049 Messaging is the Key to More Income with Brandon Lucero

Hey, there. Real quick, before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Hey, there. Welcome to this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur Show. Listen, let me ask you something. Are you an entrepreneur? That is, you want to scale sales? I mean, that's a ridiculous question. Everyone wants to scale sales. You want to build profitability. You want to create distinction. You're trying to create additional revenue. Here's the thing, A lot of times we think that we need to do more, but it may not be that. And in this episode, my guest, Brandon Lucero, we're going to talk about some of the key things that create distinction and value in the marketplace. And how do you. How do you communicate that to the world, to your market, to your customer at a level where they want to buy without you even selling? So this episode is off the charts. Get your pad of paper together ready, and let's take some notes. Let's get some things dialed in, because this one is gold. See you in the episode.

This is the Affluent Entrepreneur show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money, and scale your life while creating a deeper impact and living with complete freedom, because that's what it really means to be an affluent entrepreneur.

Oh, my God. Brandon Lucero is on the show. It's so good to have you here, my friend.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here. First time on your podcast, so I am stoked.

Yeah. I mean, as you guys heard in the intro, Brandon and I have known each other for a while. We became fast friends. I think we just kind of hit things off from a values standpoint and found that there was some things that we could do together that make a difference in people's lives and stuff. And it's just been a fun journey, and now we get a chance to share this and share a platform and everything. So for those of you that don't know, Brandon, we're going to talk a little bit about where he's come from, what he's doing, the obstacles that many of you yourself are probably hitting obstacles, too, or you may have hit them, and how's he transitioned through them, you know, financially, business wise, how he's thought through them. I think this is going to be such an enlightening episode. So get the pad of paper ready because he's going to get your mind going. So let's just start off, Brandon, with a little bit about your story for those that don't know who Brandon Lucero is. And let's just start there.

Sure. So where I'm at now is we have a business. It's a personal, personal Brandon Lucero, where we basically just teach messaging to entrepreneurs. But, you know, messaging is kind of a fluffy word. So what I like to tell people is we help you communicate what it is you do in a way that gets you to stand out, puts you in your own field. But more specifically, it actually adds value while creating demand for what you do. So you can create content that is adding value besides just giving out information, and allows you to create demand for what you do. But that's where we're at now. And when I started this whole thing eight years ago, I was selling real estate videos to real estate agents for like $127 a pop. And then somehow I ended up here. So. So, yeah, it's been quite a roller coaster over the last eight years or so. I've been broke, I've been in debt, and I've also made millions. So it's been.

It's been crazy, you know, and I've had a chance. I've had. I don't know. I don't know if it's the blessing to watch this, the transition and the growth, and some of the bad stuff, the really crazy stuff I didn't see necessarily, which is fine. But, I mean, here's the thing. I hope everyone heard what he said. He's talking about, how do you stand out? We're going to talk deeper about this, because the fact of the matter is, when we talk about affluence and we talk about the affluence blueprint, one of the pillars is generate, and that's all about scaling your income, scaling your cash flow, scaling your profitability in doing that. And we live, especially in this time that we're in, in a sea of sameness, and this is a dangerous place to be for us trying to create profits from our expertise, from our knowledge, from our wisdom. And I know that you yourself kind of ran into this while actually before the pandemic and started to see the. The tidal wave coming.

Yeah. So basically, when I was selling the real estate videos, it led me to learning SEO, like, how do I rank these videos? Which led me to then doing that for local businesses, which then led me to partnering with James Wedmore. And I was teaching how to do this for local businesses. But really, at the end of the day, what I was doing and where most of our money came in was I was teaching YouTube marketing. I was teaching people how to make videos and how to rank videos. And I believe it's either at the end of 2017 or 18. I can't remember now. It's always hard because it's like it was right in the December, January. So I'm like, what year was it? I think it was 17. 18. End of 17, beginning of 18. I was basically known as a YouTube expert, and I just saw more and more competitors coming in. So there's more and more people coming and teaching YouTube and teaching YouTube and teaching YouTube. And what's great is when you're the only person teaching YouTube, like, you're going to make money because you're the only option they have. And the example or the analogy I always give is like, if you're a grocery store in a town of a thousand people and you're the only one, you could mess things up. Like, you could have awful customer service. You could not carry all the products. You could treat the people like crap, and they're still going to come in and buy because they need to eat. And so when competitor two or three come in, like, well, now you actually have a chance of going out of business. So I saw this happening and we were. Our business was doing about $500,000 a year, which, by the way, I'm supposed to be super clear that everyone. That doesn't mean we did that in profit. We were basically breaking even. So I had a business partner at the time. I get. I had to give a lot of that to us to split that with. And then we had. I had my own salary and there was. There wasn't really anything left over. And so you had a job? I had, yeah, pretty much. And I was like the only employee. So it was like, cool. I don't have a boss, but I still have a job. And I'm not really saving anything, but. And then I saw all these competitors coming in and I said, I don't want to be known for YouTube. I don't want to teach YouTube. I want to do something else. So I just stopped it all. I just gave it all up. I like killed off that business. And because of, for financial reasons, I didn't have things set up and I didn't know, really know what I was doing with money. Never made that much money in my life, never run a business before. I found myself $40,000 in debt within, I believe, three months. And that's mostly credit card debt. 30 grand in credit card debt and about 10 grand in taxes that I owed that I didn't know I owed. And so I decided, what do I want to do? And I decided I'm going to land. I'm going to create this thing called the Video Forex Effect. And it was this philosophy of how you can get video working inside your business. And the reason why I loved it was because I wasn't an expert on a platform anymore, and I wasn't really a video expert. I was this, still kind of an expert in teaching people how to use video inside of their business. But it was a unique spin, a unique approach. It was something people hadn't seen before. And we took off really fast. We did about a million dollars in sales in the first nine months with this thing. And what I didn't realize then was it wasn't even just that I was different. It was the way I was communicating. It was the messaging around. Everything led to different positioning. The messaging led to the sales, the messaging led to the demand creation. The messaging created all of this revenue really, really fast for us. And that was about three or four years ago. And over the last three or four years, we've just gotten really good at messaging. It's been our quote unquote, zone of genius. And that's what we help people do now to help generate more money, bring in more income and all that stuff. And I was able to pay off that $40,000 in debt. Luckily met you and you helped me a lot with that and setting things up. And now we have things done right. Like we have multiple streams of investments, we have retirement, we have, uh, I, I can now pay my taxes on time.

