Kelsey Bratcher — Marketing Automation Tools And Strategies

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flow Chart with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf.

Hey. Hey, Joe.

Hi.

How you doing?

Great.

Today you're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast and we really appreciate it.

What are we going to listen to tomorrow?

Probably the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

What did I listen to yesterday?

That's an obvious answer.

Porn.

Whoa. Some people needs friends.

Some people on audio.

Drives down the road listening to adult movies on audio.

Why do you do that?

I don't know. I've never thought of this idea, but now I'm getting a really good visual. Not a good visual.

Look it up on Amazon. They actually sell audio.

No, wait, this is a thing.

This is a thing. It's a real thing.

God help us all. We all need more friends and to be institutionalized for a bit.

Anyway, that was a little bit of a sidetrack.

So today we're talking to Kelsey Bratcher, and this dude's like an automation master in many ways. He used to work for infusionsoft.

A long time ago, and it's like, I think over 10 years ago now, and kind of. Well, he's doing a lot of cool stuff now. So he essentially runs an agency, but not like an agency. He scales. It's a scalability type agency. He has a podcast. He has all these opportunities out there that he's doing strategic things with. I mean, Matt, what were some takeaways from you?

So, for me, one of the things that I really liked diving into right in the beginning was we kind of got into. So he used to work at infusionsoft for a long time. And I was asking him, what are the biggest takeaways you took from a company that managed to grow that size and bring into your own entrepreneurial world? And he gave us some good tips and things that infusionsoft did really well. And then we also had an interesting discussion, which we never really thought the conversation was going to go here at all, but we talked a little bit about direct mail marketing and some of the strategies they use for direct mail marketing. So if you're. If you have any interest in direct mail marketing, there's almost like a little blueprint in here of how you can just get started by sending out mail in the snail mail for marketing purposes.

Yeah, it got us interested in doing this stuff again because about a year ago, we stopped sending a lot of direct mail. We were sending at least some. Something per month out to thousands of people, but stopped when we wrapped up our EGP letter And we want to kickstart that. And yeah, I mean, basically Kelsey was breaking down how they have been filling up rooms with Doctors and pitching $10,000 stem cell treatments to chiropractors out there. And it's crushing and it's all, it's leveraging his, his abilities. And then his podcast a little bit too.

Yeah. And he's an automation master, so he's really, really amazing at tying things together using like zapier and API integrations between tools. And he just, he takes it to another level. And we cover all of this ground in this conversation. It's. It's just a really wide ranging but awesome conversation. I was blown away by how he actually gets butts in seats at events, selling ten thousand dollar products and, and the automation behind the scenes to make that happen and using direct mail there. And just like the whole culmination of this, these systems that he's created are just really, really cool.

Yeah. Dude, butts and seats is so old school that term I get. We get handstands in seats. Yeah. We get a bunch of gymnasts to our conferences.

Yeah.

And they handstand the whole time.

Nobody pays attention because everybody's under so much duress while having this handstand list.

Take any notes.

That sounds like a really effed up conference.

I don't know. I just wanted to be dramatic.

Anyway, hey, let's tell them about our traffic course that we're selling.

What are we selling?

We got this traffic course called the Perpetual Audience Growth.

All right, so this thing is freaking awesome. And we'll be the first to admit that we probably, or we do give way more than we actually sell. Make very obvious on the sales page or when we talk about, we basically give you everything we create in this thing. And it's that. I don't know, there's a lot of people in there that are doing some really cool stuff. No matter the industry. The whole big takeaway is that they're growing their audience.

Yeah. And you're gonna learn how to drive traffic. As much traffic as you want to. Anything you want. That's the main course. But we actually do have a bunch of bonus courses that we never even talk about in there. About things like YouTube and chatbots and.

All of PR and every freaking issue of our EGP letter that I was just mentioning. It's I think 12 issues in there. 13, I think 13 freaking issues. And we sold each one for about a hundred bucks. And this is like 20, 30 pages of just like total fricking blueprint marketing for anything you can think of step by steps and people loved them. And then we stopped selling them and this is the only place you can get them now.

So yeah, just go to evergreenprofits.com traffic if you're listening to this podcast right now, you can enter the coupon code shirt and we'll actually shoot you a free Hustle and Flowchart T shirt for buying our course and being a listener of the podcast. So pretty cool stuff.

All right, that's pretty good.

All right, let's go talk to this guy.

Let's do it.

Let's go jump in with Kelsey.

Hey, Kelsey, thanks for hopping on the show, man.

Yeah, no problem. I appreciate you having me on.

Yeah, man. So you're, you're out in what part of Arizona again? Remind me.

I mean Gilbert, Arizona.

Gilbert. Okay, cool.

Yeah, so like east, southeast of Phoenix kind of area. Technically, if you're like out of state, it's Phoenix.

It's a suburb of Phoenix, I guess would be the way to say it.

Yeah, for sure it's not an inferno quite yet out there, but no, it's nice. You're booking it out of there pretty soon. Anyway, we'll chat about you. You're RVing.

Matt, you hit him with the question.

Okay. All right, so we're testing something new with our podcast where we just. We want to start off with just a really random off the wall question to get things going, just for shits and giggles. So if you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Hmm, I would say I would do like eggs, hash browns, and bacon.

Oh, you're a breakfast guy.

He likes his breakfast.

Those will work anytime, you know.

What would it be for you, Joe?

Dude, you know this. It's gonna be like some form of Mexican food. So it'll be like carne asada burrito. I'm from San Diego.

It would be some sort of burrito for me too. I can eat burritos all the time.

I was just thinking, yeah, on the road for you rv and we'll get into it. I was thinking be army rations or something like that. Something consistent that's always with you.

You don't need to get the freeze dried meals that you just add water.

Yeah, exactly.

The prepper stuff.

Yeah.

Nice. Well, let's get into your backstory a little bit and find out a little bit about you. I know from reading your bio you started working at Infusionsoft around 2008, if I remember correctly. What? How did you get involved with infusionsoft and then kind of. What was the evolution after infusionsoft?

Yeah. So I. It's funny, like, all my actual, like, time where I've been, like, I always refer to the time when I was a wage slave because I had a job and someone else dictated what I had to do and that kind of stuff. But I always found myself getting into a position where I've learned more than everybody else, know everything inside and out that I get put into these, like, positions of like, as like a walking database knowledge base kind of thing. So then they. So I had been working at a call center doing like, tech support for AT&T. And I had some friends that got hired at infusionsoft to do their email marketing, like managing the, like, the backend system of email marketing. So negotiating with ESPs and things like that. So they had told me this company was hiring and it was really cool to work at. And so I applied and got in the door as a, like, CRM implementation type person. And that was 2008, I think it was like 23 at the time.

That's a pretty early on in Infusion.

Yeah. Relatively young. And I. My kid was like less than a year old, I want to say. Wow. And so took that, that, that, that leap. But the thing that I figured out, like, right at, like, first day on the job, I was like, this is going to be the last job that I ever have because I'm going to learn. Because we were serving small business owners and entrepreneurs. And so I had kind of. I dabbled with the idea of doing that type of stuff, but I never wrapped my head around how it would actually happen. And so spending time doing that every day implementing these types of. The type of tool that infusionsoft is, I learned quite a bit and then slowly developed the confidence to believe and go out on my own. But I had gotten like, the last two years that I was at infusionsoft, I was escalating into the position where you basically sit around and just wait for people to ask you questions and then you tell them how to do stuff. And so that gets boring after a while.

