How to Build a Community

And I accidentally kind of stumbled into entrepreneurship by mistake. I was probably destined for it anyways, because I was terrible at school being a dyslexic.
And so there were many options for this, besides become an entrepreneur at the end of the day, but I stumbled it backwards. And I've been doing it for about 13 years now. And so I've, I've scaled a couple companies and x exit a couple. And I've also had a couple companies that were epic failures. Luckily enough, I discovered it quickly and it tricked out too long. Sometimes you'll learn more, yeah, sometimes you'll learn more from your mistakes, and you learn from your wins, right? Oh my gosh, absolutely. Like, I learn so much more. Because I feel like if everything is a win, and everything is like, easy, and like go with the flow, then I'm not learning anything. And so like, we just got done producing a digital conference. And you know, the year 2020 is like everything go digital, because of COVID. And it was our first time using this 3d virtual platform, which was freaking amazing. But for the generation that is like 65, and plus and over, and like they don't understand how to work their devices. Yeah, it was very challenging. And so instead of actually interacting with the thousands of people on the platform, my team and I were troubleshooting, and making videos and PDFs for the older people. But it's like we didn't know, because it's the first time we've done it. So now we have like this great digital binder of all the troubleshooting problems that you can possibly have on every single flipping device that you can watch a digital, anything on. So but now like I can use that, you know, to help other people who are going to be producing digital, you know, summits or conferences online. So we always learn from those things. And I don't really think that it was a mistake, because like, I didn't know to ask these people like, what devices are you on? I mean, there were people, I'm like, Can you send me a screenshot? And they're like, what's a screenshot and like, Oh, Jesus crisis Gumby along three days, but we got through it, and it's all good. It's all good. So the company that that you have now, which is automation, wolf. So where did that name come from? First off. Yeah, see, so there's really nothing too much to it. Except for I was looking for a really simple domain. That was really good. Yeah, are easy to spell. And, you know, listen, I picked some pretty terrible domains in the past over the last 10 years. And, and I don't get too caught up with those things. Today, as much as so my own theory, in general, and business anyways, particularly for b2b and just about anything is
I don't really build anything or put too much effort into it until someone buys something from me. So like,
and it's only because my, I've only made the mistake before where, you know, I come up with an idea. And I'm like, Yes, and then I floated around there, and everyone goes, Yeah, that's a great idea. And then Mac, man, no, and they don't convert, as you gotta, you got to get them to vote with their wallets. That's the key. Even if you're not making any big money, just get people to hand you cash right away on a very simple idea, like a paper napkin idea. If you can't do that, then or you can't launch a beta of an idea. If you can't put together like a very simple, you know, VSL video sales letter is what it stands for. For people who don't know what that stands for, you know, and sell something in advance that don't, don't build it, I can't tell you how many times I've wasted so much energy on something I should have never built instead of just selling it first and fixing it. Fixing, making it better later. You know, just call it a beta like call what it is, let people know, don't set up a false expectation. Say, Hey, look, normally I'm gonna charge you know, X amount of dollars for this, but I'm gonna discount it by 75%. Because there's a beta, I just want to see, you know what I'm missing what you guys need to know, sell it, and then go build that thing. And I do that all the time. I love doing that. That's how I test new things now, but it's the it's the way to go. So like I when I learned how to build online courses, I kind of went like crazy. And so I developed like, all these online courses, and I never launched them until they were completely done in my head and my standard. And then I went to a conference where I heard this girl speak and she's like, Oh, no, we never build anything. Like you know, we we test it. So we do pre launches and we pre sell these courses, which gives us funds to actually build the courses. And then it's like it's all much the way she talked about it was like an artist I think she used like Taylor Swift as you know, and I'm from Nashville live in Nashville. It's like I know a lot of these people because, you know, we've worked with them before in some capacity. And so she's like when she's about to launch a new album. They
