Latest / The Daily Writer / Grow Your Business By Borrowing Other People's Audiences | Bryan Harris

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Grow Your Business By Borrowing Other People's Audiences | Bryan Harris · The Daily Writer

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: Hey friends, welcome back to the Profitable Writer Podcast.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: If you're new here, my name is Kent Sanders.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'm an author and ghostwriter, and this is the show that helps you grow your impact and income as a writer.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: Well, no matter what your product or service, and no matter what type of books you write or publish, you need to grow your audience.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: Because ultimately your business depends on people and their willingness to buy from you.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why I'm really excited today to feature this incredible interview with Brian Harris, CEO of Growth Tools, which is a monthly coaching and done-for-you partner matching service that makes it nearly impossible to fail at getting more customers.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: They combine proven growth playbooks, one-on-one coaching, peer support, and matching you with your best fit partners who will promote your offer so that you're never overwhelmed, stuck, or left wondering what to do next.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: So in this episode, I had a chance to talk to Brian about an innovative and very successful method of growing your audience, which is borrowing other people's audiences.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: Brian has had great success with this method over the years, and he shares which audiences to borrow, how to borrow them, and what to do afterwards.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: Brian and I also talk quite a bit about ghostwriting, and he gives some fantastic advice for connecting with clients and dealing with some of the problems that can come up when you're doing client work.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I've got to tell you, I was blown away not just by Brian's strategies and his business knowledge, but also by his humility and his honesty.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: He talks about some of his own mistakes and disappointments in business, which is something, of course, that all of us can relate to, but uh it's not something that everybody shares on public podcasts, and I really, really appreciated that, and I know that you will also.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: Brian and his team at Growth Tools have also been kind enough to put together a very cool page of resources that he mentioned during the conversation.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: And this is not just some random static page on the Growth Tools website.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: This is an actual list of resources that he made while we were talking, so this is completely customized for profitable writer listeners.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: And just the fact that Brian did that could give you some indication of how cool the guy that he is.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: You can grab that list of resources by going to growth tools.com slash Kent.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's K-E-N-T.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's growthtools.com slash Kent.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: And you can also learn more about Growth Tools by visiting their site at growthtools.com.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: Here is my very fun, inspiring, and informative conversation with the amazing Brian Harris.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: Brian, so excited to talk to you.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: As I mentioned uh before I hit record on this, I've been following your your stuff with video fruit and now growth tools for a really long time.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: I just want to take this opportunity to say thank you for all the amazing content you've put out over the years to help writers, to help people who are not necessarily business-minded, but they love the creative side of things.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: You've done an incredible job.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you for all that, and also for joining me here today.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's good to have you.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit surreal.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is our 12th year uh in business, which I'm just shocked we're still around and still exist.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's like just a wild ride in entrepreneurship plan.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and started for the first six years.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote a blog almost every day, a blog post almost every day, kind of detailing out the things I wanted to know, which is like how do you get people, random people on the internet to pay you money?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: People that didn't know I existed yesterday.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: How do we get them to know I exist and then give me money for the service or or a product or whatever I'm offering?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it's been a it's been a fun decade.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like I figured out a few things along the way and still have a thousand unanswered questions about how this stuff works.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm grateful to be on and looking forward to talking.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: So can you talk, and actually that's a great segue into what I want to ask about first of all, which is especially in the early years, you blogged constantly and you had so much good material and so much of it that was relevant to me, um, that I would just like print off reams of your blog posts and articles.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I was like, man, this is like gold.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk talk about what tell us about that decision to write on such a consistent and regular basis and how that helped you, particularly in the early years?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I know I'm talking to a bunch of people who identify as writers, and I don't identify as a writer at all.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yet writing has been probably maybe the most helpful discipline I've ever done, maybe outside of a good prayer life.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's just it clarifies thinking in a way that just nothing else does.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Drawing doesn't, talking doesn't, like getting it written down on paper and specifically teaching it to someone else via writing, which is what I did for the first you know, half a decade religiously, every week was doing that.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Which by the way, anything I I'll reference as we kind of give examples of stuff that's worked for us in the past and in the present throughout uh any of the any of the things we reference, I'll make a list of these uh and put them at growth tools.com slash Kent.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so anybody that has anything that they hear me reference or whatever, blog posts, examples we're talking about, feel free to go there and grab them for free.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they'll be there.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, it it has been helpful.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the reason I started was I the then I created a course and then no one bought it.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized, like, hey, I gotta get people that don't know I exist to know I exist so that they'll buy my stuff.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then as I just I literally just went out and saw like what are the smart people doing?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And they seem to be writing blogs, and then somehow people would find those and come to their site and buy their stuff.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I had this course on making videos, which we don't do now, but the company used to be called video fruit, so we did.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I just started writing and sharing my journey.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I would do an experiment, I'm like, all right, let's try you know doing outbound email to get people to show up to the site.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Let's try that.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then when loser fail, um, or when loser draw, when loser fail, uh, whatever happened with it, I would just share the detailed write-up of what happened.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And over time, as you do that over a year or two or three or four or five, like you found stuff that works, and people just like that transparent, open, totally unvarnished, uh, no-holds barred kind of approach, which I still take.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it it helps a lot of times, and it does turn off people.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Clyde fire me today as a result of that.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, of just like, man, uh uh, it's just not me at the end of the day.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't put a nice varnish on things intentionally.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's just probably a part of who I am.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: But there's something about just being real, and you don't find a lot of that on the internet, especially in the internet marketing world where everything's about looking good and sounding good.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we probably do that to our own detriment at times, like today.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: We had a big high-end client that everybody knows uh fire me today, due ultimately due to that.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, eh, that sucks.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And move on.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like, it just weren't the person for you.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, which is maybe a whole nother conversation about how to handle clients that uh you know you don't they don't necessarily love you at the end of the engagement.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: But at any rate, um, yeah, that's just become a part of who I am, probably how God made me, and something that at the end of the day attracted people to growth tools was like, hey, we're just gonna tell you in a kind way, in a gracious way, what we've seen, what we've experienced.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if you hire us and want us to help you coach you, we're gonna show you how that applies to you.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that's sometimes that's painful, even for me, because I'm not a combatitive, confronting person at all.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like, you know, the heart's beating and all that stuff.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, that's how I got into writing was just documenting what I was doing as I was doing it and teaching other people.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that turned out to be the single best thing ever to attract people to us and our products and our coaching and what we do.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: So you really took an approach of I'm just gonna experiment and talk about my journey and what I'm learning, as opposed to coming at it from the perspective of, hey, I've got all these frameworks and I've got all these things figured out, and I'm gonna come at you sort of as the authority who is speaking to you from the platform.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: You really approached it more like, I'm a fellow traveler, here's what I'm learning good, bad, and ugly.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: Take what you want from it.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: I love that idea.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's stated in our operating, we have a little document we call our operating system.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: We're not the guru, we're just your friend walking alongside you.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that gets blurry when people hire you to coach, which is what we do.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and technically they've hired you to be the guru, but it's still like, hey, uh EO does this really well, where you can't share advice in EO group.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: You can only share your experience of what's worked for you.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the person has to interpret that into their own, which honestly is just effective.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like many people that hire us and pay us lots of money, uh, when we give them advice, they don't listen.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: But if we share our experience and have them internalize that and say back to us what they're gonna do, that actually works, which is all I want at the end of the day.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to be effective in what we're doing and what we do with clients.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just more effective to do it that way.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and there's less, honestly, it I feel like it lowers it's like a weird sneak attack on imposter syndrome.