Roland Frasier — A Step-By-Step System To Decide Which Opportunities To Pursue

This is an intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf. Hey, what is up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. My name is Matt Wolf, and I'm here with Joe Fear.

Hello.

And today, this is actually an episode we were really, really excited to do because this is a dude that we met fairly recently at a Mastermind. He's one of the partners in a massive company. Maybe you've heard of it. They put on a seminar every year called the Traffic and Conversion Summit. And today we're speaking with Roland Frazier.

Yes.

And we talked about a lot of really cool stuff. Before I tell you what we talked about, I want to tell you about why we're doing this podcast in the first place.

Do that.

So the reason we're doing this Hustle and Flowchart podcast is because we believe there is a better way than what you're used to. You know, the typical life path of going to school, then going to college, then graduating, waiting to get a job so you can save money. And then when you're freaking too old to do anything with the money, you retire and finally get to spend the money you've worked so hard to get. You know, we're proof, and we're on a mission to prove to other people that there's better ways. And that's why we talk to entrepreneurs. That's why we talk to people that have made themselves financially free. That's why we do. What we do is to prove to you and to give you ways that you can do the same thing in your business. And Roland does not disappoint on that front today.

Not at all.

So some of the things we talked about in this episode, we talk about how to decide which opportunities to pursue, because if you're like Joe and I and a lot of other entrepreneurs, you have opportunities flying at you constantly, lots of stuff that you can potentially get involved in, and it's hard to decide which is a good project to go down and which one isn't. And so we talk about how do you decide on that kind of thing.

And the other thing that. That we touched on. And honestly, this podcast probably could have gone on for, like, hours and hours and hours, and it will. We'll have a part two for sure. But the second big thing we talked about is his Facebook video strategy and how he monetizes this thing. Very, very simple strategy that is extremely actionable. He gives you the instruction manual inside of this podcast, and we'll definitely put a lot of the summaries and kind of cheat sheets on the actual show notes page. So go there for sure. But yeah, you could basically take a very simple Facebook strategy and monetize this into what he's doing into 3K type workshop.

Offers, all the way into $25,000 masterminds and even up into the hundred thousand dollars consulting and advisory type packages. So a simple little Strategy that's literally $5 a day for these things, producing all the way up to $100,000 type offers. And it's just. It's radical. What this.

Well, at one point, he's talking about literally how he's making $70,000 a day in profit on some of. So it's pretty interesting stuff, but let's let Roland tell it and let's dive in. Hey, Roland, thanks so much for joining us. We're super excited to have you today. How are you doing?

I'm doing fantastic. And yourself?

Doing great.

Yeah.

We've been really excited about this interview for a few weeks now. We actually, I think, met for the first time at a Mastermind here in San Diego, and Joe and I just thought you were one of the most giving people with your time and your knowledge and everything you do. You were so helpful, and you just gave us so many ideas for our business that we just. We couldn't be more excited to have you and to dive into some of the stuff we learned from you on that day.

Fantastic. Well, I'm excited to be here, and I really appreciate the opportunity to get to hang out with you guys.

Awesome. My man. Well, yeah, and one of those things from the Mastermind, which definitely piqued Matt and I's interest kind of selfishly, is basically about how to make sure you're focused on the right stuff. And this is kind of jumping ahead a little bit. But before we dig into that, because you are a busy guy, tell us briefly, maybe a few minutes or so. Kind of what got you to the point where you're at now? A little history about yourself.

Sure. Yeah. I basically grew up in kind of a. My father is a tax attorney, still is. And so he dealt with a whole lot of entrepreneurs. And I just had a cool cast of characters as a kid coming in and out of his office and the deals that he would do, and he would get into deals with them as well, pretty much as an investor, not really as a business guy, but as a business partner. And I just found it so interesting. And I was like, some of these people that came through his office, I'd be like, man, that's what I want to do when I get older because it's super fun. They're not like tied to a desk and a job and they're into all these cool, different things. That sounds super fun. And then I had a very strong interest in business and the easiest place to start for me was real estate. So I started selling real estate and looking for leverage points and found that if I sold for folks who were.

Selling properties because they were developing them, they had a continual supply and I didn't have to go out and get new listings all the time. And then talking with those people, I found out that they were raising money to do that and needed key man insurance. So I ended up getting my securities license and my insurance license and my real estate license and basically just found ways to.

Get involved in projects on the doing side of the working side. So I wasn't an investor at that point. I was just the guy that was selling houses and funding deals and selling insurance. And then I did that while I was going to. I did that basically 18, 19, 20. Those were when I got those. Those three different licenses and then went on and got my accounting degree and went to law school. And while I was going to law school and going through accounting school, I had that securities license. So I met some folks in New York at Prudential securities and did deals with those guys. And just. I just kind of learned all about buying and selling companies. And so I didn't really have that traditional on the org chart thing to start with, which was really great for me. So it kept me off the org chart and more in the strategic and buying selling side and the value adding side and the scaling side. And I really liked it. And after I got out of law school, I opened a law practice. And it's kind of funny because I had a job. I had two job offers with the securities and Exchange Commission in D.C. and was accepted to Georgetown to go for an advanced law degree in securities. And I was like, I could either do that or I could just keep doing what I was doing and hang out a shingle and see how I did my own. So I turned those opportunities down and decided I would stay in the fantastic weather of San Diego.

And get involved in the deals still. And so I practiced law and had a very entrepreneurial bent to that. And my clients were all entrepreneurial clients. And my law firm, which I left in 2003.

