197 – Breaking Barriers In Your Consulting Service Business With Kyle Tully

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Kyle Tully is back to discuss why many people fail and how your consulting service business can succeed.

James Schramko and Kyle Tully

Podcast highlights:
02:03 – The Top 10
03:33 – Blaming your lack of time?
04:44 – What inspired James to quit his job
07:31 – The safest way to earn
09:26 – Worried about the competition?
12:21 – The fear of learning
15:58 – Go here for success
20:24 – Take action with what you know
23:57 – Find better clients
25:24 – Building up confidence
28:44 – What an effective partnership should be
31:56 – The beginner’s dilemma
34:36 – Kyle’s new training course

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Quotables:

A normal business owner is going to look at you as if you have three heads. [Click To Tweet].
You’ve either got to change your mindset or change your circumstances. [Click To Tweet].
And the second best time to start is right now. [Click To Tweet].

Transcription:

James:                 James Schramko here, and I’ve got my friend on the line who’s been on several podcasts with me before and that’s because we’re in a great topic segment of local business marketing. This podcast episode is going to be useful if you sell services to businesses or if you’re a small business owner yourself and struggling with it. I want to welcome Kyle Tully back.

Kyle:                       Good day, James, how are you?

James:                 Good, and it is Kyle Tully, not Tullyback. But I’m welcoming you back. I’m not sure how many times we’ve been on podcasts together, but every time we do it, we’ve had a great discussion and got lots of good feedback because this affects a lot of people who work in our communities that are more or less setting up their own business and perhaps stepping away from working for someone else.

And they’re out there dealing with the majority of businesses who are struggling with this whole online marketing phenomenon and certainly in our country, not even half the businesses even have a website yet, so we’re still in the early days.

Kyle:                   Yeah, exactly, I think you and I have walked the same path that a lot of our students and clients are now walking and so we’ve got a lot of experience that they can draw on, and like you said, the market, it’s still massive, it’s only getting bigger.

I was actually looking before our call today for an updated stat to see if there was any news, if anyone’s got more than 50% of Australian businesses with websites, and I think that’s still the stat, it hasn’t grown since then so we’ve got a lot of catching up to do in terms of getting Australian businesses online.

James:                 Yeah, and this is probably a worldwide thing, and certainly the stat that I got was given to me at a Google headquarters in Australia, so I’m sure that it would be pretty accurate. Now I get your emails, which are pretty fantastic, and you have a background in copywriting, and it’s obvious from your emails because every time you send one they’re quite compelling.

One of them you sent recently was The Top Ten Excuses for Failing, and I love this email because I recognize a lot of these questions from the forum that I run, SuperFastBusiness, and also some of the students who I have in another environment.

These things come up over and over again, and I thought it would be great if we could just address these. We’ll mention what the excuse is, and then we can perhaps talk about some solutions. How do you feel about that?

Kyle:                   Mate, that sounds awesome. That email actually came out of a coaching call I did where this guy brought up probably four of the ten excuses as reasons why he wasn’t successful.

And I just got so frustrated you know at having these same things come up and up and up again so I thought that I’d write a quick email and try and address them in a broader sense to everyone just to get them to see that all these things are excuses and that there’s dozens of people out there who have overcome every single one of them and there’s no point you sitting there saying why can’t you do something because of “x” when someone else has overcome that.

James:                 Exactly. There’s this philosophy that if someone is asking it, probably a lot of people are thinking it but they don’t even acknowledge it to themselves or they’re certainly not letting you know so you’ve probably covered a whole bunch of people with the same questions. I know a lot of my videos are reactionary to the input that I have from people’s questions.

So, the first one you had on the list was, “I don’t have time because I work a full time job”. Now, as someone who had a full time job when I started online, and getting a couple of customers over the line was the thing that actually helped me quit my job, I know that this one is just an excuse. Tell me your take on this one.

Kyle:                   You’re actually the person that I use as an example of someone who’s overcome this, to people I speak with. They’ll say, “Well I’m making 60 grand a year at my job, and it’s really hard to replace that”, and I’m like, well ok, I know at least half a dozen people who replaced that type of an income within a couple of weeks and look at James, he was a very well-paid employee, and was able to make the transition, so the bottom line is, what’s going to change?

You say you want to start a business, but you say you can’t because you’re working a full time job. So something has to change. Your attitude around it has to change, your priorities in terms of how you schedule things, the bottom line is something has to change somewhere or you’re just kidding yourself.