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because at the end of the day, I'm not telling you what to do, I'm just sharing what's worked for me, and I'm gonna share the closest experience I have to your situation and like you do with that what you want to do with that is your business, it's not my business.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I can't care about your business more than more than you do.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I'll just share what's worked for me and clients and other people I've experienced, and like you take that and apply it as you see fit.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's just worked well.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: So taking that approach in writing is rare too, because it I think it it requires a level of like, I don't know everything.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know plot twist, no one knows what they're talking about, and no one knows everything.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and the people that do, you should probably be very much hesitant to people that are super opinionated and super trying to take their one framework and fit it into every place that exists.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like it just doesn't work like that.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, I just like that approach better.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: If it's better, I'm attracted to people that talk and things like that.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just reality.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like it there, there is no one that is the guru.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's called Jesus.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're not him, maybe don't do that.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: Correct.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great viewpoint.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: I actually had a conversation with somebody about a very similar thing just a couple weeks ago, talking about how vulnerable we should be as as writers or content creators, because there comes a point at which you're kind of, you know, we've all seen people on social media, they're kind of sharing too much about their life.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: What for you is is the line that you draw between how how do you maintain that expertise and authority and respect of people, but at the same time, you are being vulnerable and sharing things about your own journey, both the good things and the bad things.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: What how do you figure out what the line there is?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: I keep it mostly topical.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, to like I don't share a ton about family stuff and whatnot.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh like I'm not opposed to it, but mostly I just keep it on the problem I'm solving in professional life for the most part.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um and if I keep it there, that cuts out all the other stuff.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like I I mean I've shared at times and do occasionally stuff about family on social media and whatnot, but most of the time people don't really care all that much.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: If I weave in stories, like if I weave in family, it's gonna be as an analogy or story of some sort to make an illustration to a point.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh like I might share how marketing's not a mystery, it's math.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you have a ghostwriting service or a product or a coaching something you want to sell, like most people, they live in the they live in the mystery box.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like they um they think they have to find the perfect formula, they found the perfect thing to make it work.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: They know you actually just need two things.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: There literally is not another thing.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: You need calls on your calendar, like good qualified prospects to talk to.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when you have a call, then you need to close them.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it is if you don't have the number of clients that you want, you either have a call volume problem or you have a close rate problem.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: There is not another problem that exists.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of those two things.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're missing your unit sold goal, just go figure out which one it is.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: I want to sell, I want to get two new ghostwriting clients at$50,000 a month.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, great.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: So how many people do you need to talk to to do that?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Talk to 10 a month that are qualified.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: So how many did you talk to last month?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Zero.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: So let's go solve the booking problems.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: So to tell that story, I might tell something, I might tell a story about my child and how you know that cleaning their room is not a mystery.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a set of five actions you do every day.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I have to inspect what I expect with my child, and I have to inspect what I expect with my marketing leader and my client.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: So if I'm telling that, if we have an agreed to plan to get the 10 calls and to close them at a 10% rate, which means we're going to get one unit sold out of 10 people, it is just math.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: You have a$50,000 product, you get 10 qualified people on the phone, you close them to 10%, you get one client every single time.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to tell a story from my personal life just because that's what I think.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've spent more time thinking about my family than I do business.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I might use this story from over there.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that's relatable too.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like it builds trust with people when you just kind of share who you are and and how you think and whatnot.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's how I think about it.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like I just pull examples from church life or whatever normal life stuff I do that's just relatable to people because I'm just a dude at the end of the day who lives in a house in the suburbs and has three kids that go to school and get picked up by the bus every day.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's just what I do.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where I think about all the time.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I use those as illustrations, but usually not like I don't go hardcore into family personal life.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but pretty much anything in the business, like the the stuff that's the most uncomfortable to share is the best.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the failure, I'll do a real-time example here.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we're in one of our hardest periods of business in 12 years this week, right now.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like really difficult.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Trial of trials.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And today I had a friend, uh, and I just told him, I was like, hey man, I just feel like I need to tell you today where we're at.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I just shared, you know, I typed for 10 minutes and shared.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Man, I got halfway through this and just had tears in my eyes because I'm in the exact same spot right now.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the best thing I needed today.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a good a good mentor of mine who, as the name everybody knows, one of the best stories I've ever heard from him was the story about how one time he had to take out a loan to make payroll that week.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, please tell more of those because I feel like more of a human, knowing that you have reached the point of failure multiple times is one of the most endearing things and trust spinning things you could possibly have done to help me.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I find just sharing real life real time is the easiest writing to do because it's the most visceral to you right now.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, it just happens to build the best trust you could build with somebody.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um if random people on the internet find you and discover you, uh that you got the eyeballs, but before you get the wallets, you gotta have their hearts.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta have eyes, you gotta have hearts, and then you can get wallets.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: But if you have the eyeballs, people know you exist and they you have trust in them, you they have your heart.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: They just know who you are because you've spoken to them in a podcast, it's great for that.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Making a good call to action is the easy part.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like that part's easy.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you have eyeballs and you're not converting, you probably don't have their heart.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the best ways to get hearts is just like just share your life with them.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Not like overshare and be over-sherry person and sharing way too much personal information, but teach and share what you're doing as you're doing it and use personal stories interwoven, and man, that builds trust and relationship more than almost anything that exists.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's why like AA is so effective.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bunch of people sit in a circle set on their struggles and sharing what they're having a hard time with.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and that works.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like, that's a better version of church than church because it's real.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's not some varnished up look at my pretty stuff and we're in a church and listen to a sermon.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, it's real stuff.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's like I have this addiction, I have this sex addiction, I have this alcohol addiction, and my my wife divorced me and left me and I lost all my kids and haven't seen them in a decade.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Please help.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, man, you don't get there's one way to build trust, and it's share the vulnerable stuff.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: The the best measurement of trust on a team is like how willing are we to share the things that are the hardest in our life today and still work on the team together.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: So just do that in content, man.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that like, it's just real.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's just being a real human and not having some mask on.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I think at the end of the day, my all of my my my hope, my heart, my intent is to do that.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: I've failed at that a hundred times over, but like that's the heart behind it, is to do that.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, folks, we're done.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: That that I'm just kidding.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: That is that that is what so many people need to hear.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: Just that it's okay to be vulnerable and to admit you don't have this all figured out.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I think we're all exhausted by the gurus and authors and and podcasters and speakers who are just like they sort of give this presentation of I've got it all figured out and everything is great.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: And meanwhile, things are not, they're they're never totally great for everybody.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: I've worked, I've seen behind the business of almost all of them.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: None of them do.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Trust me.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like it is, and but hey, here's what they do well.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: The people at the top at the top that everybody follows them pays attention to.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like they do two or three things really well.