But yeah, that's what we've kind of uncovered over the years was that it's messaging was the foundation of the biggest growth in revenue and generation that we've, we've ever seen. And when clients get it right and, and follow the process, same thing with them. Like Bob Healig, who we both know. Yep. Was someone we worked with. And he had a $2 million business, but he was stuck there for like three years and then came to us, we helped reconfigure his messaging and then the very next year did 4 million. And he's still climbing. And it's just again, messaging is the foundation of everything. But it's often the thing that's overlooked by everyone when it comes to standing out and actually creating more generation of revenue inside of your business.

This is so huge. And I love this because here's how I think about it. I think a lot of people come at this when they start to feel this. Cause we talk about this whole idea of market sophistication or saturation, however you wanna look at it, is that when you have players in the market, multiple players in the market, your buyers have options. And when they have options, they're inevitably comparing the options to decide where they wanna go. And they vote with their dollars, they vote with their credit cards, they vote with their money. And so the tendency, and I was guilty of this until you and I met, is to, oh, well, I need them to hear me. So I'm just going to scream louder. Yeah, yeah. And so you're going to scream louder. You're going to make more noise in a noisy environment. And then in effect, what you allowed me to do is to say, wait a second, there's all these people out there, but there's this little group in the corner that just need to hear some specific words in a specific way. Not yelled, but. But whispered in their ear at the right time and they'll come join you. And first off, it was easier to grow the business, it was easier to scale the income, it was easier to create profitability because we were speaking a specific language, specific message to the right people that it mattered to. And I think that that's huge. And too often we come at it with this shotgun approach. Let me just go at it. Let me just put as much out there as loud as I can and see what sticks. And that just doesn't work.

Well, it doesn't. And here's to play off of what you were saying is that there's. When people have options, they're looking to see who they want to go with. And when you say the right words, they no longer are seeing who to go with. They're not making a logical decision making, they're making an automated emotional decision. And we all know that there's science behind this. I think it's like 95% of all buying decisions are made subconsciously before we are Even aware, like before we even logically think about it. What happens is when you learned how to say the right words to the right people, what happens is they automatically start to know. This person can help me. I trust this person, and I like this person. We've all heard, like, the know the like and the trust, but no one ever tells you how to get to the root of how those things are developed. That's what we do, is we teach you how to get to the root of the psychology of where people's minds are at. And that's why I say we don't want to talk at our audience. We want to talk to them and with them. And I was with A Funny Story is I was at the bookstore with my wife and she picked up a book of Brene Brown. And I was just curious. I'm like, why Brene Brown? Like, why not Mel Robbins or, you know, whoever. There's a million and a half choices. Why Brene Brown? And she said, because anytime I hear her speak or I read her books, I feel heard, I feel understood. And I was like, that's interesting. And I feel. And she goes, I feel seen. And I'm like, what is she? I'm like, had to get down to the root of it. And I started to realize what Bernay is doing is she's speaking so specifically to Jacqueline's situation, my wife situation, that she doesn't have to think about whether or not she likes her. She automatically goes, this person gets me. And I was actually thinking about this this morning when we watch stand up comedy. And for me, I love all the parent jokes, like when a standup comment gets up and starts talking about parenting and all this stuff, I like it. And I started asking myself, why are those things funny? And what I came to is that when they make jokes that are so true about what I actually do or what I actually experience as a parent, I laugh and I find it funny. But I'm asking myself, why is that? And I'm like, oh, because he's literally describing exactly what I do and getting us to laugh about it. But if they weren't describing so specifically what we do, I would have been like, oh, whatever. And almost every comic does that. Like, you know, that's almost like an inside joke. But it's not really. But that's kind of what we do. And here's why this is so important, is we kind of touched on a little bit. Is that the pandemic hit, hit in 2000, was it 19, I think is when it, when it started.

Yeah, late 19. Early 20.

Early 20. And what it did was it forced so many offline businesses to go online, like yoga studios and workout places and all these businesses. And it brought so much awareness to online education. So now everyone's consuming content online, which is great. As course creators, we have way more customers now, but we also have so many more competitors. So if you were in a field and you had, and you're an expert, like a weight loss coach, you might have had a thousand competitors, you might have like 5,000 now because the pandemic sped it up. And when you have 5,000 competitors and you're all like trying to put out content, you're all titling it. How to lose 10 pounds. How on earth is the audience supposed to know that your video on how to lose 10 pounds is different than the 4,999 other people who have a video titled how to lose 10 pounds? It's impossible. They don't. So when we learn how to communicate and even just switching our titles around so we can just, first of all get eyeballs on us, it's game changing. And then when you learn to how to hold those, those eyeballs on your content, but then also elicit an automated feeling of, I need to work with this person at the same time, well, then it's game over. You have, you'll never have a problem making sales anymore. You have never problem standing out, creating demand and all that stuff. So, yeah, it's, it's. The easiest explanation is we don't want to speak at our audience and yell louder. We just want to speak differently. We want to speak to them and we want to speak with them. And it's literally simple as that. Like, I can get into the science of all of it and stuff, but that's really what it comes down to.

