The 4 Forces of an Irresistible Offer: 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 to episode 23 of the Coaching Equation podcast.

0:42 I'm your host, Ryan Lang, CEO and co-founder of Empire Partners, alongside my co-founder and co-host, Brooke Bishop. And in today's episode, we've got a special guest, Michael Hunter, the founder of PersonalBrand.com and Spiffy Checkouts is with us today. And holy smokes. You're going to want to get out that notepad and hopefully you've got several pages available because you're going to fill it up. This episode is packed with so much goodness. We're going to dig into Michael's entrepreneurial journey from the young age of 17 doing sales, getting into the marketing space and working with some of the best in the business to...

1:22 Pairing with Infusionsoft and eventually creating an incredible SaaS product in Spiffy Checkouts and still continuing to do work with some of the biggest personal brands in the industry. We're going to get into sales and marketing and irresistible offers. We're going to get into the trials and tribulations of being a business owner, what to focus on, and also why it's important to not just get mentorship from videos and books, but why Michael believes that he actually lost a step by not having a hands-on mentor. This episode is packed with enough goodness to fill up at least two episodes and you're going to get it in one.

2:05 So without further ado, let's dive into episode 23 of the Coaching Equation podcast. 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. What's up, man? What up, what up? And we got a special guest in the house today, the founder of Spiffy Checkout's. Michael Hunter is with us today. What's up, man? How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. 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...

2:47 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 you had an interest in from an early age? Did you stumble into it? How'd that all work out? I absolutely stumbled into it. I mean, I've been an entrepreneur since I was 17. I had my first commission-only sales gig at 17 and just ended up crushing it for a 17-year-old, relatively speaking, at that time in my life. Went to my first sales conference, got looped into personal development, learned about 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.

3:29 I 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. I was like, no one's going to listen to me on how to live a good life or 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 going out there and trying to do marketing and sales for 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 the past 13, 14 years, I've been doing online marketing for authors, speakers, coaches, thought leaders, and personal brands. So cool, bro.

4:09 All roads lead to Tony. I tried to leave the company, but it keeps falling back. How is it? Every time. Oh, 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. And we have our sales mastery program, Close Everyone. We work with so many people who are deathly afraid of sales. It doesn't feel good. I don't like it. It's hard. It feels intimidating.

4:50 And somebody out there listening to this is either in that spot and or they're early on in their journey and... And I'm curious for you at 17 years old, because similarly, I was like 15 or something like that when I first started selling something. 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 getting over that hump early? How did that help you later on in entrepreneurship? Yeah. I mean, for better or worse, it ruined me. I mean, at the time I was 17 and it was that summer between senior year of high school and freshman year of college.

5:32 And for the first time I had a summer where I didn't have any sports and I decided not to play college sports, just turn the page. I had some opportunities to do so. 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 waiting tables, setting up these pop-up, really awesome dining experiences, getting paid $15 an hour. And then a couple... Maybe like 3 or 4 weeks after I started that, I got this letter in the mail. And it was like $15 base pay minimum or commission. It was this weird commission structure where it was commission only, but had a base. And long story short, it ended up being Cutco Kitchen Knives.

6:13 And my mom had owned Cutco Kitchen Knives from some other kid that came along 10-15 years before me and I used 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. 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.

6:55 So number one, you have to have a product that you firmly believe in. And then it's more of a constatative sales approach, just helping someone make a decision, realizing that your product is actually the best product in the industry and something that's going to add value to their life. You just outed one of my top recruiting centers. So speaking of Tony Robbins, when I was looking for salespeople, and I'm going, okay, 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. And Cutco is so huge on getting referrals. 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 sales peeps and pull them away. But anyways, hopefully nobody from Cutco is listening today.

7:38 Oh, dude, that's super cool. So you kind of got into personal development and 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 had some really cool opportunities earlier in your marketing career working for some pretty amazing people. 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 years ahead of me graduating with a degree, not getting a job in their discipline.

8:23 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. And at that time, I realized, hey, I've been using this social media thing. I understand it better than anyone else just because of what I was doing from a business perspective. I was already using social media for my business. 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 take money from anyone and everyone that's willing to pay you just to make ends meet. But quickly niched down to author, speakers, coaches, personal brands.

9:06 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. And so... 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 the economy and that time period. But ultimately, it just came down to getting really clear on a niche market, building specialized skills in that market, getting results for clients, and gradually 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 harder than I thought it was going to be?