Is still operating. And my partners, who I went to law school with, that started that together, are still doing it. And they're doing mostly M and A work now, mergers and acquisitions, but still all entrepreneurs. And so that's just kind of. I had that wonderful exposure to how cool it was when people would come in and they'd be buying a building one time and then the next minute they'd be buying a racetrack and then the next minute they'd be buying a superfoods company. It's just really fun and interesting to see all the different opportunities to make money and grow businesses and scale them. That was kind of what got me into doing it all myself. And so I just evolved from that as opportunities came and started becoming an investor and adding value. And my first deal was with one of my clients that was doing a direct mail business. And I saw an opportunity for him to make a whole lot more money. And we made. I said, why don't instead of you paying me fees, let me be your partner. I'll add some changes in and we'll just split the. We'll split up what makes money and we end up splitting a million eight a year later. So that was pretty good taste of $900,000 for not having to do a whole lot of work.

There you go. I love it. I love the fact that you started in this not on the org chart space. So your mental. I think you had more clarity right from the very beginning rather than.

Yes, absolutely.

Now I think our audience, they'll probably know you best. As one of the partners over at Digital Marketer, can you kind of tell us a little bit about how you got into that deal?

Yeah, sure.

As the Internet was coming into being a significant resource, I wanted to get involved with it. I had talked with and cut deals with America Online and CompuServe, which were two big platforms at the time that aren't quite as big now.

I had channels on those. And so I got an experience in aggregating content around particular interests in that case, the one was beauty and health and one was motivation and personal development.

I just saw the opportunity with everything that was going on online to take that to less developed companies because most companies at the time and actually still to this day are drastically under optimized for online marketing. And so as I decided I saw that opportunity, I was like, I want to get involved with a couple of people who are really good at online marketing. And I had several people that I followed, Jeff Walker and Andy Jenkins and Alex Mendozian and all of these kinds of guys. And Ryan Deiss was one of those. And so Ryan launched a project called Wholesale Traffic System with a guy that was Mr. X. So they didn't give his identity, but he was doing crazy amounts of money online in E Comm. This is what, eight or ten years ago at this point. And so I bought the program and I was like, I got to get to know these guys because they, they really impressed me as people who had the ability to bring digital marketing to non digital companies. And I'm buying and selling non digital companies and thinking, gosh, if we just add in the digital marketing component, we can blow these things up and sell them. I found out they announced that they were having this conference and they had called it Traffic and Conversion Summit and it was in Austin. So I flew to Austin and went. And I, my hand cramped up from taking notes. They went from like 8 in the morning till 8 at night. It was nothing crazy. And they were shooting products at the time too. They were like, yeah, we're going to record these sessions and then we're going to sell each of these things as products. I was just impressed with them as to.

How smart they were in that space. And so I decided that I wanted to get involved with them and they offered a thing. I didn't join the first year, so this is, I cheated myself out of a year by procrastinating and saying. They called War Room, which was their high end mastermind and it was $20,000 to join. And I was like, well, it's a lot of money, but it would get me close to them. That's cool. But I don't really know exactly what I want to do yet, so I think I'm going to wait. So I didn't do it the first year and then I went the second year, the whole year. I was like pissed at myself for not taking action. I was, you know, I'm like, I just wait, why? I'm just wasting time. I should have done that. So I went back to the second Traffic and Conversion Summit with the intention of joining. I didn't even care about going to the event. I was just like, I'm going to join that stupid mastermind so I can talk to these guys. I've done that, you know, over and over throughout my life. And so I don't know why I hesitated there, but, but whenever I want to get to know somebody, I find the access channel that they've put up to be able to get in touch with them. And I go through that access channel. So if, you know, if you're a speaker, like a, you know, to get what to know? William Shatner, we hired William Shatner for one of our events. And part of the deal was, you know, you have to have lunch with us. And that deal in it, I've just gone. Done that over and over and over. So why I took that. That opportunity to procrastinate, I don't know. But then the second one, I went and I was like, okay, I want to join that war room thing. And they're like, you can't. And I'm like, what do you mean you can't? It's sold out. What the hell? And they're like, no, you can't. Because we hadn't printed any forms yet, and they hadn't told us what they're going to sell it for. I was like, oh, okay, awesome. So it's just disorganization. Not that it's full. Yes, we haven't.

Anyway, I joined and. And decided that I wanted to get to know these guys better.

And so I made it a point to. At the first one, I was like, what am I going to do to stand out? Because I want to stand out so that I can get some time with them and get some attention. And they had this thing called Wicked Smart. And Wicked Smart is you take whatever thing that you've proven and the results that you've got and you share it with the group. Everybody votes on it, and whoever gets the most votes from the crowd as the thing that was best. The people in the Mastermind, there's only 20 people. And then you get to the. You get to win Wicked Smart. And so I decided I wanted to win it. I came up with three different things. I submitted them, and I ended up winning it. And then Perry came over and was like, hey, man, you need to have dinner with us, and I want you to sit next to me and we'll talk. And Perry and I just hit it off. We became great friends, and I was a member of that mastermind for three years. I just helped Brian and Perry with any challenges they had. My legal and business background was valuable to them as they were going through some challenges in the business. Ultimately, the person who had an opportunity to acquire some equity in their company went away, and the opportunity to have that equity came about. So they offered me the ability to buy in, and I jumped on it and became partners with them in 2013, and we've been partners ever since.

That's amazing. That's super cool. I think Matt and I were actually probably there for both of those traffic and conversion summits.

I'm fairly certain we've been to every single traffic and conversion that's ever been done since the first one second.

See. Yeah, it's radically changed, especially since you've been involved.

Yeah. So in 2013 was the first one that was in San Francisco where I was a partner, but it had already been put together, so I didn't, I didn't really have. With the exception of. I said we got to get a celebrity.

Yeah.

And William Shatner. And so that was our. That was our very first like celebrity. Celebrity that we got was. Was a big hit. And so then in 2014 I got to do the production, the sponsor sales and the monetization. And so I And the celebrities. So we got. That was the first shark we had. We got Kevin o' Leary and a couple of other people. We went to multi stage and the sponsorships. When I went in 2013, you probably remember there was a hallway and in the hallway there were eight booths that they. For $5,000 a piece. So there was a grand total of $40,000 sponsorship income. And this year we'll crack about 2 million. So I took over sponsorship and basically just created a system and brought on a really high quality person in Deanna, who is my director of events and memberships, Deanna Rogers. And we just went after sponsors. We went after. We increased the production budget from about 150,000 to 650,000. And that was a really big leap of faith for Ryan and Perry to take with me and Rich Richard Lindner, who's also a partner. And it paid off. It was like the big change. If you guys went to all of these, you probably saw it was a giant change from 2013 to 2014.