So part of this is you knowing specifically who you want to speak to.

Yeah.

I mean, because so many people just say, you know, look, if they can, if they, if they can breathe and steam a mirror, then they're my. And, and slide a credit card, then they're a potential client. And we know that that doesn't work.

Yeah, Let me, let me describe it like this. I always tell people, you know, those memes that are like. Or there's that Internet thing that was going around and says, like, tell me, tell me. Like, tell me you're from California without telling me you're from California. And people would be like, I put, I eat avocado toast like five days a week. Like, that's what I'm talking about is that when we communicate, we want to say things without saying it. So most people on their sales page and in their communication, they'll be like, are you overwhelmed? Well, if, if so, then this video is going to help you. And it's like, dude, everyone's overwhelmed with something in their life. Like, how does that person automatically subconsciously know this is going to be relevant to me? So let's pretend you are going after busy moms and you're like, are you overwhelmed? Yeah, but so is like the person without any kids who's just busy at work. So instead of saying, are you overwhelmed? I would say something like, are you the mom that yells at your kids at least two times every day to get their butts into the car so you get to school on time and then when you come home, you have 50 dishes lined up to have to clean? Well, if so, this video is going to be super helpful for you because I'm going to show you how to not yell at your kids, get them do what you want, and also get your dishes done in time or something like that. Like now that person automatically goes, oh, my God, that is me. I am literally yelling at my kids two times in the morning and I have a pile of dishes when I come home. You don't have to say, this is going to be relevant to you. They automatically go, their subconscious goes, that's going to be relevant.

Yeah.

And again, it's just simple stuff. But we're getting very specific. And most people think that when we get specific, that means we're going to push people away. It's like, no, let's find the specific things that almost every everyone goes through. Again, when we look at stand up comedy, some of the best standup comics in the world are finding the jokes that are going to be relevant to everyone. They're getting specific on certain things they know everyone experiences. The problem is people usually think getting specific means niche. And it can, but it doesn't necessarily mean that. But the idea is when we get specific to things, our minds automatically go, this is relevant to me. And can I take this a little further?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so I'm gonna take it a little further. I want everyone that's listening right now to think about a really good book, like a nonfiction book, like the best sellers. When you look at the, like the New York Times bestseller list, the bestselling books, they never give you a tutorial. Right. They're never sitting up there and just giving you a tutorial. They're always doing something Else. And when that person writes, when that person is teaching and giving you an value and educating you, you never really the best books, you never really have to question whether or not you believe that person. What starts to happen is you go, I never thought of that before. This is mind blowing. This makes so much sense. And you notice how they're not teaching you using the form of a tutorial, they're doing something else. They're likely making a statement of what they know is true or what they've experienced and then they're backing it up with counter examples, with data, with examples you're going to know. And something as simple as that, when you read it, the subconscious mind, your automation automatically goes, wow, that makes sense. And so when you read really good book, you don't have to think about whether or not it's really good. You feel it. You instantly automatically feel it and you know that it's good. You didn't make a logical decision that this book was good. You didn't say, why is it good? How do I know if it's good? What's the qualifications of good? Let me make a list. No, that's a logical decision. You made an automated decision about it based off of how the author was writing. And what the author is doing is just being very intentional with how they're communicating their information. So instead of just blasting their information and yelling, they're being very intentional with, I'm just going to give this information, but I'm going to communicate it a little bit differently than everyone else. So people automatically understand it. And the problem is, is most course creators and business owners never do that. They just talk from where they're at. They want to speak louder, give out information, they want to talk about the benefits and which is all great, but we need to get people to a place before we can do some of that stuff. So hopefully that that makes sense.

Yeah, no, no, totally does. And I think that the interesting thing there is if we start to look at this journey, if you will, as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, as an expert, the only way that we're going to gain distinction is through our ability to communicate in a more effective and deeper level.

Yeah, I mean, that's what it comes down to.

And it's through that distinction that one we typically probably get easy, I'm going to say easier and possibly better results than others. Primarily because it's being received differently.

Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. It's how the audience is receiving your information and almost no one takes that into consideration. And that's why there's a lot of course creators. And I'm imagining a lot of your audience right now. They know their stuff. They have a good heart. They know they can help people. And they're probably frustrated because they're looking around and seeing people that are. They are giving out almost the same information. And they don't understand why. They don't understand why this person is getting more traction than they are. In fact, there might be people that know less than you, that are still seeing more success than you. And you're just like, wtf? Like, why is it happening? It's because they're doing these invisible things that you're not aware of. Like, the thing is, is you're not even. You have. You have no awareness. If that's you, you probably, I'm guessing you have no awareness of what they're doing, these invisible communication tactics or tools or processes. And that's really what it comes down to, is. It comes down to just a couple things. It comes down to. Well, there's a couple things. It comes down to understanding what these patterns are, how to communicate, but also just even how to title certain things. But honestly, a big problem, too is a lot of these other invisible elements that I talk about as well. Like, there's a lot of kind of. Where I was at 2017, 18, I just internally felt like I didn't want to do YouTube anymore. And when I internally have this state and there was, in my mind, I was like, okay, I'm going to just keep doing it because it's what's making the money, even though it wasn't aligned with me anymore. And I think there's a lot of people that do that. And energetically, what happens is when you're doing something you don't want to do, or because you thought you should be doing it, or because you have a degree in it, or it's just because what you have been doing energetically, when you start to put out content, there's a disconnect there, and the audience can actually feel that energetically as well. So part of. Part of what we do is help people figure out what it is that they want to do. Sometimes it's just small little tweaks and changes so that they're aligned energetically and they're powerful. But then now it's like, okay, now how do we communicate this? Now that you're very clear on what it is you do, specifically the positioning, it feels good for you. You feel powerful. Now let's look at how do we Communicate that to the audience so that it's unique, it's different, but they automatically understand it and go, like, I need this and I need it now. But the core root of it is a lot of these things are invisible. Everyone tells you add value, but no one ever tells you information's not the only way to add value. There's a million and a half ways to add value into someone's life with your content without giving out endless amounts of information. But no one teaches you that. Everyone just says, add value, and then they just walk away.

And information effectively has no value. You know, I remember I did in my very first live event called Business Breakthrough Academy, And I had 27, 28 people in a room, three days.

Yeah.

And there was so much great content there. I mean, two decades plus of entrepreneurship that I unloaded on, it was totally useless. They didn't digest it. It was overwhelming. I gave them too much. And in effect, if I really was honest with myself, it was me saying, hey. And it wasn't directly this way, but when I think back on it, it probably was like, look at what I know. Look at what I know. And I'm putting it out there, thinking I'm serving. But the only way we serve is. Is if they get to use it and they get a transformation. They get a change in their life for doing it. And we're not doing them a favor by just unloading a ton of information on them.

No. And usually when that happens, one of two things happens. Which one of them is what you just said. You overwhelm them, or you trick them into thinking they have everything they need. And that usually never is the case. And what I tell people is there's multiple ways to add value. So when we help someone create content, messaging is. And this actually came from you, Mel, I think it was you that said that there's a couple things that you have to do. Like, your audience has to feel they have to, like, trust you. But you said one line is like, they have to know they can do it as well.

Yeah.

Otherwise, it's completely useless. And so I kind of took that into the back of my mind when doing this and then started to look at, like, what are some other ways to add value? What I realized was, and this isn't anything mind blowing, you may have heard it before, but helping people avoid things is sometimes more powerful than telling them what to do. And I also believe that telling people what to avoid increases their chances of them believing that they can do something, because now they feel like there's no obstacles. And so the one of the ways I describe this is most people don't know this about me, but I was an NCAA Division 1 cross country and track runner, had scholarship and all that stuff. So I can run almost a four minute mile back in the day and so I could help people run underneath a five minute mile. And if you're the type person who's been like to trying, trying for years and lowest you can get is 5:10, 5:15. And I look and I look down and I see that you're just wearing the wrong shoes. Like you're wearing shoes that are way too heavy. Switching shoes can literally cut like 10 seconds off of your time. So if you're running 5:10, 5:09, you can't break it. And you're like, Brandon, what do I need to do? What do I need to do to break this five? Just give me like the strategy, show me how to train, what is it? And I just tell you, stop wearing those shoes. That might be enough for you to break the five minute mile. So telling people what to avoid or what to stop doing is, is incredibly valuable. Now here's where it gets even more valuable is when someone is currently doing something that they think is normal, that they think they should be doing, but is actually causing the problem. And you can bring awareness to that. In my opinion, that's the most value adding and mind blowing thing you can do for anyone. And I'll give you an example of how I did it on this podcast. Most people on this podcast, if you haven't heard me talk before, have probably thought that like how to content and tutorials were the best way to add value and grow an audience online. Why? Because that's what every expert and guru has been saying for the last 10 years. And honestly, it was true at one point, but now there's so much competition, it really isn't the best way. But there's so many people still doing it and they're doing it and they think it's the right way to do it, but it's actually what's causing them the problem because they're blending in with everyone else. So when I, people hear me talk and I bring their awareness to this thing that they're doing that they didn't realize was actually causing the problem and they see how it's causing the problem. It's like mind blowing. And I didn't teach anything, really. I didn't teach you what to do, I just taught you what to stop doing. I was able to shift your perspective. I was Able to move you away from something that was causing the problem in your life that you didn't know was causing the problem in your life. I made you aware. And to me and a lot of the students we work with, that is the thing that can transform your business. That's what gives you the positioning. That's when people say, I really like your message is. Is. And my people will look at my message and say things like, Brandon believes information isn't always the best way to add value. You can stand out without having to rely on tutorials. And that's what I get known for, because that's the biggest way in which we bring awareness to people. Does that make sense? Did I explain that okay?

Yeah, I think you did. I think you did. I've got an episode that I'm doing which made me land the same type of thing that you're saying where a lot of people think, well, let me pay my mortgage off is a good thing. This episode, I'm going to actually show you that it's going to cost you about a half a million dollars in.

Wealth, by the way. Thank you, Dave Ramsey.

I was like, what is he talking about? That's the. I hate that advice.

But anyway, and so the common thought process, and look, I don't want people in debt, but there is something to it. If you start to understand where you are in certain circumstances, literally, I'm going to do the math, you know, and. And I think that's. That's the, the thing is that I call it critical thinking.

Yeah.

