211 – 4 Steps To 6 Figures Within 92 Days By Kyle Tully

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Topics discussed in this video:

00:52 – The 4 Things that matter
02:10 – Step 1: Solve a problem
04:51 – Questions to get started
08:41 – What is the value of your solution?
10:38 – Define your ideal client
12:35 – Step 2: Generate Leads
17:01 – What are you going to commit to
17:38 – Step 3: Convert clients
21:29 – Step 4: Service delivery
23:35 – Remember what business you’re really in
29:23 – The next steps
30:51 – Q & A with Kyle and James

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Quotables:

I would outsource over hiring, especially in the start [Click To Tweet].
You’re in the business of getting more clients for your business [Click To Tweet].
Productize your offerings [Click To Tweet].

Transcription:

James: Our next guest I’m going to invite up is Kyle Tully. Kyle, this is the fourth Fast Web Formula in a row that I’ve asked Kyle to come and share some ideas with us and that is because Kyle is an expert at the exact same thing that a lot of us are doing here, which is dealing with business, services, out there consulting, etcetera.

And always good information, top of the class, a very, very active contributor to SuperFastBusiness community.  So we’re going to hear from Kyle for the next half hour. Alright, I’m going to leave it with you, Kyle.

Kyle:        Thanks, mate. OK, real quick show of hands. Who’s already doing some kind of local business selling services to other businesses type of thing? Alright and everyone else kind of knows what it’s all about? I’m not talking to newbies here?  Yup, alright.

So I’m going to skip all the introductory stuff, all the stuff about the opportunity and how much money can you make and all that kind of stuff and just jump straight into the whole business building aspect of it.

4 Steps to 6 Figures in 92 Days
Everything I’m talking about applies to all types of businesses. So if you’re doing any other type of business, these four steps I’m going to talk about apply to you as well. So don’t think that just because you’re not doing local business, this doesn’t apply to you.

So when you’re starting a business, there’s literally a hundred or more things that you can do and if you try and do them all, you’ll go absolutely crazy. You’ll get stuck, procrastinating and never getting anywhere so the whole theme of this weekend is the 4%. So I’ve put together the 4% of things that I’ve seen that actually make a difference in growing a business.

The 4 things that matter. So I went through… I think there was three different trainings I’ve done in the last year or so, and I pulled out all the common bits that we use to regard people’s businesses. Then I went through some of my more recent success stories and we pulled out all the common threads that they had as well. These are the 4 Steps that I’m going to share with you guys today.

Solve The Problem
So the very first thing, the most important thing when you’re starting a consulting business or any type of business is figuring out the problem that you solve. Not being focused on the product that you sell but the actual problem you solve in the marketplace.

First Mistake: Focusing On The Product
So the first mistake I see everyone making and even people who should know better is they focus on the product, you know, “I build websites.” As soon as you say that, you sound like every other guy that sells websites.

You know business owners are getting emails from Indian companies every single day saying “Hey, we do websites,” or they’re saying, “I do SEO” and people’s eyes just glaze over as soon as you say that. Or you say, “I’m an Internet marketer.”

And that’s the perception a lot of people have when you say that. See, you need to get away from these products and services you deliver and focus on the actual problem. So I think there’s a time in this market where you really do need to differentiate or the next year or two, your business is going to die.

There’s just too many people out there doing the generic stuff.

The Dirty “R” Word
It’s really time that you need to stand out from the crowd. And the way we do that is via the dirty “R” word: Research. This is another place where I see tons of people completely skipping over research. Instead of actually doing research, they just guess.

They just use what’s in their head and say, “Well I think this is what the problem the market’s got so I’m just going to roll with that.”  And they spend you know, six months building a business that no one really wants.

Find A Problem You Can Solve
So your goal with this research is to find a market with a problem that you can solve, hopefully filled with prospects who will actually pay you for that solution.

The way I’d suggest you’d start is just pick a market. I’ve put a list out there, called the 47 players of the different markets I’ve worked in, and my students have worked in. That’s a good place to start. You’re looking for things, you know, like a market that spends money on marketing and advertising.

Businesses that have sales teams or some kind of sign that they’re using you know, sales and advertising to grow their business. If you’ve got a particular expertise or track history in a market, that’s often a good place to go.

Now if you’ve got a current job, maybe going into that industry as a consultant would be an easy way in. And what you want to do is go in there and start conversations with these people and listen for opportunities. Now ask questions and figure out what the problems in that market are.

Questions To Get Started
So a couple of questions I like to get started when interviewing people, this is the way I typically do it is:

“How do you get clients?” Understand how their business actually works. You’re looking for inefficiencies and places where they’ve been ineffective.