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the other 100, they're a freaking dumpster fire rat.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: All of them, without fail, 100%.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you know, Mark Cuban has a book, I forget what it's called.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was written years ago.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was a series of blog posts that he accumulated into a book.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's totally I'll I'll put it on the slash Kent page so people can find.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put a link to it.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the first books I voluntarily read.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, hey man, here's the great thing about business versus baseball.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: In baseball, you get a hit, like to be a Hall of Famer, you get a Vat 40%, 400.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like that means you have to hit four out of 10 in business.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: You can have you hit one out of a thousand, but you actually hit it and you're set for life.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: You're good.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like just one.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: All you need is just one thing that works well.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like one.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so like, man, you can fail a lot.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Abraham Lincoln, man, he didn't he didn't win at anything until they became president.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like the first thing he ever got right was that.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, good heavens, that's a crazy story.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the case.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody you followed, anybody who paid attention, they do one or two things really well.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Pay attention to one of those things.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like, my parents are awesome parents.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: They suck at finance.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't pay attention to them on finance.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't expect them to be.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: I know they're I know they're not great there.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: They have very not great advice there, and they don't do great things there, but they're fantastic humans in many ways.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so paying attention to that person's good at X does not mean they're good at A, B, and C, and they're almost for sure not, by the way.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: So just choosing the people you follow and the wisdom you take is of a great importance because you can easily, and I have, gone years down the road of listening to people's advice in a particular area and to realize like that's not me, and they suck at that too.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: They just happen to be good here, so I paid attention to them.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: I just have to kind of adopt at everything.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like Dave Ramsey has some great financial advice.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: He also has some terrible financial advice all simultaneously.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, like pick and choose what you want and use good wisdom there.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and to know that about yourself too.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Don't be so full of yourself to think just because I did this one thing really well, everything else will touch the gold.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like you'll learn that lesson the hard way.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: You'll be you'll be humbled if you think you are awesome at everything because you get one or two things right.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: You aren't.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, neither are they.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's hey, that that's great to hear too, because like that best author.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, take James Clear, Mark Manson, any of these people who are like the number one best-selling authors in the world, they're great at a couple things and they suck at everything else.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, I don't give too many personal examples, but like they have problems, trust me.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's okay.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: But they're great writers, so go model them and they're writing and whatnot and put your own spin on it.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: But like, don't hold them up and idolize them because they are just humans like you.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I've I've got actually Atomic Habit right here.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's one of my favorite books of all time.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's helped so many people.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: And but I've and I think that the tendency for a lot of authors is to be really jealous of the success that somebody like James Killer has.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: But I cannot imagine, and I don't know him personally.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he seems like a wonderful guy.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: But I cannot imagine being in his shoes because whatever you do for the rest of your life, it is going to be really hard to measure up to the success of that phenomenally successful book.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: Talk about pressure.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth Elizab Elizabeth Gilbert has a TED talk on this.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've seen that.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: She talks about she wrote Eat Pray Love, supernova, viral sensation.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: And she's like, What happens when you're 35 and you know your biggest success is behind you?
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like every big athlete has the same thing.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you're you're Tom Brady, you're never beating the football thing.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like your biggest success is behind you.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what do you I mean that has to be the biggest mind problem like ever?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And James is similar.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he didn't even expect it.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he there's a huge factor of luck getting that success.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And James would openly say the same thing.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is like, I don't, I wish I could give you the plan on how to do this.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even know why it worked at the time.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like Audible picked it up and they promoted it at a ton, and then it sold a bunch of units.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, I did some stuff right, but I don't I didn't make it do that.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, like there's a gigantic luck factor.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote a good book and he's a good dude.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, solved a big problem.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's stuff to learn for sure, but there's also just a big like Jim Collins talks about this.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the biggest factor or one of the most fundamental factors in companies going from good to great and sustaining it over time, he calls it the luck factor.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: And like every in his evaluation, every company and every person had the same amount of luck as your return on the luck.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like, did you have positive return or negative return on your luck factor?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you will have lucky people, who luck and luck lucky things will happen and lucky people will enter your life.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: What do you do with that?
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: You might call this Providence if you're a person of faith.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like good that God will send good things into your life.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: What do you do with them when you get them?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Are you gonna waste the who luck?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like James had the who luck or the what luck of being promoted on Audible, like crazily so.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't do anything to do that, but he wrote the return on that was great.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um anyway, but yeah, man, that's a that's a big thing I think a lot of people don't think about.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I didn't have some super viral sensation when I was 35 years old, so I don't have anything to compare that to.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I think about James, I think about athletes, and man, when they go supernova early, boy, that's a whole nother set of problems.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's there's some good things in it, and probably people probably think, oh, I wish I had that problem.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, no, it's just another set of problems, man.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's just you're gonna solve one thing one way or another.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Either you're gonna be always striving for the success mark or you'll get it early, and then you never know you'll never get there again, but you still got to do productive things in your life for the next 40 years.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: So what are you gonna do about it?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: I want to get to to this topic of which is ostensibly kind of the topic of of the whole cult, which is borrowing other people's uh audiences.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: I I want to ask you something else first, though, because uh and I don't ask this really of many guests, but because you're a very successful business guy, uh but you also spend a lot of time around a lot of other coaches, business leaders, et cetera.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: People ask me all the time about ghostwriting.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: I've only been doing this full time for a few years.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: But I have uh to no one's more surprised than myself, to be honest with you.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: I was a college professor for a long time, got into ghostwriting a few years ago.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I'm like, oh, this this actually kind of worked.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm kind of shocked by this, to be honest with you.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um so people ask me all the time about how do you build a sustainable ghostwriting business?
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: From your perspective, as somebody who's been in the business world a long time, what have you noticed among the most successful ghostwriters?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: Is there something they do differently?
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: Is there something the average ghostwriter could do to be more successful or connect with uh maybe better clients or pitch themselves better?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: What have you kind of noticed in the ghostwriting world?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: There'd be two kind of two buckets to think within.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh bucket number one is client acquisition.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is any company, any product service, any product that exists, especially higher end goods like ghostwriting, you must have a plan to get humans to pay you money.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: And if it's a mystery, I'm just gonna do these random events and do this thing, like you will fail because you'll get one client, you'll be feast or famine.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: So uh first is consistent climate acquisition.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: The other one is uh quality and ease of product.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I see this across.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Every service thing, every service business I've ever observed.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: A friend was texting me this morning about a$20,000 story, like kind of presentation service he wants to start offering.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, ask him those two questions.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like, first, how are you gonna get humans?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, like what's your what's your sales?
