0159: Reeling in Your Ideal Client by Teaching Your Business to Fish with Michael Rager

Ea interviews, episode 159, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week, join Mario Ficcini for today's expert Authority Effect interview. You have your business and you want it to grow, but how do you increase the profits? How do you reel in new clients? I am super excited to have Michael Rager here today because he's going to be teaching you your business how to fish and reel in those new clients. I'm going to bring them up right after we thank our sponsor. How would you like to grow your wealth? Easier than you think. With the change, you probably don't notice anyhow automatically. That's why I started the compounding interest snowball investing with acorns and advise you do too. Get started simply and easily today@eainterviews.com ACORNS Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Michael Rager. Michael, how are you doing today?

Doing great today, Mario. How are you?

I'm feeling great. I'm excited to talk about reeling in clients with your specific proprietary system because so many people can benefit from it.

You know, we try to make things fun on this end. So, you know, that's the way we came up with the teacher business of fish. We love two things. We love fishing and we love business. So let's see if we can help some people out today.

How did you decide to incorporate both of those and build the business around it? Because I think it's fascinating and impressive what you've done.

Well, I wanted other people to pay for me to go to really cool fishing places. And one of my favorite things to do is coach and teach. And I really like to do it outside of the classroom. I'm pretty good at doing it in the classroom, but I like doing it outside of the classroom. And I just thought that, hey, I love to fish, I love business. Let's put it together. I've heard other people have done it with golf. I'm not that good of a golfer. I'm a pretty good fisherman. So I figured, let's go put it this way and see what we can do.

So do you do most of your teaching out on the boat or over the phone?

Most of my teaching is over the phone. The boat is for a couple things that I do, Mario, is I take either teams of people out on trips, get them away from the office. Because we get them away from the office, they start thinking and they start thinking differently, or else I take groups of people who should actually know each other better and get them out on that introductory trip to let's get out there and let's go do some things. So I kind of do both ways when it comes to that. But when I'm doing my coaching and training with my clients, it's kind of just like this. 90% of it is zoom meetings, Skype meetings. Some of it's one to one if they're actually in Houston. Not all my clients are in Houston.

What is your favorite aspect of helping them?

Seeing them get that aha moment and start getting out of their own way.

One thing I know that when I started my own business, nobody taught me how to do it. You know, I was really good at what I did. The first company I was a partner in was an environmental inspection firm. We used to do environmental inspections on big pipeline companies. You know, my background is fisheries biology, and that's what I was. I was a fish biologist doing pipeline inspections. Me and a friend started a company. He was way more of a business guy. And we just figured out how to do it. We weren't really good at it. We were able to sell the company. We did it that well. We sold it right before Enron. Big Enron fiasco. So we got out of it just the right time. But it was actually, for me, seeing that aha moment with business owners saying, I can really do this.

What are some of the common problems you see in most of the businesses that you're helping?

Number one is they have no idea who their client is.

They do what I say is fishing with hot dogs. They just go out there, they try to catch anything. And, you know, one of my big teachings is that, as you know, I grew up in Detroit, so I grew up where you did. When I was young, nobody in my family fished. I knew nothing about it. We grew up in Algonak, and we used to go over to Metro Beach. We used to go take our boat over to Metro beach, and we stayed for three or four days. And my mom is like, look, you can bring your fishing gear, but, dude, you're not bringing any worms on my nice new bayliner. You know, you're gonna have to think of something else. I go, well, mom, what am I gonna fish with? And she goes, hot dogs. And I'm like, okay, crap. You know, I was nine and, yeah, I caught fish. I did. I caught. I caught carp and I caught bullheads, and I caught suckers and all kinds of crap. And that's what business owners do. They go out, they fish with hot dogs. They go find clients who are not really their good clients. Because a lot of times I've got that mentality that any business is better than no business at all. But they realize that. They don't really realize that any business is keeping them from getting the really good business.

That is such a vital point. And I want to dive deep with the.

That was not a pun. I say dive deep often. And I just realized it's all right.

It's all right.

I do want to dive deep with this because I've heard similar analogies. When you're working on your customer avatar. The marketing messaging is so important, and this is a perfect opportunity to really go. What is the difference between using worms versus using nightcrawlers, cracked crab, hot dogs, fish flies? There are so many different things you can say, well, here's the best thing. But I think it's like, well, what do you want to catch exactly?

