The 4 Forces of An Irresistible Offer Revisited: Sales & Marketing Insights from Michael Hunter

0:01 Welcome to The Coaching Equation brought to you by Empire Partners and hosted by Ryan Lang and Brooke Bishop. Our mission is to help you build a profitable and impactful coaching business by cutting through the noise and all the expert advice to deliver tried and true actionable insights that you can deploy in your business today. Each week, we bring on expert guests, unveil cutting edge tactics and strategies, and share the secrets and stories that we've gathered from working with the most successful coaching companies on earth. Welcome back to the Coaching Equation Podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Lang, CEO and co-founder of Empire Partners.

0:44 And I just got back from Phoenix a little bit ago, spending some time with a colleague and good friend of mine, Michael Hunter, who we had on the podcast last year. And we were together with a group of really amazing entrepreneurs working on sales, marketing, business building, branding. All of the things. And it really reminded me how incredibly brilliant Michael is with his frameworks around marketing, branding. This guy, former CMO for Brandon Burchard. I had an agency that did hundreds of millions in product launches for some of the biggest names in the game. His company, Spiffy Checkout, is the premier solution for checkout pages, our preferred solution for checkout pages.

1:29 And he's also got an amazing company called personalbrand.com that builds out really, really incredible and high-end personal brands. This was an amazing conversation. And in particular, the four forces of an irresistible offer. Listen, at the end of the day, if you don't have an irresistible offer, you don't have a business. So I wanted to revisit this episode. It was phenomenal the first time around. Being with Michael again reminded me that we needed to do this again. So here it is. Replay of last year's Coaching Equation podcast with Michael Hunter. Welcome back to the Coaching Equation podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Lang, CEO and co-founder of Empire Partners, alongside my co-founder and co-host, Brooke Bishop.

2:12 What's up, man? What up, what up? We got a special guest in the house today, the founder of Spiffy Checkouts. Michael Hunter is with us today. What's up, man? How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Bro, I've been really, really excited for this conversation for a number of different reasons. I think that you've got an incredible story that our audience is really going to resonate with. And I want to talk about Spiffy, too, and all of that stuff. But before we even go there, I want to ask, first of all, what kind of got you in the journey of getting interested in – Digital marketing and all of that stuff in the first place Was it something that that you had an interest in from an early age?

3:00 Did you stumble into it? How'd that all work out? Uh, yeah, I mean I I absolutely stumbled into it. I mean, uh, i've been an entrepreneur since I was 17 I had my first commission only sales gig at 17 and I just ended up crushing it for for a 17 year old relatively speaking at that time in my life and Went to my first sales conference, got looped into personal development, learned about Tony, this guy named Tony Robbins, and realized somewhere along the line in that short timeframe that being a public speaker was the highest paid profession. Saw the impact that was being had as well. And I was like, I want to do that. And so I was 17, 18 year old kid at the time.

3:42 It's like, no one's going to listen to me on how to live a good life or like take life advice from a kid. And so like, all right, what's the skill set I need to learn in order to do that someday. And it came back to online marketing and sales, marketing and sales. And so instead of, you know, you know, going out there and trying to do marketing and sales for myself. you know, building a speaking business, I was like, I'm gonna get paid how to learn. I'm gonna get paid to learn and I'm gonna do it for other people. And so that's really what got me into online marketing. And for, uh, the past 13, 14 years, I've been doing online marketing for authors, speakers, coaches, thought leaders, and personal brands. It's so cool, bro.

4:23 All roads lead to Tony. How I tried to leave the company, but it keeps falling back. How is it every time? No, that's awesome, man. That's way cool. Michael, I want to ask, too, I mean, we're going to talk lots about marketing and offers and all kinds of stuff like that today. But I don't think I realized the piece about sales. And I would love to hear from you. There's so many people who we work with because Brooke and I both have very deep sales backgrounds as well. Yeah. and we have our sales mastery program, close everyone. We work with so many people who are deathly afraid of sales.

5:03 It doesn't feel good. I don't like it. Uh, it's hard. It feels intimidating. And somebody out there listening to this is either in that spot and, or they're early on in their journey. And I'm curious for you at 17 years old, cause similarly, I think, you know, I was like 15 or something like that when I first started selling something. Um, What do you think it did for you to have a commission-only sales job at 17 years old? What do you think in terms of development and kind of getting over that hump early? How did that help you later on in entrepreneurship? Yeah. I mean, for, for better or worse, uh, it ruined me.

5:47 I mean, at the time I was 17 and it was that summer between, uh, you know, senior year of high school and freshman year of college. And for the first time I had a summer where I didn't have any sports and, you know, I decided not to play college sports, just turn the page. I had some opportunities to do so. Um. And so all the jobs I wanted, you needed to be 18. And so I actually went and worked for a family friends company as an employee. It's a catering business, just like waiting tables, setting up these pop up, you know, really awesome dining experiences, getting paid $15 an hour. And then... You know, a couple, maybe like three or four weeks after I started that, I got this letter in the mail and it was like $15 base pay plus commission or commission.