You know, because when it comes to business, when I hear this from a business owner or when I'm on, you know, on boards or anything, and they, they say, well, this is the way we've always done it. That's the first dinging of the death knell bell.

Right.

It really is. Especially in, in the expert space, in the online space and in the. In what we do, things are shifting, things are changing, and people are looking for new paradigms and new ways to think, new ways to understand. So just parroting what everyone else is doing isn't going to solve it. No.

And I think that leads to a lot of the problems. And this is actually one of the things we teach is like, when you want to look at how to position yourself in the marketplace, look at the things that people have just been doing for so long, they don't question it anymore because there's a massive problem in this world, in my opinion, when it comes to critical thinking. I don't think we have a lot of critical thinkers in this world. I think that a lot of people just do things because they saw success with it one way, or this person saw success, or this is just the way it's always been done. The world is changing and changing faster than it ever has, which means that ways of doing things will ultimately become irrelevant faster. And if you can be the person who identifies this isn't relevant anymore and it's actually causing a problem and you're able to critically think, then you're going to have an. A huge, A huge position in the marketplace to be different and to gain traction fast. And that's what. That's exactly what we did.

Yeah.

And what it comes down to is looking for those things that you just said is where is everyone just saying this is the way it's always been? Or what are people doing that's just been the way they've done it for the last five to 10 years. If you can identify something that has just been a norm for like, five, maybe even like 10 years might be a better amount of time. Ten years, it's probably a good chance. It's not really the best way to do it anymore. Not always, but probably. And if you could figure out, is this causing a problem, is there a better way to do this and then bring awareness to the marketplace of like, hey, this better way, this thing's outdated. You be that critical thinker. It gives you great positioning inside the marketplace. And so I love that angle with you. Mel is like, yeah, paying off your mortgage may not be the best thing in order to build wealth. And I don't. That advice always rubbed me the wrong way because I'm like thinking, cool, you have $400,000. You're going to pay off your thing. Why not go buy some rental properties and then have that income coming in and then use that income to go pay it off. But then you're left with rental properties. Doesn't that make more sense? Like, I don't know, I'm not, I'm not the financial expert, but that kind of makes a little bit more sense to. So, like, doing. Doing stuff like that, like looking at those things. I think especially for you in the financial space, there's so many things that are like, this is just the way it's always been done, so we should just keep doing it that way. And it's just backwards.

And in the financial space, it's even worse because most people's education in the financial space came from observation and not actual training lessons or understanding or as you call it, knowing so we tend to not want to talk about money. Therefore, the only way we learn about money is by watching others who probably don't know about money either. And so it's even far worse when it starts to come to this financial world.

Yeah. And what I love about what you do, I know we're getting off topic a little bit, but also when it's. Everyone's so different with money. Like, there's some people that make money from a job. There's some people that make money from entrepreneurship. There's people that make money from launches. So why would we take the same collective advice when it comes to money when we're all making money differently in different amounts? It just. It just doesn't make so much sense. And kind of like when we bought the house that we're in now, I didn't put 20% down, and everyone's like, don't buy the house until you have 20% down and you're going to have PMI and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, yeah, we want to buy the house. So we bought the house. We had PMI. It was like 99 bucks a month. And our house has gone up like $350,000 in value in two years because the housing market's been crazy. And I'm just looking back going like, man, if I followed the advice of all these traditional financial experts who are like, never buy because PMI and blah, blah, blah, blah, like, I would have missed out on $350,000 over $99 a month for two years. Are you kidding me?

Like.

Money and equity in our house.

Let me ask you something, because I think it's. You hit it. You mentioned it. And I want to make sure that we dispel it. You said a lot of what we do when we do it right is invisible.

It is, yeah.

But I want to make it really clear. We're not talking about. It's a strong word, deceitful or manipulative kinds of things. We're talking about a much. Just a much better way to communicate.

It's taking what you do that, you know will help people and presenting in a way where they understand it. Most of the problems and fights in this world come down to communication. Willing to bet the fights that you have with your spouse are just miscommunication or a lack of communication. And I'll give you a couple examples. Yesterday, my. My wife and my son kind of got into it and breakfast, and they're kind of just yelling back and forth. And it was because my son wanted to go grab something from his room that he needed. And my wife didn't know that. And he was getting off the table and she told him a million times to sit on the table. And I told him, well, if you would have just said, mom, there's something in my room that I really need to get for dinner. May I get off the table and go grab it real quick? I don't want you to get yell at me or think I'm not listening and come back. She probably would have said, yeah, go do that. And there probably would have been no fight. It's a miscommunication.

Yeah.

So I'll give you another example. If my message or the thing that I wanted to have happen was like my son to go clean his room, I said, hey, will William, go clean your room now because I'm your dad. That's one way of communicating that message. Another way of communicating that message might be, hey, Will, Superman cleaned his room in five minutes. Do you think you can beat Superman? I'm gonna get the timer ready, go. Like, which one do you think is gonna get me the result? Which message is gonna land deeper? Probably the one with the Superman. Right. It's just there are different ways of communicating so people better understand what's going on. And so that's really all it is. And I'll give you one more example. So it's really clear. If I would have just come out on this podcast and I, if I said something like, how to content is one of the worst ways to build an audience online. And then I just moved on. And you believe that how to content was the best way. You are going to be like, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. I don't really believe him. Like, why am I listening to this? Even though that statement is true, in my opinion, it's true. There was a, there would have been a miscommunication. There would have been a jive or not a, not a jive, a like a headbutt of belief. But if I would have said how to content is one of the worst ways to build an audience online. Let's look at Gary Vaynerchuk, who's grown faster than anyone has and probably ever will. He doesn't do traditional how to or tutorial based content. Simon Sinek doesn't either. And almost every TED Talk, which gets millions of views and still educates, doesn't use tutorials and like how to stuff. So why are we still doing that now? What I did there is made the statement, but I Backed it up with counterexamples. This is what I'm talking about. Just I'm not letting beliefs, a conflict of beliefs, really disrupt my communication. What I'm doing is going like, I know, and I'm well aware that this is going to be a budding of beliefs. I'm going to take care of that in my communication. So it's a very smooth understanding for my audience. So the thing is, if someone wants to believe something, there's nothing you can say to switch their belief. There's nothing like you can't hypnotize someone and then all of a sudden get them to do something. But there is ways to flaws in people's thinkings or old ways that they didn't see before. And when you can show these flaws that they weren't seeing, you now give them a higher perspective to look down from to, for them to still make a decision on what they want to do.