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta put calls on calendars, you gotta close those people.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: So, what's your script and process for the calls, and what's your marketing plan to put calls in your calendar?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And you need about 10 a month.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you do that at your price point, you're good to go.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have that, it's gonna be random acts of marketing.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And what'll happen is if you don't have that, you'll get a person or two just because you have a network and you talk to people, you'll grunt work up a couple clients, but then you won't serve those clients all that well because you're gonna be looking ahead at your cash flow forecast and realizing I gotta spend a bunch of time on marketing and sales, or I'm not gonna even be able to like make it to fulfill this person, or not gonna have money at the end of this.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you wind up with these cycles of you wind up spending more time on sales and marketing than you do making a quality product.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and in ghostwriting specifically, it's such an intimate thing that if you don't make well, there's maybe two parts of quality process.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: So bucket one, client acquisition.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta have a client acquisition.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: Simple, easy to do uh process.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: We have our number one channel, we call it BOPA or borrow other people's audiences.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's really simple and perfect for growth writers or really any high-end service-y thing.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we can go over that later if we want to.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: So do that.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's the easiest thing to make that happen.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that allows you to spend a couple hours a week once you're kind of up and going and actually get a client a month, two clients a month.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what your volume of handling people are, but that.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: The other side is, and I'll put a link at the slash camp page for the mark keeping book, the Liz Gilbert video, and our I'll give you a bop of overview if we don't go into details here so people can kind of get some scripts and templates and examples and stuff.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: So uh on the quality, this is where I see people.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I know both of those things are really.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: Both of these are equally weighted.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Quality of process and service.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got to realize as a ghostwriter, um, you are like the high-end executive assistant of some high maintenance human.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good way of putting it.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Ninety times out of a hundred.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: You're working with somebody who's never written a book, they get a lot of opinions, they have no idea how to write, except everybody thinks they can write, um, and this person's busy, and you are the writing part's the easy part.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're good at that.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't be in this if you wouldn't.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's important for sure.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: But the least, if it's gonna fail, it's not gonna fail due to your writing.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the problem.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is you being like a maybe better, it would be like you're the you're the manager of a high maintenance artist.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like an artist brain over here or CEO brain, where they're like, they're doing a thing, and that's the reason they're writing books, or they're a doctor, or they're a CEO, they're a something over here, and they're like, Yeah, I want to write a book, and they're working 60 hours a week over here, and you gotta like wrangle the schedule, you gotta wrangle them, you gotta make sure you don't write the whole book and they come back and want to throw away the whole thing and write a new book.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like, where I've seen it fail over and over and over and over again is that side, like managing the talents, that piece right there.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that's a little bit of client selection, but primarily what I found you can get bad humans for sure, people that are just like you can wrangle them all day long and they just won't submit to the process.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: But also, it's the biggest lever you can pull is setting expectation up front with hard boundaries of process and review cycles.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't do that, you were signing up for a hell of a job.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like literally, like this will be a nightmare to you.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and anybody that's done any amount of ghostwriting, you've ghostwritten more than a couple books, you have lived that real experience.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: So good.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like we do this in coaching because they're not dissimilar things at all.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: You're managing high maintenance humans who want to do it but then don't want to do it at the same time simultaneously.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we have something, we we have this in multiple ways with a clear contract, although nobody ever reads contracts, you can make them as clear as they, but it's clear, so it protects ourselves legally.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we're not going to get to the end of like a negotiating where you've written the whole book and they're like, actually, let's start over.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, nah, bro, we ain't doing that.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you better back yourself up legally or you will lose a lot of money.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: So first make there be a contract, because it all the contract is, and we'll put our contract in a link as well, you can read it.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's for coaching, but you can pull some the you can see the spirit of it, which is make sure your deliverables dates are extremely clear and what happens when we disagree.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because all the contract is, is the rules we fight by when we fight.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if you don't agree to that ahead of time, you will lose and you will be intimidated, and they will win.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if you got tens of thousands or or more dollars on the line, like people tend to fight a lot.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: So get it, get it in writing before you start anything, and then in a friendly way in your sales process and post-sales process, make them extremely abundantly clear of the process of the non-negotiable parts and the review cycles.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you do that, nine times out of ten, unless you just got a total Yahoo! in there, which they exist, um, they're gonna play by the rules and they're gonna actually let their guard down and trust you ten times more.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you say, Hey, Johnny, remember we got three different parts for reviews.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you just blow through this and they want to hear this almost all the time, you might be intimidated by this, but they want to hear, I want to hear this.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, just so you know, there's three times to give your structured feedback.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: This is the most in-depth part right here.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you just give a passive yes to this and you get into review cycle two and three, there is not time to rewrite chapters of the book.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's not gonna happen.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: So you need to spend time, let's slow down here and take another week for you to do a real review, not a passive, yeah, it looks good.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, see you later.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because they're busy.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta realize like they're doing another thing and their brain is not in this.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: So if you don't hold those boundaries and remind them of the importance of them, you will create a terrible client.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the bad clients we've had, we've made them accidentally.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like we didn't give good boundaries, we didn't give good process, and they gotta have that because they're they're doing our thing, but they get a whole other life and everything they're living over here.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, two buckets of things.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: If it goes wrong, where does it go wrong in the ghostwriting business is you don't have a client acquisition system, and as a result, you're having to spend 80% of your time at marketing sales and not writing good books.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: The other side is quality and boundaries of process.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: So you are meant you are the manager of Taylor Swift.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure I'm sure she's a great person.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure she's super high maintenance as well at the same time.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: So these people are like that.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're just high maintenance humans.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta think of them like that, not in a derogatory way, that's just who they are.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta manage their calendar and the process better than anybody's ever managed their calendar and process before.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you do that and think of yourself primarily that way, and oh, by the way, you happen to write a book.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you think of yourself, you're just gonna take their brain and download and go write a book and it's gonna be awesome.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're up, you've signed up for a terrible job.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's not gonna be that nine times out of ten.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh nor will it will be for any client services thing you do, whether it's that or coaching or whatever.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then they're done.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that'd be my two buckets, I would think, within.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: Man, that is that's genius and brilliant.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_02: That is that that's a section that uh every ghostwriter who's listening to this needs to go back and listen to that and take extensive notes.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I got one other thing I was gonna share.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'll link this up so you can see it as well.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: So before someone can like literally they pay us money, and the next thing gets an email saying, Hey, thanks for paying us money, go here to sign the contract and schedule your onboarding call.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you have some version of this, it might be manual or automated or whatever, it doesn't matter.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: Before they can watch the contract, they click a link to sign the contract and they go to a video, and it's like a 15-minute video from me.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'll link it up so people can see it.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like it's literally the title of it is What Did You Just Buy?
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's me almost trying to reverse sell them out of the thing by giving them the intimate detail.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's literally every pain point we've ever experienced with any client.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: We just put in the video.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like, here's the timeline, here's a deliverable, here's what's gonna work.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um if you do this, you're a bad client.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: Don't do that.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's what bad clients do.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to be a great client, this is what they I mean, we're just like explicit in there.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it what I have found, this has been shocking.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Any frame we give them, they adopt.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like if we tell them, hey, you got a great guarantee and refund policy, and just give it a shot and we'll give you money back if it doesn't work, people will adopt that and they'll half-ass it and then they won't do it, and they want to get their money back, despite not doing anything.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but if you say, hey, this is gonna be hard work, we're gonna grind it out, but you can have an amazing product and you're gonna get ghostwriting clients every week from this point forward.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, all you gotta do is install BOPA.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you install BOPA and set proper expectations, your ghostwriting business is going like there's nothing to break, actually, if you do those two things.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the two points they break.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: Get clients, have good expectations up front, and enforce them.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you do that, your business will work.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: But you got to do that, and that's gonna be difficult a little bit, and here's your problem spot.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: You give them a proper frame, they'll go into it with that, expecting that, and that's good.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that video, as soon as they buy, it's now like like in college, I'll love college football, and like you recruit these five-star, you know, the five-star quarterback or five-star linemen, and then as soon as they get on campus, you've got to start derecruiting them because you've done nothing but sing their praises and tell them how awesome they are.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: But if you get somebody who's full of themselves and there's your quarterback or lineman or something, they're like terrible teammates and they're not gonna win.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, like as soon as we hire somebody, as soon as somebody hires us, we start derecruiting them.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: But they like it because it's what they know at their heart of hearts that this is not like writing a book is not easy, even if you hire somebody.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: You should tell them that.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, this is not gonna be simple.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna spend at least 30 hours reading this book.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: And by the end of this book, you will hate this book because you've read it 20 times and you're sick of me, and you won't like me and will disagree.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: And just tell them everything that's gonna happen.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: So when you encounter it, they just like and you're kind of I'm laughing and jovial and kind of making fun of them in the video as I go, but like I want them to be thinking like that because if they aren't, this is gonna be a disaster for both of us.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and then we're gonna end up fighting about something along the way.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and sometimes, despite your best, you will do that, and people will still not get it.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll get nine months into the thing, you know, have somebody who's a pain in the butt, so that's gonna happen.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: But the key is if you set the expectation up front, contract sells call expectation videos along the way, or uh communicated them expectations along the way with clear boundaries, you can redirect them back to that.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like this client that just fired us, you know, being transparent here.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't normally talk about clients that fired us, they're a very high-profile person.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: I told them 12 months ago exactly what would happen.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what you don't want to do, here's what you don't want to do here's what you don't have to do.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: They blew through four of the five stop signs, and exactly what we said would happen, and happened.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: Literally all of them.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, Well, why isn't it working as fast?