“What marketing are they doing?” And how is that marketing working? Is it working at all?

“How has the Internet impacted their business or their market as a whole?”

“What’s their biggest frustration?” Frustrations getting clients Frustrations the way their business currently works. Frustrations with what their competitors do; and

“What would their ideal solution look like?” What would be that magic bullet that they’d just love to get?

Just asking these five questions will give you such good insights into whatever market you’re looking at going into. And most people I speak to, I’ve spoken to probably 500 people who are involved in a consulting industry in one way or another. Most of them have never asked the market they’re trying to sell to these type of questions.

What Specific Problem Can You Solve?
And so what we’re looking for all these questions is a problem that you can solve. This may be something like a way to get traffic to their website or a way for them to be found online. Could be a conversion problem, or one of many, many other things. The key thing is a specific problem that you can solve. Not necessarily you individually, but you as in someone you can outsource to.

For example, I’d say 90% of people in my program outsource their SEO services to one of James’ companies. So it just needs to be a problem that you know where to find the solution to.

How Would You Solve It?
And then you go figure out how you would actually solve it. What’s the product or service are you going to sell to these people to fix that problem? It sounds crazy but I’ve had people who have been consulting for 6 months and they come to me and they’re like, “I don’t really know what I’m selling.”

As in they haven’t decided what they’re selling.  Is it websites? Is it SEO? Is it pay-per-click? They actually don’t know what their product is and they somehow magically think they’re going to get clients to pay them for something they’re not really quite sure about.

So figure out how you would solve the problem. It’s just as important to figure out what you don’t do as what you do do. So you don’t necessarily want to go out there and offer websites and traffic and conversion and emails and video and everything like that because you can’t be the best in all of those things and you’ll spend too much time trying to manage all these different things rather than getting really good at doing one thing.

What’s The End Result?
Then you want to figure out what the actual end result that you’re going to provide to this market is. Can you get close to that magic bullet that they said they wanted? What would their life look like once they’ve implemented their solution?

People don’t buy SEO but they’ll buy more traffic and more customers and more leads. They’ll buy beating their competitors. So you’re going to figure out the end result that you can actually provide these people.

This research doesn’t have to take long. You can do this in a day or two. It doesn’t have to take 6 months. But just these deep thought about your market, their problems and how you can potentially provide solutions to them goes a really long way and you being able to first of all deliver it but also communicate that to the market which is another big problem people have with copywriting.

What’s The Value Of Your Solution?
And what’s the value of that solution? You know, what’s the monetary value of it? You could actually sit down and work out what an average client is worth to the people you’re looking to market to over the course of a lifetime. It’s often a lot higher than what you’re charging.

I’ve got students who are working with accountants and lawyers and their average client value is $10,000 to $100,000. You don’t need to get very many clients for them to be making a lot of money off the products and services you deliver.

So the first step, in my opinion to being able to charge higher prices is you being convinced that what you’re selling is actually worth that much money. So figure out the dollar value of your solution and then figure out some of the intangible values. How much stress are they going to be relieved of by having your solution? How much are you going to get rid of the competition by having your solution?

What about if they don’t get your solution? What’s the negative side of things? If they keep going the way they’re going, where’s their business going to be in five years? There’s a lot of markets where 90% of leads and clients are now looking on Google.

And so if they don’t have a website and they don’t have a way to get traffic to that website, five years, they’re probably not going to have a business. That’s the end result. That’s going to be the big negative thing that’s going to happen if they don’t buy your solution, if they don’t buy your website or your traffic services.

And so the first step is you need to be convinced of this, you need to know 100% in your heart that the best thing these prospects could do is give you $10,000 for a website or buy a $5,000 monthly traffic package. And once you’re convinced of that, convincing other people is actually pretty easy because you’ll be passionate about it. And you’ll have done all these logical research and calculations to present a good argument to them.

Define Your Ideal Client
If you want bonus points, you’ll also want to define your ideal client. Map out what problems have they got?  What keeps them up at night? What’s their wife in their ear about, complaining about all the time? And what don’t they like? What beliefs do they have?

Now if you’re selling SEO services and you’re selling SEO to accountants, what do accountants believe about SEO?  What’s their perception of the market? Knowing this gives you huge insights into how to sell to these people into where you need to enter the marketing space in terms of educating them. How sophisticated are they? How much do they know about SEO?  How much do they think they know about SEO?