6:34 $15 base pay minimum or commission is kind of this weird commission structure where it was commission only, but kind of had a base. Um, and long story short, it ended up being Cutco kitchen knives. And my mom, uh, had owned Cutco kitchen knives from some other kid that came along, you know, you know, 10, 15 years before me. And I use them every single night for dinner. And I firmly believe in the product. I was a raving fanatic of it. I thought the best knives in the world, especially after I learned more about the company and the background and the quality of the product and so on and so forth. So going back to what you were talking about, most people's experience with salespeople is with unqualified, low-training salespeople.

7:17 And they feel shmarmy and they feel sleazy. And so a lot of the resistance is just based off of our negative experiences with people that aren't really trained or professional. And they're peddling products where no matter how much of a sales job someone does, you're not interested. So number one, you have to have a product that you firmly believe in. And then it's more of a consultative sales approach, just helping someone make a decision, realizing that your product is actually the best product in the You just outed one of my top recruiting centers. So speaking of Tony Robbins, when I was looking for salespeople and I'm going, OK, I need any people who are already trained up, who have already cut their teeth, who did the hard work because selling door to door is not easy.

8:06 And Cutco is so huge on getting referrals. That's that's dope that you started there. And it is that is a training ground like no other. But yeah, if anybody's needing to get good recruits, go find some Cutco salespeople and pull them away. goes listening today. Oh, dude, that's that's super cool. So so you you kind of got into personal development and you've you've really from personal development, it kind of boiled down to like, hey, if I'm going to really figure this out, it's got to be sales. It's got to be marketing. And how did kind of the marketing journey start to unfold? Because, you know, you you had some really cool opportunities earlier in your in your marketing career, working for some pretty, you know, some some pretty amazing people.

8:56 Yeah. And I mean, it really comes back to the economic landscape when I started my marketing company. So I was in college during the Great Recession. Started in the fall of 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, graduated in 2011. I saw kids and friends a couple of years ahead of me graduating with a degree, not getting a job in their discipline. Yeah. And so being a little bit of an entrepreneur, starting some side hustles in college, realized, okay, if I'm going to get a job at all, most likely out of college, I'm going to need to create it. And right around that time, Facebook opened up their platform for businesses, business pages. So way before even Facebook ads.

9:38 And at that time, I realized, hey, I've been using this social media thing. I understand it better than... uh, you know, anyone else just because of what I was doing from a business perspective, I was already using social media for my business. Um, so I realized I had a skill that was valuable in the marketplace, started as a social media marketing company for small businesses. At the beginning you have to like take, Money from anyone and everyone that's willing to pay you just to, you know, make ends meet. But quickly niched down to author, speakers, coaches, personal brands. And once I niched down, started working with bigger and bigger and bigger clients, all the way to working with a bunch of household names. you know relatively quickly i would say but i mean it was probably a three or four year process to really start crushing it just by nature of of of the economy and that that time period um but ultimately just came down to like getting really clear on a niche market building specialized uh you know skills in that market getting results for clients and gradually uh working up to some of the biggest names in the industry I'm just curious, during that time frame, during that three to four year time frame from kind of ground zero to working for some really big names, are there any key points that you can kind of point to for you personally where it was like, oh, shit, this is this is harder than I thought it was going to be or wow.

11:01 Wow. like this is tough enough that I might have to pack it in and do something else. Were there any key moments for you where you kind of really had to, to, to forge ahead like that, that come to mind? Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was, it was, I wanted to quit a million times a lot of the times. And we had a couple of failed business partnerships. My marketing company, it wasn't my first company. And so I had one of my best friends in college who actually has since passed away, Max Mendoza. He was a marketing major. And so I had started a business. He wanted to start a company. He wanted to be an entrepreneur. And so I was like, sweet, I can help. my friend Max and my other friend Mike start this marketing company and I can have a marketing company in my back pocket to implement all the other crazy ideas I had.

11:47 Long story short, those business partnerships didn't come to fruition the way I thought I would. And I ended up being the sole owner of the business and building it all on my own. Um, and so that brought a lot of complexities and, you know, really building the exact thing I was trying to avoid. Um, and then also along that path, um, I was cutting my teeth on marketing, working with really good clients, driving results. But I kept losing these really big deals to these guys that were coming out of Infusionsoft, which was a big tech platform back there. And we specialized in authors, speakers, coaches, thought leaders who were using Infusionsoft. Because people that anyone and everyone that was generating results at that time was using Infusionsoft.

12:33 So that was kind of a qualifier for us. Like if you're not using Infusionsoft, you either need to get on it or you're just not a fit for where our ideal client. And so these guys were coming out of Infusionsoft, either leaving on their own accord or getting laid off. And they weren't even in the marketing department. They weren't even good in the software. But I kept losing these deals because these guys used to work on Infusionsoft. And so actually, I live here in Phoenix, Arizona. Infusionsoft now Keep is headquartered here. And I had one of my friends get a job in the social media department in 2013. And I basically got recruited to join Infusionsoft's company. marketing department. I had a decision to make. And it was like the biggest decision that I had to make in my life at that point in time was like, do I sell out as an entrepreneur and get this job?