Do like this 90 day, like build up, build up, build up, build up. And then you know, so you have thousands of people waiting for these new albums, she's like, that's the way you have to think about selling things online. And in my mind, I'm like, this chick is crazy, I would never do that. And now I'm like, I'm the dumb one. Like, you just have to think differently. And I never thought of it that way. But that's actually how we do a lot of stuff moving forward. And the other thing I learned about it, too, is one course, a year, like not five, not five, not 10. I'm like, this lazy. And then I learned like, No, you beta test it, you tweak it, you you ask for feedback. And the feedback consistently that I kept getting to one of them was this is too much information, like I don't even know where to start. And you know, when we're so close to something you don't realize, like when you do something every single day, it seems easy to us, but to someone who's trying to intake new information and change their processes in their ways. It's not that easy. So it's really good feedback. And I agree with you 100%. I just wish I would have learned that like 10 years ago, so I wouldn't have wasted so much time and money. Totally. We learned the hard way. Yeah, it's called the curse of knowledge. That's what you have, right? So you're too too close to it, you can't see the trees in the forest. And what you think is, like easy or interesting is not usually the thing that your audience actually needs help with. You know, so if you can even do like just a beta live version of it, you quickly start to find out, oh, this is what they need, and what's important to them, and then you can give them that thing. Yeah, totally. So I know you're an expert at building community. So and building trust with people before you both communities. So what are some steps or techniques that if someone listening is a new entrepreneur, and or maybe they've been at it for a long time, but they've never built any type of a real community meaning like, I think when I think a community, I'm like, you got to be present, you got to be present consistently. And you've got to build trust. So what are some things that you've learned over the time becoming the expert, if that are so So? So I want to talk, you know, first, let's like, maybe speak a little bit about like the communities like why you might want to build one, and this may not be the right answer for you. Generally speaking, I help people who want to grow their b2b businesses. So an example of these individuals, it could be a, like a founder or CEO of a marketing agency, it could be a founder of a b2b SaaS company, or you could be selling high ticket consulting and coaching. Okay, so those those would be sort of the main buckets of the people I usually help. And when you're selling b2b, high ticket stuff, you know, it, it, the higher the ticket goes, the more trust you need. And, and the quicker you start to realize that people really only make a sales only made when you really break it down to three things, okay? there one needs to be a problem.
Two, there needs to be a budget. And three, there needs to be trust. And this is assuming that you have some sort of service or product that is like half decent and doesn't have to be the best product or service because it's not always the best products and services that win. Often, it's the people who have the most trust with the marketplace and the best marketing and positioning that win. But you need product budget trust to equal sale, those are the first principles of that. Now you can't control when someone has a problem. And you can't control it. They have a budget, but what you can control is the trust. And so what I usually recommend the people's like, Oh look, if you're targeting a particular nation, assuming you've carved out a niche, let's hope that you've done that because the riches are in the niches but let's say you go down to that.
You once you know once you figure out what your your niches are in the in the US, you call it niche. Right, Richard? And so you find your niche. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you find you find your niche, and then you know who they are. They're not these people are not invisible, right. So the first thing you need to do is build a list of these individuals, but then you need to come up with something that you can reach out to them to start bridging that gap of trust. Well, if you just reach out to them cold in your stranger, well, you know, we all know what that means. Stranger means danger. I mean, your parents taught it to you since you were three years old, and if you've children, you're teaching it to your children. So it's not a really good offer. Right? So you got to come up with a better offer a lot of times that offer is community, okay. And and inviting someone to a community it doesn't come across as salesy or sleazy or slimy and is usually welcomed by most and and most people want to join it, because birds of a feather flock together, right? So if you're like a CMO
I don't know that at one company, you're only one cmo. But if you said, hey, I've got this awesome community, it could be online or offline does really matter of other CMOS. Do you want to come hang out with other people? They'd be like, Oh, yeah, that sounds pretty cool, right? Because this, it's lonely. You could do this with CTO, CIOs, you could do this for any industry whatsoever. Even if you get into the entrepreneur niche in general, if you invite a chiropractor, chiropractor group, they're more likely to want to join and that's just the general entrepreneur group, there's just something about like minded people that gravitate towards each other, it's the same reason why Comic Con works, or people drive,
you know, hundreds of thousands of miles sometimes just to go in, hang out with other people who own the same vehicle as them, like we're fanatical about being around people that are like us, right. So the whole concept birds of a feather flock together is why it's attractive to them. Now the trick is, when you create a community, is that you actually want to make it a little bit hard to participate in, you want to make sure it's it's private, okay? And, and the reason why it needs to be private is the same reason that private golf clubs work, or private ski clubs, or private, you know, supper clubs, work, people want to belong to something that's not necessarily easy if everybody can get in, and it's not that exciting anymore.