Big Ah-ha Idea
The big Ah-ha idea here that many people completely dismiss is that your clients may not be who you would assume they are or who you want them to be. We all kind of just naturally tend to think that our clients are kind of like us. They kind of think the same way we do. They kind of know about what we know and most of the time they’re not.

Unless you’ve been an accountant for 20 years then you go into the consulting to the accountants market, unless that’s the case, most of the time, your clients aren’t going to be like you.

Do The Work
So the most important thing you can do is Do The Work. Actually sit down and do this research.  Spend a day or two days or a week interviewing people in the market. Some of the most invaluable time you can invest in your business and that goes for any market, any nation or any industry you are in.

Doing this kind of research and doing it regularly as well. Go back every 6 months or so. Interview people. Find out more. Survey your existing clients. Make sure your answers to all these research questions I have been proposing are coming from the actual work you have done from the research and not from up in your brain.

Generate Leads
So, second step is you need to generate leads. Goes for pretty much every business out there, you need a way to generate leads. And the goal is pretty simple, you want your interested prospect to raise their hands so you know who to spend time and money and resources marketing too.

Let’s say, probably, the fundamental problem I’ve seen in the consulting businesses or people who are just starting a consulting business, is they haven’t actually decided on a way to get leads in the door. They’re kind of pretending they got the business and they’re buying products and looking around and sorting all out their outsource providers. But they haven’t put up a system in place to get leads into the business.

Top Strategies To Try
We’re going to look at a bunch of different strategies. I’m not going to spend too much time on the actual strategies. One, because we’ve only got 30 minutes together. And two, we simply couldn’t go into enough depth on them anyway. The important thing to know is that they all work. Every single one of these works.

Tap From Your Own Connections
The first one is Personal Networks. Go to the people you already know. It’s really surprising sometimes who your friends know, or who your current boss knows, or who you know through existing relationships you’ve got. Many of our students come in and had no other lead generation other than going to their personal networks. And they’ve been able to switch from a full time job to a full time business just by leveraging these networks.

Networking Breeds Clients And Referrals
Networking is still working really well for a lot of my clients, really, really well. Because you can go in there and it’s like you’ve got this own little market of your own to play with and to just sell to. And the way a lot of these networking events are set up is that they can be, for example, one SEO guy for the group and one website guy.

Once you are in, you can kind of lock it down. You’ve got a group of 10 or 20 people you can first of all sell stuff to, and also have referrals and stuff coming in from. So networking is still working really, really well.

Newsletters, Reports, Direct Mail, and OTR
Newsletters and reports are also working great, same with direct mail. We kind of integrate all three of these, many times. And more recently, people have been experimenting with the OTR strategy, James’ Own The Racecourse type of thing.

And the thing all of these strategies have in common and I think the key difference between people who are getting clients relatively easily and those who keep struggling is that all of these strategies deliver value before you actually ask for a sale. So we are not sending an email and saying, “Hey, buy my SEO services, hey buy a website.”

We are putting content out in the marketplace. We are delivering high value reports. We are writing a monthly newsletter. We are putting out weekly video tips, educating people on why they need a new website and why they need SEO, why they need traffic and conversions. The sale happens much more naturally once you have done that.

My main advice here is just pick one. Just pick one strategy and actually execute it. There’s no point knowing about 20 different strategies. There’s no point spending $7 a day on the latest greatest strategy if you still haven’t implemented the first one. So pick one and just roll with it and execute it and get good at it.

Focus On Your Strengths
And the way you pick, figure out what are your strengths. What are you good at? What is your expertise? Are you a great copywriter? Are you good on video? Are you a great personal one-to-one salesperson? Can you sell them a phone? Figure out what your strengths are and leverage them. Don’t just go down one path because someone else said that worked for them.

What’s The Way To Go?
What resources do you have? Where do your ideal clients actually hang out? What are they likely to respond to? If your ideal clients aren’t reading emails or aren’t browsing the Web for a solution, then maybe email marketing or doing an Own The Racecourse type of strategy isn’t the right way to go.

Maybe you are better off going direct to them via direct mail or an industry report.

Your Commitment Spells Your Success
And probably the most important thing is what are you going to commit to? This is the only difference, I would say, between my most successful students and the ones who never really get anywhere is that they commit to our way of getting clients. They get good at that strategy and they just execute it consistently.

It sounds really simple but this is where almost all the mistakes are made. They are not made doing the super-advanced stuff. They are not made because people are not doing automated follow-up. They are made because people have not got these really simple things in place.

The Systematic Way To Convert Clients
So our third step is you need a way to convert those clients. Again, the real, real simple stuff. You’d be shocked how many people who have a business and they don’t actually have a systematic way of taking leads and converting them into clients.