9:53 Or, wow, this is tough enough that I might have to pack it in and do something interesting? else. Were there any key moments for you where you really had to forge ahead that come to mind? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It was miserable. I wanted to quit a million times. A lot of the times. I 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. Long story short, those business partnerships didn't come to fruition the way I thought I would.

10:37 And I ended up being the sole owner of the business and building it all on my own. And so that brought a lot of complexities and really building the exact thing I was trying to avoid. And then also along that path, 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 is a big tech platform back there. And we specialized in authors, speakers, coaches, thought leaders who are using Infusionsoft because anyone and everyone that was generating results at that time was using Infusionsoft. So that was kind of a qualifier for us. If you're not using Infusionsoft, you either need to get on it or you're just not a fit for our ideal client.

11:20 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 at Infusionsoft. And so 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 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? It was a fast growth tech company. I knew I wanted to get into software someday.

12:01 They had just raised $50 million of funding, which is atypical here in the Arizona market. That's like Silicon Valley numbers. And so I had a soul searching moment. It's like, 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, 5 months, 12 months, 5 years, as soon as I left there, I could move forward faster in whatever I did next because it was a credibility booster. I was there for 16 months, got really political. They tried to go public. They ended up not going public later down the road. But I just went back to being an Infusionsoft partner, running my agency after about 16 months.

12:44 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 that how we get there. And the truth is that how you get there can and probably should switch and change and be all kinds of topsy turvy. 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, let go because I've been there, like the whole sellout thing. And 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...

13:29 you can end up stopping yourself and straighten your tracks and even further 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. cross, 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. I'm a firm believer that the mainstream message of hustle, hustle, hype, hype, hype, hype, moving, get super clear on your goals, burn the boats, no plan B, only plan A. There's a season for that. And that's applicable in some areas, but it's not the end all be all mode of operating for sure.

14:11 Will you say a little bit more about the 45 degree angles? I've never heard that concept or that sentiment before. 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? 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 a sidestep. It wasn't a direct line from point A to point B. It was like point A to like C over here to go back to B. And so it ultimately was just I realized that that move was actually going to help me get to my end goals faster.

14:56 Even though short term, it seemed like I was going out of my way. I love that you asked about that, Brooke, because you know what 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 false belief, especially from people who haven't been there, done that, that they've got to be in a constant upward trajectory at all times. If we're not growing, you know, there's some kind of problem. And 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 do something that needs to be done.

15:38 And then we get back on the growth path. God, that's 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. So after you kind of got back to the agency and now you had an opportunity to go and work with some really big players, when was the moment that you kind of started looking at checkouts specifically? Because obviously, you still have stuff going on with the agency. We'll talk about that in a minute. And then there's Spiffy. When did you sort of spotlight Spiffy and how did that all come to fruition? It's a really great question. It was a process. 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.

16:36 And so we just knew everything about the industry. And really what led to checkouts and Spiffy was we started customizing Infusionsoft order forms, custom coding for our clients, big product launches. 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.

17:18 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. And we were charging 2,500 bucks just to build out that single page. We kind of 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. So long story short, we had the agency work with a high profile clients who were super stressful, no matter how well you communicated or set expectations or set boundaries.

18:05 They were always crossed. 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 they're paying you a ton of money, so you have to justify it. And so 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 million-dollar ideas, narrowing it down to three that we thought could be 20, 50, $100 million ideas, and then choosing Spiffy out of all of those based off of highest opportunity, lowest risk to execute against.

18:50 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 encapsulate the last 30 seconds sentiment. That's... 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, and not just mobile ready, but like optimized for the mobile experience. Oftentimes, people think of like, Oh, my competition.

19:31 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, a freelancer, agency owner building an online business, it's not about who your direct competitor is. Our competition is customer experience that the billion-dollar companies, the trillion-dollar companies are setting the expectation for. Yeah. While we're on the subject of checkouts for just a second, because I'll be totally honest with you. 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.

20:16 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. Like I just slapped the thing in there. People are going to put their credit card information in. We're good and we're done. 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 converting?

21:03 What were some of the keys that you noticed early on when you started studying this? 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. 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. That's a really, really good point. And when you think about an irresistible offer, we hear this from lots of different places. But in Michael Hunter's world, what makes an irresistible offer?