How long was Infusionsoft around before you joined?

2001.

Okay.

They were a custom software company, I guess would be the way to say it back then.

Yeah.

And so they had been in business for seven years prior to me.

Starting. So I was like employee number 76. And they are. So they had made a transition, like, I think the year and a half, two years prior to start getting into more of like, a SaaS product. And so there's, there's a, there's a time period there where it's like, you know, they're just like any other small, like any web developer, you know, freelance type of stuff is more like a freelancing business than it was like a software company.

Yeah.

And when I started, it was like after that, like I got hired right after their first round of venture capital.

Got it. Yeah. Because I knew they blew up big.

Yeah. I never discovered Infusionsoft until about 2010, as I think the first time I ever signed up and started using infusionsoft. I'd never even realized they'd been around for nine years before that.

Right. Yeah.

No, it's a weird. Yeah, it's weird to think about because now you're looking at like almost 20 years that they've been around. And I mean, things are a lot different now. We'll just say that like, because at the time they didn't have any competition really. I mean, you had like act CRM, but that was something you like have to install like on a machine in your office or like on a remote server. And there wasn't a SaaS product that was helping or focus on small business like doing marketing automation or CRM. And so that time period was. I mean, there wasn't a lead pages, there wasn't clickfunnels, there wasn't Drip and Autopilot and activecampaign.

Yeah. And to be honest, I mean, I don't want to sound like a huge infusionsoft fanboy or anything. We actually don't even use infusionsoft anymore. But I have not found a CRM that does that whole like visual campaign builder thing as well as infusionsoft. Pretty much every CRM kind of has that visual campaign builder now, but none of them have quite gotten it as good as what infusionsoft does, I think.

I definitely, I agree with you. I mean, I'm not as big of a fanboy as I used to be because I'm getting a lot more into like pipedrive and other, other small like CRM slash marketing automation tools in this space. And. But you're 100% correct. Like, if I go into like, I've been using Autopilot a lot because it works really well with pipedrive and I've been. I have reuse pipedrive in my agency and I also work with some pipedrive users to do some stuff. So there's. They have this thing called Journeys, which is more like what like Drip has, where I think they're called automations. And you're defining like what a trigger is. So that's like a general thing, but your goal or your what, what stops the automation is done differently than it is done in infusionsoft. So you have to make like a decision tree that says, you know, did this person join this list already? If not, then send this email as opposed to saying when this person buys a product, this whole thing stops.

Mm, that makes sense.

And that's how like autopilot is pretty significantly different. So you're missing out on a lot of the components. But then there's also this other aspect where that's just all the marketing automation stuff and none of the, like, I'm a sales guy sitting in front of my CRM and I need to call my leads. Right, right, right.

That makes sense. Now, while you were at infusionsoft, just to stick on that for a second, was there anything as a company that you felt infusionsoft did really, really well that you kind of took away with you?

Yeah, when I was there, this has changed significantly for whatever reason. I don't know. But when I was there, the thing that really resonated with me is that it was the first time I worked at a company where I felt like people actually liked their job and that they would work hard. You'd see people working like 60 hour, 70 hour weeks with no problem. They had a company culture, was a huge emphasis that they put on it. And so during that time period, it resonated really well with me. And then they had core values that I felt like were pretty legit. So it was like entrepreneurship, authenticity, integrity. Dang it. Anyways, so they had five core values at the time and entrepreneurship was one of them. And the way that they had said their positioning was like, we'd like it so that you work here, but like when you leave that you would be going to start your own business as opposed to leaving for a different job. I like that. And then over time that changed a little bit because they had too many people leaving to start their own business.

I don't see that being a problem.

Well, you know, you spend a bunch of time talking to people that making two, three, four million dollars a year in their business and you're making a salary, that's not bad. But you know, you're saying, I could do this.

You know, I could see that. Yeah, is. I don't know. That's interesting. That's. That's really empowering though, for a lot of the employees there.

Well, you don't hear about that very often where a company is actually encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit.

Right.

You get companies that want people that know they don't want to be entrepreneurs so that they never leave you.

Right. I think that that's changed a lot where they don't have as much. They don't. I mean, there are definitely people that will do that and they realize the opportunity, but they're not as culturally focused on the entrepreneurship aspect of what it is that they do. So the other thing is like the way that you would work in your job or job position was be like as if it was your own business. So they gave you a lot of authority and autonomy to execute without having to have someone all up your ass telling you what to do. You know what I mean?

Yeah, that makes sense.

Getting busy work, man. That's the main reason why I don't have a job, is because I hate busy work.

Well, how long do you stick it out with infusion then?

Five years. So I was there from 28, 2008 to 2013. It was September 1, 2013, when I left to start Hired Gun Solutions, which is like my. I'll call it freelance CRM, marketing automation, implementation consulting, whatever.

And then I started. So I had been doing that for. I had left in 2013, started it off, and I actually had met my. My first client was somebody I started working with, like Moonlighting. So I had kind of gotten used to the idea of like, this is how much this is going to be and like how long it's going to take and how do I manage my time. So I had a little bit of a dry run with someone who was like.

He'S a friend of mine.

So yeah, it helped out.

So it was a real, real safe environment to try it out. Right. And so that gave me a lot of confidence to leave and do this. And he had a painting business in Toronto and he had been in business for like 20 years and his best year ever was like 375k. I had met him on randomly on vacation in Mexico and we started working together. He had just bought infusionsoft and it just weird that I was working there. And so I helped him start implementing how leads are going to get into the system. And then what happens to those leads? Like, we need to book an appointment, you go out, do a quote, and then once you do a quote, we need to follow up with all those people either via, you know, calling people back or sending emails or text messages and that kind of stuff. And I introduced them to the world of like Google AdWords Dangerous at the time, you know the. It was fairly inexpensive and.

Nobody else was doing it in this area really. You'd think Toronto would be a, a pretty serious place for any kind. I mean because it's a massive city.

Yeah, that and I know they're big on their tech as well, you know.

But I explained like the mathematics of like how the traffic breaks down into conversions and like what those would. Could be worth and like if, if these numbers were. And I gave him like real shitty conversion like estimates right so far low man. I was like, at this rate, would you make money? And he's all, I'd make a shitload of money.

And perfect.

He started, he understood the how that would work. I mean execution. He start. He just started doing stuff and we started rolling more and more and more. And like in that first year he went from 375k, best year ever to 975k. And so like the stuff that I know how to do to help him like implement those systems really helped him get to where he's at. I mean now he's doing 3.3, 3.2 million a year.

I am not. We had a little bit of a falling out. We're still friends, but as far as the business relationship's concerned, yeah, we're done.

That's just really cool. And it sounds like you had a client that actually was a good client to start your whole business that actually did the work that followed through. Because I think Matt and I ran an agency for years as well before now. And that was always like the pain in the ass. It was like these clients that just wanted all this. Had all these big goals and just flopped. Did nothing.

Gotta do jerk offs, man. You can't.

And that drove us away from being an agency owner. We're like, screw this man. We want control. We want to see results just for our selfishness.

Well, I always felt like in an agency that instead of having like one boss that we reported to, we had like 15 bosses that we reported to at any given time. That was my feeling of an agency.

Oh yeah, no, I mean there's definitely. Because I mean we have that same problem. Like my agency, we'll call it automatic practice. Profits is we have so we operate in like a specific niche which is like stem cell doctors. Right. And so we don't do like traditional agency. Like we're gonna go find you leads and you're gonna, we're gonna get your leads off of Facebook and Google and do this type of stuff. We're gonna do branding, we're gonna do all your pay per click development and stuff like that. It's very specific what we offer. And so there's no. Like, we obviously have demanding clients, but it's different in the sense is that we're selling a methodology more than we are like a marketing service. Does that make sense?