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I mean, I'd never do that.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: I told you so, game, because that's a road to nowhere.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm like, I don't even know what to say.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like, we blew through four of the five stop signs.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, that's why it's not working all that well, because you literally just hired us to help you and coach you, and you just ignored practically everything.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you should probably hire another coach because you weren't listening to us.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: You should hire somebody you respect and buy into what they're doing, and you obviously don't with us, and that's not derogatory, that's just true.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, for some reason, we weren't able to capture their heart, and thus they're not following us because simultaneously, three other clients trust us too much.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, Well, y'all trust us too much.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you're doing everything we're saying, it's going great for them.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, not that every time everybody does what we say goes great, but anyway, so despite all of that, you will still have it's a service business.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you know you're signing up or you're not for service, you're dealing with people, and people are not clean.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: But those are two things.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you do those two things with any high-end service, whether it's ghostwriting or coaching or what a service service done for you stuff, um that sets up the business to work.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: Know how to get clients, and that's a very simple formula.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: Use BOPA, it works well.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: You can do it for ghostwriting, works fantastic.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then contract that has expectations all throughout, pre-buying, post-buying, and every major point along the way to remind them of what you told them already.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because you could give them the seven-page Google Doc of the timeline.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: Ain't nobody remembering that stuff.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: Every time you hit another milestone, remind them, hey, here's where we're at, here's where we're going, here's where it's gonna be hard.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, we're at step three, here's where we're at, here's where we're going, here's where it's gonna be hard.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: Just say it over and over and over and over and over again.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we even like in our core program, we lock people in.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you literally can't do the next thing unless you watch that video and have a call with somebody to make sure you watch the video and you've digested it.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, like you just get sideways really quick.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that's been effective for us.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll put a link to all that stuff.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: A couple videos, the contracts, you can kind of see it in the uh in the link in the slash Kent Growth Tools.com slash Kent.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you can go just watch it and take that.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're a coaching company and y'all are doing ghostwriting, so you'll have to adapt it, but it's like 99% of the same thing.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I've I've seen uh a couple different docs related to your processes.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: Now it's been a few years.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: So in the intro to this episode, I will have mentioned that the way that this whole conversation came about is because I actually applied for a position with growth tools back in 2019.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: I don't remember what the what the position was.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_02: It was something to do with education.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: You had like two, two or three thousand people apply for it, some like crazy number.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: I made it down to the last few dozen.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_02: I really thought I had a chance and I I I didn't get the position.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I was so discouraged by uh two or three things like that that had happened that summer with other positions.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, man, I gotta figure out what in the crap am I gonna do if I'm trying to get out of college teaching.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_02: But it was at that point that I figured out, okay, well, what am I really good at?
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: What kind of business tool I want to build?
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I shifted into ghost training.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: But I remember looking at it, I think it was like your SLPs or something that you had given people access to as part of the interview process and thinking, man, these guys like they've got it nailed.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: This is fantastic stuff.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I appreciate you sharing a couple of those things with us.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, absolutely.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: And and no, just like anybody, we're good at like five things and we start at the other 95.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll tell you the five we're good at, and I'll say just ignore us on all this other stuff.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: Hiring process we're really good at.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a that's a good one.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's something we're we're on point with.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, thank you for saying that.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: I I was very impressed with the hiring process, even though I didn't I didn't get that job and I don't I certainly wasn't meant to have it.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I was like, I feel like I'm a better human because I've been through this process.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: I learned a ton.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: It was it was great.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_02: So it's kind of like the thing where the the the process was so good that you sort of felt good about being rejected, you know, which I guess is kind of the goal in a weird way.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it definitely worked out for you well.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm glad we didn't hire you because you were obviously meant to go do your own thing and succeed in that.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's great.
• 34:55
  unknown: Yeah.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I do want to respect your time.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so maybe we could wrap up on this.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I would love to hear about the borrowing other people's audiences strategy.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm familiar with this, I've read a lot of your stuff over the years, but a lot of our listeners are not familiar with it.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm super anxious if you can give us the the lay of the land and the and an overview.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so think about any marketing.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: When people use the word marketing, they're usually talking about they gotta get people to pay them money.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: So client acquisition or customer acquisition.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you gotta have three things, and everything is the same thing: Facebook ads, SEO, YouTube, TikTok, uh, organic, whatever.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's all partnerships, all the same stuff.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's three primary components.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you can think of any of the channels you've ever seen and will see, they all have the same same three dynamics.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta get their eyeballs, you give it people that don't know you exist to pay attention to you and watch you.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: Then you gotta get their trust to get their heart, and then you can get their wallet.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you'd have those three components.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to have a way to get them to know you exist, a way to build trust with them, and then a simple conversion mechanism to get them to actually pay you money.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: So those three dynamics seem to exist in anything anyone any human's ever sold.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you're selling ghost riding, uh, you don't need a lot of eyeballs.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: You don't, but like you you can't take many, actually.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: You maybe do five year, ten year, twelve year if you got some pretty tight operation.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lot, though.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um so barn of other people's audience is instead of paying money to get eyeballs like you would do in ads, or instead of creating a bunch of content like you would do in SEO or YouTube or TikTok or something, you're gonna create tons of content.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then ideally people would be searching for it and find you via algorithms or whatever.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the thing we have found to be in most every instance I've ever seen, there's a few exceptions, um, which we can talk about if you want, but a few exceptions, almost almost every instance of every company.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we've worked with over 3,000 companies, like one-on-one coach, 3,000 companies over a decade.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we've seen behind the scenes of a lot of them, and most of those are like zero, hundred thousand dollars, and probably about 150 that have been in the million plus range, and maybe a couple dozen that have been in the 20 million plus range.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: So we've seen behind the business behind the scenes of lots of businesses, and and um the number one channel that almost all if you're starting, if you're sub-million dollar, the first repeatable scalable marketing channel that in almost every instance makes sense is to borrow other people's audiences, meaning exchange content for eyeballs.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, one of the simplest ways to do this is a something we call a lead magnet swap.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: You have a lead magnet, like for me, it might be hey, five ways to get your next ghostwriting client in the next seven days or the next 90 days, which by the way, we'll make that and put in the show not and put in the slash can't page, growth schools.com slash can't.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'll make we'll make a little one pager that is five different ways you can get a ghostwriting client in the next 90 days.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: We'll take our method, form it into that for you, everybody watching.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's genius.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: So there so we just made a lead magnet flop up on the s on the swap.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have it.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: By the time the podcast episode goes, we'll have that exist.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I have that lead magnet.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Kent has a lead magnet on what's the lead magnet you have?