Mario. I started switching this around when I started. My grandparents took me to Ludington and I wanted to go salmon fishing, and I had to learn about salmon fishing. And I know that being a fish biologist. And I was a salmon biologist. Trout and salmon biologist. That's what it was. And I knew salmon and trout lived in 56 to 70 degree water and in Lake Michigan that was 80 to 200ft down. They weren't going to eat hot dogs, dude. They were going to eat smelt and they were going to eat alewives and, you know, a few other things, but that was primarily it. So you had a fish with. Exactly. With what they wanted. I could drop a hot dog down to 80ft and chances are I wasn't going to catch a salmon. No matter. There could be thousands of them there. It just wasn't going to happen. So, you know, why not do it and do it with your clients? Why do you do that with your clients?

So I'm going to be a little contrarian in here and say, well, what's the best thing to fish with?

Depends with your client. You know, it really. It really does the type of client you want. I was on a call this morning and we were talking about, you know, lead times and stuff like this. You know, it all depends on the type of client you've got. If you're a restaurant owner, you know, I saw a restaurant here in Houston recently, went out of business because the guy said, look, I make good food so people will come in. And I'm like, bullshit. It ain't gonna happen. You had no concept to who your real clients are. And I would go in there a couple times because I knew the guy's girlfriend and I was friends with her. And I'm like, look, you guys, if you look at who's here in the restaurant right now, who was in the restaurant was 28 to 40 year old women. Mainly it was an Italian restaurant. They did things, but they weren't doing anything to help them. Help them come in. I had another friend that owned a wine bar and he used to have on Tuesday nights, $10 pizzas and $10 bottles of wine. Place was packed constantly with women. It was packed constantly with women. What else happened? Guys came in on Tuesday. It was packed every Tuesday. He knew that that was his crowd and that's what he catered to. This guy, other guy, tried to cater to everybody. You like good food. Guess what? That ain't enough.

He was trying to fish with hot dogs.

He was fishing with hot dogs. He thought just because he had good food, that was it. And he was out of business in seven months. He lost his money, he lost his investors money. He lost everything.

And that's unfortunate. I don't want to downplay the reality of it, but when you're talking about the marketing message and knowing your avatar, it's vital.

Oh, it is. It's not just your avatar. It's where you put that information out as well. You know, it's, you know, Dan kennedy, you know, the famous, you know, sales guy, marketing guy, you know, he always talked about your media. Where's your media? You know, if I want to catch a blue marlin, I'm not going to fish for blue marlin in lake Michigan. I'm going to cabo san lucas. I'm going to where they are. And you've got to be able to once you create your avatar. I struggle with avatars because there's. There's two things with avatars. There's, you know, I get told a lot by marketing people, oh, create an avatar. Who's the perfect client you have now? Well, guess what? I don't want them now. They're crappy. I want better ones. You know, don't make a frankenstein of other. Other avatars. Put them all together. But, you know, yeah.

Who's your ideal customer or client? It might not be who you have now or had in the past.

Exactly, exactly. That's what I look at. Who is your ideal customer? Who do you want? And then it becomes hard to find a lot of that information out. You know, you get a lot of these marketing people are, oh, what magazines do they read? What do this. Look, they're out there. Put the message out. As long as you're putting the Message out where they hang out. You're going to have a good idea to really change things around, you know, and do it. We did it with a company here. It was really funny is they didn't realize who their avatar was at one time and.

They were kind of like a bioidentical hormone company. They did testosterone treatments, stuff like this. And they really thought their main client was premenopausal women. And it was for one of their services. But when we went, they really looked at what was going on and what their marketing they were putting out was bringing in. It was bringing in gay men. And we're like, what the heck? And we really started looking at it, but we started looking at where they were advertising, what their message was. It was all about looking better, feeling better and wanted to do that. And we found out that the gay guys here in Houston wanted to look good and feel good and they spent a lot of money on it. We changed the avatar. We changed the avatar to that. We started marketing in the places where these guys were and we went from really good business to exceptional business. And with one of the products they have. So it's really, you've got to look at it, it changes.

