Crafting Digital Expertise: Mastering Email Deliverability and Profit Expansion With Justin Keltner

I learned that the real value, the real value both for me and for the clients and the marketplace as a whole was in figuring out what the highest leverage things that I could do were. And not just getting paid based on the hour or based on the activity, but actually getting paid based on the result.

Hey, I'm Joe Fear and welcome to the Hustle and Flow Chart podcast. This is where we talk all about building businesses so they give you the freedom and fuel for your life. I. I'm not here to help you build a billion dollar business, but I am here to help you create a business with systems that work for you so you can make more money than you need just by working part time. You know, I was a chronic hustle mode kind of guy and I want to share my experiences and mentors I've met along the way to help you reframe things to be the most effective as an entrepreneur. I wish I had this guidance and insight when I was younger. So that's what I'm doing here for you. Please share and enjoy. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to another episode. I'm your friend Joe and I'm thrilled to have my buddy Justin Keltner on the podcast today. I see him as a true powerhouse when it comes to this combination of personal development technology and digital marketing. The guy has been doing all of that in some type of way for his entire life. It seems like he started building websites at five and a half years old, went through some tough times as a kid. Finding himself and with his family, we dive into how that really made him who he is today and some unique things and actionable insights that he gives to you when it comes to persuasion and sales and really seeking the most leveraged position when it comes to your business and your personal life and how to expand on that. Because what he does, I guess in his day, day job, quote unquote, it's his business. He's essentially the email scientist. He helps seven figure coaches with large email lists to sell their high ticket products and programs in a much more leveraged fashion. He's all about using what you have rather than going and spending a bunch of money and doing some external stuff. So by the end of this episode, you'll walk away with a bunch of insights, actionable stuff around personal development, sales optimization, the importance of understanding, persuasion and the fundamentals there. So make sure to get ready to take some notes. You're gonna hustle flowchart on this puppy and you're going to unlock some things that I feel like you can put into action Right away. So I will see you in the episode and let us know what you think and make sure to go grab everything in the show notes that I've listed and go check out hustle and flowchart.com for all that information and I'll see you in the episode. Justin. Justin, we're going stoked to have you here. I feel like this has been a long time coming, man. How you doing?

Absolutely. It's. It's great to be here. We've had so many conversations over the last few weeks about life and business and personal growth and everything in between. It's great to finally be on here and have an opportunity to speak to your audience and. Yeah, to. To really share some of our conversations and some of the lessons that we've both been learning with a lot of people.

Yeah, for sure, man. So, yeah, taking a step back, I think we originally met through Trevor Turnbull at Traffic and Conversion. I don't know how many years. Like 5ish? Maybe. Maybe. @ least. Maybe. Yeah. And it's always been. I feel like at the events, we'd pop around, I'd see you, we'd chat a little bit, and then that was kind of it. And I never got to know, you know, you or even really understand what the heck you do. And you've done a lot and there's still not a lot. I know. So that's where this episode will be a fun one. And. Yeah. And just to speed people up, because Trevor's been on the podcast, Mike Prince as well, and we've talked a lot about the group flight and just like the power of microhabits and actions and all this stuff, accountability. And you're one of the dudes in that group too, so small group. And yeah, we've learned a lot, shared a lot. So this was a long time coming. We'll just see where we go. So I feel like, yeah, like, let's talk about who you are then ultimately, obviously, like, on the business side, we'll talk about some of the stuff you're doing with email deliverability, some best practices there that people can swipe and deploy or whatever they're doing. I think you specialize in, like, high ticket sales. Right. And clients that have those kind of.

Offers. Absolutely. And email deliverability is just kind of one of the things that we do. Really. It's all about. Well, on the technical. On the business side, it's all about how do we leverage what people already have, especially business owners with large customer lists, and get them more sales, more high ticket sales, specifically, without having to go and spend a bunch of money on ads, without having to throw so much more into the mix. It's really a utilization and optimization equation to just take advantage of what you've got and to serve more people in a big way without having to dump a bunch more money into Facebook. Because you and I both know that that money would be much better served actually making a difference with our clients and in the world in Zuck's pocket.

So. That's right. Zuck doesn't need anymore. Well, like what you said, start with where you're at right now. Because I think everyone can relate to that no matter where you're at. Large company, or if you're just starting something new. Refining an offer. Like, I'm refining some of my own offers. And that's actually what I was thinking, like, what do I got right now? It's like podcast, email list, network guest. You know, like, we can rattle off all these things, and sometimes we just ignore some of those buckets or those audiences that we have access to. It's just framing a really good offer and obviously presenting value. So you've been doing that. We've been chatting about that in the group. So let's maybe dog ear that for a moment, because I'd love to go back and learn more about you, what you've done, because you've been in this space online marketing for what, like, 14, 15 years? So we're both right around the same time frame. Ish. But you tell me, man, like.

