners right now, or when I talk to other people that have websites with good traffic, they're stuck. Their business is down 40% to 80% and they don't know what to do, right? And so now is a time like this where you want to build your foundation to understand that for the long term, the next time something like this happens, like any type of crisis happens, You will be prepared to weather the storm because you are diversified and you don't have all your eggs in one basket. So you can jump around if you need to. So you're not going to be as worried. And because you're not as worried, you're going to be able to A, take advantage, and B, you're going to be able to operate smoothly through the kind of the rough waters, right? And by the way, your team's going to be looking at you for this. They're going to be like, okay, how is Eric reacting to this? If Eric's reacting, he's panicking right now, I should be panicking too. Good news is you treat people well right now, even if you have to let people go, you treat them well, you check in with them, they're gonna remember that forever. If you don't treat people well right now, people will remember that forever. And people are gonna talk about that way more than they're gonna talk about you treating people well, right? But it's about you fundamentally being a good person right now, making the tough decisions you need to make, making them quickly, and then taking care of people. And then, again, building the foundation. If you haven't produced any content right now, here's your chance to build leverage for for the long term. And once you come out of this, you're gonna be like, okay, I have these different channels where I have media. And, you know, if one business goes down, I'm not gonna lose everything, then I can kind of pivot quickly and then move around, right? Pivots, by the way, in basketball, when you're pivoting, you're not like, you're not changing completely. You're one of your foot, you're usually your left foot is still down and you're just kind of moving around, right? But you can move around quickly. And like, I have some people right now, they have ticket businesses. So they sell like event tickets and, you know, right now for them, their business is down 100% or anybody that's running like events business right now, their business is down 80% to 90%. So in a scenario like that, what do you do? Oh, like I'm in all these, you know, different entrepreneur kind of WhatsApp groups. It's like, oh, you know, I'm going to get a PPP loan. In America, that's called the Paycheck Protection Program. So, you know, the question there is you do this PPP thing. It's like, okay, then what? What are you going to change rapidly, right? You know, the restaurants that are doing well that are charging a lower price, I mean, delivery is thriving for them. Great. But, you know, again, businesses that can adapt, they probably have to lay off a ton of people. Like, I know in New York, there's a couple of restaurant groups that just, they laid off thousands of employees, right? So I would encourage you, if you're going to think about doing a business, you think about something that does not have, you know, very high cost to operate. Has a has great margins, you know, very scalable, and then you can go from there, right? And by the way, like I'm not poo-pooing on agencies because I have an agency, but I also have other businesses that have economies of scale. So what you got to think about right now is if you if you have a like agency type business, you got to think about how could I drive economies of scale? Can I work for free and maybe charge on a pay for performance basis because there's economies of scale there? You know, SaaS obviously, you know, it scales. If we did a subscription for our podcast, that would scale as well because it's a subscription. Same thing right now. We had old courses that we put together around old programs around helping people start their agencies. And we brought that back because now's a good time for that. Ad costs are down. Now's a good time for it. People are looking to do that. A lot of people are being like 16 million people filing for unemployment in the United States in the last week. Or last couple weeks, like that's crazy, right? So I'll tell you right now, like if you want to start, if you want to talk about growing your agency, or if you want to you know just learn a little more about the program, you could actually book a call directly with us. Just go to singlegrain.com/call. That's C A L L, and then you can book a call with us, and then you know go from there. But um yeah, you got you gotta you gotta be able to diversify. Because if you don't, you're going to die. Again, like I'm going to give you some more examples, right? Let's see. Web design agency down 70%. Ticketing company, like I mentioned, down 100%. Events-based business down 80%. PR company down 70%, believe it or not, you know, because people talk about crisis management during this time, but PR agencies down 70%. And then when I talk to other kind of service businesses, they are, they're like, yeah, you know, leads have kind of dried up right now. And it's kind of shaky, right? And, um, you know, even the businesses that are doing well, they're kind of shaky too. Like, we work with a— we work with a hosting company, um, they're kind of— they're, they're like, okay, you know, we're kind of just waiting and seeing what, what happens, right? It's kind of— you take things on a month-by-month basis. So, you know, all this to say that even the businesses that are doing well, they're kind of like a little scared right now too. And I have a survival blog that gets, um, you know, a couple million visits a month. And, um, even there, like, you know, it's an affiliate blog, but The manufacturers that we work with have said that, you know, they're running low on inventory and they're gonna have to operate on a day-by-day basis. So you gotta think about that. Like, I don't know how much is booming right now. Like maybe