Oh yeah, right, yeah, yeah. I'm just picturing the very first one that Matt and I were at and we knew someone at Digital Marketer. I forget who it was.

That was the affiliate manager at the time, Chris Daigle.

Daigle, yes. And he got us some back room. Like it was like the VIP room and it was like a hole in the wall room. We were getting piped over, I think some TV feed. Yeah. But it was just like it was so tiny and like it was one room.

Well, I also remember from the early trafficking conversion summits that some of the stuff that was being taught from stage.

I don't know how to quite put this, but it was a little black hat stuff that I'm not sure with the audience that's there now, they would get away with talking about on stage anymore.

No, yeah, definitely not. And it's a really good point. So two things is like one of the conversations that Ryan and Perry and I had was what do we want to be when we grow up? And I remember the challenge of the business model then for Digital Marketer was that there were a lot of business opportunity offers and there was a lot of black hat stuff. And we weren't going to appeal to people who had money in the corporate and the high level entrepreneur area. We were appealing to people who didn't have any money who were basically up night looking for offers and ways to make money, which isn't terribly far from the multi level marketing crowd. And so it was if we do this, then we're never going to have the opportunity to build something we can sell, which is something that they wanted to do. And that is always my objective when I come in is how can we build this to sell?

So we had a good talk about it and to their credit, they were both really on board with, yeah, let's reinvent it. Let's go after the corporate and high level entrepreneur market. We'll get rid of the black hat stuff, we'll get rid of the biz ops stuff and reinvent Digital marketer. And so that's what happened in basically, I think that was 2015 that Richard and Ryan just said.

Let'S do these courses and let's really change and let's have the certified partner program and really reach out to agencies and focus on a whole different crowd. So that was really cool because the business model back then was we're going to do this thing on how to make money on Instagram and then we're going to do how to run Facebook ads and make money and then we're going to do how to make money playing on your phone. I didn't like the liability of the make money. I think income claims you want to just not do at all, right? You want completely away from income claims, especially in the current FTC environment. And the problem was is that those offers, we weren't building a catalog of assets to be able to increase the value of the business because the offers would change. So you would do how to make money with Instagram or how to make money writing a book, but everything would change and all the buttons would move and all the technical stuff would change. So that wouldn't be an asset you could continue to sell. It would be good for a year and be done. And if the offer bombed like you create how to make money on Fiverr. There was one called Fiverr Freelane or something like that. Fiverr Fast Lane or Freedom something. Anyway.

The challenge was that you're gonna launch it. And it's either the market's gonna like it or not. And you've put all this time and effort into emailing and marketing and creating the program. And if it tanks, you get to have it up for a week or two. And then you've got to go to the next offer because you don't have any assets that you've built that are continuing to grow. So the Asset one, you do and you launch, ideally. And then you launch Asset two and Asset one still generating revenue. And then you generate revenue from Asset two and then Asset three launches. And now you got three things. But for our model when I came in was you launch Asset one and then that goes away and it doesn't generate anything else. And now you launch Asset two and Asset one is out of date and two maybe fails. And so you got no money from Asset one, Asset two failed. You better get Asset three up there real quick or you're going to go broke. Right? And that was a horrible cycle. So we were able to break out of that by reinventing the company. And that is what the company has become now is this tremendously valuable asset. And so that was a big pivot that took place in. And this is towards your systems, because I know you're very systematically inclined, right to systems. We have a system for evaluating the performance of our business model. And so we look at the business model every quarter in our board meetings and we say, are we moving in the direction that we want to move in? And how are things trending both macroeconomically and within our niche and industry microeconomically? And is this where we want to be? Do we want to pivot? So that was a giant pivot into agencies and away from biz op and black hat and into agencies and corporate. Then.

Two years ago, we pivoted. We were like the biggest place to have the best opportunity on evaluation for sale and the best way to build loyalty and the best way to grow Traffic and Conversion Summit into more of a user conference than just here's Internet stuff was to do our own SaaS.

So we hired a software developer. And in the meantime, so we could launch quickly, we cobbled together. Mike Weiss, had a really cool program, and there was another one called Memberium, and three or four different programs that we cobbled together in a learning management system to. It's not in the learning management system, excuse me, in a software delivery system to be able to launch our DMHQ SaaS. And we launched the SaaS, and the valuations on sasses are now 5 to 8 times revenue.

That's amazing.

Yeah, revenue as opposed to a multiple of ebitda, which is like net income.

So, yeah, we were like, you know.

We had our meeting. We're like, we need to be in SaaS. If we're not SaaS, we're missing out on this huge valuation bump we can get. So we decided to do the software, and we turned all of our course products that we were selling for $300 and $600 into a subscription to a SaaS that delivered those products and allowed managers, since we had a corporate bent. DHQ allowed managers to assign trainings in different digital marketing core practices, which we had eight of. And then they could monitor how people were consuming them to be sure they were going through and achieving a minimal level of competence. Then we bought another SaaS that was an analytics company. And then we decided that there was no real. We looked at Kajabi and Teachable and all these different other products, which are fantastic for their intended purpose, but for a marketer.

They don't really work that well because they're too constraining. So we needed to do our own LMS learning management system, which we did create, and it's now in its final beta, and we announced it at Traffic and Conversion a few months ago. So that's Praxio, and that, I think, is going to be a giant, giant company.