Yeah, if you want count, when I built my first website at five and a half, I think it was closer to about 26 years. So I might have a couple years on you.

Joe. Five, five and a half, dude. What were you using back.

Then? Yeah, front page seven. Yeah. This is before. I mean, it was even pre tables. For those of you nerds here, I won't get super technical, but, like, I guess it did use tables, right? It was like the original Internet, right, Where we use tables, the format, but you use the program like front page. It was even before Dreamweaver, where you would, like, lay stuff out on a page and it would format it for you. That was before. Before I learned to.

Code. Dude, tables always would make my brain hurt, man, back in the day. But I did learn front page and a little bit of Dreamweaver. Yeah, dude, I know that, like, opened up probably so many things for you because you are very, you know, like, you code stuff. I mean, you do. You have a broad experience, but five and a half, that's A hell of a time to start. So where do you go from five and a half? I guess it's all up from there, I.

Guess. I mean there are a lot of ups and there are a lot of downs. There was a lot of, I guess you could call it ego growths and then, and then ego deaths. Because my childhood was interesting for sure, and I'm happy to get into, into some of that. It was one of those things where sometimes on the surface everything seems kind of totally fine and kosher, but then really go a little bit deeper and there's a lot of stuff happening. But I started that, that sort of journey in online marketing very young because my dad was actually building his mortgage business around that time. It was like 96, 97. And he had started using Front page and he actually showed me how to use it as well and made sure that I made every single keystroke myself to really learn the ins and outs of. I learned Front Page. I built that website when I was just just barely walking around, barely barely talking, and then did go on to teach myself how to code. And eventually I started learning about business. Had an e commerce store when I was 15, when I was, I was still in high school, actually built and sold lasers online. That's how I first learned real online marketing, like after just the website development. So it was kind of like, you could say that I'm a website designer turned coder turned marketer turned business owner and.

Consultant. I think that's a smart way to grow up and learn a lot of the. I. You got your hands dirty at a young age and props to your dad for having you. I don't know if you liked it at the time, but forcing you to do every keystroke and really learn the ins and outs of. Yeah, I mean how everything is built now. I mean everything is built on that kind of architecture. It's changed over the years, but you understood it at an early age. So what was that website? So was that. That wasn't Lasers at five and a half, but like was there. Was that just like your favorite band or something? That's what it was for me back in the.

Day. It's called Links, Exciting Adventures and probably still on archive.org if you guys want to embarrass me and try to try to go and flash it on. Maybe I need to do. Yeah, maybe I needed to do like a little post about that and see if I could find it and just kind of laugh at myself a little bit. But yeah, it was called Links Banks. I came up with the name and no, I loved it. I love doing things with the computer. I was the kid who growing up, you know, they could never get me off the computer. And that was like the worst punishment that my parents could possibly do was say you're banned from using the computer Justin. I'm like no, what do you mean? But, but I found ways. I was clever. I figured out how to get on theater even when I wasn't allowed. But I always love things apart. Trying to put them back together, driving my mother absolutely crazy. You know, when I took apart a couple hundred dollar model, whatever little airplane thing and all the electronics to see how things worked. Y learned. I learned front page. Really enjoyed that. I learned like you said, the kind of the frameworks of, of the Internet and it was a simple kids site. That's how it started off and then it evolved into more things. And When I was 11 we were on a trip to Aruba and I sold you know those little fab icons that appear on website, you favorite them. So I sold one of those to a diamond dealer on an airplane at 11 way to.

Aruba. Wait, you sold the icon itself? Or, or like the, the creation.

Of the icon for his.

Website.

On an.

Airplane. A lot of little mini, mini stories and all that.

Dude. Okay, so you had the sales or at least you were getting that. Was that from your dad as well like being in mortgage? Assuming there's, I mean you were learning the tech side, the sales side.

Maybe. You know I think that I, I was always, I was definitely curious. Not nearly as curious as I was about technology. And something kind of interesting happened. Like I didn't have a ton of friends growing up. Few friends that I did have as a kid were basically like adult friends. You know I would get, get along much with my parents friends at a party than other whatever 7 year old when I was a little kid. And I think it's because I had always kind of had just a very curious mind mind and a very systems thinking mind. So I think I may have learned about people almost inadvertently because I started recognizing patterns in technology. So like I would I start to understand computers and how those computers worked and because certain things that were a little bit turbulent growing up, I felt a lot of just solace and what's the word? Security and like connection to the tech. Right. When you feel like and trust this technology more in a way than you can some of the people around you, you can predict and start to analyze patterns. If I give a computer this input then it's going to Say this thing back. And that was comforting to me growing up because I knew what would happen. Right. You put a piece of code and it's going to say this. You, you give this input, it's going to say that. So you asked about sales and I think that somehow me trying to work on figuring out compute and how they work taught me about people and patterns and communicate and how some of those elements of sales. I've never considered myself really a salesperson though. Yeah, like that, that was probably the last skill that I learned. I've always just been very good at fixing stuff and figuring things out and understanding processes and really getting, getting the nitty gritty. I've always been very detail oriented. So it's really more recently that I've actually reached out and started to connect more with people and become tiny bit more extroverted and. Yeah. So understanding those elements of things, that's.