Yeah, because I know you mentioned us. It's very templatized. You have this process for your agency where it's not like a typical agency. Right.

Well, so it makes something like onboarding a new client relatively easy. Basically, they just need to. So what we do is we teach and then we also help them execute on lead generation seminars. So a doc in say San Diego wants to get some stem cell clients. So what they would do is they put on a free event where typically a meal or snacks are served right at a nice place. And it's an educational seminar. So we drive traffic to get people to register for that. And then we have the system in place to make sure that as many people can show up as possible. And then they execute on the presentation and the offer and then they can business as usual from there because it's just a normal appointment to treatment or whatever it would be. Right?

Yeah. Now do you, do you help them come up with that presentation and offer as well?

We have. So we have a couple of solutions. Like my business, that's my business partner's territory more than I am because he understands that niche because he's a chiropractor and he has an integrated clinic which is what they do stem cells stuff. So he understands the pain points, what the buying mechanisms are, the objections. He's a fairly astute marketer in my, in my. And I've seen a lot of bullshit, you know what I mean? And he's a, he's a pretty. I would say he's an effective copywriter. He understands sales and I would say he enjoys it a hell of a lot more than he does doing chiropractor stuff. So he, he has a lot of recordings of his presentations where we'll have like a recording, he'll be doing a talk and then the offer and you'll see the, you know, back of the stage rush type of thing go on a little bit.

And so we provide that to our clients. We have templates that we give them one of the things that we've realized. So some clients can't do it. They just can't. Either public speaking is not their thing or they're just terrible at it, or there's a variety of factors. Those are people that we have a hard time being successful with because we can fill the room. But if they can't close, our relationship is kind of up in the air at that point. So either they can learn how to do it and struggle through it, or they can try a different strategy.

Yeah.

Now I'm curious. How, how do you. How do you help them fill a room? What, what sort of mechanisms do you use to get butts and seats? Because I. We've put on live events. We're actually planning a live event later this year. And we've been involved in a whole bunch of other live events. And the hardest thing that we've always seen is actually getting people to show up to events.

So it's a little different. There's a lot of things. So being that these are free. So that's one aspect of it. The other thing is that. So we used primarily Facebook ads. Our Facebook guys, like, basically all he does is promote these types of events. Right. So, you know, you probably think someone Sundays, I spent $2 million on Facebook ads running all kinds of different campaigns, but what about like $2 million in like one type of campaign?

Yeah, that's a good specialized.

So he's really, really good at that. So we're able to get. Keep cost per acquisition relatively low for registrations. But the mat. So Facebook's primary aspect of it then we also do postcards. So we purchase lists for mailing of people that match our avatar for that particular type of market. So they're typically affluent old people or affluent people that are old enough to have the kind of pain that is fixable by stem cells or other treatments that are related to.

Where are you getting those addresses?

There's a couple. It depends on the type of mailing that you're going to do. But we've done every door direct mail. That's pretty straightforward. You need a little bit of runtime. So we actually promote our seminars for a 10 day window. So 10 days prior to the seminar date. That's what we do.

And partially is because of the amount of time out that's hard to forecast. But a lot of people are registering like all the way up until the last day. Right, Got it.

And what is something like that cost? Out of curiosity, if you're going to go to a direct mail list like that. I know it depends on the size and there's, you know, CPMs and stuff like that. But on average, if one of our listeners is listening, thinking, you know what I might be interested in Testing some direct mail marketing. What's, what sort of numbers should they be thinking about?

I want to say, I mean, this is just off the top of my head and so I might be inaccurate. Out of all the things that I've talked about, this may be one area that I'm slightly inaccurate because my business partner does more of the direct mail. He also has some relationships with. Are you familiar with like. No. BS Marketing. Dan Kennedy.

Oh, yeah.

All right. So Craig Simpson is like the list guy in that, in that space. And so my business partner works with him on some list selection. So that's one aspect that we do. We've also used and we use a service called Every Door Direct mail. But Every Door Direct mail is loose, demographic based. So you could say I want to see all the people that are 10 miles from this zip code. And then it'll show you like that what the population is. Right. And then you can start applying attributes. And so those things are like income, homeownership, status, presence of children, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Um, so then what you do is you select the, I think they're carrier routes or there's Darryl. It, it'll show you a visual map of the area and you select the boxes. But it's, it's, it's not personalized. So like when they get a mail piece, it's not going to have their name on it. It's just going to be resident kind of thing.

Got it. Okay.

And so you're paying like I think 40 cents, 40, 45 cents a mail piece in that situation. So we end up with like around 100, $110 registration with direct mail. So for $1,500, you're going to get roughly 15 registrants. We find that they're higher quality, but that's in our data that we've, I built a whole apparatus for tracking this. But like.

They'Re expensive. They're way more expensive than a Facebook registration. But they generally show up.

That makes sense.

I can't tell you why. Just, just that they do and that it's worth it. Right. Because the return on investment in this situation, they're going to be doing a stem cell treatment. It's like north of 10 grand. Right. And it's high profit margins right now because it's a hot thing.

So you can justify spending $1,500 to get 10 people to show up to your seminar if you're going to be selling three or four of them, something that costs north of 10 grand. Right.

For sure. No, I love this, that. I just love that you're bringing lead gen into this interesting selling mechanism that is obviously used all the time in many niches, but you're doing this specifically for this high ticket value thing. What's the conversion rate typically in the sales presentation that you guys do?

So if you go to my business partner, his best event, he had 90 people show up and he closed. He got what? The initial consultation, which is the only thing that I have data on. I don't know what happens after that because it takes place in a different system that I don't have eyeballs on. But he's booked like 50 appointments in one event. But that was like a sane event. But you're generally walking away with 10 to 15 depending on the size. And every market is different. So it also has to do with competition. So in his area, there really isn't any competition. Any competition that does exist isn't anywhere near what we're doing, but like superior marketing if they.

Yeah.

In other areas where there's like. Like if you go to like Dallas, Texas, where there's like 15 to 25 different stem cell clinics, there's options. There's other people competing for that. That money or, you know, the money that you're spending so your results aren't as effective or the other things that affected is like, in a certain part of the country, running local Facebook ads is super inexpensive, but in another place it might be really expensive. Right. And so the performance varies. But one of the things that we do is, let's say you have a venue that's 65 people. Right. So your capacity is 65. So you need to sell like, or you need to give away, quote unquote, you need to get like 90, 95 registrants because you're gonna have a bunch of no shows. And so, like, worst case scenario, you blow out the capacity. You got a fire marshal up your ass. Right. But that's not going to happen.

Yeah.

And so there's one last thing I want to throw out. There is once you have a registration, there's a pathway to making sure that as many people show up as possible. And I can go into a little bit of detail about what that looks like if you're interested.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So the first thing we do, and not everybody does this as religiously as like, what my business partner does or what we're going to be offering our newest clients, it's just built into our service now as opposed to being optional. And that is we perform welcome calls for every single Registration that comes in. So we have, most of our clients will either do this themselves or they won't do it at all. And they'll neglect it. They might have, you know, show rate problems. So this is one of the steps that you take. And then we also have email, autoresponder and SMS that leads up to the event, reminding them of where it is, giving them links to Google Maps, like 10 minutes before, 15 minutes, you know what I mean? That kind of stuff. So we follow up with them all the way up till 10 minutes before the event. We have a confirmation process that happens through like an automated fashion through text message and email. So they can register or confirm their attendance either way. But the day before the event, we blast through, we have our callers or in some cases their office should be calling every single registrant to get confirmations to have an idea of what the numbers will look like. Because what you get in confirmations is roughly 95% of those people will show up.