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: The Profitable Rider Pathway.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's nine steps to build a profitable writing business over the long haul.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: So a subset of people in my audience, we have you know several thousand people on our email list, uh, are people that are writers, have thought about writing, or super professional writers, any mix in between.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Kent has people that want to sell high-end services, thinking they want to do ghostwriting.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they could, and and we just get people that have high-end services, usually coaching or consulting or something, but ghostwriting can fit in that category, and we coach them in order to set up successful marketing channels.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that's our setup.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the new businesses.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: The way barring other people's audiences would work would be I would take Kent's Fleet Magnet and email it up to my audience.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: Hey audience, uh, some of you love writing, some of you have thought about writing.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the number one things people want to do is write a book before they die.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Kent has a way to be a profitable writer.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: He has this free resource right now called the whatever the name is you just said, go get it for free today.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it'd be a link, and it would go to a landing page Kent has.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: And several hundred or several thousand people would join Kent's email list as a result of that.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now he has their eyeballs.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: Kent would do the same thing.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: He would take my lead magnet.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, here's the five ways to lend your the next ghostwriting client in the next 90 days, and email it out to his list.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now that is hyper custom to his list.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: The methodology is fairly similar for different industries, but like we'd customize it for his list.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: He'd email it out, several hundred people, several thousand people would click on it, would get their email.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now we have their eyeballs.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we just got the eyeballs by exchanging a lead magnet for each other.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now that can apply to different content types.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: You could do that with a podcast.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is an example of barring other people's audiences.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, hundreds or thousands of people are listening to this podcast episode over the next 30 days, they're going to find I exist for the first time.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: We got their eyeballs.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: And hopefully a couple hundred of you go to growthstools.com slash Kent in your email and get all the resources I've been talking about, including the BOPA thing and the checklist thing we just mentioned and the Liz Gilbert video and all that stuff, and go get it.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll now have your email address so we can communicate to you.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the goal of the email communication is to get your heart so that at some point down the line, now or later, if you're interested in hiring us to set up a marketing channel for you and we'll walk you through how to do BOPA in your business to get your first ghostwriting client or next ghostwriting client in the next 90 days, we can do that for you.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: You can hire us to pay us money and do that.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: We did all that without paying money to anybody.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: We just exchange content.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: So podcasts is a great kind of natural example of doing a barring other people's audiences.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm borrowing your stage right now, and you're interviewing me on that stage while thousands of people watch.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: And some of those people, a couple dozen, a couple hundred, will come and decide to follow us.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: If we exchange a lead magnet, which we should do by the way, we'll send out your lead magnet, you send out our lead magnet to the list, we would get a couple hundred more people from that.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: So those are new people that have now joined our trust bucket.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now we have the opportunity to actually capture their heart and put a call to action of whatever sort in front of them to schedule the sales call or um or buyer course or whatever we're promoting in the future to do that.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how you borrow other people's audience.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same fundamental mechanism uh of why Rachel Ray and Dr.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: Phil and Dr.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oz are all people that you know.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: All of them started by going on Oprah Winfrey show.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't exist.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad, poor dad.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knew that dude existed.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: He goes on Oprah Show one time, and it's like one of the best-selling books of the last two decades.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: As a direct, attributable result, uh, guy Kawasaki, in his own words, say, that happened because I went on Oprah Show.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: He borrowed some of the else's audiences.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: He went on, Oprah obviously had a huge platform.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: He goes on, they interviewed, the audience clicks, tons of people enter his trust bucket, he gets their heart, he sells a book to him.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just the simplest, it's the hardest one to screw up, which is really what I'm not doing for.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to be fancy, I'm not trying to do the crazy funnel thing.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: Way too many people get way too company to try to run ads, you have no business running ads.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like, just bar like go on one other stage each week.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: Go on a podcast, do a lead magnet swap.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: Those are two of the easiest things that exist.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: And do it once a week for the next 90 days, and you will get a customer.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's literally almost impossible to screw up.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine you were to speak in front of a thousand people each week for 13 weeks.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's 13,000 people that have heard you in person talk for an hour and give your spill.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and at the back of the room, you just have your book or you have your service with a little placard saying, Hire me to write your book.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: Out of the 13,000 people, one person is going to hire you just from sheer numbers along, even if you suck at sales.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it is just really hard to screw up, which is the number one reason I like it.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it can scale really well.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: One more example of this, and I'll shut up.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: Most people know Convert Kit.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: So in actually, there's a post I wrote, I'll link in the Slash Camp page uh years ago.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: Before they were known, they were doing about$5,000 a month of recurring revenue.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now they're doing$33 million a year, so I guess that's two and a half million a month or so in revenue.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: Their hockey stick hockey stick year was 2016 or 2017, the years run together now.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: But they did 125 partnerships, barring other people's audiences in one year.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: They did mainly webinars.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: They would go to somebody like Pat Flynn or a bunch of people that you don't know, and Pat was one of their best, and they'd say, hey, we'll teach your audience.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: You bring your audience, we'll teach them, and uh, and we'll tell them about how to do email marketing.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: At the end, they gave everybody a free trial to convert kit.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: Darrell Vesterfeld and Blake Stratton were the two dudes who ran that in 2016 or 2017.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: They did 125, 130, somewhere around there in one 12-month period.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when Convert Kit went from nobody knew it to now it's like one of the highest current ESPs in history as a result of that, of barring other people's audiences just for one hardcore year.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: And now they're on the map and have grown to be a lot of things that aren't that.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: But that was the thing they did.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't pay for ads, they didn't do affiliates, they didn't go to TikTok, didn't do all this crazy stuff.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: They just got on a bunch of stages.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: And stages are easy.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: It can be as easy as a podcast interview, it can be easy as a lead magnet swap, and there's more advanced stuff that people get lost in.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: But those two things, you do those once a week and you will grow.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's I mean, you gotta like intentionally screw stuff up not to grow if you do that.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_02: So if you were gonna pick one, would you pick posting on somebody else's blog as a guest post, being on somebody else's podcast, or doing webinars?
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: Do you find one of those is more effective than the others?