That's super exciting. So systematically we looked at our business and said, is this business generating what we want it to generate? We're like, no. Okay, let's evaluate the marketplace and see where we want to go. Let's move into the people that have money and create a continuing asset base and a catalog of assets we can use on an ongoing basis. And that certifications and agencies. And then how can we. We looked at it again and said, how can we make the most from valuation and value for ourselves and their customers? And we went to SaaS, and now that's where we are today.

That makes sense. And now my question is, this is amazing, by the way, because you're kind of walking us through this evolution, and it's like a perfect case study of what you do and how you apply your knowledge and just the focus of everything in terms of the valuation. So the SaaS valuation, you said five to eight times revenue. Would that be for the entire company or just revenue from the SaaS?

It's recurring revenue. So that was an interesting thing too, is one of the things that helped us in knowing exactly how to do that is we had a meeting with Companies tend to come and when you get to a certain level you just start getting approached by investment bankers and funds and people that want to give you money.

One of the companies, Spectrum Equity that had funded Lynda.com, which sold to LinkedIn for a billion dollars and a bunch of other companies came down and met with us in Austin and we talked with them about our model and we had a lot of recurring revenue, but we also had a lot of non recurring revenue. And so that was what really made that lit the match for us to change. That is they said, okay, we'll give you a multiple of five on your mrr, your monthly recurring revenue and we'll you give multiple of one on your which is still better than ebitda, but one is five. One on your static revenue for all your core sales that you do. And then you have to go and sell them again and again and again because that's much more risky than the monthly recurring. So that was a really bright line for us to say, okay, well so this part of the business is worth literally five times more than this part of the business and the only real change we have to make is get this on subscription. Yeah, let's do that.

Well, it's a no brainer and I think even in the mastermind when we were chatting, that was the thing. One of the questions that Matt and I had for you is going into a SaaS and to get a multiple like that, because that's something we're currently on the hunt for, we have some prospects and you basically told us, okay, well you need to either acquire it, so buy it or create it.

Yep, absolutely. And that's what's cool is, you know, we've done both. To me it's build or buy or cobble and then build. So cobble is what we did in between so that we could get money faster. Because if you think about like the development cycle, it could take you a year or two and we didn't want to wait to get that recurring revenue. So we just looked at all the different things that were out there and then we frankenstein patched it together to do what we needed while we were creating our own. And then we were able to just migrate over as soon as it was built, which was really cool because then we didn't have to wait. We literally right into effectively owning our SaaS even as all these things cobbled together.

Yeah, so it's essentially a minimum viable product. You're able to put out there, turn some revenue, pay for your development and prove the concept. Yeah, Love it.

Cool. So one of the. I'm going to shift gears a little bit here. One of the things that we wanted to talk about a little bit was something you actually talked about when, when we met maybe a month ago. You were talking about sort of this process that you go through. Because we were talking about how all these opportunities flow to us. And one of our actual struggles in our business is we have too many opportunities flowing to us, too many people saying, hey, can you get involved in this? And you know, what do you think of this idea? And you went through a process. Process that you use to kind of figure out whether I should go in on this or not. I was wondering if you can maybe walk through that with us one more time.

Yeah. So we have so many opportunities that are coming across, as every entrepreneur does, that are coming across our desk all the time. And we had a challenge with how do we want to do them all? And.

Not only do we want to do all the new opportunities that come by, we have all these opportunities that exist in our existing businesses and we want to do all those too.

We can't do that. How can we figure out a way that will allow us to evaluate all these different opportunities and not get totally lost.

Not get totally lost in the process?

So the way that we decided to do it was to create this tool. And so we said, how do we go about evaluating opportunities.

And decide what we want to do?

What we decided was that we do actually have a process.

How do we go about taking the process and turning it into an actual tool? The way that we decided to do that was to create this thing called the Growth Idea Scorecard. What that is, is it's an Excel spreadsheet and I'm actually turning it into.

A SAS. So it won't be a profitable SaaS, but it'll be a lead gen SaaS. So kind of also, how do you take all your assets and get the most out of what you've got? And you do that is that you say, how can I monetize this thing that I've got now? So the Growth Idea Scorecard is an Excel spreadsheet, currently will be a SaaS soon that we'll be able to use and other people will get free access to it. We're not going to sell it.

The way that we're going to. Excuse me. The way that we evaluate that is we say, okay, let's make a list of the opportunities. So let's look at this each opportunity on its own. Let's put together A growth team. And we'll have our growth team look at it and make the decision as to whether it's viable or not. We said, okay, that's great. So we say, what is the idea? What's a brief description of the idea? What's the date? What's the.

General information about it? What's a detailed description about it? And then.

What is the hypothesis that we're testing? And so for us, there's a section.

On the sheet that says we believe that if we do X.

Then Y will happen and we'll know when Z occurs. Right. So let me pull it up so I can walk through it.

I can hear you clicking around, you're trying to find it. Thank you. See, I love this about you, is that you approach everything with a systematic, this kind of scientific approach.

Yeah. It's just you have to. Right. Or you'll get overwhelmed. Okay, so we say, what's the date? Who's the person that thought of this thing? What does it apply to? And then I was trying to get past the one that's all filled out. Okay, what's the idea? What's the hypothesis? Which is, I believe if we do X, we can expect Y and we'll know when Z happens. So that's critical. I believe if we do X, we take this action, we can expect this result Y, and we'll know when Z happens. Like people show up or it proves out or conversion rate is X percent or whatever. Then we put in what are the assets that are needed in terms of physical assets and resources. That could be money or that could be, we need to use this code that we've got and we need this sales team or whatever. And then what's the team that's needed? Who are the actual people? Resources that are required as well. And then that gives us an idea. That's the ideation part. So now we know we have an idea what it is, what's going to take to make it happen, and what's our hypothesis we're working with. Then we go to growth levers and we say, is this going to actually grow the company? And so we look at five different things to determine if that's going to happen. So we look at acquisition, activation, monetization, retention and referral. So if it's not going to help us acquire new customers. Acquisition, activate customers, meaning taking them from kind of looky loos into real users that will stay with us for a good time.