Interesting. I mean, sales, I, I'm no sales expert, but know a lot of the, you know, obviously the fundamentals and how that works. But I mean, I'm sure you can boil things down to the fundamentals and get an expected response, which it sounds like you really enjoyed is something that was expected like input and output. And obviously people are unique creatures and all that, but we have these, you know, persuasion elements that kind of work and you know, the needs and desires of people, more or less. So you tap into that, you know, for the sales side of.

Things.

Things. So it's interesting. Yeah, it's like you approach it with this computer mind, this programming mind and you could apply it over here to people in a way. And I guess a sales funnel more or less is kind of that, you know, it can be repeatable and predictable in a lot of ways. Talk about. I'm curious about your childhood and growing up. You said it's turbulent, so. And obviously didn't have a lot of friends around. So you connected with technology and found comfort there. I mean, was that like you. Did you continue to build things over the years? Because I feel like, and I've heard little glimmers in the group that you've done some stuff in real estate. Maybe that's because your dad as well and some previous. I guess there's a couple things you said turbulent years which are interesting because I feel like a lot of people can relate to those. I'm curious of the upbringing, like without a lot of friends but connecting with adults. I feel like you learn you're almost like wise before your years, you know. And how did that, I guess serve You. In growing up through turbulent years and also into business eventually, because it sounds like it was always kind of wrapped up into that.

Somehow. Okay, so one of the biggest challenges that I faced as a child, and I'll preface this by saying I really think that my parents did as good of a job as they could have raising my sister and I, given their backgrounds and given the resources they had especially at their disposal, like, based on. Based on their own childhood and based on the things that they had to go through. With that said, my dad has always struggled with. With alcoholism as well as my mom, with gambling, with other addict addictions, with. With codependency in between them both. And so my parents weren't as emotionally connected to me as perhaps they could have been. And so that was probably part of the reason that I found so much of a. Of a reprieve in having that connection with the digital world. Right? That was something that was predictable to me. That was something that was easy to understand, that was something that was reliable, that I knew that I could count on. Because even though my parents did give us all the physical things that we needed, right? The gadgets and the phones and trips and all of those things, there was always lack of. Of maybe being there in. In the way that could have served us better. So for me, looked like kind of having to grow up, like you mentioned, having to grow up very quickly, having to grow up quickly, having to adult a lot earlier than. Than perhaps I needed to. I remember a time, and I haven't really shared this with too many people, but When I was 14, 15 years old, I decided to leave my mom's house in Northern California and go and live with my dad. Even though, like I mentioned, his. His challenges with alcoholism and. And a lot of other things that he. At the time, there was just so much chaos with my mom. And a big part of it was my fault, right? I wasn't the easiest kid growing up. I was very rebellious. I would run away from home and skip school to the point where they were, like, threatening to. To take us to court because I just wasn't showing up because I was bored out of my mind. I mean, I already knew most of what they were teaching, if not more. And it just didn't make sense to spend however many hours a day in class. And so I was a rebellious little kid, and I think I wanted to get attention, and my mom didn't like that, and she didn't know how to deal with me. So finally I just said, you know what? Screw it. I'm out I went to live dad. And there was a time where we were living in a little town most people haven't even heard of called Silver Lakes, which is, it's near Victorville in, in Southern California. And we had a house actually on the lake there. There's an interesting story about how this guy named George, who was basically homeless at the time, but for a while living with, with my dad and I. I don't know how that ended up happening, but he taught me how sail on this lake in a catamaran. This is like I was 14, 15 years old. We had a catamaran that was basically just parked at our house. It wasn't even our boat. But one of my clients, I had a computer company called High Desert Computing at the time. And client Bob, who was older, gentleman, he lived there in Silver Lakes and he had a boat. He was paying the HOA to store this boat on land somewhere. And he realized, you know, we lived on one of the fingers of the lakes and he's like, oh, I could just, you know, park my boat there and you could use it whenever you want. I'm like, okay, yeah, perfect. So George was staying with us, taught me how to sail a catamaran in this, this little man made lake in, in Southern California. That was actually probably one of my peak experiences growing up. It was, it was a lot of fun sailing out on the.

Lake. That's fun, man. That was.

