Selling Less and Profiting More with Russ Ruffino, Founder of Clients on Demand

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Instead of trying to sell thousands of copies of something for like, seven bucks, I took something that was like $7,000 and just tried to sell a handful of it and only work with a handful of people.

Yeah.

A, how could I enroll people at that price? B, what would happen? Would they show up more committed? Would they actually do the work in and what would the ultimate result be? So it was kind of this massive experiment because at the time, almost nobody was going from cold traffic into a 5,000 or 8,000 or $10,000 sale. And I was like, well, let me just design a funnel that I think might work. And it did work, and those people did show up committed, and they did do the work, and they did get the result. And I think my income went from about 20k a month to I had like my first $200,000 a month as soon as I got this funnel, cranking it, like literally just 10x my income and my results with. I was getting with my clients. And then I just, I never looked back. And then from there, we scaled and scale. You know where we are today? We're doing around 1.7 million a month right now. And just scaled it up and just like, loving it. Loving every second of it.

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Hey, everybody. Roland Frazier here. Welcome to this episode of Business Launch.

I'm really excited today to have as.

Our guest, Russ Ruffino. Russ, you've got a fantastic company called Clients On Demand. We had you speak at our wonderful war room Mastermind. You're going to be a featured speaker over at Traffic and Conversion Summit. You've done all kinds of stuff. Can you give us kind of a quick background of who you are for everybody here that's watching and listening?

Yeah.

So, like, Roland, thank you. So first of all, thanks for having me here. Yeah. So the company's called Clients On Demand. And what we do is we work with experts, coaches, consultants, thought leaders, and we basically show them how to take their expertise and turn it into a high ticket online program. So it's sold online, it's delivered online. It only takes you a few hours a week to deliver it. And it's something that you can sell for a 5,000, 8,000, $10,000 price. So we cover creating that, marketing it, selling it, the whole nine yards.

And you've, you've, you're kind of meta.

Because you've built a business that teaches basically exactly the business that you've built. And I know lots of folks that are clients of yours that have done amazing and I know we've done some consulting, you know, from you. You've shared some really cool stuff with us. And you've got all these folks that are doing, I know some of them are 80, 90, $100,000 a month. Tell me, like, what is the, what was the background that led you to do this? I'd like to kind of do two things because I got two things I'd like to talk about. One is how you've done, like, what was the story that led you up to where you are and your success and how you're doing now and how you're making it happen. And then I'd like to talk a little bit about the process that you go through to help people do this as well so that everyone can kind of say, I mean, there's not really a better example that I know of of somebody living what they do than you because you literally teach exactly what you do. So can you give us a little bit of like, what got you into this in the first place?

Yeah. So I started out in online marketing in 2011, kind of just doing what everybody else does when they first dip their toes in the water. Started doing like affiliate marketing and then had some success there. And then I started, you know, realized pretty quickly that the real money was in creating my own products and my own stuff. So I started doing that.

What did you sell as an affiliate?

Oh, I don't even remember. I mean, I literally would just go to clickbank or Commission Junction and find anything that I thought looked good. It had to be something that I believed in, could really help people. And then just went out there and just kind of started, you know, promoting it, building different sales videos and promotional pages and, and stuff like that. And the crazy thing was I could just do it. You know, I was a bartender. I'd never tried to do anything online. I didn't know anything about marketing. I didn't have a marketing degree or a background in business at all.

Did you take one course?

Yeah, Yeah, I bought everything I get my hands on, I think.

Yeah.

Russell Brunson, I think, had a course called like 20 Minute Payday. Like, just like, like super bizzapy stuff. Like, Lee McIntyre, I think, had a program and there's like a. Like, it just. I just bought everything I could afford on like my meager bartender salary and then just started trying to put it into practice. And some of the stuff worked, some of it didn't, but the stuff that did work worked really well. And so then I started creating my own products and selling them at like a really, really low ticket price. I mean, like $7, like $27, you know, that sort of thing. And so we would do these launches and I would take a, I don't know, $27 product and sell thousands of copies of it. And, you know, those products, even back then, were always well received. People would always be like, russ, that, you know, that video course you put out, I really enjoyed it. And then mine was like, kind of.