So my advice is you want to have a system. A system doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be advanced. It doesn’t have to rely on technology, anything like that. But you need to say, “Okay, this is our process for taking these leads that we generate from that strategy and converting them into clients”.

Because once you’ve got that, you know where to funnel people, you know what to do and you’ve got a point that you can get good at.

The key thing here is that these little small steps you take people through lead to big commitments.

And it’s really, for most people, it’s quite difficult to take someone from a cold contact via an email or something to a $10,000 website sale in one go. Or even to do that on the phone is quite difficult for some people.

But if you implement a survey in there or a phone call and then an email and then something else, just by adding these small steps along the way, these really help to get those big commitments because of the commitment and consistency principle.

So a couple of simple examples: Many of my students are using some kind of similar process for this where initial contact is made via an email. And that email leads into a phone conversation. That phone conversation is basically designed to qualify or disqualify the prospect.

If they are qualified, we’ll send them out some kind of information report or put them on to a newsletter list or some kind of high value, high touch piece of content, basically designed to educate them and do most of the selling work. And then we officially close it via a consultation. This is very similar to what many of my students use and it’s probably about as complex as you ever need to get it.

It can also be a lot simpler than that. Going directly from a website to a survey and then from the survey into like a strategy session, similar to a consultation. Or can be even simpler than that, just burgers at a café.

I’ve had students who would come in, and it is just really good one on one talking to people, you sit down for 10 minutes and before you know it, you signed the contract for 5 grand a month and you don’t even know what you’re getting ‘cause they are just really good at selling.

So, if that’s you, don’t feel like you need to use all these technology like surveys and everything like that. Do what works for you. You want to develop that system that leverages your own strengths and then get really good at it.

You can add the 50 other strategies once you’ve got this one working, and once you’ve got one strategy consistently generating clients. But there is no point having 10 different strategies for conversions if you haven’t got one that works.

There is no point trying to sell someone on the phone first time and then the next person you are trying to take them to a cafe, and then the next person you are doing an in-person presentation. Because there’s no leverage there; you are not improving at any one strategy.

And it’s just going to be sheer luck whether you land one of these clients whereas if you’ve got a funnel in place, and you know exactly how your conversation process works, anyone contacts you, so the first step is fill out this survey and we’ll see what we can do for you.

And you take him through your process and you get really good at that process. And if it doesn’t work, you change it and make it better. But you’ve got a process, you’ve got a system in place.

So we’re moving really quick, this is usually training that would take probably about four weeks to deliver. We probably have about 8 hours of content, we’ll put that down at 30 minutes. We’re moving really quick. I’m sure there will be recordings or something.

Ensuring Efficient Service Delivery
And the fourth step is service delivery. You’ve made all these big promises. You’ve found the problem you can solve. You’ve found the way to generate leads. You’ve found the system that works for you to convert. Now, you’ve got the annoying thing of actually having to deliver something for that money that you just took.

So the best advice I can give, at least when you are starting out, is make sure you are outsourcing. You don’t really want to be doing too much stuff in-house and the main reason for that is that it just adds too much complexity, way too complex. Too many moving pieces, too many things to do. You want to be outsourcing.

Outsourcing Is The Way To Go
So beware the technician trap. This is the idea that “Ah this is just a quick little job, I’ll do it myself and I’ll bank all the money.” And those quick little jobs almost always turn into two weeks, three weeks, four weeks and before you know it, you spent an entire month working on this little $5000 project and you haven’t done anything else on your marketing front.

You haven’t gotten anymore leads coming in. No more clients lined up and you go through this feast or famine cycle where when you get the next cheque come in, you actually need all that money so you have to do this again.

So my advice is right from day one, outsource it. Because outsourcing buys you time. Time to invest in marketing. Time to invest in personal relationships, business relationships. It also buys you sanity because you will go crazy if all you do is build websites and do SEO all day. And that extra time, you are able to invest in marketing, gets you more clients coming in the door.

Then you’ve got a real business rather than just being a highly paid or sometimes lowly paid technician. The website design and website building business isn’t necessarily a very fun business. Being a middleman, like we saw James Reynolds, that’s a really fun business. It’s a really good business and it’s a whole lot easier as well. I started out as a web designer, wouldn’t recommend it.

So remember what business you’re really in. You are in the business of marketing. Whatever it is you do, you are in the business of marketing those services. You are in the business of getting more clients for your business. That’s the real business you’re in.

Actual technical stuff of what you deliver as far as you are concerned in growing your business isn’t necessarily all that important. So let an outsource team provide that while you focus on what you’re good at, which should be the marketing and the sales and relationships.