And that's why it's so vitally important to have the right message. Because you can have the best product in the world, you can have the best message. But if you're not going to the right mediums, you don't know if it's even going to the right audience. Like you were talking about when you're helping your clients, how do you know what the mediums are that you want to go out? Do you have a. Here's the top three that pretty much work all the time or what do you do when you drill down to 5, 10, 15, when it's really industry specific, what would you suggest?

It really depends on the industry, on where they're going and the size of business. Restaurants. We're going to do a lot on social media. If we're talking to engineering companies, we're probably not going to do as much at social media. We're going to look at more of going into seminar to.

Events and stuff like that and getting in front of your clients. It's really funny as I've got a couple of my clients, I've even taken them out of magazines and social media. I got a lot of people. One of the things I think is best is getting out and actually talking and speaking, hosting lunch and learns and stuff like that. Depending on the industry you're in, that's a way more effective use of money. You know, I could do a lunch and learn for a hundred bucks. You know, let me. Let me try to do an ad in a magazine for a hundred bucks. It's going to have nowhere near. Nowhere near the exposure and return on investment.

And let's talk about the influence and authority of that, too. Just being in front of the crowd, how much of a return do you find you get just from being the leader or the speaker in the room versus another person on the page?

Ton, ton, ton. Because they actually hear you. They get to ask you questions. You know, it's. The. Becoming the authority is way better. It's funny. I do events here in Houston. I have people that speak for me in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When I go to Baton Rouge and they bring me in as a special guest speaker, it's amazing how many more people we get. And it's funny is I'm going to give the same message they give. Nothing's going to be different, but they just think because I'm driving four hours to get there that I'm something. I'm something different. I think it goes back to, you know, the man's never a prophet in his own hometown. You know, he's got to get out of there and go do something. So, you know, if I was to come back home to Michigan, I'd probably have a, you know, A bigger. A bigger audience than I get. It's hard for me occasionally to draw people in in Houston.

No kidding. You know, why do you think that is?

I think there's preconceived notions in. In people's minds.

Do you think it's because you're just so close to everything all the time?

I think so. It's because they see you out. You know, I. I spend more money on going out to events and seeing things, so people see me out a lot, and I'm talking to them. And so it's. I think it's. You're.

You're more accessible, you know, that normalcy. And, you know, he's there all the time.

And, yeah, yeah, if I want to talk to Rager, I'll go pull him aside and go talk to him. I said, yeah, that's fine. You can do that, but I'm start charging you $300 an hour to do it, you know, and do those things. So it's. I don't know why it is, but it just is, you know, and it's always been that way. So, you know, it's just people, you know, we're funny.

Well, I'm glad that you are helping companies refine all this because it is so vitally important, because you can have the best food in the world, you can have the best message, but if you're going to the wrong medium, you're not going to be, like I said, reeling in those clients. So the people you've worked with before, what are a couple things that expert authority world could do? When you're saying, I want to refine the av, I don't even want to say avatar. Ideal customer, ideal client. What are a couple things they could do to refine it right now and start testing what mediums are going to be best for them?

I think the first thing they need to do right now is go back and look at their last, depending on how many customers, their last 50 customers, their last 100 customers. Look at them and start finding the commonalities between them. You know, are they men, are they women? What's their socioeconomic background? How much money did they make? Where do they come from? How did they find you in the first place? You know, there's the Pareto principle. You know, 80% of our revenue is going to come from 20% of our people. And if we start figuring out, what happens is people try to gather everybody and they try to get. Again, we go back to fishing with hot dogs, they try to gather everybody, everybody. If you were to go ahead right now and look at your last 25, 50, 100 customers, no matter what kind of business you're in, you're going to find out there's commonality between them all and start going with that commonality. What works? Once you see what has worked in the past, go ahead and expand out from there and start looking at other options.

I want to set some reasonable expectations because some people might think, oh, I can do this in 24 hours, a week or a month, what would you say is a reasonable expectation? When you start diving in and refining this, what is a reasonable expectation for? Is it going to take 30 days, 60 days? Longer? Shorter?