How to stuff it, just how to stuff.

Like, anytime I found something that I did that would. That actually worked, I would create a tutorial so I could, you know, so I could share it with other people and then market that. And, you know, they were always well received people, People always were happy with what they got. Refunds were always really low. Feedback was always really good. But I would, I would have conversations with people who bought my stuff and they'd say, you know, hey, Russ, you know, I really like that video course or whatever that you put out. And I'd say, okay, great, man. What'd you do with it? Tell me about your results. Tell me what you did. And they'd say, oh, well, you know, I got like five other programs I bought that I have to get to first and then I'll finally get around this. So eventually just started to. I started to realize, like, you know, people were buying My stuff. They were happy. I was making money, they were making money, but nobody was really doing anything. And I thought to myself, okay, well, what would happen if I took this model and I kind of just flipped it on its head instead of trying to sell thousands of copies of something for like seven bucks, I took something that was like $7,000 and just tried to sell a handful of it and only work with a handful of people. A, how could I enroll people at that price? B, what would happen? Would they show up more committed? Would they actually do the work and what would the ultimate result be? So it was kind of this massive experiment because at the time, almost nobody was going from cold traffic into a 5,000 or 8,000 or $10,000 sale. And I was like, well, let me just design a funnel that I think might work. And it did work. And those people did show up committed, and they did do the work, and they did get the result. And I think my income went from about 20k a month to I had like my first $200,000 month as soon as I got this funnel, cranking it, like literally just 10x my income and my results I was getting with my clients. And then I just, I never looked back. And then from there we scaled and scaled until, you know where we are today. We're doing around 1.7 million a month right now. And just scaled it up and just like loving it, loving every second of it.

That's awesome. And this is to cold traffic, right? You're running ads. Is that kind of where the people are coming into the funnel?

Yeah.

So the model is really simple. It's just ad, webinar, phone call, new client, that's it. So we run ads on YouTube and Facebook, drive that traffic into a webinar, which is like only a 40 minute webinar. So it's not like one of those big two hour, like long webinars, like 40 minutes. And then on the webinar we invite them to book a call, and then on the call we enroll them straight into one of our high ticket programs. And that's the model we use in our business. It's the same model we teach to our clients. And like most of our clients are in a totally different market. They're in the relationship space or the health space, the dating space, the nutritionists, therapists.

So it's not just like make money online and that? No, no. Like the vast real life businesses. Right.

The vast majority of our clients not in any kind of business building space. In fact, we stopped working with most of those People, because we don't want to just create our own competitors. You know, we don't want people to go out there and take our program and then turn around and teach exactly what we teach. So yeah, the vast majority of our most successful clients are in real estate or other niches. And you know, we got people doing 3, 4, $500,000 a month right now with this model. And it's, it's just simple. It's just a really, really simple, elegant model of that. Like this is what you're left with when you kind of just toss out everything extraneous.

And so who's the ideal customer for that business?

The ideal customer, the way that we frame it is we say it's anybody who can solve a major life or business challenge. So the one thing I can't give you is the expertise. You know, if you're some 16 year old kid working at Pinkberry and you want to have like an $8,000 coaching program, well, you have to have something that you know to teach people or some outcome you're going to help them achieve. So we don't pitch it as like a biz op. Like, hey, you know, screw it, start a coaching business. As long as you've got the expertise though, in any field, we can help you turn that into an online program that you can sell for 5 or 8 or 10k or whatever.

One thing that I really love is, I know one of your case studies is a guy that teaches people how to do handstands are people paying thousands of dollars to learn how to do handstands.