13:21 And it was a fast growth tech company. I knew I wanted to get into software someday. They had just raised $50 million of funding, which is kind of atypical here in the Arizona market. That's like Silicon Valley numbers. And so I had a soul searching moment. It's like, do I... you know, in my mind, do I sell out and go get a day job? But it was a strategic move because I knew if I was at Infusionsoft for one day as an official employee, five months, 12 months, five years, as soon as I left there, I could move forward faster and whatever I did next because it was a credibility booster. I was there for 16 months, got really political. As they tried to go public, they ended up not going public, you know, later down the road.

14:03 But, I just went back to being an Infusionsoft partner, running my agency after about 16 months. And sure enough, just because I could say that I used to work at Infusionsoft, my agency blew up. Bro, I love so much that you just told that story because I have a similar story and I try to explain to people all the time that we all think that it's going to be a straight line from where we are to what we want. And we get so caught up in how we get there, you know? And the truth is that... Like how you get there can can and probably should switch and change and be all kinds of topsy turvy.

14:50 And truthfully, so many of those moments where we have those big decisions that we have to make are the defining moments. And if we're willing to let go. Right. Let go because I've been there like the whole sellout thing. And, you know, it's like if you're not willing to let go, though, and go with the opportunity that seems to be in front of you and where the momentum is heading, you can end up stopping yourself and, you know, straighten your tracks and even further, you know, prolonging the journey. 100%. I always say sometimes the scenic route is actually the fastest path. Because sometimes a direct route, you have to go over the mountains, the valleys, and there's chasms you can't cross.

15:31 But there's this paved route. I also talk about moving in 45 degree angles. And so it's something that's been a theme throughout my life as well. Um, yeah, I'm, I'm a firm believer that, you know, the, the, the mainstream message of hustle, hustle, hype, you know, hype, hype, hype, moving to get super clear on your goals, burn the boats, you know, no plan B only plan a, like there's a season for that. And that's, that's applicable in some, some areas, but it's not, not the, the end all be all a mode of operating for sure. Will you say a little bit more about the 45-degree angles? I've never heard that concept or that sentiment before.

16:12 Yeah. I mean, just based off of the context of the story I just told about taking that job at Infusionsoft, it wasn't just any job, right? It's not like, oh, this marketing company, it was working just fine. I actually took a pay cut to go work at Infusionsoft. So it wasn't like... I was just taking any random job just to bring bills in. It was like a very, very strategic move. Yeah. And it wasn't in direct alignment with my bigger picture goals. It was kind of a sidestep. It wasn't a direct line from point A to point B. It was like point A. A to like C over here to go back to B, you know? And so ultimately it was just, I realized that that move was actually going to help me get to my end goals faster, even though short term, it seemed like I was going out of my way.

17:03 You know, I love that you asked about that, Brooke, because this is, you know, it reminds me of, I mean, it's kind of a microcosm for how in business we have seasons. We have to have seasons. You know, I think that there's this there's this false belief, especially from people who haven't been there, done that, that they've got to be in a constant upward situation. you know, uh, trajectory at all times. If we're not growing, you know, there's some kind of problem and it just, just the same way as it is in our personal journeys, we've got to be willing in business to, yeah, we have an upward growth trend and then we level off for a minute and we take a breather and we look around and we optimize things or we take a sidestep for a second to, you know, to do something that needs to be done.

17:48 Um, And then we get back on the growth path. And I got this so wise, man. And I agree, Brooke. I really love the analogy of the 45 degree angle. I've not heard that before either. It's really good, man. It's really good. So when you – after you kind of got back to the agency and now you had an opportunity to go and work with some really big players, what was it – you kind of – that was – when was the moment that you kind of started looking at – checkouts specifically because obviously you, you, you still have, you know, stuff going on with, with the agency.

18:35 We'll talk about that in a minute. And then there's Spiffy. When did you start sort of spotlight Spiffy and how did that all come to fruition? Yeah, it's a really great question. I mean, it was a process. I mean, we were in the trenches, building out funnels, building websites, writing copy, running ads, just really knowing the ins and outs of our entire space, all the tools in that space, using all the tools, realizing all the limitations of all the tools, hopping from tool to tool to tool... And so like, we just knew like everything about the industry. And, um, um, really what led to, to checkouts and spiffy was we started customizing infusion soft order forms, custom coding for our clients, big product launches.

19:29 These are big name authors, speakers, coaches, personal brands, and the personal development and business thought leadership space. They do these big promotions, affiliate promotions, internal promotions to their own list. And the price point and the economics of that marketing campaign, the price point of their product and the economics of that marketing campaign made a lot of sense for them to spend some money optimizing and smoothing out the checkout experience. Now this is back in 2014 and 2015 timeframe. We just realized all of our clients were coming to us because we were doing this very unique thing in 2014 and 2015, creating mobile optimized and conversion optimized checkout pages.

20:13 we were charging $2,500 just to build out that single page. We had this code snippet. My business partner, Jeremy Abraham, created this little mobile optimized code snippet that we could just copy and paste, but it still took a lot of coding and development to add all the content and all of the other pieces of the equation to that checkout page. And not everyone can afford to spend $2,500 to build an optimized checkout page. We had the agency work with a lot of high profile clients who were super stressful. No matter how well you communicated or set expectations or set boundaries, they were always crossed.