Outsourcing vs. Hiring
I’ll make the point again; I think James said this early on as well. I would outsource over hiring, especially in the start. And this is not just my personal opinion, this is from working with dozens of people who have tried both strategies and seen the ins and outs of how they would work. And what happens when you hire people is you have to manage them. You have to deal with them.

And you have to pay them each month, no matter whether you’ve got new clients or not. But when you are using an outsource team like one of James’ companies, they are there with capacity when you need it and when you don’t need it, you don’t have to outlay any money.

So in those first couple of critical months when you are getting started and you need all the cash, all the money you can get, it’s so much safer and easier to have an outsource team you can rely on rather than trying to be training and managing and paying a whole team of people for a business that has not really been proven to be a business yet. Because you’re not really in business until you’ve got some clients coming in.

So I would always outsource first rather than hiring. Down the track, if you work it out, then you are going to make more money by hiring people and building your own team, sure go for it. But I think for the first year or two, definitely look to outsource versus hire.

Attaining Your Ideal Scenario
And your ideal scenario is that when you bring on a new client, it doesn’t take up too much of your time. Because very quickly, you will run into capacity issues where there is only so much time you’ve got to project manage and deal with people and be on the phone, all those kind of things. And if you add in actually having to do the work as well, three, four maybe 10 clients down the track and you are stuck, you run into a wall.

You want to set up systems where new clients don’t take up too much of your time. And probably the best advice I can give there, I’ve made this point a lot and I still see a lot of people who are struggling with this concept and that is you want to “productize” your offerings.

What I mean by that is present, package, and sell services as products.

Services vs. Products
So we quickly compare services… The services typically are they customized for each client. Client comes in, says “I want a website. Here’s the colors I want. Here’s the fonts I want and they come back 50 different times with 50 different fonts and color and pixel changes and stuff. Because of that, it requires unique skills.

You need someone who kind of knows a lot about websites and how to do all the different changes and all the different shopping carts people want to integrate with. Because of that, there is not very much leverage. It’s hard to scale that because it relies too much on human skill and knowledge and talent, rather than a system.

Services are typically very difficult to price because they can blow out to pay for time and cost. And the concept people have in their head for a service is you pay on delivery or maybe you may pay 50% upfront and 50% on delivery. Whereas with products, products are bought off the shelf. You either buy it or you don’t buy it. Either you want it or you don’t.

Because of that, they are very easy to systemize, very easy to create processes in your business where you can train just about anyone on how to deliver them because they are working within a set framework. They’re not having to be creative or think on their feet or know the different ins and outs of whatever you are working on.

They just follow the process and they check off the boxes and they work through and they deliver the result that you promised. So, they’re very easy to scale, easy to price. And the really cool thing is products typically you get paid upfront. You don’t walk into a supermarket aisle and say “I’ll pay 50% now and 50% when I finish the cereal.” You pay for it all upfront.

So many of you probably heard this, Henry Ford quote: “Any customer can have a car painted any color he wants so long as it is black.” Now, apparently, this came about after he’d implemented the production line and they figured out that the longest part of that production line was the paint drying process. And the fastest color of paint to dry was black.

So he figured “I’m going to make the most money by saying we only sell black cars”. So, how does that apply to your consulting business? You get to decide the options. If you only want to work with WordPress websites, make that decision and that’s the sort of productized offering you offer.

I’ve had one client, he started off offering WordPress new sites and WordPress rebuilds, where he takes someone’s existing site and convert it to WordPress. And after a couple of months he figured out that the rebuild clients were taking more work than the brand-new clients, were paying less, and were more of a hassle.

So he just dropped that option completely and now he’s saying “You want a brand new site, and here are all the reasons for it. Or you don’t work with me.” And now he’s making a lot more money and he’s doing it easier with less clients and less hassles. So you get to decide the options.

What Is The Right Mindset?
And this mindset brings us right into the very first point of solving a problem. The mindset you want is you want to be the best in the world at delivering your solution to that specific problem that you identified in the market.

And once you’ve got that little system where you have identified the problem, you’ve got the system to solve it, and you are one of the best in the world at delivering it, then you go and find another problem and you repeat the process.

Your Next Steps
Don’t over-think it. Everyone’s first thing when they go away from a seminar is they get the whiteboard out and they map out 10 years in the future, all the things they’re going to do and all the different components and how everything is going to fit together. And a week later, you’ve already lost it.

You don’t know what you are doing, you don’t know what direction you are going. You’re procrastinating because there’s just too many options. You get stuck in one place and it all falls apart.