So this was one that we got that, I'll be honest, I was kind of iffy about. When he first came on, they were like, look, this guy's a handstand coach. He's super motivated. He really wants to be here. And I actually got on a call with him when, after he signed up. And I cause whenever we have someone join the program that I'm not 100% on, I always sit down with that person. I say, look, you know, handstands, I don't know if this is going to work. We've never done this before. You know, if you're willing to give it a shot, we're willing to give it a shot. But this isn't something that I can say, hey, this is going to be a slam dunk. And he was like, no, let's go for it, let's try it. And so what it was was it's not just doing a handstand, it's doing like a Press up into a handstand, which if you're in yoga or fitness or whatever, is like the holy grail. So we found out that, yeah, when you pinpoint the right customer, which in his case was like yoga people, fitness people, ironman people, spartan race people, people that are really into fitness with those people, they were more than willing to pay. And I think he was charging $7,000 for that handstand program and getting amazing.

I would never imagine that to be possible. That's so cool.

Yeah, well, because we also connected it to what the ultimate benefit was like, doing that handstand is cool, but it's a symbol for sort of all these other things. Like, you'll never have back pain for the rest of your life. You'll never have shoulder pain for the rest of your life. You'll probably literally be like an inch taller when you nail this down. So there's all this cascade of benefits. And we were able to sort of tap into that so that it became about more than just, you know, hey, do a handstand.

That's really cool.

So if you were like, if you.

Were starting over right now and you didn't have this to teach people how to do this, what would you do?

Well, there's certain principles that I think just work. So charging a high ticket price I think just works. I think going directly for that high ticket sale just works. So as long as I knew how to do that and as long as I understood the principle behind it, then I could take any life problem, like marriage problem, health problem, whatever, and build a program around it that's designed to solve that problem. And once you do that, that is something that you can sell for a high ticket price. So once I discovered this and discovered that it really is possible to take people from cold traffic to like enrolling them at a high ticket price. There's. Why would I do I just. To me, it was like, why would I do anything else? You know, I mean, unless you're building.

So you just find something. You'd find something that you could teach that would add the value and then you'd go straight into high ticket. And most people say that you have to do a low end thing first. You have to do the like a $7 thing, and then that leads to a $500 thing, and that leads to a $5,000 thing. Do you think you're leaving money on the table by going straight to the high ticket or should you go down from that? Like, you have the 5k thing? They can't afford to buy that. So you sell them a $500 thing. What are your thoughts on that value ladder thing?

So we know that you don't have to warm someone up. So what people have to understand is that at each stage you lose people. So only a certain percent of people are going to take that $7 thing, and only a certain percentage people are going to take the $27 thing. And if those are the only people that you actually end up offering that 10k thing to, I don't think there's any more likelihood that those people are going to buy. And in fact, I think that in some ways a low ticket offer actually filters out the most committed people. So in other words, if you're dealing with like a really big challenge in your life, let's say your marriage isn't working, that's a big problem. And I come to you and I say, hey, buy this $7 thing. It's gonna fix your marriage. Like, you know, it's not gonna fix your marriage. And so you're gonna say, ah, whatever, and you're gonna, you're gonna go look somewhere else. But if I come to you and say, hey, check out this webinar, come and talk to us. It's a $10,000 program, but it will save your marriage. And that's something that now you have to take seriously because you go, wait a minute, maybe these people really, if this is 10k, maybe these people really have something here. Maybe this can really help me. And so I think that by offering people the low ticket thing, you actually end up filtering out some of the most committed people. And that's just the way people sell high ticket stuff. I mean, when you go to a dealership to buy a Rolls Royce, they don't like, you know, sell you a keychain and then sell you floor mats and then a T shirt and then work their way up to, you know, they sell you the freaking car.

So.

And then as far as how the back end goes, you're probably right. We probably are leaving some money on the table there by not having a downsell. It's just that I don't know what that downsell would be. So for us, we probably could sell like an information only version of our program that like, didn't have any support to it. But I worry about that because it's like one of the things we teach is Facebook ads. And if I just teach you how to do Facebook ads, but I don't really coach you through it, chances are it's like giving a stick of dynamite to a kid. You're going to lose a lot of money before you crack the code on that. So for me it's more like I'd rather just have you buy the high ticket thing where I'm 100% confident I can get you results, than the low ticket thing where it becomes iffy. But that's just a value choice for me. It probably would make more sense to have a down seller.