21:45 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. 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.

22:32 And ultimately, there's a couple of different pieces here that we can get into. The number one biggest piece, and then I'll talk about this concept that I have called the four forces. I think it's 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. 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 1 3rd to 1 10th of the value. So this is where target market research 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 1 3rd to 1 10th of the perceived value of the offer.

23:18 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? It's like, think about when you go buy something. Sometimes you buy something you don't even necessarily need. You don't wake up that morning thinking about it. But it's a really good deal. You take advantage of it because, heck, absolutely no brainer. So that's one aspect. I'll roll into the four forces. This is a topic we could do a whole entire podcast on. So we'll just talk about it 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. with these four things in mind. Or maybe you don't need to change anything.

23:59 You just need to change how you talk about and how you present it. So the four forces are effort required, speed to value, certainty of result, and urgency. 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? 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've figured that out by now. Yeah, exactly. But going back to a similar parallel of mobile optimization of your checkout experience, urgency, you're not competing with the other person.

24:48 If you're a coach, you're not competing with another coach selling their services that might be like yours. 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 why they should hire you or hire a different coach. Your message needs to be dialed in. 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. Effort required, speed to value, certainty of result, urgency. 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.

25:33 So I'm not promoting Xanax as a thing I believe in. We're not promoting Xanax on the show. Sorry. Call Michael for drugs. No, 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 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.

26:16 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 that. 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. 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 sometimes simple wording can really shift the results that we're getting in terms of what we're putting out there from a marketing perspective.

27:03 I love these four forces, by the way. And I think this is all 100% spot on. One thing that I'd love for you to touch on, because clearly this is something that you're really honed in on. 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 while I know that in theory, 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 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?

27:47 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. 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? And still show that maybe there's more speed to value? I don't know. I mean, help me with that idea. Yeah. 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.

28:27 Obviously, there's so many different facets to that. But typically, a prospect... has some type of symptom and probably multiple symptoms, but typically one or two symptoms that's really on their top level of awareness or 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. 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.

29:14 One example of this is like, hypothetically speaking, like a restaurant owner. It's like, struggling, barely making payroll every single month, really just working long hours. His top of mind level of awareness is, 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. He has no way of even communicating or marketing back to his existing customers. But if you're the person positioning themselves as the person that helps implement systems in restaurants or whatnot, he's not looking for you. He's looking for the marketing guy. 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.

30:07 And it's lack of systems that are really... causing the problem further upstream because you get someone to come into your restaurant and your food's quality isn't good and the service, there's a breakdown and there's no system in the kitchen. There's no system in the service. Just because you had someone come in your door, they're never coming back. So there's a different level of thinking there. So that's how I think about that concept. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it kind of seems like the old adage that I still believe is very true in many cases about like, tell them what they want and then give them what they need kind of a situation. 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.

30:55 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 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 your mindset is trash. I was like, oh gosh, I just want to go tell the whole world. You just got to get it right up here. And then all the rest is easy. 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, Nobody wants to hear that at all.

31:36 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 I just talk all about all the nutrition and the training woes that they were going through and then whack them upside with the mindset hammer when they came in the door. But I love that. I think that's really, really valuable advice. You talk about personal branding and you know quite a bit about this, especially with some of the people that you have worked with and... I'm curious, what do you feel like, because 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, actually profitable personal brand versus those who don't?

32:23 Because you've seen and worked with some of those people. 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 isn't said, isn't spoken about, 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. And we try to mimic what they're doing now, but it's not how they got started. And so being Brendan Burchard's former CMO, I know Brendan intimately, and he's at my wedding. He's someone that I worked closely with for several years. And one of the biggest ahas I had in my entire career was the first time I logged into Brendan's Infusionsoft account.

33:09 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. 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. 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 doing less can actually produce more.

33:55 And so oftentimes, 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. However, once you start to get traction, it's about optimizing and really refining your business around what's working and letting everything else 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 like 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. I mean, shoot, over the last 14 years, I've talked with thousands and thousands and thousands of people building online businesses.

34:42 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. You work in an industry that is so in, you know, 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.

35:30 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, 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. How do we figure out in business, what are the things 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? That's a deep question to unpack.

