Reacting to My Own Speaking Event (Honest Thoughts)

Here we go. First reaction here. So this week we're actually hosting an event here in our offices with one of our marketing partners, Tax Hive. This is actually the Tax Hive building. We occupy the south part of it. And what's really cool about this in-person event, we've been doing this now for like 3 years. Every single month, Tax Hive customers come to this office. We actually brainstorm and have a bunch of different topics and speakers. I'm speaking at the event talking about marketing. Bruh, I gotta get some Botox. First reaction is my wrinkles. You can see my wrinkles. They're producing. I'm really starting to show my age here. Those of you that have never hosted an in-person event before and you just wanna maybe see what it would look like? We're gonna take you behind the scenes, show you what we're doing this week. Also, maybe some new clients that were onboarding should be a fun time. Something with the eyes— I look tired. Maybe that's 'cause I have a 4-month-old at home who's screaming in the middle of the night but here we go. Time! [MUSIC] What, what, what? You hear that?

Is he gonna hit again?

Where did you find that song?

Just Artlist.

That's cool, man.

Yeah.

You wanna know what it's giving? It's kind of giving like John Wick. I'm thinking of like John Wick entering a club, like a club about ready to just go merc a ton of Humes. I think they were playing like that exact same song. Couple things about having a successful event. Number 1, you gotta have food. You can't give them a reason to leave the event, so you wanna make sure you're catering meals and containing all the excitement as much as possible. Which, by the way, I'm not some professional speaker. Like, I honestly kinda suck. The thing I do well, though, is I have a really good object lesson that I'll do with cash, which you guys will see. Okay, so she just gave me a dollar. I've got a fat stack of ones right here. "Okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to give her 1, 2, 3, 4, $5 back." Okay, so I actually think this is just a little too long. Okay, so I want you to essentially make this a little shorter. Which one am I looking at? Am I looking at this one? Am I looking— You can look at both, dude.

Okay, alright.

It's totally up to you. The other thing you got to do is you got to make sure you're speaking with energy, okay? I would challenge that notion. It's hard. But there's money to be made in figuring it out. A lot of money. If you say the exact same thing, and it's really valuable information, but you deliver it like this, "Hey guys, I'm excited to be here today." No one's gonna listen. It's gotta be over the top. This is so true. In your natural way of speaking, like, it's kinda the same way on camera. You wanna make sure you're doing it like 2 times, 3 times as over the top energetic as you probably normally would. And then yes, absolutely, if you're the right fit and you wanna work with us, you don't wanna do it yourself, you're like, Tanner, "Hey, I don't wanna even touch this, I just wanna hand it over to you guys." Great, we can have that conversation. Any other questions? That's gonna naturally help you, I think, have more success than anybody else. The other thing that's a fine line is trying to provide a ton of value and kind of solidify your authority and your expertise, but not overwhelming people. Because if they feel totally overwhelmed, it's just gonna be demotivating. So you gotta give them just enough information that they're really excited, they believe you, you're credible, they have all the authority, That way you can actually tee up a really effective backend and sell them something so you can actually make money. Because ultimately, doing in-person events is great, but it costs money to throw the event. You have to have a predictable way and an engine to generate revenue and create solid offers. So what I'm gonna walk you through is my presentation that I give. I won't show the whole thing because it's super long, it's about an hour. You'll see snippets of it, how we do it, how we tee it up, and you'll actually see after I give people the opportunity to book appointments with me here in my office, me and my team physically meet with them, we walk through their businesses, And ultimately we're selling our marketing services to support them. So hopefully this is valuable and helpful. And if you want to do this to grow your own business, give it a shot.

This is what made me 3 locations instead of, oh yeah, they went out of business and shut their doors 8 or 9 months in, right? So I can't give this guy enough credit and applause. He's a dear friend of mine now. And the business partnership is thriving with Club Pickleball and with Syndicate and so many other partnerships that Syndicate does the marketing for., and so will you guys give a very warm welcome, put your hands together for my friend Tanner Smith.

Was a small group. We normally have more people there. Devin gave me some simple instructions. You ready for it? Teach these guys everything you know about marketing in 45 minutes.

Ah.

So I'm gonna do my absolute best that I can do here. We're gonna talk really, really fast. I'm gonna try to give as much value as I possibly can. If there are questions, write them down. We'll actually have dedicated time for Q&A. Afterwards. Now, what I want to do is ask a quick question here. Who here has a dollar bill? Single dollar bill? I'm going to make it worth your while. Let's see. Debbie's going to give me a dollar here. Here we go. Perfect. Yeah, single dollar bill. Single.

Yup.

Okay. So, she just gave me a dollar. I've got a fat stack of ones right here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to give her 1, 2, 3, 4, $5 back. Who else wants to play? Who else has a dollar? He's going to give me a dollar here. Perfect! Chad from Oklahoma just gave me a dollar. I'm gonna take that dollar, I'm gonna give him back 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Now we can keep playing that. He's got a dollar here, I got a $20, I got a $100. Listen, my stack is gonna run out if we keep playing, but the moral of the story is that this is advertising. This is marketing. I love it. I feel like I'm on an episode of Dr. Phil when they're doing like the mini-docs. Like introing the story, and like cuts back to the person, like they're like sitting in, that's awesome. That's like Oprah Winfrey, you know?

