9 Ways to Get Paid in Cash and Equity - Traffic and Conversion Summit Replay

So my least favorite person, right? Can I pick your brain? Sounds painful. Should be illegal, right? Can I pick your brain? People, though, can be now for me, somebody I'm actually happy to hear because can I pick your brain? Is I need help? How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Grab your seat at the table, because.

This is business lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Deiss. Hey, business owners. At Scalable, we know there are three key steps to getting your team clear on where they are in relation to your company's goals. The first step is to identify three to five metrics that tell the clearest story on how this team is helping the company hit its growth goals. The second step is to create clear targets so your team can declare in advance what winning looks like. And the third step is to measure these targets on a weekly basis. When your team is forced to interact with the numbers themselves, they begin to truly know their numbers. If you want to see how we track our numbers here at Scalable, you can get a free template@businesslunchpodcast.com dashboard. That's businesslunchpodcast.com dashboard.

So I'm going to talk with you about consulting for equity, which I think is really, really exciting if you are. And I know Ryan asked, but I couldn't see through the curtain. Well, do any of you do consulting now at all? Yeah. Okay. A few of you. Have any of you thought about doing it but haven't done it yet? A few. Okay, cool. So this will be good. Because the challenge with consulting is that generally it doesn't really build wealth and you can really turn it around to make it do amazing things. So I had a challenge with productivity at the end of 2019, just before the whole pandemic started, and I was setting my goals for 2020, and I was like, I want to be more productive. I've got too many things going on. How can I do that? And so there were a lot of meetings that I was having that just didn't go anywhere. It's like a lot of people are like, hey, can I meet with you and talk with you? And it's like, okay, that's cool. But then nothing happens. And too much advice given that people don't take. Have you ever been frustrated because somebody takes your time and you volunteer it because you want to help them and you give them great advice, and then they come up to you six months or a year later and ask you exactly the same question that they asked you before. And you're like, did you do any of the stuff that I talked about? No, because I was busy and stuff. Life got in the way, and that's very frustrating. And it's not fair to you.

Right.

Also, there's a lot of deals that I would look at that it didn't really pan out. Like we'd be talking about doing something and nothing would happen from it. And overall, there just wasn't enough time to do all the things that I wanted to do. So the solution to me is that I think you can get paid to vet deals. So I wasn't doing consulting. I'll tell you about that in a second. But you can get paid to vet deals and have them lead to both cash and equity. Equity, meaning ownership. Right. So I had all these people asking me for stuff, asking me for advice, can I help all this? And I said, what I'm gonna do to get more time and is I'm going to charge something for it. To basically scare them all away. Right? And not because I don't want to help, but because it wasn't good for me and my family and the time that I was spending. And I also wanted anybody that I spent time with to actually value the time. If it's free, generally it's not valued. So I started. I said, I'm going to charge, I don't know, $18,000 for a half day consulting. I had never done that before, and I had no idea if anybody would do that or not. I didn't really care because to me, it was just a way to put something in the path of having so much time that I was spending talking to other people. And we had done. Does anybody here know Dan Kennedy? Anybody remember a few. Okay, that's cool. So I had gone and done a consult several years ago with Ryan and Perry, Demean old Dan's house, which is in a basement in Cleveland, by the way. You have to fly to Cleveland, and then you go. He picks you up in an old car, and you go to his house, and he takes you down in the basement and gives you Atkins Nutrition bars for lunch. It's a really interesting experience. But Anyway, he charged $18,000 to do that. I was like, okay, I'm gonna charge 18,000. And so I was at one of our war room masterminds, and I got somebody that said on Facebook message and said, hey, do you. Do you do consulting? Can I get your idea on this? And I said, the way I do that is it's $18,000 for a half day. I'd never done it before. I went and spoke and I figured I'd never hear from this person again. I went back and he had replied and said, okay, sounds good. Because I had said in the thing and I'll give you the exact text that I use. But I had said, the way I do it is it's $18,000 for a half day. It's up to four hours. If this is a fit, the investment is 18,000. I said, investment, not the fee. And if this is a fit, let me know and I'll send you the one page consulting agreement and the wire instructions. So don't talk to me for hours and hours. Either you want to do it or you don't. And he sent back and he said, okay. And then I was like, well, crap, I don't have an agreement and I don't have wiring instructions, so I'm going to have to do this now. So I emailed our finance guy and said, can you send me wiring instructions? And I put together a quick one page simple agreement. And I sent it to him. And again, I figured I'd never hear from him again. And the next day he sent me back a wire confirmation and said, okay. I sent the money. I was like, well, this is pretty cool. So over the last 18 months or so, I have done about 75 of those. And along the way I raised the fee about 18 months ago, right? I did it for a little bit and I got too many people. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna raise the fee to 25k. So it's 25k for, you know, for four hours of time. But my goal is that this is a side hustle. This isn't my main thing. And it can be for you guys too, right? It can just be a whole bunch of found money. So my big hope for you, takeaway wise, is that you leave here saying, I can consult, I'll tell you exactly how to figure out what to do and all that kind of stuff, where to find people, But I can consult. And in doing that, I'll do a few things. One is I'll make some extra money up front, which is cool. Two is I can have equity in a whole bunch of companies that I would not have otherwise had the opportunity to do that with, and that that equity will actually significantly, significantly into real wealth. And for me, it's been tens of millions of dollars over the last few months. Right? It's a crazy effective strategy. So five to six figures a month to your Income, tens of millions in equity value. So I've done a whole bunch of these deals over the last several years with equity where people would come to me and offer equity in their companies. But recently it stepped up tremendously because I tied together the consulting with the equity, which is what we're sharing here. Okay. So there's no money out of pocket when you're doing this. I'm a big fan of not having to do that. It's really just solving the problems of people that come to me for advice. And I'm going to give you nine ways to find these people also. Okay, so here's what you want to ask them. You want to ask them when you consult, what's your end game? Because a lot of us are like, if we haven't done this before, how could I possibly get $25,000 or $5,000 or $1,500 from somebody to give them advice about something? You can, because you're here and you already have tremendous specialized knowledge. You already have ridiculous value. So for anybody that's got a business that's going, how hard is it going to be for you to give them one little tweak to that business that can make them an extra $50,000? Right. The key is only do business with people who have businesses that are already working, all the people that are starting up. Unless you want to be a startup consultant, you say, hey, I'm not really good at that. But there's a lot of good resources. And you just have an auto text thing. So you do text replacement in your phone so that you can type in SU for startup maybe. And then it just says, hey, I've got a bunch of good startups. I don't really do that. I've got a bunch of good resources. Here they are, and it's got links and you just type SU and it fills it out in all of your social media and everything else. And you end up giving great advice and. And you don't piss them off. But you also don't waste time, right? Because time is really important. So when you do this, you want to say, what's your end game? What is your end game? And if you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the business right now, what would it be? If you could wave a magic wand, what are the biggest challenges that you're facing right now and what are the biggest. This is really important. What are the biggest constraints or the biggest roadblocks that are stopping you from that? Because a lot of people feel like they know what they need to do, but they still can't do it. It's all those people that ask you for advice and then come back and ask you for the exact same advice six months later. Right. There's a roadblock that's in the way. So if you can identify that and help them get past it, that's worth a lot to them. Also, who are the people that you would most like to be connected to? Your network is hugely valuable. When the pandemic first started and I was doing these, I had several people that came and they're like, my whole business is gone. Like, okay, tell me about that. Well, we do events. So we're having a big event and it's usually a $3 million event for us or a 5 million dollar event or whatever. And I'm like, okay, well what about doing it virtually? Yeah, we don't know how to do that. Okay, great. So I would literally just text them together with all the people that they needed to get their virtual event done and they would make. One of them came back and said, I literally made twice as much last year as I made this year. Normally we take home about 800,000 from this. We took home a million six this year. That's crazy value only because you know people that they don't. Right. That's a very valuable thing that you have to offer. So it's also good when you're starting to do this to have a reality check to be sure that the expectations that people have are reasonable. So my friend John Assaraf told me something that Brene Brown talks about, which is paint it done. So you can use either of these things. Paint it done is, hey, okay, so after we do this consult, paint me a picture of what it looks like now that we're done. Like we did the consult, you've done whatever I suggest you do. They're like, okay, this is it. The second thing is to use Dan Sullivan's Dan Sullivan question, which is, if we were sitting here meeting a year from today, what would have had to have happened both personally and professionally for you to feel happy with your progress? Right. And he wrote a whole book called the Dan Sullivan Question. Spoiler alert. That's the book. But it's a great question, right? Because it future paces them to say, is this something I think I can do for this person? Because if you can't, if you deal with somebody that's got unreasonable expectations or expectations you're going to do something beyond what you're able to do, then you'll only disappoint them. So just skip that. Right? Because you don't need people that are unhappy saying, you know, oh, they're not that great. You know, I paid them a bunch of money and they weren't that great. So those two things are really, really important. The problem and the reason that I didn't do this for years and years and years is that to me, consulting businesses are generally a dancing bear business. The dancing bear business is as long as I'm dancing up here on stage, people will throw money and deals at me. But when I stop, I don't get anything. And that's from a conversation Tony Robbins had with Dean Graziosi and he was like, man, we're the dancing bears. That's the problem. That's the whole reason that Tony wrote Money Master the Game and cut a deal with a mutual fund company to raise a bunch of money. He's like, if I get a billion dollars under management, then the fees from that will take care of me for the rest of my life. I won't have to go do another thing. I like doing it and I want to, but at some point when I'm not able to, I'll be taken care of. So you might want to think about the same thing because so many of us are trading dollars for hours that we are in fact dancing