Monetization, is it going to make us money? Retention, will it help people stay longer? Which will make more money and grow us or as people to tell other people that we have good stuff and they should use it, which is referral. If it's not doing one of those things, it's not growing the business. So that's a just a black and white test right at the beginning as to is this idea just something that's cool. Like for example, it could apply to software. So we could say, hey, I think the software should do X. We've had a lot of customers say that the software should do X. Well, if that's not going to help us acquire new customers, activate them, monetize them, retain them, or cause them to refer other people, then we shouldn't add that feature. We shouldn't have that feature.

It's a good way to fight feature creep. And then it's also a good way to say, okay, well we have the opportunity to buy this analytics company. Great. Is this analytics company something that's going to give us new customers? Yes or no? Well, does it have a bunch of customers now? Yes, it's got 5,000. Awesome. Then we can bring those people in and also use that to sell other stuff. That's going to be a yes for acquisition activation. Probably not. Monetization. It's a new way for us to make money because all the people we already have can now use this analytics thing so we can put our existing audience into this new valuable device for them. So monetization? Yes. Now it's two of them. Will it with retention? Maybe. Don't know. But that's a maybe for sure. It might help people to stay longer because if they, if our normal people that are in our other business go and sign up for this analytics thing and then they install it on all their sites. That's pretty sticky. So that's kind of like a strong maybe and then referral. Will it cause them to bring in additional people? Probably not. But it's not like a referral mechanism, like something that's going to go viral and be crazy because it's behind the scenes. It's not like there's a footer in every email or there's a powered by digital marketer on every page or something like that that's going to then lead people to click on that and go sign up for stuff. But that's cool. That means it's for sure. Yes on two things. Activation, monetization and it's a maybe on retention. So let's call that a 2.5. Yeah, it definitely goes to the next stage and then that's the growth lever stage. So now we know, yes, we're going to go to the next thing, which we call project scoring and then we use ICE analysis to decide. Now we know this is going to have a growth impact. Is it something we should do? So then we look at impact, confidence and ease. That's ice, I, C, E. And we say, okay, is it going to move the needle for the business? Is the impact going to be something that is going to actually show up in dramatic way? If it is, it's a 10. If it's not going to do it at all, it's a zero. If it's somewhere between, it's one number in between zero and 10. And then confidence, how sure are we that we can actually pull this thing off and that the hypothesis will work? The hypothesis that we did up in ideation will tell us what we think is going to happen. Now it's time for us to say, how sure are we that that's. Then ease is how hard is it going to be? If it's, hey, we should have a SaaS, it might be a 10 on hard because we've got to hire a software team and an inside sales team and we don't have either of those things right now. Right. Or it might be super easy because, yeah, it's just we buy this company and then we tell people we own this now, this new product and everybody buys it. That would be super easy.

After we do that, we have. And you can pick anything you want. We have a raw total and a weighted average total. And if it's, you know, for us, if it's a 6 on the raw or an 18 on the weighted average, then we're going to go forward with it. And then we just add that. This is cool too, though. It doesn't stop there. Here's what's awesome, right? You get that on the ideation growth project scoring, right?

Yep.

Okay, that's good. Now we do a tab and we take the scores for all of these things and put them on a separate sheet. And now we've got this huge list of all these ideas that we have for growing the company. And this is really great when you go to a conference too, and you're like, I just heard 62 things I want to do, 40 pages of notes and I'm so confused. I'm going to go and have a coffee.

Thank you. Traffic and conversion summit.

Yeah, exactly right. I absolutely had that experience myself. Now I've got everything on a sheet and I've got my 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 things from ideation, my five growth levers, my ice analysis, my raw totals and weighted totals. And they're all columns in a spreadsheet. So what's cool is now we get together and we say, okay, what are our goals for this quarter? And we pick one or two because statistically they've done studies and if you have more than one or two, you generally don't do any of them well, whereas one or two and you get, then you have a pretty good shot at hitting those. And then you can take the other things that you were deferring and hit those later. So a great way to figure out how to decide which one or two you're going to pursue for the quarter is to look at your growth idea log, which is the second page of this thing, and say, okay, I'm going to sort by score on acquisition because we've decided we want to get more customers this month. And so now all of my best ideas that scored the highest in terms of impact, confidence and ease and being a growth lever for acquisition are going to be ranked. And I don't have to make a decision that is subjective. I just look at it and say, okay, we've already scored this, we should do the first two. If we get customers, we should do the first two things that we have already gone through this multi step process and determined that they're going to have the greatest impact with the greatest confidence and the greatest ease on this particular growth lever. If we want to do monetization for this quarter or we want to reduce churn so we want to bump retention or we need more referrals, that's all here at your fingertips simply by sorting. And that is a system for deciding what you want to do like I've never had before.

Oh my God. Yeah, no kidding. And I love the fact that you can use this not just for outside opportunities, but like you said, different features, things that you want to accomplish in your business, which just in our business alone, I mean, I know there's like an in endless to do list. Every business is that way.

Right, right. So it helps you decide what's important, what's going to move the needle in the area you want the needle moved. And then of all the options of the different things that might do that, what is most likely to get you there the fastest?

I love it. And I could see why you guys are now making this software for free. It's a total referral. It's a way that you can, you can acquire new people as you know to digital Marketer and all your other assets there.

Exactly. So we can give great value to people and rather than selling it or I had been sharing it with people as an Excel spreadsheet, but it just occurred to me that I've got several updates that I want to do to it and as we evolve.

Can become a very valuable tool that everybody can use for free. And it'll also help us lead gen because we'll be able to pixel people and I don't think I'm even going to ask for an email. I think we'll just pixel people and then we'll show them the stuff that we think they're most likely to like based on having used this. It's a win win for everybody.