I wonder because to me it seems like the downsell, well on either side, whether it's a pre sale to the high ticket or a downsell that it kind of takes the pressure off of like I get the $7 thing, people are like, ah, that's not going to be, that's just, you know, it's not deep enough. But the $500 thing or the thousand dollar thing might be something that they feel like, well, I'll go through that first. And then most people as we know never do. And also they wouldn't be as committed because they didn't have as much skin in the game to actually do the thing. Because if you pay seven grand for something or 10 or 12 or whatever, you're going to be a whole lot more likely I think, to go through it. And then I'm wondering, so this leads to my next question in terms of immediate sale versus follow up sales. Because if you had a down sell, it could really hurt the follow up sales if it took that pressure off. Exactly what percentage of the people do you find throughout all of your clients because you got a ton of them. What percentage would you roughly say of the people who get on a high ticket sales call close on that call versus on follow up of the total buyers?

Last time we pulled these numbers, about 95% of our enrollments happen on the very first call.

Do they really?

Yeah. And the ones that don't tend to be like where the person left the deposit or something or it's like, oh, I just got to move some money around. Let me give you $1,000 right now. And then circle back with me on Friday because I got to move money into the account. But yeah, we don't really do follow ups. We just don't, you know, we're getting like 30 to 35 people a day reaching out to talk to us. I have five people on the phone. And so they do follow ups when it really makes sense to do them. But for the most part it's just like right there on that first call. And I think the reason that works is in a way it's an easy decision. Do you want to get this outcome or do you not want to get this outcome? If you do, great, it's whatever, you know.

What do you think the importance is of. Do you use a schedule call kind of thing?

Yeah, we use calendly. So people come in and they watch the webinar and then they go to the link and then right there is the calendar where they book their appointment in right there at the time that they want.

And do you, have you tried kind of live calls having it do a round robin number hunt and give it to a live salesperson versus scheduling appointment? And have you seen any difference between those two?

If you have, we've never tried like giving people like call 1-800-Russ is amazing. And then it gets routed to a person. No, we haven't done that actually.

Please tell me you have that number.

I don't have that one but we actually registered a couple of them. But no, actually that's one thing that we've never tested because it just requires a whole different kind of coverage and a much larger team. And so no, we don't have that going.

Have you tried outsourced sales versus in house sales and do you have any thoughts on that?

We haven't had a lot of success with outsourced sales team and we have tested it. So I spend just so you know, I mean like we spend around $800,000 a year just trying to like break this model. So like testing what if we sent people here, what if we sent people there? What if it was a 10 minute webinar VSL into a call, you know. And we've never found anything that beats the control that beats just add webinar phone call, new client. And one of the things that we have tested is using an outside sales team. And so the problem with that, number one is that it's very difficult to find someone that's aligned with our values. And what I mean by that is that like, you know, look in, in online marketing everyone's like oh you know, this isn't for everybody. This is only for you if blah, blah blah. But we really mean it. And so we don't even make an offer to about 20% of the people we speak to on the phone. That's how seriously we take it. And you know, when you've got a commission based outside sales team, you know, most of them, they just want to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. And so getting them to be protective of the company and protective of the client and not enroll someone unless they're 100% sure they're a fit that is difficult. And the other thing too is we just found. So there's the value gap and then there's also the skill gap where teaching people the way that we do sales, we do it in a very different way than most of what's taught. It's very consultative, it's very open. It's much more about guiding the client to make the right decision for them as opposed to just get the credit card. But for this, it works because it really establishes that trust and it sets up that coaching relationship beautifully where they know, like we have their best interests at heart. And, you know, and again, you know, just going back to why we don't do a low ticket thing using this strategy. We've been profitable on our ad spend since day one and Facebook ad costs have gone up. When we first started doing this, we were making about $10 for every dollar we spent on advertising. I think today it's like seven or eight dollars. So, you know, just cutting out anything extraneous. It's worked very well for us.

That's pretty great. That's a 7, 8x ROAS is not a bad place to live, especially because it's a high ticket program.

Right.

It's so much easier because it's not $50, $29 kind of thing.