bears. The traditional consulting business is that. So I was like, I don't really want to have that business. And when the content stops or whatever, right? Then the show is down and we have to find something else to do. So the solution to me to this is that if you can get paid to vet deals, to find and vet deals that would be good for you and then get paid equity to actually do the work, then that's a really cool solution. Okay, so old way, if you're doing just consulting or if you're just giving people free advice, you might have income or not, but you don't have any wealth. Right? So you might have to do a whole bunch of business to make the money that you want to make and keep doing new business because it's not recurring. Generally we do this consulting and then we've done our thing, we've added the value and then it's gone. Right. This can be very low volume. I'm okay with four to six deals a year. Right. That's really cool. For me, a one time fee that you get normally when you're consulting turns into recurring revenue, which is a big, big deal. Right. It's effectively passive income because you've got an equity interest in the business right now, it's not transactional, whereas most consulting is like, hey, man, give me 25 grand. I'll give you this advice, right? That's a transaction. Hey, let's look at your business and figure out how we can work together as partners to take it to the next level. That's relational. It's so much better, right? Immediate taxes if you are doing normal consulting deals. But if you get equity in companies, there's a lot of ways so that you don't actually have to pay any taxes when you receive the equity. There's a lot of strategies for doing that and then high competition because you're competing with everybody else in the world who's a consultant, which is, by the way, everybody else in the world, it seems sometimes, right? Instead of that, it's very, very low competition because what you're offering is the opportunity to potentially partner with you and your positioning changes because you now are the person of authority that they've already paid to help them with their business. So when you go in and razzle dazzle, frazzle with all of the genius that you've got, then they're like, this is awesome. How do I get more of this? You don't have to sell at all. They will ask you and you will say no to all the ones that aren't perfect. Right? And you get to, you still get to have the upfront consulting money. Also, Frank Kern and I were having a conversation the other night and he was like, he just, he said, man, I just stopped doing my fourth agency. I'm like, yeah, so how many times? He's like, I don't know how many times it's gonna take me to never do an agency again. I just, I like the idea of it because I like helping people, but I hate it. And I never make money at it. Even though it's like I watch it go up, but I never actually make profit, so I'm not doing that anymore. And I was like, okay, well, that's cool. And he said, here's the problem. When you are an agency or when you are a consultant, or when you are a contractor that people hire, you are a provider. When you are a partner, you are a genius. And I thought that was really insightful. Because you want to be the genius that comes in and creates value for the people that you do work with. You don't want to be perceived as a provider because providers get paid to typically an hourly wage. Geniuses get paid bits of companies. Okay? So the three step plan is very simple. It's get clients, get paid and then get equity. So how do we do that? The first thing, just like when we're looking to buy a business, you're effectively thinking, how am I going to buy a business with my efforts, right? So the first thing we think about in mergers and acquisitions is we think, what are my acquisition criteria? So in advance, instead of just taking anybody that comes along, you get to design who you want to do business with based on the companies that you would like to ultimately have some equity in. So identify your ideal consulting a client. What I start with is the exit. What are the industries that I'm going to be able to go into and help that will have the greatest exit value? So this is a chart that starts with. And I fortunately you can see it pretty good up here, right? It starts with smaller companies. EBITDA is a fancy way of saying profits. It's earnings before interest. What is it? Earnings before interest? Taxes, Depreciation, amortization. But you can see on the left side we're talking about what is the size of the company. Note that the company increases between 3.3 times and 7.5 times more in value as the EBITDA gets up to 50 million and above. So one of the cool things is that as you think about where you're going to be able to take the company, you can say, I'm interested in companies in certain categories of certain categories of what they do and certain sizes that have the biggest growth potential. Your biggest growth potential is going to happen going really from under a million dollars in EBITDA, which could be. I mean I've dealt with 60 million, $70 million companies in sales that weren't taking a million dollars to the bottom line. So what's cool is you can have tremendous impact there even with marketing, with any of the things that we can do. So I look there and I say, okay, well where do I have the biggest chance to grow? I really have the biggest chance to grow from smaller ones that are 5 million or under in EBITDA right now and up. So I like that. But I don't really like companies that don't have enough profit to work. And I'm going to give you a formula for you to determine who you should work with based on what you want. But that's the first thing. There's another profit definition called sde. SDE applies to owner operated companies. So if the owner doesn't show up to work anymore, that company would probably not continue to be around. That's going to be an SDE or seller discretionary earnings number if it's professionally managed so that the owner could leave and take a vacation for a year or two and come back and it would be as good or better than it was before. That's gonna be an EBITDA company, but the same thing. You can see the multiples go from 1 to about 4.25 in these smaller owner operated companies based on what the earnings are. Okay. The best industries to look at, there's several. You can see business services and