20:54 Everyone wants everything done yesterday. You set a week of vacation, 6 months in advance, you get on the calendar and all of a sudden, halfway through your vacation, someone wants to launch a new product and your vacation goes to... 18 double hockey stick. And, and, uh, and they're, they're paying you a ton of money, so you have to justify it. And so, you know, Jeremy and I, we turned to ourselves like, all right, this isn't in the cards for the next 30 years of our life. We can't raise families doing this. This isn't in the cards. And we both wanted to get into software. And so naturally we went through a process of identifying about 20 different software ideas that we thought could be a million dollar ideas, narrowing it down to three that we thought could be 20, 50, a hundred based off of highest risk or sorry, highest opportunity, lowest risk to execute against.

21:44 So ultimately, choosing Spiffy came down to knowing our industry, being practitioners, seeing the pain points and identifying an opportunity. Oh my gosh, I just want to like encapsulate the last 30 seconds sentiment. So brilliant. There's so much that's in there too. Even just one of the words you dropped early in that segment, which was mobile. I cannot tell you how many people don't even think mobile still. And it's like, holy cow. If your website's not mobile ready, if your checkout cart's not mobile ready, you're leaving so much money on the table. But, uh, dude. And not just mobile ready, but like optimized for the mobile experience.

22:25 Oftentimes people think of like, Oh, I'm a competition. They're not super, you know, our competition is Netflix. Our competition is Facebook. These are free platforms or low cost platforms. User experience needs to be seamless. So if you're a small business, if you're a solopreneur or freelancer agency owner building an online business, it's not about who your direct competitor is. Our competition is customer experience. You know, that's, the billion dollar companies, the trillion dollar companies are setting the expectation for. So good. While we're on the subject of checkouts for just a second, because I'll be totally honest with you.

23:08 I've been, you know, I've been, I started really diving into digital marketing like 2015. And really for the first three or four years was just kind of figuring it out on my own and doing what I needed to do to run my own business and that kind of thing. Um, and, and have done quite a bit more since then. But one of the things that I didn't think about until very recently was you just said something I think that very few people think about, which is conversion based optimized checkout pages. Most of us honestly are just going, well, shit, checkout page, checkout page.

23:51 Like I just slapped the thing in there. People are going to put their credit card information in and we're good and we're done. What was it where – I'd love to hear because I'm sure you guys did analytics on this. But what are some of the things that you guys noticed early on? And I know you've got a whole list, and we're going to tee this up, by the way. We're going to give you a super cool tool at the end of this episode to go check out. But what were some of the things early, Michael, that you guys noticed were like, ooh, if this is this way – people are not, you know, if people are not converting, what, what are, what are, what were some of the keys that you noticed early on when you started studying this?

24:31 Yeah. Well, the first thing is to look at the offer. Luckily, by the time we were building out checkout pages, we were already working with people who already had their offer dialed in high converting, had some track record, but there's no amount of funnel hacking or conversion optimization tactics or blocking and tackling that can fix a broken offer. So first you have to have an irresistible offer and then there's lots of small nuances that you can implement to streamline a checkout experience. So what do you when you think about that? That's that's a really, really good point. And when you think about when you think about an irresistible offer, we hear this from lots of different places.

25:11 But in Michael Hunter's world, what makes an irresistible offer? There's a few different things. The biggest place where I think people miss the mark is they know what's in their product. but they don't do an effective job of really explaining what the benefit of getting that result is. So one, your product needs to be able to get a predictable and repeatable result. And we can kind of visualize this as someone on the left bank of a river and they want to get to the right bank of a river. And your product or service is a bridge that just helps them get there faster.

25:55 They don't need to get wet. They don't need to spend the time building a boat and trying to navigate the river on their own. Your product is that bridge to help them go from point A to point B. And what tends to happen is people spend way too much time selling the features and the bells and whistles of the bridge versus selling the destination. And ultimately, there's a couple of different pieces here that we can get into. But just like three of the biggest pieces... Actually, the number one biggest piece, and then I'll talk about this concept that I have called the four forces, I think are really relevant here. That's really helpful. The first one is just cost to value contrast. And so it's not like what you know that your product is valued at.

26:38 It's in the mind of your customer. What is the perceived value of your offer? And then making sure that the cost... is a ratio of one third to one tenth of the value. So this is where target market research kind of comes in, getting feedback from ideal customers, presenting an offer, asking, hey, what's your perceived value? What would you price this result at? And then just making sure that what you're actually charging is one third to one tenth of the perceived value of the offer. When it comes to an irresistible offer, you think about like, what's going to get someone to take their credit card out right now and exchange dollars for my product or service. And ultimately it needs to be a good deal, right?

27:20 It's like, think about when you go buy something, like sometimes you buy something you don't even rest necessarily need, you don't wake up that morning, morning thinking about it. but it's a really good deal like you take advantage of it because like heck like absolutely no-brainer so that's that's one aspect um i'll roll into like the four forces this is a topic we could like do a whole entire podcast on so we'll just kind of like talk about at a high level here but there's really four forces that build up the anatomy of an irresistible offer so these are ways where either you might need to retool your product or service to with these four things in mind, or maybe you don't need to change anything. You just need to change how you talk about how you present it. So the four forces are effort required, speed to value, certainty of result and urgency.