And then it becomes a secret society thing. And you know, how the secret societies work, it's really, really important. And some people can make a lot of money off this community thing. I mean, some people will fly all the way to you know, Necker Island, to rub elbows with Richard Branson, and get their picture taken with them, it's that important to do something like that. Now, I'm not saying that's why you should build a community. But that's a great offer to start with, you know, is is the key. And that's why it works. Now. What happens when you actually offer community instead of your services to begin with, is you get to capture the whole market versus just those people that are in market. And what I mean by that is that, if I was to, let's just say you sold website, design services, or something like that, and you took 1000 random entrepreneurs and put them into a room, and we said to them, hey,
raise your hand, if you are going to be looking to redesign or build a new website in the next few months, while you're probably going to notice somewhere between one and 4% of the room raises their hand, those are the people are in market, looking for what it is that you do right now, assuming that you you know, so website design services. Now, if we change the question said, Hey, who here in their entire entrepreneur career between now and the end of it
would be looking to redesign their website
or have a new one built? Well, the majority of the room is gonna raise their hand at that point, probably 99.9%, so they can all buy from you, right? You just don't know when that's going to be you don't know when they're going to have the problem. And you really shouldn't care.
And whether they have the budget or not, you can't control it. But what we want to do is we want to put them into a controlled environment, like a community, because once you've been in a controlled environment that you control, you can now build rapport with them, you can now build goodwill with them, you can now do one to many educating and one to many selling so that they can get to know like, and trust you. And if you have that trust,
then at the end of the day, when the problem arises, usually get the first shot at it. And when you have that trust, price becomes less of an issue.
And I could give you an example of that. I'll give you a real life example. Real quick of how much this matters. Okay, so in Toronto,
we're allowed to build these laneway homes in the back of our backyards. It's like where you had parked behind our house. And there's like a laneway. There. They're called laneway homes because we're running. I mean, is it like another house? It's like another house? Yeah, think of it as like a coach house almost. Right. Okay. So in Toronto, we're running out of land, you know, it's a city of four or 5 million people and we just don't have enough land. It's the fourth largest city in North America, most people don't know that. And so we have no land. And so the the government's here basically said, Hey, if you live in Toronto, we're gonna allow you to build in your backyard, basically build another house in your backyard, because we have no more land. So I'm allowed to do that. So I'm going to do that because it's a great way of creating some additional cash flow and adding some equity in my property. Like, why not? I'm in Toronto, really? Why I'm gonna do so I got a quote from a friend, family member that I trust, you know, very, very much and they quoted me $320,000 to build this 800 square foot two bedroom house in Toronto, my backyard. But then I got another quote from someone else I didn't know and their quote was $240,000. That's an $80,000 Delta, but who am I going to end up choosing which is so different?
With the lumber better so well, so yes, of course, you're going to get into all these things. Why is this so different? But at the end of the day, you're going to choose the person that you know and trust. Am I correct? Like, yeah. And so this is the power of that that that was talked about is an example that price doesn't matter. When you have trust, your price can actually go up, you can charge more when you have trust, you can actually suck at sales be terrible at sales, and still close deals.
And so this is the great thing about building trust. So when you take all these people called in, put them in a controlled environment, like a community, and then you do get some leverage by doing this one to one to many selling to them. You get to build rapport and trust with them, that you can do amazing things where the byproduct ends up being like a lot of great deals for you with lots of great margins and profit in it. Right? So this is why I said again, it's not always the best products and services that when it's those that actually build the most trust with their ideal buyers, their ideal clients, right.
Now, here's part two, that's really, really important to this strategy to getting this right. This is really, really important.