Right, that makes sense.

So confirmations is like probably the most important thing out of all that. But the email, as far as manual stuff you have to do. And so the way that we've mitigated that is we just rolled it into our service as part of the cost, but we have callers that will just call through all the leads on behalf of them. And so I built a call script tool that says, you're calling Kelsey Bratcher. The office that it's related to is Desert Medical Care. And this is their phone number. This is the niche that we're going to be offering at that seminar. And the script is all pre filled so that they don't have to try to think about it.

Right, nice. Now are these like commissioned callers or are they just, you know, hourly?

Just they're like upwork, you know.

Got it. Okay.

They're not in the United States.

Got it.

So they're like outsourced va, like VA talent. So Philippines is a great source because they have massive call center presence there. And then they also have, you know, their English is, you know, relatively undetectable. That it's not, you know, quote unquote, an American calling.

Yeah, no, I love what you're doing. And this is something Joe and I harp on all the time, is most businesses don't want to go the extra mile. Especially people who are kind of building online based businesses. They want to build like an online storefront, run Facebook ads and Google Ads and just go, okay, cool, I've got my automation system set up. Let's make our money now. But, you know, you're doing. You're actually getting people on the phone calling potential customers. You're actually putting on live events. You're actually doing direct mail. And almost no marketers these days that are focused on online marketing put any focus in any of that stuff. So I love that you're doing all of that.

Oh, I'm a big. Because it's not. I mean, it's not. Nobody's doing it. Right.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. You go a little further and you're kind of in, like, your own world.

It was.

Competition has nothing against you at that point.

It's interesting because, so Joe and I, we promote a lot of affiliate products. So one of our main income sources is actually promoting products as affiliates. And we often get asked, you know, how. How are you so effective at affiliate marketing? And it's literally the same stuff you just said. We haven't been putting on live events where we promote affiliate products, but we are actually getting on sales calls with people and closing them on products that aren't even ours. We are actually sending out direct mail about products. We are doing all of this other stuff that most companies just don't want to go that extra step. But that's what makes us. And what makes you guys so effective at what you do.

Yeah, I mean, I know there's a lot of. So, like, in the online space, there's a lot of laziness. There's a lot of, like, cheapness. Right. People are like, I don't want. I'm going to spend as little as possible. And it's like, well, if you spend more, you could make more. And especially if you can justify it through, like, tracking, like, there's tools for doing direct mail that are way. I mean, as far as automation is concerned, that all you have to do is set it up and then track it. Right. So I. I'm a big fan of postalytics for that purpose.

Okay.

Because you can implement a mail campaign and then you can set your landing pages up to have tracking that are associated to, like, personalized URLs. And they have like, an analytics component that feeds, you know, feeds you information about how your campaigns perform, but you can also do it on demand. So, like in your autoresponder series, we'll call it like, you might send like, an email and an email and a text message and maybe Facebook messenger bot, Right. But then you have a postcard that goes out, like, right away or even a letter. And with a service like postalytics, that can be done on demand on an individual basis for relatively low price. Right.

And so that's one solution that we're using.

So just to clarify, postalytics is for direct mail, for analytics. For direct mail, basically.

Well, it also is a service that lets you do that.

Oh, got it. Okay.

And then they have a partnership with a list broker that you can rent lists for doing mailing. They're not like, I don't know how far into direct mail stuff people want to go, but if you go into, like, there's a thing called srds, which you can use to find lists of a specific type. Right. Like, if you want to find a list of all, like, people interested in fitness products that they can sell you a list like that. Right. For doing direct mail. And in this service, you can do more. Like what I described with every door direct mail, where you're buying a list with specific criteria based on demographic data. So it's unrelated to, like, interest per se. But if you wanted to, like, bomb the entire area around your store, like, or your restaurant or your office or whatever it is, you could do that. So you can do that, or you can do, like, the individual ones where, like, a lead comes in off the website, like, you know, like free book funnel, quote unquote, or free for the price of shipping or whatever. That would be a perfect type of funnel to bolt on, like, this type of direct mail because of how easy and inexpensive it is.

Yeah. And it's just getting them in that funnel. And I could see that because especially if you do have some kind of book funnel with upsell something or, you know, going to the event ultimately would be where. Where you had people to.

Yeah, I mean, you have to get. So one of the things that is complex about is getting address data. Right. Like, for your customers, getting address data isn't the easiest thing in the world because it can affect conversions negatively or et cetera, et cetera. But.

If you do get it, like, if you're shipping products, then doing direct mail makes sense in my mind, as long as you have the profit margins, like, on the back end, we're selling stem cell treatments, which are insanely expensive in my mind. So there's a huge amount of profit margin to chip into for getting one or two extra patients a month. Right?

Yeah.

Now, do you think there's a minimum threshold, a minimum number that you have to have for profit margin to make direct mail work, in your opinion?

I don't know. I don't have one off the top of my head, But I can Tell you that if you take, let's say 1 out of 100 recipients responds, then what is it? 1 out of 30 that you would need to. We'll just say rough numbers. So 1 out of 100, it'll cost you $0.50 times 100 to mail those people on average with these services. So what does that turn out to? 50 bucks to do the mailing. So you get one response and then how many responses you need to make a sale. And that's, I would say somewhere in between, like anywhere from 15 to 30, just like pay per click type of conversions.

And that's real bad. So if you don't have your sales process dialed in, there's lots of things that can affect it. But if you're gonna. So it would take you $50 to get a lead and thus times 30, 30 times 100, 1500.

No.

What does that math work out to? 1500 bucks to buy a customer.

We'll go with that.

So in that situation, this excludes a lot of businesses. Right. Or a lot of types of products that you could sell. But then you might have like a high lifetime customer value. Right. So like an event, like if a pizza shop, and I use that because I used to work at a pizza shop, so you understand lifetime customer value.

You know, they might order a pizza every week for three years, so it might be worthwhile to do the direct mail piece. But the other thing is getting someone to respond to a pizza offer is not as hard as getting someone to respond to something that would. And I'm also talking about using this in like a cold aspect of when we're buying like a. Every door, direct mail. Yeah, it's cold. Like it's usually cold traffic. Right. So if you're using warm traffic, like let's say you're getting conversions for something that someone's buying on your Shopify store, then getting them to repeat a purchase after the fact increases their lifetime customer value. And you know, you may have, you know what I'm trying to say?

Well, just the fact that you have the first touch, but you have everything behind that first touch to back up the fact that you could just blast a whole neighborhood or a demographic. Whereas. Right, yeah. If you have a single product that's one time purchase, Shopify kind of not going to shake out so well.

Yeah, no, I love this conversation because I think this. So Joe and I, we used to do a lot of direct mail, but it was probably what, a year and a half, two years ago that we've sent our last piece. I think this conversation sort of inspired us to test some direct mail again.

But I want to talk to Craig Simpson.

Yeah, so I want, I want to switch topics a little bit and talk about automation and some of the things that people can automate. Now there's, there's some obvious things, right? Like you've got your, your email autoresponder and you've got, you know, your checkout cart and things like that that are kind of the more obvious automations. What are some things that most people don't think to automate in their business?

