How to grow a successful business, with Jermaine Griggs | Ramit’s Brain Trust

You know, I've talked about automation a lot. I've talked about systems, I've talked about building online businesses. And today I'm thrilled to introduce Jermaine Griggs. He's one of my favorite people to study. Thank you. In fact, I bought one of his courses. It was one of the most advanced courses I've ever purchased. And he created a site called hearandplay.com to teach you how to play music. But if you look beneath the surface, there is a ton of sophistication going on. How'd he do it? What did he do? We're going to find out today.

Hey, Jermaine Griggs Here, founder of HearAndPlay.com and Automation Clinic. And I'm here with Ramit talking about how I took $70 and a dream at 17 years old and turned it into a multi million dollar business teaching people how to play music by ear. That change from nothing to something was huge. And so I remember how that feels. It was March, March 2, 2002, was that feeling like that's when and literally it happened. So it was like we had that period from August 6, 2000 to March 2002. So between that, that's the $300 a month, 500 in a good month, something like that. And I bought this guy's course. His name was Corey Rudol. Corey owned Internet marketing.com and Corey. So if I was making $300 a month, Cory was the guy making 5, 6 million, you know, back in 1996, you know, when I don't know if they had SSL encryption or if they did, I don't even think it was 128 or, you know, it's crazy. And so he was like the Godfather. He had like 70,000 affiliates. And I think I stumbled onto him because I had that feeling like, there's gotta be a better way. Danny Deutsch did a show There's Gotta be a Better Way. And I had that feeling too. And so I started Googling and I came across him and it wasn't hard not to find him. Bought his course with. I probably didn't even have $200, you know, because that money that I was making doesn't amount to anything saved. So I put it on a credit card, I think I had a student credit card by then and bought his course and I devoured it. He talked about a sales page and mind you, I was getting these sales pages in the mail, but I never considered.

Didn't make the connection.

I didn't make the connection. I'M doing this with the books on the brown carpet and the couple sentences and the button and I'm making money. He said, change it to a 20 plus page sales letter. Now. This was one of those things. This was a big risk, you know, this is one of those things like when we sit back and say, oh, they couldn't be, you know, people are hearing this story. You can't be making good money teaching music or piano. It's one of those like where you have to suspend your disbelief for a moment because we get in our own ways by saying, nah, that's not possible, or he got lucky or that's just an outlier or that's this. And then we kind of excuse ourselves from it. I was of the mind. I'll try everything once, you know. And I did. I remember my sales page, it was@homepianocourse.com you could probably or hear on play.com course HTML, if you look it up in the way back, you could actually see it if it goes back that far. And it was a long sales page with a red headline that said, discover the secrets to playing the piano by ear in four easy steps. And then he said, you have to relate to them. So your first line needs to be like, if you're like other struggling musicians. And he used struggling business owners, I just took out business owners and put musicians. And all you want to do is just play. You want to feel what you play. And oddly enough, I don't teach kids. It's all adults. When parents in the community are like, I want you to teach my kid, I'm like, well, I don't really have anything that's here in playground. That's the next evolution. But these are adults waking up at 40 years of age. They want something to do. Midlife crisis. They just want to play. They want to play guitar or piano. And so you have to talk to that person. He taught me how to talk to that person. He taught me what benefits are. Most people don't even know what benefits and features are like. Features. Features are what your product does. Benefits are what your product does for them. Right? Features that it's 300 pages benefit is that, hey, you're finally going to be able to play the piano. Serenade your family and friends by the fireplace during Christmas. Imagine how close your eyes and imagine how that feels to be having your grandkids singing a song, that you're actually backing them up and you're not looking at sheet music. The sheet music is distracting you from realizing the moment you just Know how to play. You know the patterns and the chords, and you're having fun and you're smiling and your grandkids are stepping on your foot. You know, you create that through storytelling, through imagery. And I learned that. And so I sent out an email. I had about 700 people on my list. You're probably like, wow, you were doing list building. No, I wasn't. It was a Yahoo group. I was a moderator of a Yahoo group that I started. But you could. You could broadcast it. So I said, hey, I got a new site. And I sent it to 700 people. Well, the next day, March 2nd, is when I woke up. And by the end of that day, we would make $1,100 that day. So I woke up, it might have been like 700 in there already.

It's like four or five months of revenue in one day.

In one day. So when I say, like, straight there, it wasn't. Yeah, I wandered in the wilderness for that, those years. But when it happened, yeah, it happened. Like, eleven hundred dollars. March 2, 2002. I called my girlfriend. We gotta buy these books. I skipped school that day and the next day. And then the next day it was like, $300. Obviously. That was like. We had a. We had a rush.

Yes.

But then I thought it was gonna. It's gonna go back to normal. But it never went back to normal. The next day I got like, four or five more sales. Now I'm making a couple hundred dollars a day. And then by the end of that month, we would make $8,000 that first month. And so automation was a necessity. You know, like, when you talk about, like, a lot of people use the word ninja with me, and he's so ninja. And it's not for ninja sake. It's not like, what can I do? You know, like, people think I'm in a lab right now, like, cooking up some automation stuff. And, like, the bubbles are. It's not like that. Everything. Every problem that I've solved has been a real problem. Kids in school, I mean, we made a million. Our first million dollars. I don't think I was 21 yet, so. Cause 2002, I was still 18. So I always say that my first shot at adulthood, like, thank God. Like, I can actually. When I'm ready to clock out, when I'm ready to clock out, I can say, you know, I fought a good fight, I kept it. But at 18, like, I really. I just thank God that by the time I turned 19, I was making good money. That was my story. And by 21, we were doing seven figures. And so how do you manage a business? How do you grow a business while having other priorities like school and then after school? April 2, 2005, I got married. There was never a break. There was never. And then a year later, I have my first kid. So Jermaine Griggs has never just had that normal break. Be a kid. You know, it's always been, how do I run this business on the side? It's never really been. I've never done a, like, go hard nine to five. It's always, okay, so I have this list. Okay, how can I make the list feel that I'm personally communicating with them, but in an automated fashion? So my. I mean, where focus goes, energy flows. So if you focus on being personal in your email and saying, well, what else can I do? What would I normally do? And then really turn that into a process of emails and communications. Wait, I wonder if they open the email, can I pop something back out to them? Or what if they click it and then what if they call in and then I acknowledge that in the next email and it ended up being called Pam, I know we have a mutual friend, but personalized automated marketing was how I thought about it, and it just, like I said, it came out of a natural progression to have this business really run itself because it's always had to run itself.