You may as well just stop learning about Internet marketing, stop pretending like you’ve got a business and just go and work your full time job, if that’s the excuse you’re using. There’s no other way around it, in my mind. You’ve either got to change your mindset or change your circumstances.

James:                 Well, that’s it. As you mentioned, I was on a high salary. It was close to 300,000 dollars a year, with great benefits. Two Mercedes-Benz, fully fueled, insured and everything. And that made it that little bit harder, but I do remember one thing clearly. When I quit, I had this realization that I probably could have done it a year earlier, I just didn’t connect the dots.

And it was only going overseas to a live event and meeting people who built up my confidence. And it was this guy, actually, Tim Houston, great guy. He was sitting on an airplane and he looked across to me. He said, “Why do you still have a job?”

And he was making circa a hundred thousand dollars a month. And he said, “With your knowledge, and your skills, and your contacts, I don’t get it. I don’t understand why you would accept such a low return for your time.” And I actually came back from that trip thinking that 300,000 dollars was such a piddly amount and that I was underselling myself.

So I had a change in perspective, and that’s when I went back to people who I’d built a website for, and said “I’m going full time into this”. Now as of the time of recording this, coincidentally, this was almost six years ago, and the interesting fact is that I still have the same two customers, right now, paying me every single month, and that’s been for almost six years.

Now imagine if I’d just stayed there in my job, weathered out the GFC, and maybe even got sacked because I was just so highly paid and they probably didn’t need me. But by the time I systemized everything, and made myself redundant within the business, I was on a dangerous situation. But now, as a business owner, I get rewarded for making myself redundant in my business. I get that extra time for me, and I can’t sack myself.

Kyle:                   Yeah, exactly, and I think the key word I heard in there was confidence. And I’ve heard so many people say a similar thing that they suddenly become successes in their business, and they’re like, man, I should have done this a year ago. I should have done this two years ago and it was just building up their sort of confidence or mindset to a certain point where they had the ability to just even mentally make the transition.

There’s so many sort of safety nets or perceived safety nets around having a job that it’s a nice little security blanket. But you’ve got to look at what are my criteria for life, what are my values. Is making 60 grand a year working for someone I don’t really like and a job I don’t really see a future in where I want to be in another three years? Because that’s the bottom line.

If you don’t make a change now, in two or three years you’re going to be feeling even worse than you are by now, wanting to have made the change before, regretting the decision you made today not to change. So why not just change now while things are as easy as they’re ever going to get?

James:                 Yes, and some of the other steps that led up to me making that decision were reading books from some of the business greats, and one of the key concepts that really sticks in my mind is that you must get paid by lots of different people, not from one person. If you think having a job with a salary, where you get paid by one person, is safe, you’ve got to be out of your mind. It’s the least safe thing you can do.

In my case, my business gets paid from thousands of different people and I can afford to make a mistake with one or two, which hopefully we never do. But I’m not single source dependent, so that’s the big reason that you have to get out of that full time job if you dream of being an entrepreneur and earning your own business.

Now there are secondary things, too. The fact that you get paid first and then you pay your tax, rather than just getting paid after the tax is taken out, is a great one. Plus, as an entrepreneur, with your own business, when you employ others, you’re able to help more people, and I think that’s a good reason to have your own job.

Alright, now in…oh, and the other thing regarding time, just stop watching television, and work a few extra hours.

Kyle:                   That’s a big one.

James:                 I worked from 9:30 at night till 2 in the morning, most days, for years, 2 years, before I quit my job, so if you really want it you have to be prepared to pay the price, but it is possible. And I had seventy staff. So I had plenty on my plate when I turned up to work.

And you’re probably going to have to spend your lunch breaks, and morning and afternoon tea on your own business, somewhere on a laptop or on the phone to someone in the background who can help you. But these days, with virtual assistants and support, outsourcing and content outsourcing and traffic outsourcing and website outsourcing, you don’t have to do anything other than do the marketing.

Alright, now that was just number one of ten, so we’d better motor on. Number two: There’s too much competition already.

Kyle:                   Oh, mate, I wrote an email about this probably a year ago, because this is another one I hear all the time, and it annoys me because I used to feel the same thing seven or eight years ago when I was breaking into the consulting world, like successfully for the second time, where I felt the same thing, I felt like there was too much competition, it was going to be too hard to break in.

And what I quickly realized was that there was a big difference between my perception from the outside looking in and the reality of the situation once you actually get in there.