Huh.

I would say there, I mean, cause like a lot of automation people was first dabble in. It is done primarily around marketing, right. Or, and the marketing activities, you know, with the concept of funnels and autoresponders is kind of, you know, if we go back 10 years ago, this is the first time people would be hearing about it. You'd be changing their lives. Now it's like, oh, funnels are, you know, an everyday type of thing. And so is a lot of the automation that could be put in place to support a funnel. But like oftentimes what I've seen most people that I work with and most businesses that I've observed is that the automation stops like once a name is obtained on the back end. Right. So when you get a lead, what happens to that lead? Like the manual stuff that maybe has to happen, right? Is it need to be assigned to a sales guy? Does that sales guy, is there criteria that maybe this person has a territory or they're full of new leads and we need to load balance. There's things like that that are more complex but like the CRM that backs up your funnel if you're doing like sales, like offline sales, if that makes sense. So that's a huge area where automation and tools can come in to help out because you know, round robining that lead, making sure that that salesperson stays on top of things. Your data and the data that is generated from that process, you have your activity. So like calling them or receiving inbound calls or outbound texts that are sent from your sales team.

Some of the other aspects are like when you want to sign somebody up, like how does that happen? So in our business we require contracts because it's decent money that we're talking about and there's some risk on our part. So we require contracts and we use integration between Pipedrive and PandaDoc to make it so that our contracts are pre filled with information from the customer.

So PandaDoc, that's, that's like an automation for, for getting documents signed.

Yeah, it's kind of like DocuSign or Adobe Sign or Echo Sign or Sign. Now like there, there, there's a million tools that do quote unquote document signing. But like the difference with a Panda Doc is got a lightweight type of interface to it, so it's really easy to get up and running.

Cool.

And it works with Stripe. So like you can bolt in your Stripe account and then you can pre fill it with Zapier. So you know from your CRM you can go directly into sending your client or prospect of client, a contract or an agreement, a sales presentation. And then that can serve as kind of like a sales page like in an online checkout.

I love that because it's essentially it like combined about five processes, manual processes that people would have to do, maybe someone in accounting or you know, legal, whatever for the contract. And so all those touches are just an opportunity for something to fail or payment not to happen, something bad to happen for that agent.

So the other thing with that is that when the document is actually we'll say they maybe have to give us their billing address because we don't have that. Basically they're giving us information we don't have, but everything we do have is already there. And so they give us the credit card and now we have a trigger to kick off the next part of the automation which would be fulfilling our service or you know, triggering our new customer welcome. Marketing stuff and things like that.

Gotcha. And this is the kind of process you're using for your agency. It sounds like the stem cell project, all that stuff, right?

Oh yeah, for sure. I mean I do that to some extent in my freelance consulting stuff. But it makes a huge, I mean it makes a huge difference on it. If you're a one guy, one to two person show, you can save a lot of time by doing this kind of stuff.

Oh yeah.

But like in the other business it saves a lot of time and more importantly, it allows us to make sure that the people that need to know about stuff when these things are happening are informed. And we can build our process to be more, less manually intensive so we can better serve our customers faster, I guess would be the way to say it.

Sure, sure. So I'm going to ask a question. So Zapier, I know you're a big fan of that. You were saying how we saw that you saved what, 7.5 million minutes using Zapier?

I think I'm over 8 now.

But like that's like I love Zapier and we use it all the time. But it's great because it's kind of mindless. It's all logic you set up but like for me, kind of simple minded folk and maybe people who aren't super techy. Can we talk about Zapier a little bit and how you like to leverage that?

Oh, Zapier is. Without Zapier none of this would have been possible.

I probably overuse it in situations where maybe it would be a better idea to hire a developer. But the main thing that Zapier does is that it allows you to say when something happens in one tool, I want this to happen over here. So moving data, triggering events, starting automations and your marketing automation tool, transforming information. One of the things I use it a lot with Twilio for sending sms, but out of our CRM the phone number isn't formatted in a condition that Twilio will accept. So instead of trying to figure that out manually, I made a process in Zapier where it takes the phone number, translates it in, changes the format of it so it can be accepted by Twilio and then allows us to send text messages really inexpensively. In comparison to a lot of SMS services.

They mark up, Twilio is basically what they're doing and then they provide a somewhat ranging from terrible to decent to okay interface for interacting with text messages. Right. And so I just skip it altogether and I built my own for sending and then I built my own interface for like when a reception comes in from a text. Like people reply to text messages if you didn't know that. So you should have some way of doing some kind of two way back and forth.

Yeah.

If you're going to do sms, I'd recommend having some kind of two way component.

So Zapier can make that happen. More importantly, you can do it quickly. You can set something up like once you get used to doing it, you can make something like that very easily. It's super affordable and you can test stuff out very quickly. And then if it's something that's like I had someone come to me and they wanted to do some stuff with Zapier that was in the numbers were in the millions of events. So when you think of an event is like someone calls into this phone number, that's your event. Well, if you're going to generate a million phone calls over the course of a month, we'll just, I mean that's an insane amount. But Zapier is not the tool you use because it's just, it's going to be cost way too much to pay for Zapier to do that. It's better suited as like I want to test out the idea that I have and then later I can pay a developer to build the thing that will support a million. Right.

I like that. So it's like an MVP for your process.

Yeah, it's a massive prototyping tool is the way you want to look at it. But oftentimes it's adequate enough to just be done permanently. So like especially on like something that doesn't happen very often. So like let's, let's take in a lot of people's businesses. Credit card failure is a common problem, right?

Sure.

So if you're using stripe, there's tools available to you to like recoup some of that stuff. But like what if internally you needed to have a process where maybe a human being gets involved. Right. So a stripe credit card payment failure is a trigger in Zapier that you can then start something off of. But that credit card failure thing, depending on how, I mean we have a relatively low amount of customers, like say 50 to 100. It's a pain in the ass to try to keep track of that normal. So instead you build a process that, you know, maybe you have 20 of these a month on a bad month. So it's not something that happens often, but it happens and it's important. So you can spend the time to develop a process and use Zapier to make it happen very easily. And it works extremely well in these scenarios that are like less common. Right. And so I would encourage people to look at things that are more of a pain in the ass to think about how can I make that smooth. Right.

That's a good. Yeah, it's kind of like how we look at say Google Analytics. You don't want to just jump into Zapier or Google Analytics without having like this question in your brain, like what am I trying to solve here? Because I know Zapier, you have like a million recipes. I think it's more like, I don't know, 10,000 or something. These combinations that are pre made that you can integrate tools with. And like I know you could just get a million ideas looking at that list right there. It can get a little overwhelming. But it's also like, wow, that's possible. I think that's what I would probably tell folks listeners to check out, just like see what's on there.

So I'll take like, I often refer to people like if they're, they're used to like funnels and stuff. Like one of the easiest transitions into automating. Some of the manual stuff that you do. I mean, we booked this appointment through Calendly, I believe Calendly is a scheduling tool. I mean today it's commonplace. Right. But there's still people that are trying to negotiate appointment times back and forth through email or through text messages and things like that. And this is like a super easy way. You don't even need to integrate it with anything. And you can automate that. That problem goes away. Right? Yeah. But you can also then build that into your like a lot of people are doing like high ticket funnel where there is a sales call or appointment or free consultation or whatever you want to call it. And that is typically scheduled through Acuity or Calendly or whatever scheduling tool people are using. So those are the kinds of things that you can build into your funnel but then also translate into some of the more offline sales type of activity.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So now you've mentioned quite a bit of tools on this call.