Fun. And there, there was, there were a lot of good experiences like that for sure, especially leaving kind of the, the comfort of my house and being in this relative chaos with my dad. But I had to like hustle because there were times where he was just not able to really like produce or work unfortunately because of that disease, because of alcoholism. And it was sad. I was in a position where either we were going to be evicted, we already didn't have money to pay for the electricity, so we would basically have no air condition, 120 degrees outside. So you're just, you got fans, you're sweating. But then on top of that there wasn't enough money to, to pay any of the bills or pay the rent or anything. So I took a city bus, 45 minutes each know to the nearest like big town. We were in the middle of nowhere, go and hustle and get clients. And I had a couple print shops that would give me business building websites again, 15, 16 years old and would go and like door to door. And this is, you mentioned that the sales part earlier, like I learned it because I had to. And we Were literally in a position where we would have been on the streets if I didn't go and actually hustle and make shit happen and. And help to. To pay for.

Things. So you did learn sales a.

Little bit of the.

Chaos. Yeah, No, I get it. I. I see it now more so is. Yeah, that's the hustle mode, right? Like, it's like Alex Hormozi talks a lot about this as well. It's like, you gotta have, like, this reason why, you know, the sales. And usually it's this, like, burning need or. Or anger, whatever it is. Then in this fact, it's, yeah, you could have been homeless. You obviously didn't have electricity in a Victorville. And that around there, it gets very fricking hot. Holy crap. Okay, so you were hustling like crazy. This is where your dad was doing the best he could, you know, but obviously tough position there. Did you stay there or was this, like, already. At 15, you were already making moves. So it's like, what'd you do from.

There? I was kind of back and forth. I was all over the place, actually. I think I was maybe living with my dad in total for on and off for about a year and a half, two years. I actually did a year of high school online. And I spent part of the. The time actually traveling with my uncle. He had a family in Tijuana, Mexico, and now they're finally all, you know, together in the. In the States. I live good part of the time down in Tijuana as a teenager, him and his family. And when I started to learn Spanish and also realized that there's more to the world than just the U.S. but, yeah, I traveled and that. That was kind of a reprieve as well from all the chaos of my father. Because, sure, there was also chaos, but it was a different type of chaos. And I did feel a lot of sense of a family, you know, when I was. When I was with my aunt and uncle and cousins. And it was. It was a different, you know, level of connectedness and stability. And I also a brat there too. I didn't know how to be really a good kid or how to function as part of a family team, because all I'd ever really, really seen was that example of chaos and instability. And that's kind of a common theme. So for me, like, the biggest lesson, I think, in that is being able to turn chaos into order. I think for me, that's been like, the number one lesson throughout all of it and all of these things that I've been Through all the experiences that I've been through with my parents, with other things that I. That I got involved with, you know, perhaps that were even less wholesome or less. Less legitimate than. Than websites that I got dragged into and figuring out how to like, reconcile a lot of those things and how to kind of get back on the straight and narrow. It taught me a lot about persever and a lot about just transforming the chaos around me and being able to create inside from all the craziness that was going on in the outside.

World. Do you have tools to do that to? I feel like the order thing, putting chaos into order. You were doing that from a young age with technology. Did you have tools for, like, internal chaos? Because I could just imagine, like, emotionally, you know, and all that. Like, how did you navigate.

That? I didn't have tools. I mean, you know, American father and ex Soviet Russia, right? My mom came from Odessa, Ukraine, when she was 16 years old to the US but it was all part of the Soviet Union back then. And their idea, even things like, like meditation or therapy, God forbid, or anything of that nature, like, what are you crazy? Should say in her, in her Russian accent, Justin, why are you paying for all this therapy? She does not know what she's talking about. Why are you paying hundred dollars an hour for her to tell you that your parents are bad and what to think? I could tell you that for free. You don't need any of that.

Shit. That's good, dude. Wow. Yeah. I mean, old times, right? In Russian. They're. They're hard, they're tough. Maybe their cold plunges were okay, though. I don't know if you're doing that back then. I'm just.

Kidding. I wasn't. No, all the personal development stuff, I mean, that. That kind of started when I was maybe 17 years old and I. I took my first personal development seminar, it was called the Landmark Forum, and then proceeded to finish a lot of the. The cricket, actually, I think pretty much all the curriculum that Landmark had, and there were other things that I did of a lot along the way as well. I started also getting involved in a lot of, like, marketing events. And that's how I fell into working with. With coaches, was because I was on this journey to really heal myself and to reach that next level myself. And that is what got me working with those people, because I realized, wow, these coaches, these consultants, really cool. I mean, transformational, you know, people, transformational thought leaders. They had helped me so much to just deal with and process things that. That I was dealing with and to give me the tools that I needed in order to succeed and in order to. To really have the life that I want. And so I really want to give back and help them as well with their businesses for.