For example, with the Internet marketing world, everyone’s still talking about offline marketing and local businesses and everything, and from the outside it looks like everyone’s your competition, you know it’s completely saturated.

Once you get in there and you start actually talking to business owners, there’s very, very few people doing this kind of stuff to the level that you want to be doing it at successfully. Most people are just on forums and they’re talking about it, and they’re not doing a whole bunch of stuff in the real world.

There’s also tons of opportunities these days to either niche your business down to a particular market or a special type of actual service, like being a pay-per-click specialist or something like that. So there’s a lot of different ways you can slice and dice the market to differentiate yourself from anyone else who is in your market doing a similar type of thing.

James:                 Perfect. So you can specialize, you can become the expert at something, and you can do a little survey out there. I mean most of the population still don’t even know what Google+ is, let alone split testing or personalized URLs or multi-step forms or any of the stuff that we take for granted if you’ve been in the Internet space for a while.

A normal business owner is going to look at you as if you have three heads. So it’s not hard to be a superstar. There’s very little competition. Most of the people from the big companies out there who are selling the solutions like door-to-door or canvassing businesses are still just sales reps who’ve had a PowerPoint presentation from one of their managers who spoke to someone else in their team and they really have no idea when it comes down to what actually happens.

And most people in our community have access to really good high quality wholesale supplies of these services that they can take and add a good margin to and make decent money from without having to know anything technical. But I don’t think there’s much competition.

Kyle:                   No, there really isn’t, not when you do it properly. Not when you go out there and you’re thinking high value, you’re talking to people on a human level, you know, you’re not trying to just blast them with sales messages, you’re not trying to pitch them, you actually kind of know a little bit about what you’re talking about.

That goes such a long way, and you speak to business owners, and they’re sick of the sales people and they’re sick of the SEO spam emails being offered all the time. And when you actually sit down and talk to them, say, well look, what do you want, how can we help you, they love talking about it, and they’re extremely open to it. But you’ve got to come on with that kind of a high value approach and not be perceived as a salesman from day one.

James:                 Ok, so on this related topic, your next item was, “I’m not an expert or guru, so I have no value to offer”.

Kyle:                   Yeah. And you kind of touched on this one just before, saying that most business owners are completely clueless. And that’s exactly the feedback I still get every single week from my students.

They still can’t believe that they’re going to be talking to a business owner about, you know, being able to install analytics, or being able to install QuickTail or one of these sort of tracking things and telling them what we can do with their website and how we can see what visitors are doing, figure out what they want, you know, survey them.

They’re absolutely blown away by these things, and I think some people get kind of intimidated by being in the Internet marketing space, because they see what the gurus are doing and they see what people like you and I are doing, which is a lot more sophisticated than what you need to do for a local small business. And people get scared.

They’re like, “Well I can’t do that, I’m not an expert at that”. And they kind of talk themselves out of the value that they do have. What you find is that when you speak to a local business owner about some really basic stuff like maybe using pay-per-click or SEO to get them some traffic, like putting an opt-in form on their website, like being able to survey their customers, they are literally blown away, and they’re like, “Wow, how on earth can you do that?” Like they just don’t have any clue about it.

James:                 Well I’ve got a specific example here. I had a customer trying to buy a website from us, and he knew so little that he didn’t really know what to ask for. But when I investigated, the problem he was having was that he’d sent 25,000 visitors to a site and had just a couple of thousand people fill out the form. And he wanted something that converted better.

I took over the project for him and we were able to get the conversions to 65%. So had he sent that traffic to the site that I actually set up for him – well my team did, not me (by “I”, I mean my team) – he would have had a significantly better result, probably closer to fifteen thousand people.

So 700% increase in result just from the very, very simple idea that you have a two-step form, where you ask for a name and email at part one, and then the rest of the details. They were trying to get too many fields. So it’s a classic case of a simple idea, not well-known, that can significantly – I’m talking millions of dollars in difference in revenue – for that simple idea.

Kyle:                   Yeah, and you touch on two things there. The first is that they literally have no idea what’s possible. They’ve got no idea of just the basics of Internet marketing, absolutely no idea of any of the technical stuff, any of the testing and tracking things. So just by knowing that, you know enough to provide immense value like your example, you know.

Massive, massive increases in the number of leads and everything they can generate and profit obviously.  And the other thing is, I actually had a very similar example with the multi-step form where we took someone’s form that had 50 different questions that were asking and they wonder why no one would fill it out.