like streaming software like this is booming right now. Twitch, you know, Twitch is booming, you know, YouTube's booming, Netflix is booming, like all these things, right? Food is booming. Like you look at Blue Apron stock, it's shooting up and to the right. And by the way, like if you think about it, during times like this, a lot of businesses were built during recessions. I think Slack was built during a recession. Airbnb was built during a recession. There's a lot of different examples. So it's a really good opportunity, I think, for you. Like obviously things suck, you know, for people to be suffering and for people to be, you know, for there to be so much chaos outside. But for you, if you can stay safe and you can stay healthy during this and you can keep your mind right, Then what's going to happen is I think 80%, 70 to 80% of us are going to emerge from this stronger than ever. Because you know this is a moment of stress, right? And I recommend you guys read the book Anti Fragile. But this is a moment where you get stressed, you get taxed, and you this is where you get to test your muscles and see what you're really made of. And you know if you emerge from it stronger, great. And even if you fail from it, that's still a lesson, right? And obviously you know I don't want anybody to fail, but still like there's. There's a lesson in successes and failures, and you learn more from the failures too, right? So anyway, next time I'm going to make sure the comments are all working so then I can actually engage with you guys. Oh wait, look, there's people engaging. Chat disabled on YouTube. That is my fault. Can you tell me more about the Marketing School Podcast Premium? So that would basically be like this. So Neil and I, we do Marketing School and we have Right now, we're hesitant to do it because we don't know how many unique listeners we have. So, we get about 1.1 million downloads a month. That doesn't mean we have 1.1 million unique listeners, right? We know we have a good amount because when I go to conferences and when Neil goes to conferences, people talk about the podcast. But what I would say is instead of just the free podcast that has ads in it, what you would get, let's say you pay $10 a month, you would get an ad-free podcast. Okay? So, no ads. You would get a monthly newsletter from Neil and myself. So we'll share kind of stuff that we've learned. And then you would also, you could potentially get a Slack group or a WhatsApp group or private Facebook group where you can engage with people. So there's additional value in paying for that. But again, go to singlegrain.com/pro if you're interested in the free trial of the leveling up thing. And then that might parlay into a premium podcast where we might even try to get discount on softwares. We'll give our software into it as well. So there's a lot of different ways to skin a cat because right now we're trying to package nice deals for people too. That makes sense because people want a good deal right now. And so, by the way, if you have a lot of different assets, think about how you can package things together. Think about how you can offer your customers or your clients a deal right now too because they're going to remember that. Like if you go easy on them, they're going to remember that and they're going to remember you forever. And that time where you give them a discount for 1, 2, 3 months, maybe 4 months or so, maybe even longer than that. What might happen is the retention extends a lot because they remember you for doing good things, right? And you just got to be out there kind of ready and willing to help. And that's what's happening right now. Like, why do you think a lot of people are going live so much? Yeah, they're at home a lot more, but it's an opportunity to build your audience more and to add. And if you think that you're too early right now to build content, then that's completely fine. But you know, let's say you're learning. You can even document yourself. Like, yeah, use this. Use a selfie. Make selfie videos. Document yourself learning during quarantine, and then after that, you'll come out of it much stronger and go from there. Do I think $9.99 is better? Oh, look at that! I can put that in there. Do I think $9.99 is better? No, not necessarily. I think just $10, $10 flat. Do $9.99 and super. Make your podcast into like a Patreon so you can make a subscription from it. But anyway, yeah, next time I'm gonna make sure the YouTube chat works. Looks like Facebook chat's working. Looks like I can't see LinkedIn. But yeah, this is cool. This is cool. If you guys would like to see more, type 1 into the chat. And it looks like this went pretty well the first time and I'm gonna do more of them. All right, so that's it for today. I hope you guys have a A great day. Oh wait, so this will be slightly better than what Tim Ferriss tried. So what Tim Ferriss did, just to give you guys some context, Tim Ferriss podcast gets a couple million downloads a month. He tried a donate button. So that's a lot different than a subscription with an explicit offer. I think he didn't try as hard as he could have. It's just like, hey, you can do, you know, for $10, $15, $1,000. It just, it wasn't clear what was being offered. So in marketing, your offer has to be clear. If your offer is not clear, nobody's going to buy it. People are going to be confused, just like you're kind of confused right now with our offer, right? So we got to do a better job of that. But you can go to singlegrain.com/pro and then learn more about the current subscription that we have available. And there is a free trial for that. So anyway, guys, that's it for today. I hope you guys continue to stay safe and I'm going to do more of these. All right. If you guys want to do more of these, leave a comment. Let me know. I'm going to actually go check the comments on the different channels right now, make sure everything is working. And I will see you tomorrow or not see you tomorrow. See you when I do this next time.