Sure. And I gotta say the same thing, man. Like, the more personal development I got into and I kind of found it through clients and there are coaches, a lot of the similar clients. You know, we have shared some. And also. It's just that phase. Yeah. Like you're into personal or coaching. I mean, it's personal development's kind of wrapped up into it. There's techniques. I used to learn that from making sales videos for people. Like, oh, interesting, you know, take me down a rabbit hole and learn something new. Breath work came out of there. Yeah. A lot of meditative practices, all that stuff, which, I mean, it's. It's so cool if you could pair up a service or whatever into a personal development type of practice. I mean, with your email stuff. I know you cater to a lot of coaches now, you know, with what you're doing and it's. Yeah, it just feels good to help them as well. And then it kind of comes back. I want to. Let's see here. Curious of where. Where to go because I feel like. So what did you do in terms of. Of, I guess, with coaches? Did you always play the consultant role, like with this, you know, with helping them? Or am I wrong that you were in some real estate stuff and did that as well? I guess. Fill me in there and how you. I guess when you grew up a little bit more and were on your own, like, what did you choose to build and like, did you learn anything new after you left your parents, your TJ with your family down there as well? Like, what did that look like once you got into some personal development and working with these.

People? Sure. So. So I never worked selling real estate, but I did work for about two years for quite a large real estate sales and I was like the guy kind of behind the scenes. So actually there's a parallel here because most of the, the journeys that I've. I've had with. With clients over the years, whether it was with real estate organizations, with consulting organizations, with some of the, like solopreneur coaches. I've always been the guy that has come in like the hired gun. So they called me the Swiss army knife of digital marketing. That was actually what our mutual friend Trevor used to call me when I was working in his business because I worked with Trevor actually for about four years. And that's probably how we ended up meeting in San Diego at a couple of those events. And so I was always the guy behind the scenes, just connecting the dots, building the systems, doing all the technology. And what was interesting was that deep down I really had this desire. I didn't really know it at the time, but I had the desire to be like them. I want, wanted to be the coach, I wanted to be the thought leader. I wanted to be the one saying amazing things, creating content, changing people's lives like I'm beginning to do now. And the personal development work that I did really helped me realize that was truly a desire of mine and that that's where I wanted to, to go. So the more I started working on the therapy and the NLP and the seminars and the personal growth and working with coaches and. And I've invested over the last decade, paid well over a hundred thousand dollars in coaches and trainings and workshops and everything related to that. And yeah, some of it's been bs. There's unfortunately a lot of charlatans in the world that are peddling nonsense. I don't regret any of the money that I've invested in it because it's created an environment where just, just this year, between my partner and I were probably going to close half a million to a million dollars of sales. So that wouldn't have been possible with the mindset that I had even five or 10 years ago. Now the other thing that was happening simultaneously was that I started going from just, just being the guy, the technician that like hit the hammer on the nail, fixing specific problems where people are like, oh, go fix this problem. And then you're like the dancing monkey and you go in like the thing, and you only make money when you're actually doing the activity. Slowly I learned that the real value, the real value, both for me and for the clients and the marketplace as a whole, was in figuring out what the highest leverage things that I could do were. And not just getting paid based on the hour or based on the activity, but actually getting paid based on the result. So this all transformed into a lot of what I'm now with email marketing strategy and deliverability. Because I started working with people with very big email lists. So in some cases their email list was 10, 15, 20, all the way up to hundreds of thousands of people on the list. And one of the highest leveraged activities that I discovered as I was working with these clients was solving the problems that they had around their deliverability. Because what does deliverability mean? I know that's kind of Technical, but that's this whole aspect of, of you've got a big email list of your subscribers. But email isn't a guaranteed service. So what does that mean? Well, you send a letter through the mail, you pay the 49 cents or whatever it is today, and the letter gets delivered. It's pretty much a guaranteed service. Yeah, sometimes things get delayed, sometimes they get lost. But 99.999% of the time your letter's gonna get through to that person at some point relatively soon. With email, people think that it functions like that. It doesn't function like that at all. In fact, you're lucky if you get 15 or 20% or 30% of people to actually open your message. So what I discovered with Trevor, with Kim, who's also a mutual client of ours, and with several of these other coaches and business owners that I worked with, was that one of the lowest hanging pieces of fruit was fixing the deliverability. Because guess what, you can go and get another a hundred leads a week by spending $400 a week on Facebook. But that's $1,200 just as an increase. So you're already spending. Right. So instead of going from $3,000 a month to $5,000 a month on ad spend, you can just follow two or three or four little hacks. I don't even call them hacks because that sounds black hat. I don't do any of the black hat. Gray hat stuff like this is very compliant all best practices. It's all following what the email providers explicitly and implicitly tell you that you should be doing. But most people don't. And also understand patterns and analyzing what you've already done to say, okay, what's working? How do we, how do we split test this to see what's actually going to function and what's not. And so we follow those threads, we take the low hanging fruit and we make those optimizations first. And people are able to, in 15 minutes of making some changes, save themselves from having to spend an extra thousand plus dollars every single month, or 5,000 or 10,000, because they're optimizing what they already have, their existing list and they're getting more out of that list. And that's kind of how that thing as an offer came to be. And then of course, we have other parts of it. And how do we optimize the content? How do we segment our audience? That's kind of the story of how I got into.