Yeah. For something like that, it might cost you, I don't know, two, $300 to make that $27 sale. And now you're hoping you can make that up on the back end. And some people do that. But it's like if you can be profitable right from the get go, it's like, why not?

So you start your value ladder really high. Do you have a value ladder that goes beyond whatever initial thing that you do?

Yeah. So we have our eight week program and then on the back of that we have a one year mastermind. And that one year mastermind is 24k for the year. And then we have a higher level mastermind on top of that. That's for the people that really want to go to like multiple seven figures. And that program is 85k for the year. So that's sort of the value ladder we have like the one and then. And then people can graduate into the other.

Hey, business hunch listeners, we're going to get right back to this show, but Roland wanted me to invite you to a brand new training that he's doing on acquiring businesses with no money out of pocket. It's something that he's talked quite a bit about on the show, but he's doing a Free training, where he's going to walk through the entire process. So if you want to get access to that, go to businesslunchpodcast.com epic that's businesslunchpodcast.com epic and you can get signed up.

That's great. And for the 20% of the people that don't get the offer to come in, what are the things that you feel disqualify people from coming in and why did you choose those things?

So obviously there's certain groups of people that we just can't work with. We can't work with copycats. Like, if someone comes to us and says, hey, I teach coaches how to enroll high ticket clients, it's like, okay, well, you know, we're not going to have you come in and just copy our program and sell it, right? Yeah. So there's that. And then it really just comes down to, you know, like, do we think this person has a viable high ticket offer? You know, someone comes to us and says, hey, you know, I teach people how to play the accordion. You know, I'm Italian, I love the accordion. You know, who doesn't love the accordion? Is that going to be an $8,000 program? I don't know. I mean, unless you're teaching people how to, like, do it at the professional, like, orchestra level, you know, so we have to sort of make that judgment right there on the call about whether they have a high ticket offer or not. The other thing is whether or not that market is one that's reachable. Sometimes people have a very, very, very narrow target audience. You know, like, I only work with the CEOs of companies doing over a billion dollars a year. It's like, okay, well, there's not that many of those people. And so, you know, running Facebook ads is not the best way to reach that audience. And so that's another call that we have to make right there on the, on the, on the phone.

That's pretty cool. You teach them how to get the salespeople how to do the Facebook ads, the whole nine yards, we do it with them.

So in other words, I'll show you how to do the Facebook ads. But then we have a whole team of Facebook coaches on staff that will go in and like on a zoom call or whatever, look inside your account. We'll look at exactly what your targeting settings are, exactly what your bidding settings are and all that stuff, and just really, really hands on, make sure everything is set up correctly.

Because.

And that's what we have to do to get people results. Because you could be the smartest guy in the world. And you are a very, very intelligent person. But Facebook ads is like, it's a whole minefield. You know, you can have one setting in your account that's off and it can screw your whole campaign. So it's just a very, very, very hands on program where you might not have the skill in copywriting. Okay, great. We have copywriters who will help you. You don't have the skill in Facebook. We have Facebook people, we even have mindset and performance people who will help you through self sabotage and self doubt and overwhelm and fear and on all those things. Because that's the entrepreneurial condition, sort of. That's the stuff that comes up when you're operating outside your comfort zone. So we have people there to coach you through that too.

That's really cool. So for you, like kind of moving from you were running affiliate products and then you kind of came up with your own thing. How did you go about building the team? Because a lot of people get stuck in that. They're doing everything and they don't really know how to hire people and they haven't got any experience with it. Do you have any kind of tips or strategies or thoughts on that?