So my advice is keep it really, really simple. There are only four steps. Figure out the problem. Figure out a way to generate leads. Convert these leads and then deliver. So what I would do:

1.    Put together a one page plan. Usually, one page takes you maybe a day, two days, or a week at most. And that week is including if you need to interview people and go back and forth and stuff. One page plan on how you’re going to do that.

2.    Come up with a 90-day goal of what you want to achieve in the next three months.

3.    An then just go out and do it. Don’t over-complicate it. Don’t go buy new products. Stay out of forums as much as you can. Stop reading emails. And just sit down and execute your plan for 90 days, without stopping.

It’s a crazy idea but when you actually sit down and work on this stuff, it works. You make money. You don’t make money by constantly coming back into the forums and trying to learn more stuff and asking questions that you’d learn if you just went out and executed it.

So that’s it for me, my time’s up. We’re going to move on to Q&A now, I think. (Audience claps)

Q&A
James:     Alright! Thank you Kyle. Do you want to stay with me here?

Kyle:    Alright

James:      There’s nice little chair… If you’ve been dying to ask Kyle a question about local business marketing, then, I’m going to have to probably get another mic up, I think. We’ll just organize one. And we’ll put on the mic stand.

So if you want to grab a question while we’re here, or if you want to ask me something around that, then we’ll be happy to do it. So, who wants to learn more about what Kyle was just talking about? I can see John making a move there…

John:     Hi, John Burns, Kyle.

Kyle:    Good day John.

John:     You did a very good presentation and it made me really think. Do you have a webinar that I can attend or are you a part of this group?

James:     I’ve actually put a link to Kyle’s information on the resources page. I also put a link to Clay Collin’s information and I put a link to Alan’s school. So if you want to explore those, they are right there for you.

John:        OK, now, how do I tell my friends of you James?

James:     Well… you could talk to them? (Both laughs)

John:     I know that part.

James:     Smoke signal? Carrier pigeon?

John:     What I mean is, how do I get them to see this event so they join the, because you’ve got the SilverCircle mastermind and you’ve got the basic one.

James:     If they join SuperFastBusiness.com, then they will be able to access this information, they’ll be able to see you talking.

John:     Oh good, okay! Thanks, guys!

James:     Let’s have a couple more questions, or we can break early, it’s your choice. We got another contender here. We’ve got a few more minutes and then we’ll going to have our break.

Attendee:     Hi guys. This question is for either of you. Would you recommend having your products sort of be there from the get-go when people come to your site? Or focusing more on that opt-in and lead generation and then revealing a little bit more about your services later on?

Kyle:     For me, it depends on the strategy that you are using. If you’re going to be more of a productized, reseller-ey type thing where you want to sell stuff online and you want people to come up and sign up for a package like what James says with his services, put it online, have your prices, do all that stuff.

If you want to sell stuff, you know, $10,000 or $25,000, that’s a lot harder to do online and you’ll be much better served getting people to opt-in, putting them on strategy sessions, doing consulting-type things with them, and selling them that way. So, it really depends on which kind of model that you are going for.

Attendee:      Cool. Okay.

James:     And when you got that happening consistently, which is where a lot of my top students are at, they’re now working on automating high-ticket sales. We spend a few hours knocking that out and seeing how people do it. But there are ways to leverage it. But generally, you’re not going to have package prices at certain price points.

Usually, they come in to you because they want everything done for them and they don’t even know how to interpret what are these that you are selling. That’s the main problem I encounter.

Kyle:     Yeah, people don’t know anything. They don’t know what they don’t know. They look at three from package options and they can’t even choose because they don’t know what they are looking at. That’s half the point of the consultations. It’s not like a selling session.

It’s literally sit down, ask them what they are looking for, figure out the problems and you just tell them “this is what you need.” So that’s why we use that kind of a strategy session approach.

Attendee:     Cool. OK, thank you.

James:     That’s a great question, and I’ll expand on this too. When we do our reports, we’ve had the two feedbacks from our $20 web check, and that is, some people say, “Yeah, it’s what I figured, I kind of have the same sort of tools and I was hoping for something a little more.” And then other people say, “I don’t understand anything in that report, it’s too technical.”

So we actually offer a choice now: the plain English version or the technical version. And then we can tune it up or down depending on our customer. Knowing who the customer is a good start when you’re designing a sales funnel.

Kyle:         It helps, yeah.

Stephen:    Yeah, on that call James, if you know who your customer is, for example… I will just go with my example, psychologists… they’re only selling their time in hour blocks, for example. They know their website’s sucky, they know that they’ve got to put work into it to generate leads.