Yeah.

So at the end of the day, you're presenting information and you're letting people make a decision on which route they want to go or believe. And sometimes like, I will say something and I'll say, here's all the ways it's flawed and someone will come back and go, like, yeah, but I still like it because blah, blah, blah, blah, I'm like, great, go do it. Like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna convince you. But for those people who are really suffering from those problems, it's your job to be able to communicate it to them so they understand that you understand that problem, you understand how to come out of it, and you and you have a solution. And I don't want them to have to think about it. I want them to automatically know. And so we're very intentional with how we communicate. And that's what it comes down to at the end of the day.

I love this because here's, you know, we hear this, this whole thing, especially when we first start. I remember growing up and the first time, you know, getting in a fight with a girlfriend way back when, because it was a long time ago, considering my age, you know, And I remember mom saying, you know, communication is a two way street. Yeah, but it's wrong. It's not. And what you're saying is exactly that. Yeah, if I have a message to get across or something, whether it's to a child, to a spouse, to a customer, to an audience, to a marketplace place, it is 100% my responsibility to make sure the message lands is delivered and understood. So it's not a Two way street. It's a one way street.

Yeah. When you're in business, it is a one way street. It's your, it's your job. And people do put intention into this. I think like when people write copy, everyone understands the importance of copy. That's what copy is, is communication. But hardly everyone puts that type of intention in their content, in their upfront thing, because messaging is an ecosystem. It's like it's not just one piece of copy or one video. It's a collective of a lot of pieces working together. And you have to make sure you're dropping the right elements. But people are just really intentional or try to be intentional with it in only one area, which is like their copy of their sales page, of their ads. But it needs to be everywhere. And then the other problem is, is when people are intentional with their copy, they don't really know why they're writing, what they're writing. Like they don't understand the psychology of like what's gonna happen inside of someone's head when they're reading this. And that's really what we have to get down to. And I'll give one example. So like with copy, most people try to focus on benefits. Like, here's the benefits you're gonna get to me. That's you trying to convince or explain to someone why they should buy your product. I don't wanna have to. And I, you should put benefits and stuff, but you shouldn't rely just on those. Because I talk about pain and mistakes. And so when I get very specific on a pain or multiple pains that you have, and then I get very specific on mistakes that you're making that cause those pains. What starts to happen to the person reading that is they automatically go, this person's talking to me. Like they instantly think this person is talking to me. Their mind is on alert. And then when I list the mistakes that are causing that pain, and I'm very specific on those, what starts to happen is the person goes, while this person's explaining my exact situation. Now when I do those two, and I'll give you an example here, when I do those twos together, I never said that I had the solution. I never talked about my program, I never talked about anything. But what starts to happen is the person automatically starts to want to work with me. Because I understood their situation, their problems, and I knew why it was happening to such a deep level. They just assumed that I had the answer. And that's what I'm talking about with demand creation. There's Things that we can combine together. And when it comes to communication, that elicits those feelings. So, for example, if I said, if you're the type of person listening to this podcast right now with headphones on, I have really bad news for you. Like, you. You're gonna. I, I hate to tell you this now, obviously this is not a true thing. There is no pain points if you're listening to this with headphones. But if you were the person listening with headphones, what you automatically probably did was go, I'm gonna pay attention. What is he gonna say? You're listening to my words. Why? Because I'm very specifically describing what you're doing. Now, if you weren't the person with the headphones on, you probably automatically just went, that's not me. I don't have to worry. I don't have to worry about that. But the point is, is you made an automated response the second I got specific. Okay, so if I said something like, if you're the type of person who's really good at what you do, and you're posting three times a week on social media, you're giving out great value and great tutorials, and you're not getting any traction, like, you probably haven't experienced any sales growth or revenue growth, significant growth in the last three months. I'm willing to bet that you're also like 70% of your content right now is educational tutorial format. Now, if I just described you, which I'm willing to bet is a decent amount of you, if you have problems with messaging and content, what starts to happen is when I describe that your subconscious goes, he's talking about us. Pay attention. Pay attention. Alert, alert, alert. Pay attention to what he's saying. And it's also saying, this guy understands it. He knows how to get out of it. Because really, honestly, the only way to get very specific to that level is to have gone through it yourself. Like, you can't guess your way there. And so what happens is the conscious mind knows that, and now I'm creating demand, or I'm creating an eagerness to listen to what I'm going to say next. And that's key because we have. We need three things. We need to get eyeballs on us. The titles of our content can help us do that. We need to keep the eyeballs on us. Communicating, like I just told you, which is just one of our patterns, keeps the eyeballs on us. And then we need to create demand. And that also ironically. Also not ironically, but it also. That pattern I just gave you Also helps create demand. And we have a whole bunch of different patterns and ways of communicating that, that do that, and processes we take people through. But at the end of the day, that's what it comes down to is communicating. So these automated responses, people are in our favor. Because whether you want it to or not, people are going to make automated responses. It's just the way humans are. And if you're not communicating the right way, their automated response may be, this person is no different than everyone else. This is why you're unheard, because the automated responses aren't in your favor. So this isn't about like, like you said, Mel, like manipulating someone, getting them to make an automated response. The automated responses are happening right now, whether you're aware of it or not. And right now, if people are not consuming your content, their automated responses are not in your favor. And we have to shift that. We have to change what that is. And again, simple communication shifts and patterns can help you do that.