I think shorter, if you really get on it. One of the things we've got this new software called Profit Accelerator and we go into that, and this is one of the things we look at is who is my perfect client? Why do we have them? And it allows us to go ahead and start tweaking that and start getting people on. When I coach them, there's certain things that I have them do based on this stuff. But we've got to look at what we've done in the past and learn from it. And it's either going to be, don't do it or continue to do it. And what happens is with marketing, people get bored with it. You know, I've been doing this forever, but if it's still working, keep doing it. You know, we're in this to make money. You know, this is what we want to do, so we need to keep doing that. But, you know, it can be. You can increase your revenue. One of the things that I guarantee through this software is I'll find you 100,000 in new revenue if you give me 45 minutes. So we'll sit down, give me 45 minutes, we'll find you $100,000 in new revenue. That doesn't mean you're going to get it, because 90% of the people won't do the damn work we're going to tell them to do. And you know, that. That's the whole thing, and that's why people need coaches to kind of kick them along a little bit and make them. Make them go. And I think one of my new favorite memes that was out the other day, it says, if first you don't succeed, do what your coach told you to do 30 days ago. You know, you see it out there. We tell our clients all the time. I got one. They've been a client of mine for almost a year, for seven months. They didn't listen to. They. God, they would not listen to me. No matter what I said. They would keep doing things and coming to me. And they finally, about November last year, started listening to me. They were a home inspection firm. And I'm like, you need to visit people. You need to visit people. You need to visit people. And all of a sudden, they've had their best January, their best February, and. And they were really on their way to have their best March until the coronavirus thing hit. And they're still booking people right now, you know, because people, they're at the top of mind. They're finally doing it, and it's happening, you know.

Well, I'm glad they're listening. But it's interesting that they waited so long to. I mean, seven months is quite a bit. It's not like a few weeks or anything or even a couple of months. That's like ego.

It's just getting the guy's ego out of the way. And, you know, how would you.

What is a good way to do that? How do you get the ego out of the way? And the other part I wanted to ask you was when you're Taking people through that process. Why do you think people get so bored? Because it's like, you start the business, you want to do all these things and scale up and grow and profit and rah, rah, rah, all these things, and it's like, finally you get it working. And I see. I see a lot of people do the same thing. They finally have something that's working, and instead of doubling down, they're like, let me try something new. You already did 48 times. Stick with this one.

Yeah, exactly.

We used to do it when we were fishing. We start catching salmon left and left and left and right on green things called Green Northport Nailers when I was up in Ludington. And then my buddy would say, hey, let's go try this other thing. It's like, well, dude, we're crushing them right now. Wait till they stop biting, you know, Then we'll go try something else, you know? But if they're. If they're. If you're crushing them, you got to do it. I really don't know. Business owners are a weird breed, you know? We really are. They're. They're usually very driven. They're very. You know, they're not. They're used to. Once people. They tell people what to do. Now people tell them what to do and not work with them. And so it's. It's really hard a lot of times to get them out of their own way, and that's where they stand. They get in their own way a lot, and you got to let them fail sometimes, and then you just got to give them that, see, I told you so. And you hate to do it, but, you know, you've got to do it occasionally to let them know.

That's important to note, because I think everyone tries to do everything perfect, and they. They're afraid to fail. And it's like, how. How well is your way worked so far? You obviously reached out for help for something.

One of my coaches, his thing was, I want to fail, and I want to fail as fast as possible. I want to know that crap does not work as fast as possible. Then I know it doesn't work, so I know not to do it anymore, and let's move on to something else.

That's a totally different outlook on it. I like that, though. So I want to ask you about your success stories, because I know you have plenty of them, but you've shared with me before, and, you know, I've even told you. You just rattle it off like it's no big deal. Give me A couple of your biggest success stories.

One of my biggest was one of my first early. I was a bookkeeping company in Houston.

They were struggling. They had a great product, great services. In five months, we added a couple zeros to their monthly revenue and helped them sell the company. And it wasn't a marketing thing. There was not a damn thing we did with marketing. It was operationally, one of the things that people feel is marketing will change your business, and it won't. It's the slowest way to change your business. It's really operations and things. But we went around and we changed pricing and we changed the operations and we did things. And, you know, my dad at the time told me nobody was worth what I was charging this client. And I said, dad, you know, in six months, we ended up making this lady, you know, almost $300,000 in new revenue. We sold the company for almost a half a million dollars. And the company that hired her, that she sold it to, hired her to stay on for three years and guaranteed her $115,000 a year salary. She went out, she left. She was out for three years, and she started another competing company again. You know, so she was there. She knows what to do now. She just replicate it and do it again.