28:10 So if you think about communicating your offer, what is a perceived effort required in getting that result? How fast or how long is it going to take to get that result? Right. How confident am I that you're the person that can help me get that result through your product or service? And urgency. Is this something that I need to be taking action on now? A lot of times people think urgency is like slapping a countdown timer on a landing page and... I think the market's a little wise to the gimmicks of that these days. We figured that out by now. Yeah, exactly. But kind of going back to a similar parallel of mobile optimization of your checkout experience, urgency, you're not competing with the other person.

28:54 You know, if you're a coach, you're not competing with another coach. selling their services that might be kind of like yours. You're urgent. You're competing against Netflix. So you have to have your language dialed in as to not only why you, but why now? And the trade-off isn't hiring, you know, why they should hire you or hire a different coach. Your message needs to be dialed in as like, why should you and I be having a coaching conversation instead of you sitting on the couch watching Netflix tonight? And so those are four different ways that you can really start to craft messaging around your offer to really drive urgency to communicate the value. One example that I use is Xanax versus meditation, right? Effort required, speed to value, certainty of result, urgency.

29:36 It's like you can sit and meditate, but it's hard. You have to sit there and you're not good at it at first and it takes a long time to practice. Or you can just pop the pill and get the result instantly, right? I'm not promoting Xanax as a thing I believe in. We're not promoting Xanax on the show. Sorry. Call Michael for drugs. But it's the best example I can give. I might need to think of a different example. But long story short, it's like, how can you craft your products and services to be more of that immediate solution? And it's not always possible to have that much of a...

30:17 of an immediate result. But another example that might fit better recently, I was doing a power hour call with a client and their offer wasn't converting. And it was a free offer. It's like, how do you not get a free offer to convert? But it was this five-day workshop. that they were promoting is this five-day workshop. And so it's not just about the value of the price, but it's also the time investment. It was too high of a cost. So we dug in and it's like, well, tell me about this five-day workshop. Like who the heck has time to go to a five-day workshop? Anyway, she's like, oh, well, it's like each day we spend an hour and we go through these different things. I give them a little assignment and we come back the next day and it's five days. I'm like, oh, so it's a five-hour workshop.

30:57 It's not a five-day workshop. So changing her messaging, from a five-day workshop. And today in five hours, I can get this result that you really need, want and desire completely shifted the entire thing. So now she's filling that workshop with a lot more ease. So damn smart. It's a really great example, too, of how how sometimes simple wording can can really shift the results that we're getting in terms of what we're putting out there from a marketing perspective. I love these four forces, by the way. And I think this is all 100 percent spot on. One thing that I'd love for you to touch on, because clearly this is something that that that you're really honed in on.

31:43 What do you say to somebody who is going, okay, yeah, but Michael, look – Everybody and their mother out there right now is promising the instant pill. Everybody. And I, while, while I know that in theory I could, I could offer an instant pill, I don't want to because my expertise tells me that in my particular line of work, if I, if I give someone the instant pill, they're not going to get the long-term result that I know they really want and that I want for them. How do we market something that isn't instant? For a great example, the three of us on this call know that if you want to actually build a successful business, you ain't doing that overnight.

32:30 There is no eight-week workshop to becoming a seven-figure entrepreneur that you're actually going to sustain over time. It takes work. It takes effort. It takes grit, staying power, all of those things. How the hell do we market that? uh and and still show that that maybe there's more speed to value i i don't know i mean help me with that idea Yeah. Usually in all scenarios I can think of, it comes back to symptom versus core problem. And core problems sometimes alleviate multiple symptoms. But it's something like building a business.

33:11 Obviously, there's so many different facets to that. But typically, a prospect... has some type of symptom that... And probably multiple symptoms, but typically one or two symptoms that's really on their top level of awareness that they're looking for a solution for. So even though the underlying thing, whether it's a core problem or something as big as building a successful business that typically takes years or even decades to accomplish, it's about... addressing quick wins based off of the symptoms that they're experiencing and helping guide them to a deeper level of conversation, realizing that there's more work to be done than just fixing whatever's top of mind.

33:54 And so when we talk about building a thought leader business, that's the genesis of the messaging is like meet them where they're at, their current level of awareness and guide their thoughts. to realizing that there's a bigger picture that they're missing. One example of this is like, you know, you know, hypothetically speaking, like a restaurant owner, it's like struggling, barely making payroll every single month, you know, really just working long hours. His top of mind level of awareness is, uh, I need more foot traffic. I need more people in my door. I need marketing and I need. people coming into my door. Well, the real core problem is he doesn't have systems.

34:34 He has no way of even communicating or marketing back to his existing customers. Right? But if you're the, you know, the person positioning themselves as the person that helps, helps implement systems and, and restaurants or, or, or whatnot, like he's not looking for you, he's looking for the marketing guy. Right? So how can you position yourself? Maybe marketing isn't like your end all be all, but position yourself with some content online, maybe a small crash course where you deliver on the marketing thing. to help him alleviate his immediate symptom and then guide him to understanding actually systems are valuable and it's lack of systems that are really causing the problem further upstream because you you get someone to come into your restaurant and your foods you know quality isn't good and there's no you know the service there's a breakdown and there's no there's no system in the kitchen there's no system in the service Just because you had someone come on your door, like they're never coming back.