Yeah.

Like mini-doc music. We wanna try to create a system, a process, a machine where we can put $1 in and get— Let's just show some apreesh for the mustache though. I mean, mustache looks good on camera. Looking good. I do think I need to trim it up though on the sides, getting a little bushy, but.

Tanner Smith.

Tanner Smith. You guys represent the dollars you're giving me are your hard-earned advertising dollars, okay? And if you learn how to play what I call the game of digital marketing or the game of digital real estate at a high level, that's all we're doing. We're trading our ad dollars for revenue. And if you feel overwhelmed with doing this for your business, that's okay. It's not your fault. Things are changing all the time. What I wanna walk you through are principles and laws where if you really internalize them, you really learn it, Okay, you're gonna be able to take those laws and apply them to any platform, any system, and any point in time in the future. What you have to have is this entire process figured out. Okay, so let's dive into it. Talk about messaging. Messaging is the foundational pillar of all of this. There are 4 things you have to consider to make sure your messaging is on point. The first thing is what we call understanding the competitive landscape. So if you're a— competitive tax business, you know, thinking to yourself, man, Tax Hive is a competitor of mine. They're running all of these ads. They got all these customers, right? How am I going to start to compete with them? Well, at a minimum, you should go see exactly what they're doing so you can rip off and duplicate parts of their process, their funnel, their messaging, their ad creatives that are working. And if an ad has been running for an extended period of time on Facebook ad library, let's see, uh, let's say the average is like a week to 2 weeks and there's an ad that's been running for 6 months. What does that tell us?

It works.

It's working. So rather than try to reinvent the wheel, why not just let your competitors tell you exactly what's working well and that way you can go and customize it to your offer, your product, your service, and have a much higher probability of success. It's very overwhelming to keep up with all of this and I even have a CRM which took me about a year in the chapter industry to knock it down. You agree that if you don't have a CRM, don't waste your money without CRM, right? Like, you have to have something. You don't have to have a CRM, but you have to have a way to track it. Some clients we've worked with don't have a CRM, but they have Google Sheets. Google Sheets is free. How are you tracking the leads? How are you putting notes in that Google Sheet? How are you tracking those? You have to have something, so yes. Now let me say one thing on this before we move on. It's so overwhelming. It's so hard. I don't know what to do as a business owner. Guess what? You can either look at it like, "It's so hard. I'm getting burned out." Or you can change your approach. Guess what? If it's hard for you, it's hard for everyone. Guess where the money is made? In figuring it out. Money, man, zell. That's your moat. As a business owner, if you can figure it out when other people aren't willing to do so, Guess what? So much easier to make money. Simple as that. Guess what? I make my money, all of my money with my agency because business owners don't wanna figure out how to run ads. I have the exact same access that you have. I just figured out how to run ads. Simple as that. So I would challenge that notion. It's hard, but there's money to be made in figuring it out. A lot of money.

Hey, Tanner.

Work for me.

Listen, this is full disclosure. We signed up with Syndicate, what, 2 months ago?

You're not a plant.

I'm not.

Okay. I am not a plant. Literally, we just signed up for the, for API.

When we got on the call, you said you were coming to this event.

Yes. And I shot you guys an email. So I'm checking you in real time. You're saying, well, not everybody's happy with our first thing, but it's changed. You know, it's going to change and we're working on it and we're going to find out what works. Biggest profit margin in our business is blinds. We've never had a big blinds In 6 years, we've never had people come off the website for Blinds4Us. And I put in Blinds Tillamook and we are number 1 against Budget Blinds, which I am freaking out. Honestly, I just— I didn't think I heard a word you said because as soon as I pulled that up, I lost all consciousness.

I'm going to give you guys some context with Kurt. I did lace my presentation to go after him a little bit because—

I don't care about the minutia. Google is way too complicated. You have to have pieces that— you have to have tentacles everywhere to get Google to play ball with you. We learned that through everybody we went with. And I'm just, I mean, I just had the last conversation before we went with you. We needed more. We kept begging for 3 years. We need more blind's attention. And there we, and I can't believe it.

And I will say this about Kurt too. Kurt is a perfectionist, which I love working with perfectionists. But he is learning that it doesn't matter how something looks, it matters how something performs. And so as we keep rolling that out, the results are getting even better. His results are going to be even better. Okay. Any other questions? That's great.

That was good.

Thank you for your time. You guys have been great. Okay, so we just need an outro. Like, wait, wait, the video just ends? Like, what? What? Like, I'm— this is like— It's not done, but it is done. So my take on this is we just need an outro. I don't know, did you guys even like this video? Was it dumb? I feel like it kinda doesn't make sense, but we're gonna ship it anyways because guess what, that's kinda the point of this channel is I'm just gonna full send. I'm just gonna full send. We're just gonna open the kimono, show you what's going on, and let you in behind the scenes. So anyways, maybe this was helpful, maybe you gleaned something from this that's valuable. If you're gonna do a presentation or you're looking to get on stage, maybe you learned something from this. But at a minimum, hopefully it was valuable. See you on the next one. Bye.