I want to kind of break them down a little bit because I think that's some of the stuff that I get the most excited about is tools. I'm a very like tactical system tools. I'm a gadget kind of guy, so I really like this kind of stuff. But you've mentioned Zapier, which is kind of for, you know, making one tool talk to a different tool. You mentioned autopilot, which I think is what you said you send your automated emails out through.

Right.

So we use. I've used. We don't use it in my businesses. I use infusionsoft in my consulting business because I have a free account for the rest of my life.

And then in my other business we use infusionsoft for some stuff. And then we're going to be transitioning into a larger platform probably.

What's the thing? SendGrid is probably what we're going to end up using directly because if you're using. So Autopilot is like drip or activecampaign in the. We'll call it marketing automation SaaS products.

And so we use auto. I use Autopilot and some of my clients are pipedrive users and I find that it's easier to use Autopilot. It doesn't. So a couple things about Autopilot, they have some rules about the kind of business you can have, so I don't think you can do affiliate marketing with it is. Is one of the things.

So or you have to be careful because they have stricter and they strictly enforce these rules over other competitive products, if that makes sense.

Gotcha.

But for pipedrive users, it's super easy to use it with pipedrive.

Got it. So what other. Are there any other tools that are really important for your business and the automations you set up that we haven't even touched on or talked about yet?

I mean, I can talk about like surface level stuff that I think benefits everybody. So, like, at the top of my list, Calendly is my favorite scheduling tool.

And what's awesome about Calendly now is, is they just added zoom integration. So when you book, it automatically sends you a Zoom link to say here's where we'll meet. Which saved me so much time.

Well, it was Zapier before that we had to use. And we don't have to use that anymore.

Yeah, we were using Zapier, but it would. If somebody canceled a call and then rescheduled the call, then the zoom link would get remade, but it wouldn't get sent out properly. We just had all sorts of issues. And now that it directly integrates with Zoom, I love Calendly even more.

Oh, it's sick. And it integrates with Stripe, so if you're doing paid stuff, you can do that. There's also like one thing that a lot of people overlook is in their the paid version of Calendly, which is worth paying for text message reminders leading up to the phone call, because I can tell you how many times people it saves the day. And you used to have to do that stuff in your autoresponder tool or like your CRM and it was like a huge cluster to try to get that to work. But Calendly just absorbs those problems. And I mean, there's the reminder component. The content of those messages is pretty decent. Like you probably don't have to modify it too much.

They nail it pretty well.

I don't think we've actually used the text message portion of Calendly yet. We're premium users, so we'll probably have to test that.

Yeah, turn on text messages, dude. It's a game changer.

Cool.

You'll save a lot of time and less no shows is the idea, right?

Yeah, right, of course.

So the Calendly is a big one. There are other calendar tools that have advantages over Calendly in certain situations, but generally Calendly for most small businesses that I've encountered aside, like if you had like a massage or spa or like haircut place it's not a good solution for you. They're better options. But calendly in general is pretty much where it's at. Yeah, I'm a big user of. So a CRM of some kind. It doesn't have to be infusionsoft, it doesn't have to be pipedrive. There's a lot of options. But the main thing you want to look at is what could I do with it in addition to what is out of the box. So you need to look at your zapier integration for that particular app. Right. So like Copper CRM is a popular one as well and it has a lot of triggers and a lot of actions. So things you can automate in addition to what it comes with. Right. So the CRM and then you need a marketing automation tool of some kind of. And we'll say landing page tools are another thing that you need nowadays. Right.

For sure.

What's your favorite landing page tool?

I like instapage. That's my favorite.

We use that for a little bit, but not too long. That was years ago though.

We mostly use click funnels nowadays. But we did use instapage for a while.

But it's come a long way.

I am a fan. I used to hate clickfunnels. But uh, it's grown on me over time and I will you. I have a bunch of clients that I work with that use it. Um, you can do a lot of fancy stuff really easily, which is one advantage. But the main reason I like it because in infusionsoft world, the quote unquote e commerce stuff is. Is shitty.

It's.

It sucks. And I would never recommend it to anybody. So the way to overcome that in that environment is click funnels.

Yeah.

Because you can. Because you can build a checkout that makes sense. You can do upsells down sells, bump orders. You can integrate it with infusionsoft to some extent. It's shaky, but you can do it.

It's a very viable option. And then if you're doing evergreen webinars and that kind of stuff.

There'S a lot of available to you with relatively low technical requirement. Right. And so I am a fan of that. But the one drawback in my opinion is that page load is increased on clickfunnels and I'm a fan of the fastest page possible. So instapage crushes clickfunnels for speed.

Interesting. Okay, that's good to know.

Got it.

But they don't have checkout.

We don't even use clickfunnels checkout. We're fans of a tool called ThriveCart. I don't know if you're familiar with that one.

I've heard of it. Yeah. I have not used it formally.

Yeah. So we're fans. We're also affiliates of ThriveCart. But I can't remember why we didn't use Instapage. I think at the time we were using it was either activecampaign or Drip for our email autoresponder and it didn't integrate. So we went back to ClickFunnels just because we didn't have the integration we needed. But I can't remember exactly the specifics.

Yeah, one last thing that. So have you ever messed around with personalization of landing pages?

Oh yeah, yes, we have.

Yep. So instapage has a lot of like built in features for that purpose. So like on a high level, like you're going to be selling, you know, you're trying to drive traffic for people that are of a certain type. So you can swap out language or like in AdWords you have keywords. Right. So your keyword is then repeatably used dynamically on your. So you can use one landing page for multiple keyword combos, we'll call it.

Right.

You can also do personalization. So like after someone opts in on the thank you page, you can say, thanks Kelsey, for doing the thing. Here's a special link that you could use that's booby trapped or whatever you want to do. And so they have. Unbounce also has these tools but like Unbounce's builder is a little bit too advanced, we'll call it. So it's a little bit. It requires a lot more like web design skillset than instapage.

Yeah, we've used that one too. And I think we quickly bolted because of that exact reason. We're like, we need something quick.

Yeah, we've pretty much tried them all. The other one that we've used, well, we have a LeadPages account too, but we rarely use that anymore. Convertory and then Convertory was another one that we used. And Convertory claims they have the fastest load time across every page builder. But I just had a really hard time getting the pages to look like I wanted them to on Convertory.

I hear that. I hear that LeadPages is an interesting one. I've used that. I mean in the beginning it was the only game in town. But like, why would you use leadpages when you could use Click Funnels is kind of the idea.

Yeah, I know, it's weird. Now it's Like a tool. You're like, what?

Why?

It's great.

Or was. Yeah.

And then infusionsoft has a built in landing page builder that's pretty decent.

For a lot of our applications, for what I'm doing in the agency, for how we get new customers, we use infusionsoft landing pages.

Okay, got it. Well, before I want to. Curiously, and this is a change of topic, unless you had any other tools that.

Oh, dude, I can talk about tools.

I know.

That's all I do all day on my podcast.

That's true.

What's the. Into your podcast, by the way?

So we can get automated.

Cool. Yeah, so go check that out. So give us the basics there. It's all about obviously the name probably automations tools.

Yeah, All I do is talk about, I mean, if you. The stuff that we've been talking about.

I talk to people that are in various different businesses doing stuff with their software and how they build their systems, processes and automation and all kinds of other stuff.

So it's.