healthcare and information technology and financial services are kind of the best. But manufacturing and the other categories are as well. So this just is helping you. To me say these are the places that I think that I would like to work where I can find clients and do good. So what type of consulting services are you gonna provide? There's a few different kinds. I think there's four primarily. There's ops where you're helping them to optimize how the company is actually working. Right. So if you can help them to do better in how things work with what they've already got going, that's operational consulting. There's advisory where you're just gonna kind of sit on a board. You're not gonna go into the company and do anything. You're just going to get a few points in the company to say, here's what I think you should do. What if you did that? What if you tried that? What if you did that? Right. Advisory is really cool. Transactional is where you're helping them with some specific thing like you're helping them to get funding or you're helping them to launch a product or you're helping them to get into stores that are physical stores or anything like that. And then there's performance consulting, which is the highest paying, which is where you basically say, I'm going to come in and I'm going to perform and I'm going to take this company to the next level. And you can show them the charts that I showed you a little bit ago and say I'm going to help you take your company valuation from 2.5 where it should be right now to a 10. What do you think about that? Is that valuable to people? I mean, it really is, right? So a couple of case studies just in deals that I've done in these different areas so you can get an idea. There's an online music instruction advisory. I came In, I got three points in a $20 million business, an E commerce company where I did operational consulting, 10% and a $30 million business. This is all this year, by the way. Real estate services, a transactional deal, 5% and a $30 million business. And then business services. That's a larger business. They're doing about 96 million a year and making a lot of profit. I got 10% equity in that. From an income standpoint, this is cool, too, because here's the d dancing verification of this, right? This is cool because when you get the equity now, you have income from your ownership interest. So you did the service, but you continue to get paid forever. That's kind of cool. So an e commerce event, $25,000 consult up front, then 72,500 last month, which was the first month. This month, it should be the same. A business services company, $25,000 initial consult, $80,000 a month to me, right? Every month. Tax services company, $200,000 for the consult. It was a lot that I had to do there. So I charged. Actually quoted a fee, thinking that they would say no, and they said yes. And then you're like, darn it. And that was 1.8 50%, 900,000. So what can you consult on? Almost anything. So if you're stuck now saying, yeah, but I don't think I can do this, you already know how to do a whole bunch of things. And so you can consult on any of these things, from strategy and leadership and innov, recruiting, expansion, all of these things. There's 27 different things here that I did this morning, made a list of that you can consult on because it's easy if you just start thinking about it. So there's all 27. There's all 27, right. But that's only a partial list, right? Under marketing, there's a thousand things that you could add. So whatever skills you guys have, you just take those and turn that into the thing that you're going to consult about, because that there are people that don't know what you know. You don't value what you know as much because you know it, right? Even I think the rocket scientist and the brain surgeon, they're like, yeah, this is very simple, you know, because they've done it a few times, so they know how to do it, right? So understand the worth of what you know. That's a big deal. Who are you going to consult with? Okay, let's see who your clients might be. The very first thing you want to ask is, what industry do I want to be in? And you can make a list of those, right? And you can say, what are the roles and titles of the people that I will help. That might be as simple as entrepreneur, but it might be as specific as global distribution manager. Right? Whatever it is that you're good in, it might for a lot of us be chief marketing officer. Okay, then you want to say, well, what am I going to do for them specifically? And then what are the benefits that they will get from what I do? So for me, I just brainstormed a whole bunch of things. I was like, okay, marketing, sales, SaaS, sales, business SaaS, residential, commercial, real estate, et cetera. My roles, entrepreneurs, founders, business owners, people that want to buy businesses, et cetera. What am I going to do? I'm going to help them find money, get money, identify opportunities, grow, scale, and what are the benefits they're going to get? Return to profitability for me is a big one because I get a lot of people that come in and they're like, we did $3 million last year in sales and we lost $200,000. How did that happen? And it's amazing, like you do this a few times and the things that, you know, like maybe it's for them as simple as you guys look and say, well, what's your funnel look like? Well, our funnel looks like this. And then you apply the digital marketer value customer value journey and you're like, you have no value ladder. I had a real estate SaaS company that came to me. They were doing $3 million a year in sales, losing $200,000 in profit. So 200,000 loss, right? Their value ladder didn't exist. And they were smart. They still are, right? They were doing affiliate stuff and they had sponsors that were paying and they did a licensing deal. They did all kinds of things to make money, but they never looked at the core of the business and said, what is our value ladder? So we added the value ladder to give them higher priced products and I get to appear to be a genius. It's pretty simple though, right? You know, hey, what if you sold something more expensive and now they have gone to over a million dollars in profitability with just adding that one thing. So when you make your list of things, you'll see, man, there's a lot of stuff that I can really do. And then create your service tagline. I help this specific