There's a lot of data collection there, which is really cool. What we'll do for the listeners here too is kind of summarize this. Matt's really good at note taking, so he'll probably listen to this like three times that experiment explanation and give you guys like a cheat sheet. So prior to the software being available to everybody, but obviously give you credit, let's shift gears really quick just so we could be. Because I know this next topic here we really want to hone in on. We've been sharing it with a few folks, handful of folks who do video online or just want to stand out and grow their brand and you've done something extremely unique and fascinating and completely simple. Frictionless. I love that word. We've been using it all the time now. Yeah, this Facebook video strategy, you totally. I think you're just doing something that's so easy but is mind boggling to some people with the results you brought in. Can you just explain?

Okay, what can I tell you?

Well, let's see, what are the numbers? So, okay, where do you start? I think it was about what, eight months ago or so that you start. Correct. Okay, so how many likes on your fan page did you start with right now?

Well, I started with about 100. I had begged, borrowed and stolen with all my relationships to try to get people to like my page, which I had no idea what I was going to do or how to market. You know, several years ago when they announced the pages, I was like, okay, well I got to get my name. Yeah, 100 likes to get your name. So I did that and that's where I started in August and then by April I had crossed a million.

I have other things that I'm focused on right now. So it's only grown by about 100,000 in the last month or so. But I think I'm sitting at around a million one right now.

So the beauty of that which has fascinated us is that it's not only a vanity metric of this million one that you're sitting on now. That's great. Most people don't know what to do with that. They just think, oh, I'm just going to keep putting videos out or random things. But you've been able to monetize that tremendously.

Yeah, I want to monetize everything. So like I will run through the Growth Idea scorecard to determine what I'm going to monetize. Right, yeah, of course. So.

I went through that and I was trying to think and I brainstormed with my partners and came up with the thing that would be most likely to.

The thing that would be most likely to get me where I wanted to go would be to have some sort of little small event. I didn't really want to create a course or anything like that. It's so much work and not as rewarding as I would like for it to be. So I decided that the thing that would serve me best and also be valuable to people I know is, would be to have events. And so I decided to have.

I went through names. Branding is really important. What are the names you're going to use? And I was like, okay, workshop, just event summit, all these different things. And I landed on a buddy of mine, Ed o', Keefe, who is a super smart guy, one of the best implementers I know and is just killing it in the supplement space, told me that he was doing these two day intensives. And I was like, intensive is awesome. That perfectly describes what I want to do. I want to share with people how I grow, scale, leverage and exit businesses. And an intensive where you immerse yourself in this stuff for two days would be the perfect way to do that. So I said, okay, I'm going to do an intensive and the.

I like Las Vegas. So I was like, I'm going to do it in Las Vegas. And I was like, okay, I don't want to have to rent a huge space and have a room block that I'm committed to and have it, you know, AV and have it cost me $50,000 just to put on this event. And I just want to have a few people to share this with and kind of test it out. And you'll like the evolution of this too, I think. I decided to do an intensive in Las Vegas and I booked the room at the Mandarin oriental. It sat 18 people uncomfortably or 15 comfortably. So I decided 15 people. And I just did a video. Everything the whole way has been videos, right? So just short friction free. Here's my iPhone. You and I, you know, you guys, like, if this was not being recorded and podcasted, we'd be talking about a whole lot of other things, and I'd get two or three really great takeaways from our conversation. And at the end, I'd say, you know, hey, will you guys. You know, why don't you guys hold onto the iPhone, point it at me and say, yeah, I'm sitting here with these guys. And we talked about it and had this great idea. Then I'll literally reach around and grab the iPhone and turn it on you, and you'll just talk about the two or three cool things that we talked about, and I'll. I'll do it in three separate videos. If it's three points or five, five points. Never more than five minutes long, never shorter than about 45 seconds. And then I post it and boost it, which is the way that you can advertise things the quickest and easiest, although the least efficiently, on Facebook. And I would do $10 a day for five days for each video that I shot. And then I also had $10 a day to promote the. The page, which I didn't even find out you could do until halfway through the process. I was getting 12,500 likes a week and just doing that other strategy. And then I saw the little button up at the top that said, promote your page. And I was like, huh? Promote my page? Which is what I'm actually trying to get people to. Like, that'd probably be a good thing to do. So I. The $10 a day budget on that and instantly went from 25,000, like, excuse me, from 12th Fife, 12,500 likes a week to 25,000 likes a week in a day.

Wow.

I just had to click that button.

Sure.

So then since all of that content and all of the crowd that I was accumulating was around videos, and videos were the easiest to create because for me to take a picture or caption something or write a post or all that stuff, that's just, like, way too much time. So the videos are awesome because you just do it, and then it's done. You click a button and you post it up and click another button, and you boost it, and it's out there, and people start liking it and liking your page, I was like, okay, well, the best way, if you're going to market something for monetization.

To a crowd is to market it in the exact same way, in the exact same medium that the crowd came about in the first place. I would just shoot videos. I'd hold the camera away from my face like a selfie, turn on the video function, and hit record and say, you know, hey, this is Roland doing this intensive in Las Vegas. It's two days. It's $1,982. We're gonna cover how to grow your company, how to exit it, how to scale it, how to sell it, just like we've done for our companies. If you're interested in coming, comment Vegas below and I'll message you the details and send you the link to sign up. That's it. And so I did a couple videos like that, ended up selling. Selling out two events right away at roughly $2000 a piece to 15 people. So roughly $30,000 per event. Cost me $1000 a day for the room. So $2000 for the room and $1000 a day for the AV because I didn't record it, but I still had to rent the projector and screen and stuff.

Yep.

And then I did these little intensives. And so that was like, if I had done nothing else and sold nothing, that would have been a win because I literally spent, you know, all in five grand on the event, and I got 30 grand for doing it.

That's amazing.

I had two of them right off the bat. Right. Because I sold it so fast, I didn't know how it was gonna work. And I put it out there, and I got so many comments. I think there was 136 comments.