Okay, one of the biggest mistakes people make
is they're always trying to be the expert. It's a huge mistake, you have to stop being the expert. Instead, you have to start thinking like a talent scout, just like what you're doing right now. This is a perfect example of it, this podcast,
you find great talent, and you interview them. And what's happening is if you introduce this talent, you put those interviews in that community as either snackable little short video content or long form. Both both is good. Generally speaking, if people don't know you, they'll consume your short snackable content first. But as they as you build up more trust, they become sort of superfans will listen to your longer form content. But initially, all you want to do is interview other people and be standing beside those other people. This is what Oprah did. This is what Tim Ferriss did. This is what Joe Rogan these are all people who are experts have absolutely nothing but when it's up happening when you interview other really smart people. There's the law of transference that happens, okay? It's literally This is like a real law. This is like this is physics. But basically all their expertise and all their brand gets transferred to you because you're standing there and here's what happens is you interview smart person, you're there, they go away. Next smart person comes in, you interview them again, they go away. Next smart person comes in near them, they go away next Mark Swappers comes in? Well, all the smart people come and go, but the only constant in the community in front of that audience is you. You're the only person everybody remembers, and because you brought smart people to them, and you taught that audience what to look for, and what to look out for. They now trust you. So for example, if we look at Oprah, today, he's not really been in the game for a long time. But if she decided to say, hey,
send out a tweet says this is really great company, they're really been sort of struggling, barely surviving, because of COVID be really great if you go to their website and buy a gift card, and you can cash it in later on when they can open up. Well, that business would go from barely surviving to thriving overnight based on that endorsement. Why? Because she's trust, equity, trust, equity, trust, equity, goodwill, and goodwill and goodwill, by interviewing other people, other experts, and so on. Right. And that's all you need to do. So if you just get those two pieces working together. One is find your ideal
prospect and client, instead of reaching out to them to sell them your services don't because you're a stranger danger. Instead invite them to your community of like minded people. And then three, go out there and interview other smart people stop trying to be the smart person and put that content in the community. At the end of the day, they're gonna build so much trust, they're gonna take any recommendation. So if your product is a good fit, great, if not, you can refer someone else's. It's a great way to create all kinds of JV partnerships and all kinds of wonderful things that can come from it after that it's really endless at the options that you can, you know, leverage that community, I mean, literally almost gives you a license to print money on demand whenever you want. It's really quite, quite a beautiful thing. And so if you do those two things, that's like you're done. Yeah, I mean, that's it. It's that simple. Just do those do those very simple things. And and you win. I know everybody overcomplicate stuff, they want to create these funnels and the self liquidating offers. And I call these Rube Goldberg machines, this thing triggers that thing that triggers that thing that triggers this thing, and then triggers this thing and then triggers that thing. And I mean, it goes on and on and on and on and on. And it's just so bloody hard to do. Nothing ever gets done. Right now, all you do is a whole bunch of little things that never result in anything. But instead, if you just pick a couple really good evergreen strategies, these are not going away. This will be around for forever to the till the end of days. And you just do that. It works really great. And the cool thing is it leverages what's called the network effect. Okay, and the network effect. This is again going back to physics like you if you ever want to google it go Google Metcalfe's law and Reed's law. This is what big businesses do. And so every big business leverages the network effect. Uber uses it. Amazon uses it eBay
uses it. Google uses it, Facebook uses it, YouTube uses it, you name it, they've created it. It's any system that you the more the more people that join it, the better it gets. It's like a community, the more people that join it, the better gets. It's like the interview site, the more interviews you do, the bigger your audience gets, the more trust you are, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. and better and better and better. And that's what you want to do. Right? You want to make sure you're investing all your time in something that gets better over time. And something that leverages the snowball effect, right, where eventually takes on a life of its own. And it just, you know, runs out of control. And the great thing about like, a community is you're not responsible for creating all the content, your responsibility is to start conversations, and then let the peer to peers do the education. By starting conversations, you become a good host, just like at a party, you do introductions, you don't need to host and come up with all the content. So when you look at the 8020 rule, you know, 20% of time you start conversations and maybe drop in some of your interviews, and 80% of the time, the q&a is there to create all the content for you for free, you can get all your content created for free, you're working way too hard. Everybody's working way, way too hard.
I agree 100%. Like there's one client that we have, they have 6000 people in their network that are certified in this specific area. And they're like new business, new business, new leads, new databases, new business, new leads, and I'm like, Guys, if you just nurture your 6000 cheerleaders around the world, that are already super fans that are selling your product, like they're completely missing the mark, like completely, and they're making things way too hard, and they're wasting a lot of marketing dollars. And it like literally kind of makes me sick.
But until you understand the strategy, you can't make somebody do something. And so how, how can we make people who don't? who are working way harder than smarter? How can we like undo that and make them take a step back to see that, like, you're working way too hard here? Like, is there something that like an intervention technique that you would recommend?