35:30 So, you know, there's kind of like a different level of thinking there. So that's kind of how I think about that concept. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it kind of seems it's it kind of seems like the old adage that I still believe is very true in many cases about like, you know, tell them what they want and then give them what they need. Kind of a kind of a situation. I think I love this point, Michael, because I think it boils down to being willing to really know what people are actually looking for and wanting, whether it's what they actually need or they don't.

36:11 Yeah, I remember back in when I first got into coaching, I was in the health and fitness space. And I remember when I had the aha around like, well, I could I could write you the best nutrition plan on the face of the earth. I can give you the best training plan on the face of the earth. And all of it is shit if if your mindset is trash. And I was like, oh, gosh, I just want to go tell the whole world. You just you just got to get it right up here. And then all the rest is easy. Right. And I remember in the earth that was really in the early days of me trying to run my business. And I was trying to write marketing messages around that. And it's just failing miserably, as you can imagine, because nobody wants to hear that.

36:56 Um, nobody wants to hear that at all. It was always just like, yeah, but what am I going to eat? Yeah, but what's the training plan? Yeah, but, and I finally got sick of it and I was like, okay, you know what? If you can't beat them, join them. And, and I just, I, I talk all about all the nutrition and, and the, the, the training woes that they were going through and then whack them upside with the mindset hammer when they came in the door. Um, but I, I, I love that. I think that's really, really interesting. Valuable advice. When you talk about, you know, personal branding and you know quite a bit about this, especially with some of the people that you've worked with. And I'm curious, what do you feel like?

37:39 Because this is kind of a... this is a topic that comes up pretty often in our world these days. What do you feel like separates the people that build a very successful, um, actually profitable personal brand versus, uh, those who don't cause you've seen and worked with some of those people. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we own personalbrand.com. That's our agency that we're running. And so that's our bread and butter helping thought leaders monetize their message. The number one thing that I think is that isn't said, isn't spoken about, isn't that the light's not shined on it enough, is that we often look at all the big names in the industry and we see what they're doing now.

38:35 And we try to mimic what they're doing now, but it's not how they got started. And so, uh, you know, I, you know, being, uh, Brendan Burchard's former CMO, I know Brendan intimately. Um, and he's at my wedding. I mean, like he's, he's someone that I worked closely with for, for several years. Um, and, um, One of the biggest ahas I had in my entire career was the first time I logged into Brendan's Infusionsoft account. I saw how simple his funnels were, how simple his marketing automation was. He focused on messaging. He focused on building a great offer and getting it in front of people. It's that simple. You go to these marketing conferences and like, oh, predictive AI and behavioral based automated funnels.

39:19 And if they click on that, then do this and this and that. And it's like most people don't have enough volume going to that funnel for that to make any difference whatsoever. And so ultimately, one, it comes back... Even our clients today, we usually engage people when they're right around that million dollar mark. And they've gotten there because they've just tried a lot of different things and they're spending a lot of different plates. And ultimately our process helps identify how, how, how doing less can actually produce more. And so oftentimes, uh, you know, just naturally when you're first starting out, you have to put a lot of irons in the fire and you have to do a lot of different things to see what works, where you're getting traction.

40:05 Um, however, once you start to get traction, uh, it's, it's about optimizing and, and really, uh, refining your business around what's working and letting everything else, uh, you know, fall away. This is such a key point because you're listening to this right now. You may want to go back and replay the last minute and a half because what I heard you just say is do the simple things, do them well, double down when it's going well instead of chasing the shiny new toy. Absolutely. I mean, over the last... Amazing.

40:46 I mean, shoot, over the last 14 years, I mean, I've talked with thousands and thousands and thousands of people building online businesses. And I've seen just about everything you can possibly see. And the people that are having the most success... are building within the constraints of tools that are out there. They're looking at the tool. They're looking at its limitations. All tools have limitations. There's no tool that's going to be perfectly exactly what you picture in your mind. So keep it simple. Don't overcomplicate things. Focus on delivering a result for clients. And that's really what is one of the key recipes of success.

41:31 You work in an industry that – so with most of our clients being in the coaching industry, it's a space where we have a lot of solopreneurs, single coaches that are trying to kind of figure it all out and that kind of thing. And most of them – dabble in marketing. They try to wrap their brain around it. Oftentimes, it's not necessarily their expertise. I'm curious for you because you've seen this in so many different ways, both as a business owner and then working, you know, I mean, in your own business. And then... working in the marketing space, you see plenty of people that come to you that I'm sure either want to do their own marketing and maybe some of them should be and some of them shouldn't be.

42:20 How do we figure out in business what what are the things that we that that we should be doing? And what are the things that we really ought to try to find better practitioners than we are to help us with? How do we figure that out? Oh man, that's a deep question to unpack. I'm trying to think of a way to offer a concise message there. I mean, one of the biggest things in something that I wish I would have done earlier in my career was actually find a mentor. Um, and, and some of those a little bit more hands-on. Um, I have lots of mentors through books, through online programs, through, uh, YouTube videos.