I had to close it after 15. And everybody's like, no, no, I want to go. I was like, okay. So I called Perry, who had agreed to do this with me at the event, and I said, man, do you have any other time in October? Because we could definitely do another one. He's like, yeah, sure. And so we picked the dates. So we booked two of them. So that month would have been a 60,000 revenue, roughly, with 10,000 expenses. So $50,000 month profit, which is pretty good, Right? Right. For just social, out of the. Out of the box. But of course, my approach to everything, so looking systematically, I'm always like, okay, well, what are three ways I can monetize anything that I'm doing? How can this help my business in three ways? So I said, okay, so we've got these intensives. We definitely can use them to promote our mastermind. We have this mastermind called War Room that I Mentioned that I joined a long time ago and then becoming a partner. So I can definitely have this be something that we sell to the people at the end of the thing after they've gotten a great transformational experience.

That was cool. And then I was like, but there should be a higher end thing. And then Ryan Dice was at dinner with me and Perry and Deanna and said, well, why don't we sell?

He was talking to me. He said, roland, you keep saying $100,000 thing. Why don't we. The quality of the people in the room is immense. Why don't we figure out what we can sell for 100,000? And I was like, that's cool. And then we ended up deciding we could sell an advisory board where we'll just act as your advisory board and we'll do a quarterly meeting and call us or text us whenever you want, just like we do with each other. So now I had two things I could sell. Then we also had a lot of different web properties that we had developed that we built up, and we didn't have anybody to run them. So, like, okay, well, we can have the people in there can either buy the sites from us or they can become an investor and we'll work those sites together. So at that very first thing, now I've got three ways to monetize on top of the monetization that already happened. And what happened was four people applied for the $100,000 thing. Three people. I had 15 people in the room. So three people joined war room for 30,000. And then one guy bought one of our websites for 100,000.

Jesus.

I was like, well, this is better than anything else. Aren't as good.

Almost exactly the same thing happened at the second one. The first one was like, is it a fluke? Was it a fluke? So going, we're like, wow, this is amazing. But it probably sucks because it only works one time. Sure was almost exactly the same thing the second time. And I've done 10 of them now and 10 of those that were in that model. And the other thing, my other systematic thing, is will it verticalize? So I was like, okay, this is great in the digital marketing space. Will it work in any other space? So I called my friend Frank Kern and said, you got this consulting space. How about if we do one of these things there? And he's like, sure. So he said, let's do two of them. Let's just do them back to back. He said, but I like to sell things for more money, so let's sell it for 3,800. So we sold 30 spaces at 3,800 for back to back events, all through social, through videos that he did and I did and we posted up and we did a couple together and we did the event and we had about the same ratio of people that applied for the different things. I called my partner, Kent Clothier, who we own a real estate business with called Real Estate Worldwide, and I said, hey, Intensives, want to try it? He's like, yeah. So we scheduled one and it did exactly the same thing. So it proved across the board to be a fantastic way to have a little bit of profit on the front, you know, 20, 30 grand. Right. And a lot of profit on the back and fill other things. So what happened was, okay, well now if I do these intensives, I can get off of the dependence on Traffic Conversion Summit, which is the primary source of people who join War Room other than word of mouth, right? And I could do an intensive every month and it's only going to take two days. And I can make, I can net out 60, 70 grand a day effectively for my time. And after splitting with all my partners, that's pretty good. And now I've got a new way to fill War Room by having the people that come to the intensives join War Room. So I was like, well, that's cool. Then evolved into, okay, we did 10 of those. And I said, now how can I add even more, more value? How can I make this thing work more for me? So I said, if I add. I said, first off, I don't want to do one of these a month because it's boring. I used to play in a band. I played in a band from age 15 to 42 in different bands. We played out on stages and stuff all over town. And what was fun about it was performing. But what was not fun was performing the same songs every time. So we would be learning new songs all the time. And that made it interesting for us on top of the performance. The challenge with my intensive was I had done the same intensive 10 times and I had improved it a whole lot, but it was still basically like I was playing the same songs over and over and over.

You're Aerosmith doing the same thing for, you know, right.

So I decided, okay, I'm going to do, I'm going to do something different. I'm going to still do intensives, but instead of doing an intensive a month, that's the same leverage, grow, exit, scale, Leverage, grow, scale, exit.

I'll do them on all the topics that Everybody wants to know most about. So we pulled all of our people in war room and said, what are the things that you guys want to know? Like get really deep. Well, copy and offers and bots and SMS and email and leadership and management. We got this list of 20 different things and ranked them. We went through basically the poll and we ended up with 20 things that seemed to have a lot of demand. And so I just said, okay, now every month that we don't have Traffic Conversion Summit or a war room meeting, we will do an event around a new topic. And that is what we've started doing. So we did the first in May. This month in June, we did one on copy and offers. We have a war room meeting in July. Then in August we're doing one on sms, push notifications, bots and email and so on and so forth. So now really cool is I was like, okay, can I do this intensive for a little bit larger crowd? So in May, we tested it with 40 people. And I said, how can I make this do even more for me? And I looked at my activation, acquisition, monetization, retention, referral thing and I said, you know what? I can use intensives to increase retention in war room by making the intensives free for war room and telling people that not only are the intensives free if you're a war room member, but you can send your employees training on these very specific things that you shouldn't be doing anyway.

I like that a lot.

Now I added that as a benefit and I announced it to the war room people and they just went nuts about it. They're like, oh my God, this is amazing. So now you get these, you know, an extra roughly eight events a year that other people will be paying $2,000 for that you don't have to pay for. And you can send a team member so you can send two people for free. So basically that's eight events times $2,000, times two people is $32,000 benefit. War room only costs 30,000. So you get war room for free. So that's my right. So that's my evolution. And then I, and now I said, okay, so I'll let 50% of each of these can be attended by war room people. And then we're going to sell seats to the public for the other 50% of the seats. So I did that in June. We had the offers and copy event that basically was all Perry. And we said, okay, we booked a room that would hold 100 people and we set it up Harry Potter seating style where everybody's kind of like they are in the big Harry Potter.