I mean, I've had attorneys, I've had software companies, a payment gateway. There's a whole bunch of different types of businesses, which is like the reason I'm doing it is so I can get more ideas from industries that I'm not necessarily familiar with. But the thing where I can see a lot of value is so people that are in like real estate, there's a lot of smart shit that those guys are doing are not happening in other industries and vice versa. Right. And so you can borrow ideas from other places and implement them in your business or in your repertoire if you're like an agency doing it for other people. And so I get a lot of value from that. It was like I'm getting a lot of ideas from people using stuff creatively that I wouldn't have ever encountered because I haven't gone deep into that industry or whatever.

Dude, I love that because you're branching out. You're essentially leveraging the podcast to mine opportunities and things like maybe another stem cell type niche that.

Oh, that's exactly what I'm doing.

I mean, like, like we've always said our podcast is a great networking tool, which that inherently, you know, networking only leads to trust in opportunities and more discussions and. Yeah, I think that's, that's actually what we're starting to do is kind of widen the different niches. We're talking to the experts. And like you introduced us to Jim Hacking. He's a good listener.

Yeah, he's a, he's one. He's a. I've been working that guy since 2015.

Crazy.

He's an immigration attorney and he's the automation junkie.

Yeah.

So we get along real well.

He's a smart dude. We talked on the phone, actually, after you introduced us, and I think we'll be on his podcast. But yeah, that's just a prime example of how you can automate, like, a law firm. Like, it's crazy, but you can automate anything. It's just this.

Oh, law firms. You could go deep in law firms because there's. You have, like, hard copies of shit. You know what I mean?

Oh, yeah.

That's a whole different topic unrelated to marketing and sales and things.

So with the podcast, have you found any other benefits? I always like to ask this question to other podcasters because we really preach podcasting is an amazing thing to add into people's businesses. What other sort of benefits have you seen from having a podcast?

So, I mean, my podcast is relatively small, in my opinion. I mean, my wife also has a podcast, and it's like a hundred times bigger than mine.

Nice. What's her niche?

So she's into decorative planning. So there's. You buy like a day planner and then they decorate it, and it's real popular for her. And the group that she's in, she's become like a. Like a podcast like personality in that space. And she's like north of 10,000 downloads a month. And it's pretty impressive freaking design.

That's a prime example of everyone should have damn podcast. Or if you feel like there's no audience and there's probably an audience, and.

I mean, that industry is a little interesting because it's like hyper consumerism, because it's just like, basically all it is is buying shit and then making your planner look nicer. And so that's all there. I mean, there's more to talk about because people do that activity for all kinds of reasons.

Sure.

So in their business, people. A lot of people keep, like, those journals. Right. My handwriting isn't good enough to write anything on paper, so I record my thoughts with audio or. And I type. Right. But the.

A lot of people use them for all kinds of reasons. Keeping track of their sick kids, homeschool, weight loss, pregnancy, getting all that stuff. So it's women and what they do with their planners and how they make it fun for them, and that's like their thing. But the thing that I've learned from podcasting, I've had a lot of opportunities come up. Like, I'm speaking twice this Year at. I'm doing a panel on like a thing in February and then I'm going to be at Jim Hacking's Max lawcon, probably talking to lawyers about automation. Those are opportunities that have come up. I wouldn't have ever met you guys had I not done this, right?

That's right, yeah.

Maybe eventually we would cross paths, I don't know. But I haven't ever been public about what I do. And so that's one thing that has changed because I had a lot of hangups about it and so I've overcome those, obviously. But for me, just being able to know that I can create something and people will enjoy it has been very rewarding for me and it changes my outlook. So 2019 is going to be a nice year for me, I think.

Now I have a really kind of random, it's sort of a random question when somebody asks you, what do you do? What's your sort of really quick elevator pitch? How do you sell somebody quickly on, oh, I need your services.

Oh, yeah. So you're talking about in an environment where the person would be self employed.

Yeah.

Okay.

There's the answer I give people that have jobs and then there's the answer.

That gives, oh, I'm on the same page there. People who? People. Like when my barber or somebody asks, I say, oh, I just build websites.

There you go.

Well, barbers are entrepreneurs, dude. Oftentimes that is.

Actually Matt and I were literally talking about our barber and I'm like, yeah, actually they have some businesses.

That's true.

And it's cash. You know what I'm saying? That guy knows things.

That is true. That is true.

It's all about tax evasion.

But yeah, very good point. Hope they're not.

So. So somebody, somebody comes to you who has a business and they're, you know, they could potentially benefit from your services. What's your kind of like really quick, here's what I do that could help you.

I mean, this is something that I've changed and manipulated a bunch over time. But like right now, like the easiest way to explain to someone is I build funnels because most people are familiar with what that's considered. And then they asked me, oh, okay, well. And like, and then I also take care of like what happens after. So I mean, like, I cut off. Like typically I don't ever do pay per click because I've never had the opportunity to spend enough of my own money to get good enough at it to charge of the people. Right. So in that situation, it's been I, that's the cutoff. So I pick it up from once the lead reaches or the visitor reaches your website potentially or your funnel and take it all the way to the point of sale and beyond that. And so I usually that part comes in after someone at a surface level is mildly interested what I'm saying. But like in I don't do the whole like pitch thing too well. I'm usually, usually the only time that I'm usually introduced to people and someone else has said a bunch of good shit about me and then it's easy to pick up from there. But I'm not the best at the networking activity.

Well, it's just interesting cause you talk to most entrepreneurs, especially ones that focus more on like the online world. It's one of the hardest questions to answer.

Oh yeah, dude.

Freaking entrepreneurs who do so much shit.

It's like.

Or I'll say I have a marketing agency in the stem cell niche and then people, oh, okay, that's interesting. And then either they asked me more about marketing or they asked me more about stem cells. And then yeah, yeah, that's true.

I like that. Yeah, maybe lead with that because it's different. You're an agency, so people still get it. So if they need your help, I can help you out with your little funnel over here.

So one thing, and I think it's worth talking about. So when in the stem cell thing, when you're going after a niche that is very specific, like these docs, and you're going to be selling a process like what we're doing, more or less, when you have some concrete elements like that, creating automation in your processes becomes a lot easier because there's not so many contingencies. Right. And so what I've looked at, when I sit back and I look at it like a lot of people that will sell quote unquote funnels, you buy a clickfunnels account. Here's my funnels that I built. You can use copy and paste and use them, right? Like, what if you set those up wrong? Like, what if there was a misspelling in a subject line? Something simple like that, right? How do you fix that in 100, 200, 400 accounts? You don't. That's the answer. Because it sucks, man. That's the worst thing. The worst thing about this type of work and the way that I've implemented it is I use one funnel for everybody. So there's a bunch of variables for all of the information related to it was A, practice A, practice B, practice C, for Event date on this day, this day, this day. So all that stuff is variables so that I don't have to change. If I need to change something, I can do it once. Or if I want to split test something, I can have it split test and affect cohorts as opposed to having to go and like, oh, crap, these 13 funnels are on this version. It's so much easier to keep straight. And then more importantly, it lends itself to scale a lot better.

Dude, that's so cool. So you have these categories and yeah, you must have agreements with your clients. Say, like, hey, trust me, you know, like, you have something where, you know, you're managing the split test, for instance. So it's like, hey, if you see some different stuff, that's, that's us doing that. But you do that from a high level there.

Yeah, we get some people like, ah, this copy. I, you know, I don't know about that. And it's like, dude, you could. Can you produce better? And they'll say, yeah, I think I can. It's like, have you sent this to over, you know, 100,000 people?