So essentially, there's certain obvious things that I think people overlook. Like you want to be a cool person to work for. And I think, I think that runs into a lot of people's problems. Like, I mean, honestly, like if you're someone that has trouble getting along with people, that's going to affect the kind of people that you can hire. And I think that's sort of the last place people look sometimes is you have to look at yourself and say, look, am I, am I cool to like, am I cool to deal with as a boss? You know, that's like, you know, and you, and if you're not, you gotta fix that about yourself or people aren't gonna stick around very long, even if you get the right people. But as far as prioritizing what you should delegate and what you shouldn't, you know, for every business owner I've ever met, there might be two or three things that you're just absolutely brilliant at, you know, like, so for you, Roland, like putting together deals and joint ventures and stuff, you have a mind for that like nobody else I've ever seen. And so for me, every moment in your company that you're not doing that, it's in a way it's costing you money. Cause you're doing something that's kind of outside Your zone of genius or whatever you wanna call it. So for me, I make a list of like, okay, what's everything I did today? And what's the stuff that's like right in the pocket of what I love to do that I'm brilliant at? And anything that's not on that list, it should be delegated to someone else. And it's tough because there's an ego element in that. And I had to go through this too. Well, nobody can coach my client on a webinar except me because I'm the best webinar person who ever lived, you know, and of course that's not true, you know, so you have to surrender a lot of that stuff if you want to grow your company. But the way that I look at it is, I look at it like this. It's not my job to change people's lives. It's my job to build a machine that changes people's lives. And that when I realized that, set me free from wanting to be the guy that's hand holding each and every client. Because that's a limitation. It's like if Steve Jobs said, well, I got to build all these computers myself, no one knows how to build this except me, they never would have gotten an Apple out of his garage, you know?

Right.

You have to surrender those sort of ego parts that, that come up in you and block you from building a great company.

And as far as the, like you mentioned training people to kind of replace you, how do you deal with the concern a lot of entrepreneurs have that I think holds them back, that you train those people and then they're going to go out and compete against you. How do you mentally deal with that?

I think you just have to be upfront with people from the get go. I mean, so whenever I bring someone on, we actually just brought a bunch of people on. So I actually literally just had this conversation. But you're, you sit down and you get a really clear sense of where they want to go and where they want to be. Are they somebody that has that entrepreneurial bug where they have to be running their own company, or are they more motivated by security? Where it's like, hey man, I want you to take all the risk, I want you to deal with all the bs and I just want a place where I can flourish. The other thing is you have to create space for those people to shine. You know, I think we both know business owners where it's like they have to be the person on stage, they have to be the person in the spotlight. They have to get the glory. And you start to realize that their business is about fueling their serving their ego more than it's about like serving the client and serving their team. If you can get away from that, then you can really hire people that they want to. You can let them shine and express themselves and do all this amazing stuff, but they're doing it under your umbrella where, like, you're going to deal with the liability and you're going to deal with the risk and you're going to deal with spending, you know, however much on advertising. And most people don't want to deal with that kind of stuff, you know?

Right.

So you can find people that are brilliant at what they do, but they just don't want to deal with the risk, man. And if you can create a place for them to shine where they really get to be the star, you know, they get to really show up in an amazing way and express themselves beautifully, then I think you're not going to have a problem attracting some really great people and keeping them around.

That's, to me, a really, really great take on that. And I think that just answers it. There are people that are entrepreneurs, there are people that aren't. Don't hire an entrepreneur because the entrepreneur will be your competition tomorrow after you train them up. Right, of course.

And of course they might lie to you or whatever, but after a while you get pretty good at telling the difference between someone that really, you know, really wants to run their own show and someone that's more than comfortable just helping you build your vision into something great. And the other thing I'll say too real quick is that you must remind your team about the impact that they're making. So this isn't true for every industry, but in our industry, like, we're really making a difference in the lives of our clients. And so when we have a client who has a win, we celebrate that win and we celebrate every single person in the company who contributed to that win. Because like, you know, if you're working at Subway or something, like you're making sandwiches or whatever, but you're not like changing lives when you're in the coaching business. You're changing people's lives. And so there's this whole contribution piece that most people just don't get in their job that they get to have here.

In terms of lifestyle, how do you like, what does your lifestyle look like right now? Are you working 80 hours a week, are you working the four hour work week or somewhere in between and tell us kind of where you sit right now, I know you got a beautiful home that we got to, to hang out at with that dinner one night there on the cliffs in CDR or CDM I guess it is, right?