That. No, it's a great lesson to, to everybody. Anyone listening here is find that highest Leveraged activity, that thing that you can. I mean, that is your offer, right? Like, you can lead with that offer no matter where you're at. Now you're giving a result or you're saying selling the result. The, you know, it's paradise rather than hell Island. I think it's Travis Sago talks about. It's like, you know, instead of selling more work or, hey, you gotta spend more tick. It's like, no, we're sitting on maybe a leaky bucket. And yeah, you're essentially coming in there. And I've seen your offer too, and this is something where, when you were creating it, I thought it was interesting because it wasn't that long ago where we were talking about stuff and kind of going through your existing offer. And it looks wildly different. And it's cool because I know it's working for you as well, and it's exactly what you do. I can relate a lot to the whole hired gun thing too. For the most of my time, I've been a consultant and just worked on a bunch of different projects. And yeah, with what you're saying, you kind of learn a lot of patterns. What's working, what's not. What is that highest leverage thing? I think it's a good practice for all of us to do and think about probably consistently because I'm sure it's going to change over the years as well. With the more we learn it, the more we're working on stuff. Stuff like.

This. Yeah, and you made a great point, Joe. Just about offers, and I wanted to really drive that.

Home. Let's do.

It. I know you want a couple of the tactics and I mean, however much time you have to get into that, I'm absolutely down to share whatever I can. But before we even go to anything specific to email, I don't think people actually understand quite the importance of the offer. I went from making even in the last five years, like 50, maybe 100, $150 an hour, to having a minimum offer, like the minimum engagement. Most of what we're doing now is, is actually involving both cash and equity actually moving done for you. But my minimum offer, my minimum package now for any type of Service work is.

$15,000. Perfect.

Yes. So for making 50 bucks an hour just a few years ago, literally, I mean, it was literally just an issue of repackaging from $50 an hour to easily over a thousand. Now I'm. I'm not working and billing that 40 hours a week. Sure. But that's the beauty of it. I don't have to work 40, 50, 60, 100 hours between delivery and sales in my business because I might be charging 500 to $1,000 an hour. Right. Effective rate even more. I don't even know what it is at this point because now I have people fulfilling on a lot of the things for me. So I don't even look at it as an hourly equation. But effectively going from 50 to 500 or even more just by repackaging what I was selling. That's, I think, one of the key takeaways here and what's allowed me to now have the freedom to be here in Miami with my partner, to travel the world, to be on podcasts like this for two or three hours a week or more in many cases and be able to share my message and impact more people getting into like charity work, other things that I want to do to, to help make the world a better place. Yeah, it's difficult to do that if you're billing per hour and you're just consulting and you're solving problems that people say that they want help with but aren't necessarily the best leveraged use of your time or their.

Time. And it's scattered energy for the provider us, you know, it's. Yeah, you're solving problems, different problems and putting energy in different places. I mean, for our mind, it's tough to do. It's like tugged at all ends. I'm actually more curious to dive through the offer thing than the email stuff personally. And I know you have a ton of email information. Let's just like shout out like for people who are very curious about the deliverability stuff. I know you have a guide. So if you want to shout that out really quick so you can, people can pop over there and then I'd love to dive into some of the key things you're learning with.

Offers. Yeah, absolutely. So I do have a guide and actually this focuses a little bit less on on deliverability and more on points of optimization in the funnel. If people listening are specific challenges with deliverability, they can totally reach out. I'm at justint Keltner on all the socials. We could share that again at the end and in the show notes or the email scientist.com contact me through there. But most people aren't having deliverability issues. Like there's a lot of people listening. I'm sure that maybe aren't at the six or seven figure level yet because typically the minimum sides of business I work with is already doing 500,000amillion, a few million a year depending on, on kind of what their offer is, this offer specifically or this, this guy that I have is more for a lot of the rest of us and still applicable to larger businesses. But I just think it had a little bit more universal appeal and that's how I my clients sales by their sales call bookings by over 13, 50% in a week just by adding a few elements to that funnel in addition to what they were already doing with their email marketing and deliverability. I've got plenty of guides on that. It's just that sometimes gets really technical and it's not what everybody needs. But this guide which you can find@the Emailscientist.com guide is more about how to increase sales call bookings for your high ticket offer. And again if they get that and they're like oh by the way, I really, really want some help with deliverability. I've got like I said guides on that too but I think this one better fit because it goes, it goes into so many things that are, that are like again hanging fruit. It's all about optimization, all about easiest things that you can do right now and deliverability. I'll be honest, it's tough. You can do a lot of it yourself but there's so many moving parts to it that it's probably not the highest leveraged use of your time. If you're a business owner and you're making a million a year, probably doesn't make sense for you to try to figure out what Google's email algorithms are and how to optimize for those. My team's already figured it out. We've been doing this for over a decade and so those kind of things, they can reach out, out and we can have a chat and go more in depth into that.

One. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Man. And that's the end of my little mini.

Pitch. Mini pitch. It's all good. Oh, I figured, I mean there's people listening. People are going to want to go take a stab at that. So go ahead that way. Linked in the show notes and all that stuff too. Let's go back to the offer because I think that is, it's a big transformation moment for you said in the last three to five years. I mean it's, it's all about the offer. And that's the case with everything. You go to a startup and they talk about like, you know, that's VC funded, whatever, it's all about the product. That's their offer. The core thing. Same with any online business. Like what is your offer? That's how people are going to see you. So I guess, what are some of the mistakes you were making? And then what did you learn in the last handful of years when constructing your.

Offer? So I would say one of the mistakes that I was making was really around thinking that I needed to do what people thought that they needed in their business. As in, it's the whole, like, dancing monkey syndrome, right? Mutual friend Roland Frazier talks about this, where you solve these, like, little problems, these technical problems, and you're only making money when you're doing the work. And more importantly, that level of a problem like we were discussing earlier, is small enough so that you're just getting enough money because you've got this. It's like, it's economic theory, right? There's going to be thousands of people that can do that same thing, whether they're in the US Whether they're in other countries, they can set up a DMARC record for email. There's a lot of people that can do that. There's a lot of people that build a website. There's a lot of people that can design a landing page. And so if you're just looking for clients based on them saying that they have a certain need, like, oh, I need somebody to design a page, not only are you coming in at a level that is much lower impact than what you could be doing, but you're also competing with this huge marketplace of other consultants of other vendors that are selling that exact same thing. So you don't have any uniqueness to your offer. But if instead, like in my case, I'm going out and I'm doing partnership outreach, I'm doing cold outreach, I'm getting a hold of people based on problems that I see that they might not even know that they have as far as the technical details, but they've probably been suffering by not having their emails go through as much as they were before, by their sales decreasing compared to what they were like before, by customers reaching out and saying, hey, your email went into spam, I can predict they're having that problem before they're even fully aware. That's really the problem, that that's really what's, what's going on. And then I can provide the solution that's much more effective because you stand out in this crowded market marketplace and because you're helping them with something that is actually the real issue, which is how do we close more high ticket sales from our list? How do we sell more of our, our products, our services through email? How do we make sure that we don't get blacklisted and that doesn't kill all of our chances of actually having success with, with what we're doing in our email marketing, which is a part of a greater overall integrated strategy. Yeah, so that was probably the number one mistake I was making before is just being the hired gun, being the technician versus thinking like a business owner. It's a lot of the, the employee versus business owner mindset as well say okay great, you know, I'll put in the time. That's another concept is it's about time and so I should be billing per hour or maybe I should have a retainer and that retainer has a certain number of hours per month. I said screw all of that. I'm going to look at what the problem is that I'm solving which is we're going to double your click through rate in 90 days and this is how much it's going to cost. If we double their click through rate. Guess what? Their sales are double and what they're paying me for perhaps three months of work between my team and I not only is fixing their, their email deliverability and their email marketing and their sales problem. Right. Because really the big problem is sales. Sales, they want more revenue. So not only are we fixing that problem for the short term, but we're also fixing it for the long term. And now they've paid the, the 15 to 25k depending on their business to handle all those things. And sure we'll probably make them that, that 20, 30, 40K back in that 90 days. But more importantly in the next year they're going to get 3, 5, 10x or more return on their investment. It's just going to keep compounding because every one of these things that we, it's a force multiplier. It's something in their funnel that we increase it by a fraction of a percent now. And in the long term, long run, compounded over 1, 2, 5, 10 years in their business that's going to generate millions and millions of dollars in additional revenue. Yeah, because they fix these things once and now the system is a well oiled machine and now things are just happening, they don't have to worry about.

It. That's, I love the compounding nature of it and the fact that you're putting a time frame in there where they can make their money back and you can probably show them the math on how that can work as well based on their offers and all that kind of working backwards. But also future pacing and showing how much revenue you're going to bring to them. And I think this opens up, correct me if I'm wrong, to the maybe a rev Share equity play, because you now are creating this future value that you can pretty much track back to what you're doing. I'd love to learn more about doing that. Cool. Tell me about, like, I guess give me a little bit more details. And I know you're, you mentioned Roland, fascinating guy, obviously, and brilliant mind. And yeah, he's talked a lot about on this podcast a bunch of ways on how to build equity and do deals that way. Like, how are you structuring that or thinking about building equity or maybe rev share into these deals.