Right.

Have you. How many of these seminars have you run? Because we've run well over a thousand. Right. And they've done maybe 25. So it's like a kindergartner telling a doctor you know what they should do.

Sure, sure. No, I just love it. Yeah, you're bringing that whole process, these automation, scalability. I mean, like you said, this year is probably going to be monster growth. Well, do you see yourself hanging around in the agency space for long or are you going to pivot?

Oh, it's weird, dude. So like, when I, so I, I'm in this. There's a guy that I know, his name's Lee Goff and he's, he's. So I was in the infusionsoft certified partner community and he was, he had one of the larger, most successful, we'll call it an agency. And so he's a, he's a real cool guy. I like him. But he gave me some advice and back in 2015 that I thought was. Because I had, that was like my really, my first time ever tasting success. I mean, when I say like real success, where it's like, this shit is working for sure. Right. There's no doubt about that. This was success. So he told me, you know, what do you. How are you going to take that and give it to a thousand people? Right? And so I'm in his Facebook group. He's got like a marketing agency Coach because he's had a really successful agency and so now he helps agencies do that. Right. So I'm in his Facebook, I'm not a student of his, but like I had shared where roadmap wise we should have ended up at the end of the year, right. And I had a bunch of people reach out to me wanting me to coach them and stuff. I'm like, that's, I'm not in that business. I'm not in the agency coach business. And. But it made me think about it because like I don't, I don't necessarily can't tell you how to make your agency become a seven figure, multiple million dollar agency, but what I can do is I can tell you how to build the systems that would allow you to do it without having to hire a shitload of people.

There you go. Freaking powerful. Because yeah, most agency owners, and I'm guilty of doing this is like in. Matt and I both are in our own combined agency back in the day, you just make yourself a job, you know, you add all these new offers or this client wants this change and it's just, it just starts loading up and then you have to, or you feel like you have to hire people to do all this stuff.

I think part of our problem running an agency too was that people would say, hey, do you guys do this? And our answer was always like for the right amount of money, yeah, we do that. And I think we just, we kind of spread ourselves too thin.

Definitely we did. Yeah. Yeah.

There's a. So there's this guy that I know as well. So he's a former CMO of infusionsoft. His name's Greg Head. He's kind of like a big dog when it comes to the startup scene here in Arizona. And that guy teaches this concept of where like until you get to a million dollars in revenue, you should do one thing right. So you're a brand new business, starting your first agency or whatever, focus on one thing for one niche and just sell the shit out of it. Figure out all the ins and outs, the objections, how to market it, how to sell it and just focus on that. Because once you cross a million dollars, now you have money to do stuff like hire people, build systems that you don't, you couldn't afford before. You have the ability to do things different. You could create another product line or whatever. But he had laid that in my head a long time ago. And that's one of the things that we focus specifically on stem cells, specifically on Cairos that do that in a specific way that we're doing it. And we've been able to achieve that. Revenues. Right. And so we don't have account managers and pay per click people. We have one guy that does pay per click with his small team. And then we have, uh, like myself, my business partner does handle sales at this point. That will probably be the first thing that we offset because I feel like hungry salespeople are easy to find.

Oh yeah.

But like good ones. That's a different story.

Good point.

But I got a couple of guys that I used to work with at infusionsoft that were like gangster sales guys that have now left in their, like we'll call it. They're. They're independent, so they're 100% commission sales guys.

That's perfect for you then.

And they're so good. Like guys that hold records to this day from like five years ago. You know what I mean?

Reminds me of. We had Wes Schaefer. I know he's a buddy of yours.

Oh yeah, Wes.

Yeah. He was like, you need a mediator, Get a media. Fricking media. I was like, yeah, man, that's a good sales salesperson. You need it hungry and good, you know.

Right. And so that's the. Probably the first. I mean, as we scale beyond where we're at replacing my business partner in the sales process, I mean, I could do it, but it's better when it's a doc selling to a doc or a sales guy that knows sales, because that guy could sell in any situation oftentimes. Right. So that's probably the first position to go. And then.

We have some different industries that do the same kind of marketing. So like financial advisors and estate planning, attorneys and dentists to some extent. Dentists that are selling stuff other than like you need a root canal. Right. So you're doing veneers, cosmetic invisalign, different things like that. So a lot of these, these are. Have similarities and overlap into how we do things. And it would be very easy to take the mechanism that I built and just drop it into that, that marketplace. I mean, I don't know what it caught. What's involved. Like marketing wise to get someone to like hand over their life savings to me to invest. Right.

But they generally do a free seminar, they teach you about investing or why they're better, whatever, and then they convert you into an appointment. So it's the same funnel, right?

Yeah, no, it's the same thing. It's just apply it different ways. That's all it is. Well, I Want to make sure that we don't go too far here, but this has been frigging awesome, Kelsey.

I appreciate that, man.

Yeah, it's just, it's a different way of looking at business. An agency or a funnel your time, you know, leveraging it all through these integrations and stuff. So definitely go check out, you know, the listeners go check out, get automated the podcast over there to get more of this. And really quick, where's the first stop on the RV trip of yours?

Probably San Diego.

Nice.

Nice. Well, let us know if you're in San Diego. We'll have to go grab a drink or something.

Yeah, yeah, for sure, Bruiser. For sure.

So one question we like to ask all of our guests is do you have any book that you find yourself recommending often or that you find yourself referring back to yourself often?

I don't have any books that I refer to often now, but in the beginning in a book that I've. Sometimes you have to give someone their first like baby's first automations concept or like how to. So there's a book that John Jantz wrote like way back in the day called Duct Tape Marketing and it explains the concept of. We're talking about in the terms that like a plumber could understand it. That's never seen the Internet before. Right. And so it's, it's a really good tool because it explains the concepts at a. At a very high level. I mean it doesn't go into detail about like how to execute on it. And they refer to old ass shit in that book. But it is probably one of my favorites that stuck with me. And then of course e myth that book. I mean it's weird because like Michael Gerber I guess is like a four time divorce. Like he's kind of a mess.

But that book tells the story of entrepreneurship better than anything I've ever seen.

Oh yeah, no, that book has. Was amazing. I don't know how many times we've read it.

Yeah, I have it on audio, Kindle and print, so tells you those things.

Stuck with me, man, like the whole franchisor type of model and like in a freelance consulting business, some of those things are harder to apply in my opinion.

Yeah.

But in the agency that I built and that we're building, it's just over and over and over again. I can take that same concepts and just go to town with them.

Yeah, well, you own your own systems and processes or you know, our buddy James Schramko own your own race course. You know, you kind of have your own thing as a freelancer, you're kind of bouncing around, you know, you're at the whim of other people kind of doing their thing.

For sure, man.

Cool, man. Well, I appreciate your time. Oh, and where's any specific place? I know we mentioned the podcast. Any URLs you want to drop?

Yeah, just go to getautomated. Co is probably the best way to go right now. I mean, if you're. If you're interested in hearing more about the automation game, then that's the place. The best place to go at the moment.

Sweet. We'll link it up in the show notes for anybody listening. And, Kelsey, thanks so much. This has been really awesome. I mean, you actually opened our eyes to some new tools that we hadn't heard of, and I think you got us inspired to go back to direct mail a little bit more. So really, really appreciate the time you spent with us today.

Oh, for sure. It was my pleasure.

All right, buddy.

Have a good one.

You too. All right. Thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this. This cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool, free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com. so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

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