type of client to achieve this specific type of benefit. So it might be I help e commerce entrepreneurs launch in big box stores, or I help gym owners double their membership, or I help entrepreneurs scale their media two times and cut their CAC, their customer acquisition cost by 50%. You guys can do all of Those things. Right. It's just I help blank to blank. Now you gotta go get clients. Okay, that's impossible. Right? Well, I mean, you're all marketers, so my guess is you can all do that. Okay. Pretty, pretty much. Anyway, but let's take a look. Because I like data based or data backed decisions. So when I think about what are the clients that I'm going to get, I'm like, okay, well, geez, there's this really big one called referrals. So I should probably think about where I can get referrals. You can see cold calling is on there. I don't really care for that, but some people like it. Neil in our sales booth, he loves cold calling. Company branding, digital, those are kind of the big ones. So like, okay, these are the sources of clients that work the best for me. What about referral sources? Because referrals was a huge thing there. Well, past clients, accountants, financial advisors and attorneys and lenders are giant referral sources for you. So in your network that you already have now that you might not even realize you have on social, just start making relationships with these kinds of people. Okay. They will naturally send you business because they already, they are centers of influence. They already have the customers that you want. Okay, and then how marketing wise, tactically, networking again, number one. But then digital target mailers, we still use target mailers, company branding, et cetera. So there's a lot of ways that you can get these clients. But here's the cool thing, and this is what I didn't realize until I made the decision to charge this half day thing, is that you already have a huge supply of clients that you haven't really thought about. My favorite one and one rule is just don't forget that all equity and no cash means you're broke. Okay? So I have given you, if nothing else take from this today, the formula for how to be broke. You can say, Roland Frazier taught me how to be broke. Okay, you're welcome. All equity and no cash is typically, I'm broke because you need cash to survive, right? So don't just take equity, because a lot of equity deals, when you do that, won't pay off. You got to get the cash up front. Because if you got the cash up front, they're serious. They have enough money to actually give you cash up front, which means they're not broke. Right. And they have skin in the game. So that now they're much more likely to listen to you and take your advice and see how valuable what you have to offer is. So that now they're like, oh, that really worked. And I did it and hey, we actually made money. So I'd like to give you some equity in my company. Okay. So my least favorite person, right? Can I pick your brain? Sounds painful. Should be illegal, right? Can I pick your brain? People though, can be now for me, somebody I'm actually happy to hear because can I pick your brain? Is I need help. So what I do is all brain pickers now get this from me. So on social, I'll frequently get can I pick your brain? Or somebody will come up to me and say, can I pick your brain? And I say, and I'm going to, I'm not going to read it. I'm going to say, generally what I say is along the lines of, hey, that's exciting. I would love the opportunity to help you with that. The way I do that is with a half day consult, it's up to four hours and the investment is $25,000 investment, not fee. It's important because it needs to be an investment. I want them to think of me as an investment. Okay. And after our initial meeting, we can see where to go from there, right? Which my goal is. And I tell them I said my evil plan I'm going to fully disclose to you is that I would like to razzle dazzle frazzle you to decide that you should give me equity in your business. Okay. And then if they say I would never do that, you can decide whether you want to accept them or not. Okay. I have found that many people who say I would never do that are then begging you to give you equity after you consult with them and help them. So it's not something that I would typically say no to just because of that. Then I say, if this sounds like a fit, let me know and I will email you wiring instructions and the one page agreement. That's really important because that says there's not going to be any BS back and forth and you're going to get free. And I had somebody recently, actually my most recent consult last week did this. It's like, yeah, I want to hop on a 10 minute call with you and my CFO, blah, blah, blah. I said no, if it's something you know you want to do, do it. Do you feel I can add the value? Oh, yeah. But I just need to say, okay, cool, then send me the money and sign the contract. Right. And then again, I got another one from him and he's like, okay, listen, I just need a 30 minute call with my business partner. So that, you know, so we can sell him on this. And I said, look, if you're not sold, this isn't for you, boy. The power of that takeaway is strong, right? Five minutes later, after I texted him that, he said, okay, I'm wiring you the money today, and here's the agreement. Okay? So stick to your guns on this because people will bleed you dry. Not because they're evil. It's just because it's easier, right? It's easier. So I send this to anybody that asks across any social media, any email, in person, anything. And you'll see it again and again. The other is, can I ask you a question? Right, Can I ask you a question, people? I love helping people, but I can't spend all my time answering those questions because. And my favorite are the prospectors that are, like, on LinkedIn. Can we hop on a call? No, never. I'm never going to hop on a call with you. Right. So these people, too, you send them the same thing, right? Send them the same. This is the same one. I just gave it to you multiple times. Right? People that offer you equity in their deals, right? A lot of people will come to you once you start doing this and say, hey, I would love to give you equity in my deal so that you can do all the work and make me super rich. Is that cool? They don't say it that way, but that's really what they mean. Right? And they will be happy to have