They aren’t really selling, say if they’re full up, but they do want to increase their presence for whatever reason, what leverage could you sort of add to them to… it’s actually a monetizable sort of solution for… like have you done work in professionals that sell hourly blocks?

Kyle:         So you’re asking whether you can kind of help them make their business better over and above offering just services whatever…

Stephen:     Yeah, because they’re already good professionals in their field, for example. It’s the example.

Kyle:         Yeah, well you can do it, and I’ve got a lot of experience doing consulting. My general experience is that they won’t take the advice you give them. There’s only a certain amount of stuff you can do to help them to change.

Stephen:        But if they’re asking you for it? If they’re asking you for the…

Kyle:     Oh, if they’re asking me I will charge them money and I will give them my best advice. It’s up to them…

Stephen:        But how do you actually say that it’s worth x amount of dollars for them…

James:        Show them the opportunity they’re missing. There are so many things they could do, like sell ten hours at a time, instead of one, in ten one-hour passes. They could get so much traffic that they could hire more people, that’s a very simple one. That happened to a solicitor, a customer of mine. I didn’t hear from them for about three years because they were too busy. And they just kept hiring to keep up with the lead flow.

If they get so busy then they can start licensing their information to other people who are just like them in another country or another state, and they can actually start selling their expertise. That’s when they realize that they’re a marketing person selling solutions and not a per hour laborer.

Stephen:        Yeah, a technician. Thanks.

Kyle:         Probably the first step on that is also to kind of show them the lifetime value of a client. So they might only charge $50 or a hundred dollars an hour.

But once you show them that that client comes back for an average 10 or 20 or 50 hours, and they refer an average half a person, you start to map that out over the course of three or five years, and suddenly every new client they get isn’t worth a hundred dollars an hour, they’re worth two or three thousand dollars. Suddenly a $3,000 SEO package sounds quite reasonable because you only need one client to make it worthwhile.

John:        You raised another question for me, mate, sorry. The licensing you just said on others overseas, is that within FastWeb, or is it elsewhere?

James:    The information on that?

John:        Yeah, like you said to license overseas, using other solicitors overseas, or a person overseas to do things for you. Do you have that licensing somewhere, or how do I get it?

James:     I’m not a specific trainer on licensing, but I have utilized that model. I’ve done it myself, actually. When I didn’t want to speak from platform, I had a speaker speaking on my behalf. So he would go around and speak, and every time he sold something, he would sell my product, and he’d use my slides and we would split the profits.

John:        Good.

James:    So I have talked about it in previous FastWebFormulas. There’s specific people who do it. I think Bob Serling is the guy out there who teaches this, and I know that Kyle also has covered it at some point in your training.

Kyle:         Yup.

John:        So is Bob Serling, is it? Sterling or Serling?

James:    Serling.

John:     And is Bob better than Kyle, or Kyle’s the better one?

Kyle:        Look, it depends on what you actually want to know and what you’re looking to do with it. That’s the bottom line.

James:     Before you do that, I’d say, “Hang on, are you ready for that?”

Kyle:         Yeah.

John:        I’m definitely ready for that, yeah.

James:    If you’re deadly ready for it, then hunt it down and find everything you can about it from anyone who’s got good information, but that guy is like the godfather of the licensing industry that I’m aware of.

John:     OK, then. Thank you.

Stephen 2:     Hi guys, it’s Stephen here.

Kyle:         Hi, buddy.

Stephen 2:     I have a question about the documentation that you have when you sign clients?

Kyle:         Yes.

Stephen 2:     I wrote down the words “service agreement documentation.” Now if we take a client on board and we outsource to ATLWeb, for example, of course, we have an agreement there, but we also have an agreement with the client, and the client’s going to want to know that on day 30, their product’s going to get delivered.

What documentation do you have them sign to? Do you sign them up 100% of the time or is some of it verbal? And how do you manage the expectation of the 30 days you will have this product?

James:         Why do they have that expectation?

Stephen 2:     Because they haven’t sold it from first.

James:    You tell them the rules.

Stephen 2:     Yes.

James:    And so you tell them how it works. Like Kyle had a great slide there about services. Typically you’re going to get paid afterwards or… One day I just decided well, why don’t I just get paid first? And from that day on I don’t actually have… I don’t have bad debtors.

My story around that, which is a true story, is that I don’t have to charge more to allow for bad debts, so people can buy at better rates, plus it commits us to having to deliver.

So that’s why I’m tracking, on my dashboard, accounts over 20, for delivery. I actually see it as a service debt. But the expectation is only put there if you put it there, or if you reflect someone else’s expectation from, say, your supplier if you’re on a recurring services agreement.