Yeah.

And so that, that we found to be the best way to get people to network and talk. Now I've got. Think about this, think about the strategy. This is really cool. So now I've got my super happy War room people who are there for free, plus their employees for free learning they take half the seats. The other half of the seats. I've sold 50 seats now in a hundred seat thing, 50 seats by war room people and 50 seats by other people. It turned out that we oversold, we over allowed War Room people to come. So it was actually 60 war room people in 50, 40 people. So 40 people paid $2,000 to be there. So now I made $80,000, right. All from school. And it cost me 40 to do the event because I recorded it with a three camera setup and you know, double redundancy and all this other stuff and had a higher production quality. But I still made 40 grand in profit.

Wow.

Now I've got 40 people who are to face with War Room people getting amazing transformational content and hanging out and talking with the war room people who are all saying, you should be in war room.

Oh man, that is amazing.

I was going to say there's your sales force right there.

And so everybody in the room, you got 60, 50, 60 people in the room that have a tag that says war room. And everybody else is like, I would like to belong to that. Right? So now we can pick up an extra couple hundred thousand dollars per event. And I eliminated my challenge of the bottleneck of only having TNC Traffic Conversion Summit be the supply for these things. And my other benefit. My third thing is now I've got super high quality recordings of new things that become premiums for people that join War Room or people that attend an event or people that buy a thing we're launching in October called Growthroom so that Now I'll have 20 different full high quality course quality.

Top production, deep dive courses into all of the most exciting, interesting topics that people want to hear about as premiums because I'm not selling them and I've got all this great content. So it's like happy war Room people better retention, acquisition of new customers because Happy War Room people tell new customers who attend monetization 2000 bucks ahead for the people who are attending, plus 30,000 bucks ahead for everybody that joins War Room and.

Referral from all the people who attend that talk to people about how amazing the experience was, plus post about it online and activation in terms of all of the people who are in War Room who come to the bigger events, because there's four bigger events a year that have about 200. And some people are now in these smaller events with just 40 or 50 or 60 other war room members. They're all going out to dinner and talking to each other and getting better acquainted. So it just feeds all five of these things. Plus, bonus, I've got now this great content that I can use as premiums and bonuses for selling all of these things that these people are helping me sell.

Oh, my God. I don't know how many wins. It's not a win win. It's like, win, win, win, win, win, win, win.

Exactly. And it's fantastic experience for our, you know, for our War Room members and for the people. And then I just found out, I've been trying to think about, like, how do you, how do you sell a mastermind? And it's really interesting. I just had a meeting yesterday with guy that owns a software company that we do a lot of work with. And he was telling me I was brainstorming this with him and he said, well, yeah, here's how I did it. He said, I had 500 people in my mastermind. They paid $15,000 a year to be in the mastermind. And we ended up selling it at a multiple of over 10 times to a bank that wanted access to all of the network.

Yep. The people in the room.

That's interesting. So think about that. So I've got, you know, let's just do what Perry calls hillbilly math, right? Let's say I've got.

$30,000 per member. And this is, I'm saying not, not like, look at how awesome this is. I'm saying this is something anybody could do.

Sure.

$30,000Amember and 200 members. That's $6 million. You've only got about a million and a half to spend to do that. Like beyond amazing. We do five star hotels with great receptions and all that times 10. That's a $45 million sale. Right. So our goal is to take War Room to six people, deliver this crazy value, build amazing network, and then we've got $100 million company that is an asset that we can sell whenever we want. And we will. Our job now, as we did with Digital Marketer, is to figure out how can we deliver the ridiculous value that we've been delivering kind of as a group of four individuals, Richard and Perry, but in a way that can ultimately transition to be less about us and more about the Network more about the people in it. And that's what we've been pushing for all along over the last couple years. But now over the next couple years, I want to do it more. And I have no intention of selling this thing, but in 10, 15 years.

I'd be okay with extra dollars. Right?

That's amazing, man. I mean, that's. I know we can. And I'm just thinking of all the routes. I think this call is requiring a round two.

I think we got about through half the questions we wanted to, but unfortunately we actually have to wrap it up because of another commitment at the moment. But this has been absolutely amazing.

Super fun.

Yeah, I know. That's where just this stuff right here is. And I love how you wrap the fact that anybody could do this, any niche can literally do this and just roll with it. So what we'll do is summarize this stuff in the show notes for everybody, because I know there's a lot here, actionable stuff. And to wrap it up, is there any place that you would like people to go to to check out what you're doing? Maybe check out some of these videos, too?

Yeah. So by the time that this goes.

Public.

I'll probably have this growth idea scorecard up on growthideascorecard.com.

They can watch any of the videos about the travel stuff on my Facebook page, which is facebook.com Roland Fraserpage. F R A S I E R Page Page. That's the page and obviously digitalmarketer.com of our digital marketer type stuff on it. So those are all places and anybody that wants to message me, message me through Facebook. I'm very responsive and very interested in always helping people out. I just think that.

My whole shtick is you give and help people out without any expectation of anything in return, and it just always comes back a hundredfold.

Well, you're living proof of it, man. And I appreciate it so much for you spending the time. And it's been a pleasure in the mastermind, too. I know that's just the beginning. And we have one coming up fairly soon here next month. So we'll riff more and definitely we'll link everything in the show notes here, even to your slideshares too, because that's some of the most gold that is online. Are those things.

Oh, yeah. That SlideShare is a really great resource. I think I got like 53 decks on up there.

I'll link them up there. All right. Roland, thank you so much for your time, and it's been a pleasure.

Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you.

All right, guys, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much, and have a fantastic day.

You too. Bye. Bye. 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. 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. So 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 view 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.

You're awesome.