you do that again. No. Tell you what, 25 grand, we'll look at the deal, and if it looks like something that makes sense to be involved in together, we can do that. But we should for sure date before we get married. Right? You might hate me. You know, then there's clients from strategic relationships. So a really fantastic way to get clients. But all that, those first three, by the way, are people you should already have. How many of you have had somebody say, can I pick your brain? Can I ask you a question? Can you give me advice? Okay, everybody except you. And I'm sorry that people don't like you, but. No, I'm just kidding. So now then we go into. Okay, well, maybe if I want to take a little bit more proactive approach so you can JV with people that already have your target market. So this is an event you can see that's coming up September 23rd and 24th. That is the second event that I'm doing with somebody that has a very big presence in E commerce. And so he already knew all these people and he said that's really cool what you're doing with the consulting thing. Should I do that too? And I said, you should for sure do it. But you're really good at E commerce, not business. I'm decent at business. What if you put on an event using all of your contacts and you charge them money and we split the profits from it 50, 50. And then we offer the consults at 25k, but we do them for two hours instead of four hours and they're still 25. And then we offer exit services to all these E commerce companies because everybody wants to buy an Amazon FBA company now, but a lot of people don't know how to sell them for the right price. So what we did is he said, okay. So he literally just got on the phone and called people he knew and said, I'm doing this thing and this is what we're going to do. He put up a webpage and we did the thing. We sold 25 seats at $5,000 a piece of. And then it cost us 5,000 to rent the room at the Ritz Carlton with AV for two days to do this. Very simple. Because it's a small thing. It's not a big event. Small events are awesome for getting together. But I didn't have to call anybody. I did. The first time we did it virtually last month, we sold it out. He sent me $60,000 and then we had one 25k consult. He sent me 12,500 for. And then we have the event, which we held. I spoke twice for an hour, right? Twice for an hour for $72,500 is okay. Virtually this one. I have to drive up to a really nice hotel on the beach an hour from my house and hang out for two days. And I'm still going to speak twice. And I'll still only get 72,500. But every set. This is a writer downer. Every $72,500 helps. Okay, every 72,500 helps. But what's cool is that then we. And so what I would suggest for you to do this is take your thing that you're good at and find out who's got your ideal consulting clients for the skills that you're good at, right? And then say, let's do a little small event where you fill it and people come. We'll split it 50, 50 after costs, and then we can offer these consults to help them with their business and hopefully get equity in a bunch of companies. Okay? Don't charge less than 2,000 for it because you won't get the people that you want. You want people who are successful enough to value the small nature and intimate nature of the event, that value what you have to offer and your partner enough to pay at least 2000. Charge between 2 and 10k for that event. You can see we charge 5 for this and then have an upsell at the event. The upsell can be a consult. It could also be a mastermind. My partner in this decided that he wanted to do a mastermind because we really want eight and nine figure Amazon people that we can help exit. And we'll typically get 10% of the company as a transactional consultant on the exit. So if we help 25 companies exit at an average of, I don't know, let's say it's a million apiece. But these are going to sell for a whole lot more than that. That'd be 25 million. That'd be 2.5 million that we were splitting. We sucked. Right? But it's probably closer to 12 million that will end up from this. Right? And again, every 12 million helps. It actually helps more than every 72,500. A lot of people get that mixed up. Okay, so, but here's the thing, is that you have the ability to value ladder your consulting along the way as well. And all of this is without me ever having a marketing funnel, without ever paying for advertising, without ever split testing or even getting on the phone to sell something. Right? And I only have to show up for a few hours. You can do the same thing. And even if it's not at that scale, even if it's, you made 25 grand, you know, I mean, come on, it's like most people feel that if they can add an extra 10,000amonth to their take home, that that will be meaningful. It's kind of impossible not to do that with this model. Okay, so the rest I already told you basically, and that's, that's. So that's been about 300 grand for me in the last 30 days. Okay, so that's just one of those people. So now what I'm doing is I'm looking at people that have relationships in the SaaS area and people that have relationships in all kinds of other areas. So I have 10 of these partners because I would rather make 10 million a month than, you know, than 300,000 clients from content marketing. Another thing that you can do. This is something you guys should all know, but be sure that you are taking advantage of how it can generate customers for you. And remember, the model Is everybody that reaches out from this, you send that little blurb that says the way I do that is a half day consult. I charge this much. Right? Okay. Social media, content marketing. You can see a link in your bio to whatever resource adds them to your funnel. For me, the funnel is get Epic Challenge, which is a challenge that we do once a month, showing people how to acquire businesses with no money out of pocket. Then podcasts, any podcast that you've got, we have one called Business Lunch. This is a sneaky trick that we use for podcasts. By the way, the way that you get Richard Branson on your podcast is you have an event that somebody else is doing or that you are doing and you have that event be able to have some sort of business celebrity or celebrity in your niche come. That event pays for that. The person comes and you do a live on stage, like we're doing today with Martha Stewart, a live on stage interview for the podcast. Or like