43:02 I mean, when I was in college, I would, you know, go to a, I didn't drink. I would go to a party, see my friends. I'd leave like right when the party was getting good and I'd go home and I'd literally hop on YouTube and I'd watch Tony Robbins videos. You know, it's like, like, like that was my mentorship. Right. But there's this, there's something to be said about having someone that, um, that is hands-on that can give you tailored advice. So I would say that's the first step. The next step is like really knowing yourself and there's things that you're good at that you don't like doing. And there's things that you're just not good at and you don't even know you should do. And so oftentimes that's the ladder is the thing that hangs us up. It's like the things that we don't know that we need to know that there's no way of us knowing unless someone tells us, you know, then typically we're delegating things that we're actually kind of good at and probably we should still be doing.

43:52 but we're delegating that to someone else just because it's something that we don't like to do and you're delegating the wrong things. And so, um, you know, ultimately you want to really know yourself, know your skillset. I'm a firm believer that when you're building an online business, especially as a coach or a thought leader or someone looking to monetize their coaching skill or some type of, um, expertise or coaching as a component of their offering, um, You really need to know the top five skill sets that it takes to run your business because you don't want to be hamstrung or limited by some hire that knows how to send your marketing newsletter and you have no idea how to craft your marketing newsletter, for an example.

44:34 You should know how to run a Facebook ad if running ads is a critical part of your business. It's not saying that you're the best in the world at it, but when push comes to shove until you find, you know, need to replace your ads person because they leave or they go start their own thing. Like you need to know the top five skill, what are the top five skill sets to effectively run your business and how can you be proficient in each of those areas? And that's a great place to start. You know, Brendan, a good example. He built an eight figure thought leader business. Yeah. without hiring a single marketing person. He built all of his pages. He built his website. He built his funnels. They were very, very basic and simple. I was his first full-time marketing hire. And I built out his entire marketing, his first entire marketing team.

45:18 And again, I was blown away at how much he accomplished keeping things simple, doing things on his own accord. At that time, his website... Honestly, it looked terrible. It was very bad. He built it himself in HTML. So the landscapes changed. The games changed. The aesthetics and presenting yourself and having a really great website actually is way more important these days than it was 10 years ago. And so again, the dynamics have slightly shifted, but the principle still stands. Keep things simple. Play within your skill set. Develop your skill set and go from there. And you opened a loop, so I'd be remiss if I didn't ask for, like, what are the five things? I'm like, what are the five things?

45:59 Yeah, it varies person to person, right? Like, if you are really good on camera and really good speaking your expertise, the five skills might be podcasting, video editing. I think copywriting is a non-negotiable thing. I think some type of technical skill, whether it's learning a landing page builder or some type of website software. Back in the day, I had to learn how to... you know, manually upload all the WordPress files to a server, like spin up a server, install WordPress and like do all this.

46:41 It was so technical. Now you press like three buttons and it's done, you know, things that used to take me two hours to do and figure out on my own. It's just not, it's not even a thing anymore. So yeah, those five skills, I think, you know, are different to everyone based off your current skill set, how you want to make an impact. I think the one non-negotiable is copywriting. Every single person building a coaching business or building an online business needs to become an expert copywriter of communicating your message, whether that's written copywriting. We think of it being written words and typing things out or emails, but it's your language. And the better you are writing copy, the better you are at speaking more effectively.

47:23 I love that you brought that up, especially with everyone jumping on the AI bandwagon and just being like, I don't have to write anymore. I'm just going to throw it over to Mr. Technology. So I'm stoked that you just brought that up, man. Really, really insightful. I think, too, I'm glad you just brought that up, because I think that in general, one of the things and correct me if you think I'm wrong, Michael, but I think that in today's day and age, really. Even beyond, it used to be that literally it was be a good copywriter. You literally had to either be able to write your own copy, speak your own copy, whatever it might be. But I think today what gets missed is that to Brooke's point, I think a lot of people think like, oh, I don't even have to – I don't have to care about this anymore because I'm just going to feed it to ChatGPT or another AI bot and it's going to do it for me.

48:11 But where I think you're absolutely spot on is that – If someone doesn't have an understanding of copywriting, you have no idea if chat GPT is feeding you back garbage or whether it's good. And you also have no idea whether, you know, you don't have the ability to craft it in a way that's unique and specific to you and your message and your specific and, you know, unique client. One of our buddies... Stephen, who's an AI expert and a marketing geek as well, kind of said, think of ChatGPT as your junior copywriter and you're the senior copywriter, right?

48:56 Well, if you don't understand copywriting, you can't be the senior copywriter in that scenario. It doesn't work. Totally. And especially in the types of businesses that we work with day to day and your audience, coaches, consultants, author speakers, coaches, thought leaders, you might be able to get away with chat GPT copy to make a quick buck. But then all of a sudden they show up to a coaching call and you can't talk your way into like they come to your live events and you speak on stage and someone's like super excited to see you because you had a huge impact because all of your online stuff is all dialed in because it's rehearsed and edited and cut. And then all of a sudden you're on stage and you can't effectively communicate.