And how long was she doing stuff on her own before you helped her?

Eight years.

Seven, eight years. That's. Most of my clients are like that. Seven, eight years.

So seven or eight years on your own, and in six months, six to 12 on average, it sounds like.

Yep. Turn around and flip the whole thing around. You know, the medical company, you know, one of the big things we had with them, they were very successful. They were very successful before we met us. But we found out that they. The guy had brought in a doctor to work for him. And here in Houston, it was illegal to offer medical practices unless it was owned by the doctor. And we ended up. It ended up costing him some money. We had to restructure the company and bring the doctor in as a part owner and stuff like that. So there was a lot of thing that we had to look at operationally, but then we just turned around and flipped it around and started rocking. But the thing was, they could have been shut down. You know, if the wrong person, when he came in and looked at them, they would have been shut down and there would have been a whole lot of trouble. So, you know, there's things that people do, they think they're doing the right thing. They just don't know what are some.

Things people can look at for the systems and operations that will help them improve their business.

You've got to understand how your company works. You got to understand really who does what, how and why. What happens if one of those people walk away tomorrow?

I like to tell people we need to look at the lotto scenario. So if somebody, your best person, wins the lotto tomorrow, what happens if they never come back to work? And what are you gonna do? 90% of the companies that I walk in have no written down processes or procedures. They just go do what they do. Everything's in the owner's head. It's in the manager's head. They've been there 15, 20 years and things stay there. You know, we dealt with a company where the owner died. And the daughter of the owner called me in and said, hey, will you look at this? Their operations officer and executive assistant was essentially holding the family hostage because they knew how to do everything. Because dad never wrote anything down. They ended up going bankrupt. You know, and it's. It's just sad. You guys got to do it. If you have not written down how the business works, you're in trouble. You know, it's not a sellable asset. I recommend every business owner read the book Build to sell, because you got to build an asset. That's the whole thing you're doing is you're building a sellable asset. Not that you're going to sell it, but if you ever are forced to have to sell it, it is now a sellable asset. Most businesses take two to three years of grooming and training and coaching to get them to become a sellable asset. So you got to start now.

Yeah, and I remember when I read it and it's a great book. Just.

Learning about having it to a point where it's attractive enough that someone would want to buy it. It's your choice if you do sell it or not and exit. But just having it structured in the right way and it's attractive where someone wants it.

That's a game changer.

It's a real game changer. But, you know, the other thing is, is you as the owner, you've got to give up control, and that's where you've got to develop leaders. And, you know, I'm a big John Maxwell fan, and, you know, I trained under John for six, seven years now. And one of the things that I tell my business owners is if somebody in your organization can do something 70% as well as you give it to them, it's theirs now. They run it, it's theirs, and they're going to end up running it better than you because they've got a different perspective than you have. You built it. You built that system, that process from the perspective you were in six, seven, eight years ago. New people, younger people are coming in and looking at it with a different perspective and they're going to be able to go change it and make it better.

Would you say there's also an element as the CEO where it's like, I just want to get this done and off my plate because I got other stuff to do, or I just want to spend more time with family and friends and there's a degree of I don't want to say you care less, but when you give it to someone to spearhead and champion that thing and that's all they're focused on versus you, who has 15 other things you're focused on.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to get as much off my plate as possible. And that's what I keep telling my business owners. Whatever you don't need to be doing, don't do it. Your job is to grow the company. I just brought in a new company at the beginning of the year and the son's buying the dad out. They're a carpet cleaning company, great carpet cleaning company, but they specialize in oriental rugs. And.

The dad was like, hey, you know, I need you to go ahead and learn how to clean this and learn how to clean this. And I learned how to clean this. And I told the son, I said, you want to be a high end carpet cleaner? You want to be CEO of this company? And he goes, I want to be CEO of this company. I said, good, don't go do that crap. Get hire other people to do that. Learn how to be a CEO. And so that's what we're teaching him to do now is we're teaching him how to be a CEO, how to run that company. He doesn't know.

That's exciting to hear, both for anyone listening and me personally. Because when you were talking about the procedures, I was working on some just yesterday for my software. And it's one of the reasons I love helping people publish their business books, because it's very revealing to go, hey, you got all this expertise. Now we're going to put it into a process and it's got to turn into paper on words, words on paper. And it's like, what do you mean? If you can't get it out of your head, you're done.