So in terms of my business, and I do some contracts in the five-figure region, and or six figures, actually, and I don’t have a written contract anymore. But I did actually at one point put my services agreement template into the forum, it’s in there somewhere, and that was what I got.

That’s what I started with, and when I started, I think from memory it was a nine-month services agreement because I figured that’s about how long I’d need to show a result, and in the end, it took three weeks. And to this day, six years later I still have both of those customers.

So it went into perpetuity, and that was just an agreement for $5,500 per month, and it just said some basic stuff about what we’re supposed to do and what they’re supposed to do. So if you’re starting out that might give you reassurance, but right now… I mean, I speak to a guy and within five minutes he’s transferring $10,000 into my bank account. There’s no written contract. It could be as simple as an email exchange.

I will go as I did with Ezra. In the podcast, when we started, I will actually send an email with an outline of my expectations of what is happening, and they will usually reciprocate that they understand that or what they were hoping for. And that’s what happened with my most recent high-end customer.

I just sent them an email of what we’re doing, and how it works, and my bank and EFT details and they replied back, just like “Yes” and then the money appeared in the account and we just do the work. So it can be as hard as you make it, is my short answer. What about you, Kyle?

Kyle:        Exactly the same. The managing expectation starts… it starts from right when you start productizing your services. That’s you standing up and saying this is what I will do, here’s what you should expect. So that starts right from the start and that’s an ongoing process all the time when you’re dealing with clients. And I’m the same, I don’t use contracts, I don’t use any of that kind of stuff.

I did try that, when I first started my business, and I just found this big barrier. You know, you’ve sold someone, they’re on the phone, they want to buy, they’re like, “Oh, I’ll just have my lawyer send you a document for your lawyer to go over” sort of thing, and three weeks you still haven’t gotten the thing signed. So I don’t use them.

I use what we call a statement of understanding, which is just a one-page email that goes back saying here’s what I’m going to do, here’s what I expect of you. If there’s delivery dates, we’ll put them in there, and that’s pretty much it.

We keep it really simple, and I’ve found that your best clients are going to be very relationship-based anyways, so you don’t need documents or any of that kind of stuff, and it’s just something that’ll slow you down when you’re trying to start your business.

Stephen 2:     OK.

James:     And just a little footnote. When you take out business insurance, which you should, and some of us will fall under something like an IT policy, there will be specificity in there about have you waived any of your rights or have you got contractors signing agreements and stuff.

So just check those little fine prints, because if you go stitching yourself up, and someone wants to take you to task with that, you may not be covered, if you’ve over-committed on what you can deliver. Alright.

Stephen 2:     Thank you.

James:     Thank you. So what we’re going to do now…again, a big round of applause for Kyle Tully.

Kyle:         Thank you.

James:     Now just a little overview of what’s happening in the final session. We are going to look at all of the one-minute video submissions, which because they’re only one minute, is achievable, and I think we’re going to have some spectacular laughter and we’re also going to learn some really cool stuff.

It’s amazing how much people have contributed in such a short time and such a high production level and you’ll see what sort of peer group we have here. And every one of the experts, especially the people who have come over from overseas have said, “Wow, these people are switched on. They’re good people.” Well, thank you for putting on a good reflection of Australia for them.

Secondly, Ezra and Clay Collins are going to watch the submissions live, and they’re going to comment on them, and then they’re going to choose a winner for the bottle of Grange and the ThinkActGet limited edition, exclusive, only one left T-shirt.

Then I’m going to ask you to do an exercise that is going to help you take what we’ve learned over the last day and a half till this afternoon and we’re going to ask some big questions, and we’re going to sift through to some big answers. That is going to be your action checklist for when you go home, and then we’re going to close out.

We’ll definitely finish by 5:30 and maybe a little earlier, because I know some people are going to ask me because they have flights, etc. If you do have to go home earlier, I just want to say thanks for coming along, it’s been good.

On the Resources page I will load things. If I’ve forgotten to load something and you’re asking for it, just flick me an email and I’ll add it, so keep checking it. And also there’s a survey there. I’d be really interested for you to fill out a survey when you go home, and just tell me what we can do better at this event.

Right now in the break, I’d love you to put to practice your new-found acting skills. We’re going to get the camera, he’s going to pop up I think here on the stage. If you’d like to express your thoughts about the event to the camera, I would really appreciate it. Just a quick blurb, practice your acting skills. I’d like to put those thoughts into something at some point, so if you can say something about the event, that would be awesome.

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