Yeah. So I spend, I would say about six hours a week maybe on client support that I'm involved with. And that's mostly involving that people, those people in our highest level mastermind. That mastermind we are. It's hands on and we enjoy it. So there's that. Then I spend, I don't know, maybe three, four hours a week meeting with my team, just making sure the trains are running on time, so to speak, and all that stuff. And all the rest of my time is devoted to scaling the company. So I want to go from where we are now, which is, you know, 15, 20 million a year, ish, to you know, I think we can get to nine figure territory if we're really smart about it. So that's where the lion's share of my time is going. But if I was like, hey man, I just want to let this thing do its thing and just kind of stay where we're at, honestly, I would barely have to do anything. And my father had some really serious health problems earlier this year. And so I had to, you know, bring my, my top people on and say, hey guys, listen, I am not going to be around because I got to help my dad through this thing and I'm going to be gone for I don't even know how long. And so I was completely, completely disengaged from the company for like a month and everything was fine. And we actually had our best month ever that month. So that made me go, wait a minute, maybe I'm in the way here. But yeah, so, yeah, so you can have tremendous, tremendous freedom if you want because you're not working with that many clients. I mean, even at, even at the level we're at now, I mean we're enrolling between 80 and 100 clients a month. That's us doing over $1 million a month. I mean, if you want to have a business that's doing $100,000 a month, you need 20 people at 5 grand or 10 people at 10 grand. I mean, serving 10 people doesn't take that much time.

What do you think is going to help you get to the, to the nine figures? Is it just spend more money on ads or do you bump up against scale challenge there and you have to do something else? What, what are your thoughts on that? Well, if you don't feel comfortable.

No, no, sure. Sure, sure. Yeah. You do bump up against the scale challenge. And part of that is that, you know, we do have a narrow market, right? So our market is coaches and consultants who have some expertise. There's only so many of those people. And the interesting thing is that a lot of our clients don't have that constraint. My clients, Megan Alfred in Australia, they have a marriage coaching offer and they're brilliant at it. Their success rate is unbelievable. But how many people have marriage problems? I mean, you're talking about hundreds of maybe billions of people. So it's about overcoming that challenge, right? Is how do you find the scalability? It's about finding additional value adds. So one of the things we're going to be doing is developing a software for our clients because there's a huge gap in the marketplace that we see for that. And I mean, it really is just ramping up, ramping up what we do. And the other thing too is we have to be circumspect about how quickly we scale the company. Tim Ferriss was talking about this on his podcast where he doesn't endorse service businesses anymore. He calls it the hug of death because he'll be like, hey, you know, if you need a logo design to go check out this logo designer, right? And like a million people will sign up to get their logo done. And there's one poor guy going like, oh, God, how do I crank out these logos? So for us, it's like we have to balance the growth of the company with still being able to provide a really amazing service. So my goal is the bigger we get, the better I want our service to get. Because usually the bigger you get, the more the service just goes like that. And so that's always a balancing act as well.

That's great. What would you say if you were going to recommend, Obviously, everybody should take your course, and I'm going to get some information to them on that here in a minute. But what if you were saying some business books or any other resources that have had the biggest impact on you that you would recommend to people or that you do recommend or give to people, what would you say three to five of those are?

I'm just like looking at my bookshelf right now, by the way. So obviously everybody should read the Four Hour Workweek. I have to give a shout out to Tim. That was the book that changed my life. I didn't even know online entrepreneurship existed until I read that book. It just completely changed my take on things. And the whole chapter in there about dealing with Fear is like the best thing I've ever read. I'd also highly, highly recommend Principles by Ray Dalio. That's probably one that you recommend. It's not an easy read, but it kind of reads like stereo instructions in places. But if you really need it. Yeah, you know, well, you could just.

You know, there's an illustrated version that's much, much more accessible.

Yeah, yeah. Like the coloring book or whatever.

Yeah, no, there is. There's an actual illustrator.