we did yesterday for Chip Wilson, right? Or like we're gonna do tomorrow for. I can't tell you who the surprise guest is. Did you guys. I don't know if you guys know, but you'll hear it here first if you don't. Snoop has the covids and so he's not going to be able to make it. He's going to come next year and he's going to do a video announcement of that. And we have a. We have a really cool special guest that is going to come instead of him. Who. We're not going to tell you who it is because I think it's going to be a really cool surprise for you. But anyway, everybody that we have on stage here or anybody that I interview anywhere at an event is part of the podcast. So now I've been able to have Richard Branson and Arnold Schwarzenegger and a bunch of other people on the podcast without having to pay them to do it. And I probably wouldn't have ever gotten them before, but that alone has blown up the subscription to the podcast. And now a lot of people contact me and say, hey, I love the way that you interviewed so and so I'd love to talk to you about maybe working with you. And then I send them what the way I do that is. It's a $25 half day. Right? So whatever you do, you just want to give them a way to get a hold of you and get them into your market funnel. If you don't have a direct conversation, speaking and guest appearing on podcasts is super easy. I don't like doing it because it takes so much time. But I do try to do a few of them a month. You find that once you get into doing podcasts, you could probably do one or three every single day. It's a lot. If you think it's impossible, then there's services that you can retain inexpensively. Get. Magic is one that Steve Sims and a lot of people I know use. And another is Perry Belcher's company, his VA company, ScaleWind. I would definitely talk to Perry about that. If you want to get on a bunch of podcasts, just get a VA to start reaching out. Make the list of your ideal customer, make a list of all those podcasts, and then have an outreach campaign from your email. Okay. Same CTA, YouTube and TikTok, Rachel Peterson. Hopefully you guys all heard. If you didn't, you definitely should watch it. Got up here and she helps us do this. But on YouTube and TikTok and all of the other socials, link in bio. Right? So the link in bio again is designed to get them into your funnel. So all of this just creates the people who are saying, can I pick your brain? Can I ask you a question? And the other things that, oh, can I give you equity in my company? Right. That's what's generally going to happen as you do this. So across all those, and then the one thing that I want to share with you that I think is really, really cool, that is very effective is direct response, cold traffic. And so this is basically reaching out via DMs on social. So I'll kind of walk you through this. The way you find out, how do you know who to DM is, you do it through hashtag research. So you can use a tool like KeywordTool, IO or your favorite keyword tool and then search by hashtags and you can see if I look for E commerce, it's E commerce business. Does this have a. Yeah, it's e commerce business. 718,000 posts. So I would definitely be looking at people who are posting under that. So here I chose E Commerce. E commerce business website. Tips. Commerce Store, though, is the one that I really like. 148,000 posts. People that own E commerce stores are probably going to tag themselves. Ecommerce store. That's a good potential customer for me. Right. So then I'm gonna say, okay, oh, here's another one. E commerce entrepreneur. I love that. So you can search on Instagram as well, right? For hashtags. If you don't want to use a keyword tool okay. Then you can see I found a whole bunch of people that are giving you examples of their e commerce stores. That is somebody I can help. Right. I know how to help that person. Well, now you can reach out to those people and start having a conversation with them. And when I say you, I mean somebody that's doing this for you. Okay. Not you. So you want to close Consulting Mastermind or Intensive Sales, either on the phone from this or via text or in the app. So here's kind of a walkthrough of one that one of my friends sent me. He said he just started out, his brand is a little different. But he said, what's up, bro? That's not him. That's the va. And he's like, I would never say that. So my VA is not going to ever be allowed to say what's up, bro? Again. But what's up, bro? What's going on? Not much. Right. That's the opening. Then we get to the credibility intro. He says, not much. Don't know if you know anything about me. Been in the game for a long time. Flipped over 7,000 houses. Want to reach out and introduce myself. Cool. Credibility. Whatever your credibility is, then more reason why to connect. Right? I'm the founder of the Blankety blank mastermind. Since 2012, we've been around. My team does research on people in the industry that they think this is the connection. Right. That they think would be good. So I wanted to reach out and see if you'd like to come as my guest at the end of the month. Where and when then call to qualify. Okay. For sure. Again, he's not jumping on the phone. This is going to either be if you've got a salesperson. A salesperson, or if it's you and you're good on the phone. It can be you, or you can do it through a salesperson through text or dm, which is what I prefer. Or you can do it. But anyway, any of those combinations is fine. The goal is you want to qualify them to be sure that it works. So for sure. Need to jump on a call before. I just want to get to know anybody before we invite them to come check it out. Let me know if you want to chat. We can talk later today, then set a time for the call and then close and follow up. And this was something that, by the way, was a $40,000 wire that happened over two hours. $40,000 wire that happened over two hours. Okay. So I've got so many people who are selling this way successfully. I really Wanted to share this with you. It is ridiculously effective. It is helpful if you have a verified account so that they know that it's not a scam. Right. So that they know it's actually you and not somebody else. It's also helpful if somebody knows that you're doing this. Like if you teach people how to do it at a conference or something, that you have a verified account so that other people can't say they're you. Okay? But