This pattern that you just mentioned, it reminds me of something that. And this is way before you and I met, because it was 1997.

And I went to speak at a big conference in Arkansas. I had partners at the time and they were kind of going, why are you going to Arkansas? No one's going to hire you in Arkansas. And I did an hour and 10 minute presentation to a bunch of people that needed the work that I do, but they didn't know they needed it. And I decided to go to speak anyways, even though they didn't think I would get anything from Arkansas. And literally. And I talked about the mistakes and I talked about the consequences of those mistakes or what they were experiencing. And I got off the stage, I got on a plane and I flew back to Los Angeles. And when I landed in Los Angeles, I had a voicemail message from one of the people in the audience and said, and this is what he said, you clearly understand the problem. You understand the mistakes we're making, and I need your help. When can you fly back to Arkansas? Yeah, and I flew back to Arkansas. That was back then. It was a $25,000 project. But that one lecture turned into 15 years of work in Arkansas. I mean, seven figures worth of work in Arkansas. And I didn't know it there. I don't know that I consciously did it. I didn't deliberate. Let's put it this way, I didn't deliberately do it. But as you described it, I go, that's what happened in Arkansas.

That's what I did.

Damn, I'm Good.

That's what it is. Because when you understand someone's problems so deeply and you can communicate the pain and the reasons why it's happening again, that person automatically knew Mel has the solution. He's the person who can help. And if you would have just gotten up there and just were very generalized, like, look, you're probably super overwhelmed. You may not be hitting the revenue you want right now, and you may be just be taking on more court cases than you're really, like, that's just too generalized. You'll be like, okay, yeah, I guess so. But when you very specifically, like, here's a very specific problem that you're experiencing. Here's why it's happening, and you bring that awareness, they're going to go boom. That person automatically has the answer. So here's an example. I tell our students all the time, as if you're on a hike, and you fall into, like, this pit or this cave, and it's like 90ft high, and let's say you survive, and you're like, I don't know how to get out of here. And someone puts their head over the cave and is looking down at you, and they're like, all right, all you want to do is you want to climb up as best as you can, okay? And you want to hold on to stuff that's really, like, solid, and make sure before you grab on anything, it's not very loose. And then just climb up. That's all you have to do. You're gonna look at that person and go like, okay, sure, maybe I'll try. But then if someone else came over and was like, hey, I see you're stuck in that hole. Here's what you need to do. Look on the north side of that hole. You're going to see an area that's a little. Little sandy. But to start for the first 10ft, what I want you to do is actually dig out steps. So once you dig out the steps, you're going to get to about 10ft high. Then I want you to move to the right about two feet, you're going to see a root. Grab the root and climb up. Okay? Now, at the top of that route, what you're going to do is you're going to see one rock jutting out three feet to the left. Use your left hand, hold on to that, Pull yourself up, stand on it. Then you're just going to follow the rocks leading up to the top. There's 15 of them. When you get to the 15th one, what I want you to do is actually move one foot to the right because the ground's going to be a little loose there. And then all of a sudden, there's one more final route. Pull yourself up there and that's how you're going to get out. Which person are you going to listen to?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're not going to listen to the first person. Why? Because they were so generalized. You know for a fact they didn't actually climb out of that freaking hole. But you know, and you can assume automatically. Again, it's going to be automatically. You're going to automatically assume this person has done this before. I'm going to listen to that person. And that person never said, hey, I was down in that hole and I got out of it. They just started describing. And then you looked and you're like, wow, it is. There is sand there, there is a root, there is 15 rocks. And you're going to go do that because of how specific they were. And this actually leads me to something, is because I know some of the listeners might be asking, well, how do we know how to get specific? You talk from experience and you focus on a level of mastery over your craft. And when I talk about mastery and experience, experience is great. But to me, experience only guarantees one thing. It experience, it guarantees failure. Having experience doesn't mean you're necessarily going to know the solution. Mastery is when you know the solution and you actually know not one way to get out of a situation, but, you know, like 10, you know, multiple. And I think in today's day and age, a lot of people don't want to focus on mastery. They just take a lot of courses and have a lot of education, but which is great. You can still be successful. But when you focus on experience, and this is why procrastination, like, I just can't stand it because, like, you're delaying this level of mastery. You're delaying the experience and the knowing that you need in order to speak specifically to people. And that's why usually the people that are succeeding with courses and programs are the ones that have some level of mastery. And now I know the next thing that's going to happen for a lot of people are going to be like, well, I don't have mastery yet. Well, go on, get some. You don't need a lot. Most people don't focus on it. So the second you start focusing on it, it's just an up. Like, you just have a big upswing because you're able to get to the specifics, the specifics of thoughts the specifics of emotions, the specifics of mistakes. And that is another invisible element where people are like, well, I don't. I don't know why this person's just doing better than me. It's like, because they're speaking more specifically to the audience than you are in most cases, not all the time, but. But that's one of the things that are going to. To help you, you know, master your messaging.