There's actually an app too, that's got. And this is something people might not know about. There's an app, and I think it's free or it's like two bucks or something where it's got the text of the book in it, but then it also has all these videos, case studies and things that just make it a lot easier to understand. I just think the guy's so off the charts smart that, you know, he's trying to press his brilliance into this book anyway. That's highly recommended. This book absolutely changed my life. It's a book called Letting Go by David R. Hawkins. Really, this book is all about how to let go and surrender negative emotions. When you're building a business, you're going to deal with fear, you're going to deal with guilt, you're going to deal with self doubt, you're going to deal with anger. Somebody wants a refund. You're like, you know, you have haters, you know, all that stuff. This book blew my mind. It changed my life because it showed me how to let go of all of that stuff. And what I've found, Roland, is that, you know, the physical activities of running a business. Right, building a webinar, running Facebook ads, those have a certain level of difficulty, but really it's not that tough. What makes it tough is when you're at war with yourself every step of the way. Well, how can I have this difficult conversation with this employee? Oh my God, what if they leave? What if they walk? Well, this guy wants a refund. Well, you know, he doesn't deserve one. How can I have that conversation? And you're fighting yourself every step of the way. When I read this book and I implemented what it said, that just stopped. It just. It changed my. Literally changed my life. Can't recommend it enough. Amazing book.

I love that. I'm going to grab that book. That's awesome.

Yeah. If you take your time and read it, it's a good one. So I'd say, honestly, those are my top three. And then also there's a guy named Joseph Murphy, who died in like 1985. But he wrote a lot of really great books about conditioning your mindset for success and all that stuff. And those are absolutely fantastic as well. So I read those a lot. Like, it's just one of those things where I'll pick up. All of his books are basically the same. So I just pick up one and just read through it and just immediately I'm inspired. So those are probably.

I love that. I'm going to check those out. That's awesome. Thank you. Hey, so for people that would love to find out more about how to build a business like you've built or since you also help them do that, get their own done, what are the best ways for people to reach out and learn more about what you do and all that kind of good stuff.

Simplest thing to do is probably just book a call with our team and you can do that at clients on demand.com talk. We'll get on the phone for like an hour and just. You can, we'll just dig in your business, tell us what's working, what's not working, what you've been doing that is working for you. The stuff, you know, clients you don't want to work with, clients you do want to work with and put our heads together and come up with a plan about how you can move things forward. And, you know, if you want us to help you do that, cool. If not, that's cool too. But either way, it's that one call will massively give you clarity on exactly what you should be doing in your marketing. And there's usually for most people who book that call, like 90% of the stuff you've been doing you can stop doing, which is that alone is just great.

That's awesome. Thanks. So it's clients plural on demand.com talk talk. Okay, great. Now you mentioned at the beginning that you were a bartender, so I gotta ask, what's your favorite drink?

My favorite drink. I'm a rum guy now.

Yeah.

So yeah, I recently converted rum guy. So we just. I just did an event in Miami. I took my leadership team to this villa in Turks and Caicos and they just had like incredible like old, like 30 year old, like rum there. And I was like, oh my God, this is the most delicious thing I've ever tasted. So of course I came back, went online, ordered like $3,000 worth of rum. So like now I'm like, I'm all about just, hey, just rum, no ice, no nothing. Just really good old dark rum. That's my thing.

You're going to do me a favor and text me your address. And I've got one I'm going to send you. I also happen to be a big fan of those. And I like the old rumors, pretty much what I've found. And rums are great values too, I think. But anything that gets old, like cognac, bourbon, you know, rum, tequila, it all becomes kind of cognac y. It gets like this caramelized kind of cool. And it's just so, so good. So that's awesome. Do you have one that you know of off the top of your head that you really like, that you want? I've been drinking recommend to people.

I mean, I ordered like a bunch of them, but most of them haven't had a chance to taste yet. I've been drinking one called Zafra. I think 30 Zafra's 30 year. And it's nice especially. That's awesome.

I got something fun for you then. That's awesome.

Okay, cool.

Hey, Duke, thanks. Thank you for being here today and sharing and being so open with everybody. I really appreciate it. Clients on demand. Russ Rufino, look forward to connecting with you at TNC here in about two weeks. Three weeks. Pretty close.

Yeah. Thank you, Roland. I mean, you're an absolute genius. And thanks.

Thanks, Russ.

You've been listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. If you're enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing and leaving a review. And for more information, go to businesslunchpodcast.com thank you for listening.

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