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: I would do none of those.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: If I had to pick one, I'd do a lead magnet swap.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's the it's the hardest to screw up of the hardest to screw up thing.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: I like, for example, one of our goals is I get on a podcast once a week and I answer whatever questions I have, talk about whatever thing is, mention whatever resources make sense, and then you know, some people book calls and hires as a result of that.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one of the internal selfish reasons why I'm here is like once a week, get on somebody else's stages, no matter who it is.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just do that.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it is easy to screw up a podcast interview and make a podcast interview be something that sounds good, but doesn't actually produce business results.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen that over and over and over again.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because I can just answer your questions all day long, but if I don't give a compelling resource and reason for people to come to our site and actually find out more about us, I just talk for an hour.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I've seen that many times.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: A lead magnet swap has multiple things.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: You can just have one you do minor adaptations to and swap it with other people.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: And all the all you gotta have is the lead magnet.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: And a landing page with a call booking form on it.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: You don't even have to collect their email.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know why there's a balloon showing up on the screen.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: They just randomly showed up.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's something with I think the two thing.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so uh lead magnet swap where you take your lead magnet, they take their lead magnet and email it out to each other's list.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's the hardest to screw up thing that exists.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have a high-end service like ghostwriting or something, you don't even have to have a lead capture form of there.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now I would recommend you do.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: But all you could all you need to have is like, hey, on the booking page, uh like the page they go to to get the resource, just have a thing.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, hey, additional free bonus, schedule the call with me if you're interested in ghostwriting.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: And if a thousand people go to that page, you get a usually about a five to ten percent conversion on that page if you've if you've been egregiously misaligned things.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: So on this, for instance, if growth tools.com slash Ken, Kent is the resources I mentioned at the bottom, and a booking page at the top, which is just a calendar thing, just a way for somebody to schedule the call.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_00: And at the top it says, hey, free call, free coaching call for anybody that came from Kent's podcast to learn how to use both of the sell more ghostwriting clients.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: Schedule below.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_00: If we have 100 people go to that page, five to ten people will schedule calls.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_00: And we know our conversion in our calls is five to ten percent.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_00: So you can literally just do the math.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: If I got 10 people to book calls and our closure at 10%, we'll book one client as a result of this podcast.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if we get more people to the page, because the podcast was more compelling, the resources are more compelling, we'll sell more people.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it kind of like a phrase we have all the time is it's not a mystery, it's math.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like you can do the math to get a client.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, after that, you need to set up the expectation bucket, like we talked about really well, to actually take them and to grow them and not have nightmare clients.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: But getting clients is as simple as that.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: Lead magnet swaps are this you need to have a lead magnet, an email, and a way for people to book calls.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: Podcasts, like if you don't CTA right in the like if I didn't share our link at the beginning of the interview and the end of the interview and all throughout the interview, likely we would have almost no traffic.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: So there's an art to doing that in a way that doesn't feel weird.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't, it feels like it's a value.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm kind of just sharing out loud, kind of behind the curtains, as I'm doing something I'm talking about.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: So people can just learn from it.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because many times we've we booked people on podcasts, we've got them on hundreds of podcasts, and they've almost moved the needle none because all they did is share their stuff.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: They just talked and answered questions.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, you see this, you see this in professional interviews all the time.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: Listen to any radio personality, Colin Cowherd or Dan Patrick, they have any of these people on, and they're gonna Ryan Reynolds goes on to promote his new gin brand or something, and he's dropping the gin brand all throughout the thing and telling people to go by and use this coupon code or get this special deal.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's like if you don't promote your thing, it will not be bought because you haven't promoted it.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_00: So people generally construct that up a way easier than they can screw up doing a lead magnet swap.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: Work webinars, by the way, work the best of all the things, and it is the most complicated of all of them.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I would just say, like, you just don't.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you're if you just want to get five ghostwriting clients this year, I just don't touch that.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not you need to be you need to want to move lots of units and to be willing to get into the most complicated marketing asset that exists, which is a webinar.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's the easiest thing to screw up of all, of anything I've ever got into.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why people that get into like Facebook ads to a webinar funnel totally get their lunch eaten because of your ads, which is the hardest thing, mixed with webinar, which is the most complicated marketing asset that exists.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like you're just destined to fail.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um but just do lead magnets.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: Pitch two a day for the next 90 days, and you'll convert, you'll get 30% of the people to say yes, and out of that, you'll have enough volume to actually book some quality calls on your calendar to actually sell some ghost writing services.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: So uh lead magnet swaps is the way.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's the easiest thing.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that would be anybody who has uh your same audience or some kind of adjacent audience.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_02: That would be really who you would be pitching for that.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: Related but not competitive.
• 47:16
  unknown: Okay.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's what you want.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that doesn't mean they don't do ghostwriting, because a lot of people hyper-specialized ghostwriting.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: That might be focused on like the doctor notes or the realtor niche or something.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: So but those audiences would have mixes, like the doctor's audience, the doctor guy doesn't just have doctors, he has all kind of people spread throughout.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so uh related but not competitive.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and that's a way bigger pool than most people think everybody in the market's competitive with them.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like we don't compete with 90% of the other people who coach coaches.
• 47:43
  unknown: Yeah.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because they coach nuances we don't, they coach channels we don't, they coach things we don't.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: They're coaching leadership or team building or Facebook ads or something, and we don't we don't do those things.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like we coach you in how to build how to at the right how to set up your first three marketing channels over three years to get your business to well over a million dollars and how to put the team in place to grow it.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's the long track of what we do.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: What we really tip of the spear focus on is like we're gonna set up one channel to get you repeated clients in nine months or less.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: And by the end of it, like you'll have a repeatable marketing system that you get new ghostwriting class or new coaching class or new consulting class, and you don't have to think, wake up and ever think about that.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll have a full-time person running it that pays for themselves and 10x's their salary to you.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's what will happen in nine months, unless you go to Weirdo Land, like that will just happen.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then once that happens, you'll want more, so we'll add a second channel and a third channel.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's what we do, and like that's competitive with almost no one in the coaching space.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we could go to practically any audience that exists.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if they're in some biz dev entrepreneur marketing kind of brain, and we're not competitive with them.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: Despite them, maybe even coaching coaches.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um so yes, related, not competitive, do lead magnet swaps.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_00: That that's like the simplest of the simple, hardest to screw up thing that exists, we're acquiring new kind of high-ticket clients of any sort.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_02: Man, I love that.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so you shouldn't, I assume you shouldn't worry about audience size.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, some people would probably think, well, my audience is really big and I don't want to swap with like a smaller person, or vice versa, or that person's way bigger than me, why would they want to swap with me?
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's all that sort of just nonsense.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's things to consider there.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: It is mostly nonsense.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because at the end of the day, like we have a list of 250,000 people.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: If we swapped with a list of 10,000, does that matter?
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because I I know if I swapped with a good list of 10,000 and they sent two emails promoting the lead magnet, and they've this is getting to math, they would get a thousand people to the booking page.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I know our conversion on the booking page on a bad one is five percent.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: So what is that?
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: 50 calls on the calendar?
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I know with a 10% close-up, that's five people.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: If our average order value, let's just round up, is like$10,000, that's$50,000.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: Did I care that they had$10 and I had$250, or do I care that I just made$50,000?
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, literally that matter.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, now, if you get if you have a list of$5,000 and you're swapping a list of$150, then that could just burn your list.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you're just emailing every day with someone else's lead magnet and the ROI back to you is pretty small, you don't want to be wise about that.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: You can still do it.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we do that.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: We we swap with people well below a thousand many times.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: But what we do is we'll do like one email at the end of the week where we have five people in it, and they all have smaller lists.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's fine too.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the audience loves it, by the way, because they're learning new resources all the time.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_00: So our audience loves it.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it's built like one of the best ways, and this is what I love about lead magnet swaps, it builds into a newsletter strategy seamlessly because one of the best ways to build trust with your newsletter, which is the people that will eventually buy from you, um, is to recommend things that they take your advice on.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: So the practical daily example.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm like, hey, have you seen like if I know you're a TV person, you love watching TV, which me and my wife love, have you watched Shogun on Hulu?