So I want to translate this into dollars, and then I want to make sure that they know, because you've got a special training coming up. I want to make sure that. That they know how to go deeper with this, because I think this is important. But I remember when the first doctor that I saw for that had the tumor. I went in and this doctor said, I see a 5 centimeter tumor on the CT scan, but I want to go with the scope. And so, first off, he saw the 5 centimeter tumor 12 days before I showed up in his office. Then he says, I'm going to verify it. Now, all of a sudden, it's an emergency. But the way he talked about the issue now, mind you, I just heard the three words, you have cancer, which you never want to hear. And he's flippantly going, yeah, whatever. And it's generalizations. Well, Stephanie and I walked out of this doctor's office and said, we're not going to use him. He's a hack. We don't trust him. We don't have that trust. And we got on the phone with her colleagues who are in the medical space and said, who's the best urologist around? And we get this guy's name three times. So we call his office and we have the conversation. He said, we. We happen to have an appointment tomorrow morning, 9am I said, we're there. He described everything so vividly. Not only what I was feeling, what I was going through, what was happening, but what the solution was like. You're climbing out of that hole at a level that I didn't even know if he was on my insurance. I didn't even know what it was going to cost. I didn't care. All I knew is, this guy is my man. This guy is the one that's going to lay his hands on me and get this tumor out. Because of the way he understood it, because of the way he described it, money didn't matter. So, I mean, you talk about transcending pricing and all of that. It comes through this.

Yeah, he was able to create demand, and he wasn't intentionally doing it. It was just his level of mastery over what he did. And then the other side of it is you didn't make a logical decision to do that. Like you didn't sit down and go, okay, am I going to go with this guy? Why am I going to go with this guy? How much is it going to cost? Is it really worth it? What's the percentage that he's going to get? You didn't do any of that. You're just like automatically, I know this is it, this is the guy. And it was because of the way he communicated. And that's the thing. That is how we start to generate massive amounts of revenue inside of our business is getting very clear on all of that. And by the way, I'm glad you went with him because it ended up great.

But yeah, we do have a three day bootcamp coming up and it's live. So it's all live. And it's three days where I'm going to be teaching you, not the full day. Like there'll probably be a couple hours each day walking you through this process of messaging. How do you get to the core of the messaging? What are some of these patterns? What do you start doing first? How do you start to change the way you communicate and position yourself in the marketplace and transform it into content that stands out, pulls people in? So we have that coming up soon. I believe Mel is your link. It's melabraham.com messaging. Is that.

Yeah. So we'll put it in the show notes. But melabraham.com messaging with an ing at the end, we'll make sure that you have it. Here's the thing, if you're trying to figure out how to use some of this, how to uplevel your, your, your income, your revenue, your sales, your profits, all of that, your ability to communicate and be distinct in a marketplace, man, you gotta join this training. Listen, we didn't say this early on, but Brandon helped me. I think we did 52 videos at one point in time where we built on this. And what I'm looking at, what you're going to be teaching, this is actually the next level from that.

It's. I had to get even deeper mastery over what we do. And we have that now. And here's the thing is if you're the type of person and you're listening to this podcast and you're like, I am having an issue with messaging, standing out, getting people to pay attention. No one's even. There's. There's three major problems. Number one is you're not getting your content even seen. Number two, even if your content seen, they're not staying long or even if they're opting into the webinar, they're not staying for the whole thing. And then number three is even if they are kind of listening to you and kind of staying, they're not buying. Those are the three major problems that people have. And if you have any one of those, it's it is a messaging problem. It is a communication problem. Whether it's your titles, the content, how you're speaking, it's a communication problem and we're going to fix that for you. If any of those are are you, you can't go back after knowing this information and not do anything. Nothing changes unless nothing changes. Now look, you do need someone to help you with it. Unless you want to figure it out yourself. That person doesn't have be me. But I think this doesn't come from a place of arrogance. But I haven't seen anyone else inside of this space that understands messaging communication to the level of what we do. So again, you do need someone to guide you and mentor you. Doesn't have to mean. But please don't leave this podcast episode. Just go back to doing what you're doing because it's not working. It's what's leading to problems. Now if you do want that person to be me, if you do like what we're saying, you do like my style of teaching this stuff and then make sure you go to melabraham.com messaging get on here because it's going to be mind blowing. We're going to change. Let me just say this. If you thought today was good, when you get onto this three day boot camp, nothing will be the same. It'll literally be impossible for you to go back to the way things were. And that's what you want, right? In order to change your content messaging. So make sure you register, check out the show notes and hopefully I'll see all of you guys there.

I can't wait. And I try to watch everything you do only because aside from our friendship, I'm always getting some little nugget, some little things, some little shift that can make a huge difference. So I'm definitely going to be. So we'll make sure that we hook it up all in the show notes that we have all the information and y' all go there, register and I'll make sure that we see you there.

Cool. Thanks for having me on, Mel.

Brandon, thank you so much for coming and taking the time. I know that you've got all kinds of stuff going on right now, but I appreciate you, my friend.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Of course, man. I'm grateful to be on. Thank you for having me.

You got it. Cheers, buddy. Thank you for listening to the affluent entrepreneurship with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the affluent entrepreneur Facebook group now by going to melabraham.com group and I'll see you there.

And that's it for this episode of building your money machine, where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at the top of the the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people. Because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright, and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.