You're done. Even for marketing, if you're shut down Right now for coronavirus, or you're shut down for anything. Work on that stuff. Don't sit home and say, oh, woe is me. Nothing's happening. Get the important stuff done. Build the guts of your company. You know that that is the internal. That's the guts. It's the heart. It's the soul of your company. If you don't get that stuff built, you know, it's, it's. It's not going to run the way you need it to run.

Yeah, I started thinking about some of this 15 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, last year. Because whether anything's going on in the world if electricity goes out. I mean, at the end of the day, if you even just get sick. Now, these are all negative things, but here's a reality. I started my company to have more time with family and friends. What if I want to up, up and away for a month and travel? Is the company still in business? If you have assets and procedures in place, it is.

My 30 second speech at Networking events is I go around and said, how many you people are in business? And they all raised their hands. I said, how many of you guys can leave for six weeks and your company will still function? All their hands go down. I go, not one of you owns a business. You all own jobs. Very high stressful jobs. Quit it. Own a company. Let me show you.

That's fantastic.

Yeah. What I found is my business. The bigger jerk I am, kind of, I really call him out.

The more response I get. You know, you go into being nice and you go this, you know, that doesn't help them. My job is not to be nice. My job is really. It really is. I had one company, they're rocking it. They're a company right now called germwrap. You know, imagine right now, we're talking right now. That heat of the coronavirus. They're rocking and rolling right now. But a couple weeks ago, the owner was like, oh, my God, I don't know. And I looked him square in the eye and said, well, dude, quit. Quit. Shut your company down and go get a job. And his wife looked at him like, yeah, let's quit whining. Let's go do it now. Here they are 30 days later, so busy they don't know what the hell to do.

You know, and that's the other thing. When you get to a point, for whatever reason, that you get busy and you can scale up and everything, can you sustain the growth? It's not just staying in business and sustaining every day. It's okay. I've said that for years. What if I gave you a thousand times more than you have now? When I had five clients, I looked at some Post its on the desk and I go, this isn't going to work. And I started thinking through the lens of if I were to multiply what I'm doing times 1000, is it sustainable? Post its or not? A CRM is.

Yep. Well, that's what I, you know, the rug company, I went to their operations manager, said, hey, look, if we turned on marketing right now and got really good at it and increased business 25%, what the hell would happen? Well, they got a 16,000 square foot facility. And he's like, I don't know. I don't think we can handle it. Well, good. We got to work on operations. We got to work on operations first before marketing. Germ wrap. We sit there and we talk to them, and what we're looking at is what are our bottlenecks? Where are the bottlenecks that we have right now? What can we control and what can't we control and how will we deal with it? And so they're really working on that stuff. You know, they've had a. They've had a gun. They've gone from no employees to several because they're so busy right now. But now the owner is like, okay, here's my next potential bottlenecks. How do I deal with them and what do I need to do? And they're really thinking totally different now. Crisis will make you think different. And we've got one now. And it's going to get rid of some businesses, and it's going to get rid of some businesses that weren't good. Some good businesses are going to fall out. But if you're really thinking about your business right now, you can make it grow and get yourself ready for what's coming. Because it's going to be a boom once it comes again.

That's what I'm looking forward to.

Yeah.

Every time there's been a downturn, for whatever reason, there's always, and I've been telling people for the last couple of weeks, even earlier this year, for the brand new year, it was, you know, where do you want to be 6 12, 18 months from now? What are you doing today that 6 months from now you can thank yourself for not just get through the week?

It's 90 days, Mario. Where I am today is because of what I did 90 days ago.

There you go.

It has nothing to do with what I've done yesterday. It's 90 days ago.

I love that. Well, we're gonna thank our sponsor. But before we do, I've got the fun wheel of whatever question for you. So we're gonna spin it here imaginary while it's getting painted. And do you want dinner, celebrity movie or conspiracy theory? Good.

Conspiracy theory. Because I'm not big into them, and there's way too many of them going around these days.

What's a good one? Moon landing. Do you think that was real?