36:11 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. And someone that was a little bit more hands on. I have lots of mentors through books, through online programs, through YouTube videos. I mean, when I was in college, I would go to a party, see my friends. I'd leave 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. It's like, that was my mentorship. But there's something to be said about having someone that is hands-on, that can give you tailored advice. So I'd say that's the first step. The next step is really knowing yourself.

36:51 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, the latter is the thing that hangs us up. It's the things that we don't know that we need to know that there's no way of us knowing unless someone tells us. And typically, we're delegating things that we're actually good at and probably we should still be doing. 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 ultimately, you want to really know yourself, know your skill set. 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 expertise or coaching as a component of their offering...

37:36 you really need to know the top 5 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. 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 need to replace your ad person because they leave or they go start their own thing, you need to know what are the top 5 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. Brendan, a good example. He built an eight-figure thought leader business without hiring a single marketing person.

38:19 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 first entire marketing team. 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 looked terrible. It was very bad. He built it himself in HTML. So the landscapes change, the games change, 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.

39:00 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? Yeah, it varies person to person, right? 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. 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 manually upload all the WordPress files to a server, spin up a server, install WordPress. And it was so technical. Now you press three buttons and it's done.

39:40 things that used to take me 2 hours to do and figure out on my own. So true. It's not even a thing anymore. So those 5 skills, I think, 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. 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.

40:21 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, and 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 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. 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 ChatGPT is feeding you back garbage or whether it's good.

41:13 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, you know, think of ChatGPT as your junior copywriter and you're the senior copywriter, right? 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.

41:58 But then all of a sudden, they show up to a coaching call and you can't talk your way into... They come to your live event. And you speak on stage and someone's 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. 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 be more effective at hiring copywriters, developing talent within your team.

42:40 All these things are really important when you have a baseline understanding of all the skills that are needed to effectively run your business. That'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 more of a hands-on mentor sooner than you did. 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... Well, probably beyond tapes at that point, but videos and books and that kind of stuff. That's a hard question. I don't know what I missed.

43:20 But being as retrospective as I possibly could, it just took me a lot longer to get the results that I wanted. I mean, we really established ourselves as thought leaders in the industry. We spoke at a lot of masterminds. I brushed shoulders with a lot of people. 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, there's power and frequency. There's power in building shared experiences. There's power in breaking bread over the table and not just having a quick 15-minute conversation and a follow-up Zoom call the week later.

44:06 And so I think mentorship can look very specific as far as finding someone that has your exact skill set and is actively invested in guiding you. But I also think that mentorship could be joining communities that a lot of these big masterminds, that'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. 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, everything starts moving faster when you're in a group of people that are moving and shaking.

44:51 I mean, yes to all of that. 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're such a great example of, again, somebody who started out on a path and allowed the path to kind of unfold how it did. And you've done so many really neat and incredible things. And... 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. 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.

45:38 Yeah. I swear to God. And I like you, like I've used every frigging tool on the face of the planet. And the first thing I thought was, this is simple. Like, I'm like, what's the catch? What am I missing here? Where's the like 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. You actually put them into play in a product and a service that is needed. And I love that. And for the record, we really do love Spiffy. Like, no joke. It is simple and simple is good. And even at a level of somebody who's dealt with some very complex tools, I don't need complex tools.

46:22 I need something that works and I need something that works quickly and when I need it to work. 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 listen, I teased this earlier. And Michael earlier talked about conversions and some of the things that you need to be paying attention to with regard to conversions. And if you want an actual list, they've got a fantastic checklist that you can grab 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.

47:03 This is something I think everybody ought to get their hands on, especially for crying out loud. It's free. And we're going to link some other stuff up in the show notes. If you're interested in signing up for Spiffy, you can go to www.empirepartners.io forward slash Spiffy. And we've linked that up for you there. We'll put that in the show notes as well. Michael, again, thank you, dude. Honestly, I feel like we've got a bazillion episodes of stuff to unpack here. So I'd love to do it again sometime, brother. Yeah, absolutely. Have me back. I'd love to dig into some of these concepts further and have a follow-up conversation. These are topics that I'm deeply passionate about, and especially the people that you're serving and the impact you're having in the world. Just grateful to have the opportunity to share with your community.

47:45 Appreciate it, brother. Well, thank you for listening to this episode of the Coaching Equation podcast. And 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'd be so grateful if you would share it out with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite platform. To learn more about Empire Partners or to inquire about working with Ryan and Brooke, please visit www.empirepartners.io forward slash go.