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: If not, and this is a real-time recommendation, by the way, it's the best show I've seen in two years.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's fantastic, and almost no one's watched it.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: So if somebody listened to this and goes and watches Shogun, and they're like three episodes in and they get bit by it, like they're going to just trust me more because they've taken a recommendation.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: So when what you do primarily in your newsletter is make recommendations to people and they take them, your newsletter is going to trust you more because they're getting good stuff.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so if you recommend five one week and two next week and one the week after because you're swapping with different sizes, nobody can your audio newsletter doesn't care notice any of that stuff.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so you can swap with and bundle like three or four lists you swap, they all emailed it out three emails to their entire list.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: You email like a fifth of an email for each of those people, one email with five people in.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you can do stuff like that to kind of be wise about it.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_00: But at the end of the day, I don't really care what their list size is.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: I care one, is the resource good?
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: Has to pass that test.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the time that's not an issue.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: Two, will it move the needle on the thing we want to move the needle on, which is putting calls on commentary and closing clients?
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_00: If it does that, like I don't really care.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um if it's good and it moves the needle, yes is the answer.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_02: Man, that's brilliant.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: See, Mr.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, uh we we talked about lead magnet swaps.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put a couple examples of email pitches.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what do you say to people to get them to actually see us doing lead magnet swaps since this is the one we focused on?
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put a few examples of lead magnet swap pitches in the growth tools that growth tools.com slash Kent Face.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: So people can actually see the wording and stuff there.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be our words we use, because we got we we do this ourselves.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is our number of marketing channels partnerships.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: We've gotten 11 yeses this week.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: We do a meeting every day to review them.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: So this week we've sent 40 pitches.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, what day is it?
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's Wednesday.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've sent like 25 or 30 pitches so far, and we've gotten 11 yeses.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, like now we've got to share for all those to completion and do all that.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_00: So like it is just math.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I know we sent thirty, that's a high volume for this early in the week, but we're done pitching for the week, and now we're gonna follow up and do all the other stuff.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: We already got 11 yeses out of them.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll just pull a couple pitches from this week that we've sent for League Microsoft, just put them as examples so you can see just kind of how we how we do things and you can model that.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_02: Man, I love that.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned convert kits uh a couple times a minute ago, and uh I love Nathan Berry's newsletter because he does that exact thing.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_02: Got an article, but also recommended resources.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_02: I love Noah Kagan's uh newsletter too.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's just it's kind of a similar thing, a different vibe.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of tacos mentioned, obviously.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_02: But I love those.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Ryan Holiday does this very well all the time.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, this is this is good stuff.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny you mentioned Noah.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: That was Noah was the person that I accidentally got into borrowing other people's audiences with.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_00: The first audience that ever borrowed was Noah's on his blog in 2013.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'll link the post so people can check it out.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was called I had just got into building an email list.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'd heard a lot of people talk about building an email list.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, I should do that.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I got the list of like 100 to 200 people, and I bought a course of Noah's.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't about the email list, um, but I'd followed it and I was just kind of sharing my wins as I went.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: And he saw that I'd got my list of 100, and he's like, hey, can you come on the blog and just share?
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_00: So it's funny we're talking about writing, um, and just share what you did.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I just wrote this super detailed post on how I got 100 subscribers.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: Out of that, I got 2,000 subscribers, and in the year since then, over$100,000 in sales from that first post.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: And doing that was like, that was the first thing I did that actually moved the needle on anything was on Noah's site, sharing a thing I'd done, just documenting what I'd done.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he had a list, I think his email list it's down to like 50,000 people.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: So 50,000 people got a blog post from me.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: There's a free resource link to the top.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like, hey, if you want a checklist, go do all this yourself, enter an email.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: A couple thousand people did that, over a hundred thousand dollars in sales from it, literally from borrowing, writing on Noah's site, and him telling his people about it, which is all we're doing here just in podcast form.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_00: Or all you're gonna do in a lead magic swap.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: And even that's the way League Microsoft's a great because you don't have to produce a new webinar or a new podcast interview or a new piece of content.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: You take the same thing and do minor repurposing evidence in front of almost any audience you want.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my that's my draw there.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, Noah was Noah put me on the map.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_00: I accredit all of my start the first several years to Noah directly.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: He's a great dude.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that's really, really cool.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_02: I've never connected with him personally, but I love his newsletter and I'm I'm sure I'll connect with him at some point down the road.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_02: So Brian, this has been uh phenomenal.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: I am going to uh run this podcast interview through transcription so I can go back and and review everything a couple times.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_02: You just dropped so many golden nuggets on this.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um I appreciate your time doing this.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um because I know this is you you mentioned a couple times this has been kind of a challenging week for you and a challenging period.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I just I really I respect the fact that hey, you're still you're still you're still here chatting with me today on this podcast.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you for inviting me.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: I I appreciate you, Matt.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_00: Appreciate you and the time and anybody that listened to this.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate you.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if you're at all interested in learning more about what we do, we help uh coaches, consultants, and people that sell high-end services get clients.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's our specialty.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're really good at it.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we use BOPA as the primary channel for that and get into other channels as you mature.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to hear more, want to talk to one of our coaches, just go to growthstools.com slash Kent.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: There'll be a link there.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: Just schedule the call to talk to us.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: We'll learn about your business, learn about your goals, see if it's a good fit to work together, talk about what that could look like.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: So uh if that is all interesting after hearing us talk for 30 minutes to an hour, checking out the resources, definitely, definitely check us out.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_00: Growthstools.com slash Kent.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, sir.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_00: This has been an absolute blast.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much, brother.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate you having me on.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, man, wasn't that an awesome interview?
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_02: I've got to say, this is one of my favorite podcast interviews I think that I've ever done.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_02: At this point in my podcasting career, let's see, I started in uh 2013, I believe.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_02: I've done hundreds of interviews over the 11 years or so that I've been podcasting.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I gotta tell you, this is one of my top five or ten, honestly.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh like I'm seriously not joking.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_02: I was blown away by Brian's knowledge by his sincerity, but also just his humility.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh not to mention all the great tips about ghostwriting and doing client work, and then not to mention all of the cool strategies behind his borrowing other people's audiences methods.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a lot of good stuff in this episode.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh probably this is one that you're gonna have to go back and listen to another time or two.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_02: I don't always recommend that people do that.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, sometimes you listen to an episode and you feel like you've extracted everything you needed to get from that.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_02: And to be honest with you, over the years, there are very, very few podcast episodes by other people that I have ever gone back and listened to twice.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um I've enjoyed thousands of podcast episodes once and then moved on to the next thing.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_02: But this is one of those rare conversations where I feel like you're gonna have to go back and listen to it again to really get everything that you need from it.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_02: So many, many thanks to Brian for taking time to have this conversation with me.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_02: And again, I want to encourage you to go to growthtools.com slash Kent F that's a growthtools.com slash Kent F that's K-En T.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_02: My name, obviously.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_02: And grab that list of resources that they've put together that is exclusive and that is specific to the profitable writer audience.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_02: So again to Brian, many thanks for making time to be guest today.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_02: And as always, thanks to you for listening.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll see you next time.