Oh, yeah, I do think it was. Being in Houston now, there's so many people hired in NASA down here, I can't think that we would fake something like that and keep it going for 60 years, spending the amount of money that we've got going. So I'm pretty, pretty sure that the moon landing was real. You know, actually, I know some people who work with people who worked on it, so I'm pretty sure it's real.

Okay, cool. Appreciate that. All right, we're gonna thank our sponsor and come back for the imperfect action round. Invest automatically, save for later, and spend today. That's why I love acorns. I used to think spare change didn't make a difference and saving and investing was an old faith manual process. It's not. And it's a game changer. If you're not leveraging, compounding interest in your business and life automatically, you're missing out. Acorns not only makes saving and investing easy and automatic, it makes it even more valuable. By investing with diversified portfolios, spare change, extra cash, and rounding up everyday transactions, you can even set recurring monthly investments in the amount you desire to make good. Great. There is also a debit card option that will continue to help you save and invest even further when you spend. Plus, no minimum balance in overdraft fees. Now for the cherry on top. They have partnered with 250plus companies and brands and growing with their found money program to invest back a percentage into your account with the everyday purchases when you shop, two of which you're probably listening to this right now through an Amazon or Apple device. Get started profiting from your everyday life and business simply and easily today@eainterviews.com.

Once again, that's eainterviews.com acorns and we are back with the imperfect action round. Michael, are you ready to take imperfect action?

Let's go.

Number one, what is the fastest path to the cache?

Fastest path to the cash is knowing your customer.

Love it. Number two, what is the biggest problem your prospects make in the fastest way? They can fix it.

Biggest problem they have is they have no structure and getting operational procedures in place so things can be duplicatable.

3 My favorite what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Customer lifetime value. It's empowering your staff, actually, I think it's empowering your staff to do what's necessary and do what's right to keep those customers around and with you for a long period of time. You got to trust your people.

I love that. Having the right team in place.

What is a book that has helped your business?

A lot of them. A lot of them. A lot of them.

What are some books? I should say, I know you mentioned Built to Sell, which is a great one.

Built to Sell, of course. Story Branding by Donald Miller. I think it's great. That's a great book on telling a story of your company. Think and grow Rich. Napoleon Hill I think is the ultimate. If you haven't read it, you should.

So I think those are my top three.

Excellent. Well, I appreciate you for sharing. Where can people find more about you?

They can find more about me at TYB2F. So TYB2F.com we'll have a new teacher business to fish website up here in another couple weeks. We just started redoing it. Do you want to go on some fishing trips with us? Follow us on Facebook. Teach your business to fish. We got a couple coming up. I got one of my big guides right now has had a bunch of cancellations. Come on down south and catch some giant tuna with us.

Well, you definitely inspired me when you said it was 87 degrees and I was like, it was 48 and then it was snowing.

Yeah, I know. I'm wearing this sport coat for you, Mario, and it's hotter than heck in here right now. I'm dying. So I've got the shorts and flip flops on under the desk. I feel like a judge right now.

Well, I appreciate you for everything you've shared. It's been an absolute pleasure and you've definitely delivered some expert authority insights.

Well, thanks, Mario. I can't wait. Hopefully I'm going to be up in Michigan this summer. Hopefully we get to get together and grab a beer and get to know each other face to face. We've been talking for a couple years. We need to do that.

Well, that sounds good to me. I look forward to seeing you again and have a great day. Expert authority world. I'll see you tomorrow. And God bless. Every business needs a book, including yours. Would you like to save five plus hours with every prospect generate more leads and profit in your business. Now visit businessbookchecklist.com and learn how you can implement this in your business today. Spare Change? How's that going to make a difference? I know that's what I thought before I started investing with Acorns, so throwing change in a jar is not very leverage and time consuming. But what about all the transactions you don't use cash for? You know, like majority, Acorns not only invest your spare change automatically with roundups, it also lets you add a preset amount to each transaction. Regardless, it's pretty inspiring to see how quickly and easily you can end up with a pile of cash instead a pile of receipts. Get started simply and easily today@eainterviews.com Acorns Once again, TV that's eainterviews.com Acorns hey, thanks for listening to today's episode. I hope you got a lot out of it. I know I sure did. If you haven't done so already, I invite you to subscribe to the show. And also be sure to check out eainterviews.com for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you tomorrow. I'll.