step two, now get paid. So you set your half day fee. I would suggest that you not make it less than $1,500, because if it's less than $1,500, then you're not going to get anybody that's likely to have enough of a business to be worth you doing something with. And you send the same thing that I've given you 20 times now to them. Right. This is very, very repeatable model. Okay? And then I use a half day, half day consulting agreement. It's one page long. The only things you want to be sure that you cover for sure are that you define what you're going to do. To me, the scope of the consult is I'm going to meet with you for four hours. We'll talk about anything that you want to talk about. We can meet with for four hours all at once. Or we can do two hours now and an hour later and an hour later, however you want to do it. Okay? Then the time limit, four hours or whatever you want it to be. Exclude advice that creates liabilities. So say I don't give legal, accounting, financial, medical, you know, architectural, psychological, etc. Advice that creates liability. So you don't have that. You want to exclude any advice that requires a license. And you want to limit your liability in your contract to the amount of fee you get paid. So somebody doesn't say, hey, I paid you $10,000 for this consult and then my website went down and so I've lost, I believe, $10 billion in income that I would have received if it hadn't gone down. This just completely eliminates that. Here's your 10 grand back. We're good. Exclude any incidental damages and I don't include a non disclosure in the document. I have people that ask for it and if they ask for it, I will give it to them. But it's not something to me that you should offer unless somebody asks for it. Because why have additional liability for yourself? I mean, you're not going to share any information you get inappropriately with somebody else. But you might as well protect yourself. And then you might also want to have a non circumvention poaching deal that says that anybody you introduce them to, they're not going to go around and hire them. If you've got valuable people, you send that agreement and wiring instructions. You don't give any advice until you get payment. Remember my story about the guy, right? You just keep on track and then get equity. The equity. Decide how much equity you want. It's very, very simple. I use this worksheet, what's my income goal? How much money do I want to get from this deal? And then what is the target EBITDA that we identified earlier? Right. And then if we divide the income goal by the target ebitda, that's going to tell us our target equity. So let's say that I want to get $10,000 a month out of this deal. My Target EBITDA is 1.2 million. My target equity is 10%. Right. This just helps you figure out how much equity would you like to get in the deal. And then the structure of the deal I mentioned, there's four types. Advisory, that's typically 1/4 point to 5%, 1/4 point to 5%. Just to give advice on whatever you're good at. Operating deals are a little bit different because you're going to do some more work in the company. So Those are typically 5 to 25% the transactional deals where you're helping with funding or exiting or a kind of a one time thing. That's 1% to 20%. I know that's a very broad range, but there's a very broad range of things you might do for this. And then my favorite, which is the performance deal, which is you're earning into equity because you're going to make the business bigger. Those are, I mean 5% I would never do unless it was a giant company. But 5% of a billion dollar company is probably worth doing right to 75%. So a lot of these ranges happen because of that. So step one, get clients. Step two, get paid. Step three, get equity. Really, really simple repeatable formula. If you'd like help doing this stuff yourself, feel free to come by and chat with us over at the DM or scalable booth. If you're certified partners. This is a ridiculously easy way for you to build wealth that you would never otherwise build. And I hope that you guys have found this valuable. And if you do this, when you do this, please, please, please message me and let me know that you did it and how it's working for you because that's very, very fulfilling to share this stuff and then see the people who are using it successfully. Thank you.

Ever wondered how some people build real wealth through acquisitions while others just sit on the sidelines? Well, I'm here to tell you it's not about luck. It's about having the right system, the right deals and the right guidance. And that's exactly what we give you in the EPIC Deal Fast Track. If you've been thinking about buying a business, but you keep getting stuck, whether it's finding the right deal, structuring the financing, or negotiating with sellers, you are not alone. Too many people waste months, even years just thinking about acquiring a business while the real opportunities pass them by. The EPIC Deal Fast Track is not another course. It's actually an implementation program and it's designed to get you from the idea to the acquisition in just 16 weeks or less. We work with you one on one to help you find, fund and close your first or next deal. And once you do, we're going to plug you into our elite EPIC board community so that you can keep scaling through acquisitions. We install three powerful systems in your business. The first is the Deal Flow engine.

So you always have high quality off.

Market deals coming to you.

Number two, we give you our offer.

And funding system so that you can structure offers that get accepted and fund them creatively many times with no money out of your own pocket. And number three, our closing and integration system so that you don't just buy a business, you actually successfully run and scale it once you have acquired it. Plus you'll have direct one on one support from an EPIC Deal Advisor every step of the way. And that's people that have actually come up through the system and done these deals themselves. That's the only way to become an EPIC Deal Advisor. And if you're serious about acquiring a business this year, don't just sit on the sidelines. Just text I'm in to 334-458-9034 and we'll get you in. So text I'm in to 334-458-9034 will get you in. No fluff, no wasted time, just real deal making from people that are actually out there doing deals right now. I'll see you there.