Too. So I have a current partner of mine who has her own business and we're, we're working on really combining forces in a lot of ways here. And I get a percentage of everything that comes in. We've, we've built a lot of the components of the funnel, and so there's a certain percentage. I don't want to get into specific numbers, but the deal could look like anywhere from 15 to 2030, maybe even 50% of the increase that you create or if, if, if, if it's an integral business, maybe even more. Right. So sharing on profits from an even larger amount of business because you're the person who's generating all of it. So let's say somebody's doing $250,000 a year and you say, look, I can get you to 500k. They'd be crazy not to say, let me cut you into 10 or 15% of that increase every year. So instead of that being a cloud pays you one time, let's say $20,000, you're creating 250,000 and then later 500,000 and then $700,000 of increased value. And they're paying you each year an increasing amount of money that's based on all that increase because you're doing things for them that they might not have been able to do before on their own. So specifically in this case. Right. We're working on, on systems, we're working on setting up dialers to be able to automatically identify and then have our team call all of those leads that are come. Right. And we talk about this a little bit in the, in the guide, but let's say that you are collecting phone numbers, which everybody should be doing. And again, I don't want to give too much away. They should go to email, signed to this EmailScientist.com guide and get the guide and they'll see some of the text messages and things that we incorporated into that funnel. But you add elements like that, like calling like text messages, like actual follow up, like real old school sales stuff. The irony is we're like on the cutting edge of sales technology. Nobody's doing this in the coaching space yet. We're using old school techniques, it's true, but it's like forgotten art, right? So we're doing things like that. And guess what? Now instead of the email marketing being this sort of like passive thing that happens, happens and it's just nurturing people on the back end. And then eventually when people want to buy, maybe they click a link, join a webinar and purchase. We're getting, we're collecting phone numbers from everyone. We're getting them on the phone as soon as they come in, as soon as they click a link in, in our email, as soon as they engage and register for an evergreen webinar. And I've been devising all those systems behind the scenes to make that happen. So we're going to 5 to 10x her business in the next two years and we're on track to do that. I'm happy to take 20 or 30% or more of that and so is she. Because guess what? We're creating value that wasn't there before. We're creating, creating revenue that wasn't there before from the same list without spending money on anything.

Else. It's again, leaky bucket, you know, or, or things that just adding in these layers of, of engagement to increase conversions and value. And yeah, there's just text messaging. That's one of them. It's funny. Yeah, I read the guide. I will not give any, any more away because it's great because yeah, just text messaging alone and I like the speed, the communication and follow up. I think that's key. And you lay that out inside the guide as well. That goes for any business. It's like asking for information. Follow up with them, obviously. Get them on multiple modalities if possible and build value. That's where a core offer comes into play. And then you can get creative on the back end and see what that looks like and how to take that relationship. All right, I think I. Let's wrap here, Justin, because I think we covered a whole ton. I'm excited to see where this thing's going to go because I feel like you're on fire right now and you have been obviously for a long time. But like this, this whole science scientists have feel like you're like the tech email marketing scientist. You've been hands on forever and now it's like rocket ship time, man. Kind of putting the pieces together and having a great partner always helps with that too. So kudos to you for collabing on that because it's fun to co create that kind of cool, cool stuff. Catch justin on on LinkedIn. I'm doing reels now. You're giving a lot of content out. You do have your own podcasts and stuff, but one day we'll, we'll fire that puppy back up. But I know you're doing a lot, lot of guesting so you're definitely giving a lot of content. So reach out to Justin for sure if any of this.

Resonates. Absolutely. They can reach out to me. I'm happy to chat with any. We have a limited number of slots available for calls, so the first maybe five or ten people from your show that want to really just do a funnel diagnostic and take a look at their email funnel and their sales funnel and see what's going on behind the scenes. Happy to do a few of those calls. The email scientist is where they can contact me. The email scientist.com the email scientist slash guide if they want to download that. And then pretty much on all the socials, it's Justin Tkeltner and we'll put that in the show notes for people as well. I don't bite. Feel free to reach out, have a conversation if you want to chat with anyone.

Here. And again, well, dude, thanks for being open about your past and opening up because that's it's awesome, man. And I think it helps a lot of people. I know it does. So excited for you to keep growing and sharing and let's keep the party going, man. So I know we'll be chatting more later. Thank you so much. All right, all right. That's what I got for you today. And remember, it's not all all about living to work. It's all about working to live if you need to do the work. But you know, work can be fun and it should be fueling for your life. So if you enjoyed what you just heard, if you got some nuggets of wisdom that you want to share or you're just noodling on right now, please go tell others. The way that people find this show and how you can help others get their aha moments is through work of mouth. So if it is telling your friend, telling your family, send an email to your list writing a review or whatever it might be. Everything helps. So thank you so much for listening to the hustle and Flowchart podcast, and I will see you next time.