49:36 Like there's a point where... your shortcuts will come to bite you in the rear end. And so it's all about building the skill set. And again, you don't need to be the world's best copywriter, but you need to be proficient. And it's not saying that you need to write your copy always and forever until the end of time. But when you become proficient at it, to your point, you can recognize good copy from bad copy. You can hire, be more effective at hiring copywriters, developing talent within your team. All of these things are really important when you have a baseline understanding of all the things, all the skills that are needed to effectively run your business. Yeah. It's so wise, man. Yeah, so wise. I want to ask you one final question before we start to kind of wind it down here, because you talked a little bit earlier about the fact that you wish you would have gotten like more of a hands on mentor sooner than you did.

50:30 What do you feel like you missed early on not having a hands on mentor and kind of trying to do it through just videos and reviews? Well, probably beyond tapes at that point, but videos and books and that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean... It's hard. That's a hard question. I don't know what I missed. Right. But I mean, like being as as retrospective as I possibly could, it just took me a lot longer to to get the results I wanted. You know, I mean, we we really establish ourselves as thought leaders in the industry. We spoke at a lot of masterminds. I brush shoulders a lot of people.

51:10 I knew all the top people and all the top masterminds, but I never joined the mastermind myself. Because I felt like I already knew the players. They were past clients. They're people I could make a phone call to and they'd answer. But what I realized is there's something powerful about proximity and frequency of touch points. Yes. And so even though I'd run into these people once a year at Traffic Conversion Summit or some other event, right? there's power and frequency, there's power in building shared experiences. There's power in breaking bread over the table, not just, you know, having a quick 15 minute conversation and a follow up zoom call the week later. Right. And so, you know, I think mentorship can look very specific as far as finding someone that has your exact skillset and is actively, you know, invested in, in, in guiding you.

51:59 But I also think that mentorship could be joining communities that, you know, A lot of these big masterminds, it's $25K, $35K, $100,000 a year. And at face value, you're like, who the heck would spend $25,000 to meet with a group of people three times a year? But those are some of the most valuable investments that we've made and will continue to make. And we're looking to double and triple down on those types of investments into the future. Just the diversity of mentorship, the diversity of expertise, the sharing of knowledge... being in the room with people that are already qualified to afford your services, like everything starts moving faster when you're in a group of people that are moving and shaking. I mean, yes to all of that.

52:41 Just yes. That was really good, man. Well, Michael, first of all, I want to say thank you for taking the time today, brother, and really honor you. You know, you're such a great example of, again, somebody who started out on a path and, you know, allowed the path to kind of unfold how it did. And you've done so many really neat and incredible things. And you've got such great stories to tell as a result of all the different experiences that you've had. And in addition to that, you're just a good dude. And I know that you're out there doing amazing things in the world. And I want to say this, too.

53:22 I want to be clear that you don't just put lip service to the idea of simplicity. Because to be honest with you, when we started using Spiffy Checkouts, my first thought was, holy shit, this is simple. Yeah. I swear to God. And like you, I've used every frigging tool on the face of the planet. And the first thing I thought was, this is simple. I'm like, what's the catch? What am I missing here? Where's the... Four hours of time I'm going to have to put into creating this checkout page. And I want to honor you for that, because I think a lot of times it gets too easy for any of us to say things and give lip service to ideas.

54:06 You actually put them into play in a product and a service that is that is needed. Um, and, and I love that. And, and for the record, we, we really do love spiffy. Like no, no joke. It is simple and simple is good. And, uh, even at a level of somebody who's dealt with some very complex tools, I don't need complex tools. I need something that works and I need something that works quickly. Um, and when I need it to work. Right. Ryan literally called me. He's like, dude, this thing is awesome. So easy. Never done that with any other piece of tech that we've ever invested in. So, yeah, it's awesome. So true. So, well, so listen, we I tease this earlier and Michael earlier talked about conversions and, you know, some of the things that you need to be paying attention to with regard to conversions.

54:59 And if you want an actual list, they've got a fantastic checklist that you can grab. If you go to if you go to spiffy.co forward slash checklist that you can download and it's 12 tactics to boost your conversions at checkout. And. Uh, this is something I think everybody ought to get their hands on, especially for crying out loud. It's free. Um, and we're going to link some other stuff up in the show notes. Uh, if you're interested in, uh, signing up for Spiffy, you can go to www.empirepartners.io forward slash Spiffy. Uh, and we've linked that up for you there. We'll put that in the show notes as well. Um, Michael, again, thank you, dude. I hope, uh, honestly, I feel like we've got like a bazillion episodes of stuff to unpack here.

55:43 So I'd love to do it again sometime. Um, brother. Absolutely. Have me back. I'd love to dig into some of these concepts further and, and, uh, you know, have, have a, uh, a follow-up conversation. These are topics that I'm deeply passionate about and especially, uh, the people that you're serving and the impact you're having in the world. Uh, just grateful to have the opportunity to, to share with your community. Appreciate it, brother. Well, thank you for listening to this episode of the coaching equation podcast. And, uh, we'll see you on the flip side. Take care. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Coaching Equation. Please hit subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you got value out of this episode, we would be so grateful if you would share it out with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite platform.

56:33 To learn more about Empire Partners or to inquire about working with Ryan and Brooke, please visit www.empirepartners.io forward slash go.