Well, what's funny is I find that once you sort of break it down into its first principles and help people understand this, they usually have this aha moment, you know, it's not, honestly, it's not their fault. Okay? It really is not their fault that it's, you know, you know, the CIA, right? You know, they torture people, they torture, they torture people with noise, right? noise and, and that's essentially like, what most of the sales and these marketing and sales enablement tools are doing. So, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen that mark tech study. But there's one, which shows how many marketing and sales enabled tools are out there. And like the number of tools in 2011 was 150. And currently, right now, there's something like over 7000 of them? Well, if all these tools could solve your problem, why do they keep making more of them while they do it, because they want to keep you confused, because that's how the more of your money, right? If you just if you just knew that all you needed was cold email and LinkedIn and a place to put them in a free community like Facebook group or something. And then you just needed to kind of like, you know, get a free zoom account and interview some smart people. They would all go broke and go bust. Right? They don't want you to know that right? They want you to have all these fancy analytics tools, they want you this funnel on this email automation thing and this report and do do SEO and PPC. And listen, you're talking to a person who own digital marketing agencies, I own two of them and exit both are nice to sell this stuff. So I love when people are confused because it means they needed me I can you know, they need this. So, but you really don't need it. If you sell b2b, you just need to get those two things right, and stay consistent with those two things that actually feels good, like, you know, helping people and being helpful and useful and connecting people. She's the least but at the end of the day, it's just fun.
You can look at the mirror and really like yourself, you know, like, yeah, and sleep at night. I literally don't have people sleep at night sometimes I'm like, what you're selling is such a sack of shit. And like you tell you're talking to the wrong girl today because I'll tell people I'm like, like yesterday, this this company we work with, they wanted me to listen to this software company talk about like a LinkedIn strategy. And so you know, that's 30 minutes of my time, I'll never get back at least I was walking on my treadmill desk. So I was getting steps in so other
There was it was a complete waste of time. And they're showing me how you can download 500 emails per day. And I'm like, that's not what I'm looking for. In fact, I have an email address that's on LinkedIn. That is only for LinkedIn. And when I get emails, it goes straight to junk. And it is complete, it's deleted, I don't even look at them. Because it's spamming people, and cold calling people. And we want to stay on the platform on the LinkedIn platform and message people directly on LinkedIn and build authentic relationships. And so that we can convert a sale, but we have to add value first. So if someone wants to start building a community, what are the It sounds like you're a fan of like, Facebook groups? What are some other platforms? Well, they honestly, LinkedIn is a great place to begin. So your example of what you're talking about, I'd love to just build off of that for a second and share a very clear plan of like actually how to leverage LinkedIn and in the right way. So whenever you're on any platform, you you want to keep people on the platform that they're on.
Right? Because we want to, we want to remove friction. And the mistake that everybody makes is everybody's trying to get people to either scrape the information on one platform, get them moved to another or communicate on that platform only to move them to something else. Even sometimes it's your own crap, like you're trying to put them into your own lead magnet, right, which is like, honestly, not really the best strategy most of the time. But people do it because they want they feel like they have more control if they can put them on their list. But today, it's really not necessary on LinkedIn, like, what you want to do is you you want to first grow your connection requests with people who are active on LinkedIn. So to be able to know who that is, the first thing you do is you get a Sales Navigator account, it's a paid account with LinkedIn, it costs like 70 bucks a month, but it's totally worth it. And when you do a Sales Navigator search for your ideal prospects who we want to network with, you can sort of buy, are they active, because not everybody's active, right? If they're not active, reaching out to them on LinkedIn is probably not a good place to go. But
if they're active, great, now, what you want to do is go through and create a system, either you do it, or VA does it and send a very quick, short, personalized connection request to them. And that's it, no selling absolutely no selling, just look at their profile, find something to be quick to connect on. And ask for the connection request with no selling and no obligation whatsoever. By connecting and growing your first connections, now you have the opportunity for them to see your amazing content that's going to show up in the newsfeed. And here's what you need understand with LinkedIn, LinkedIn has 600 million active users who are logging in every day, just like they log into Facebook or Instagram. But here's the big opportunity. LinkedIn, no one's posting. So they're logging in four or five times a week. But they're not posting, only 1% of people are posting. So if you just post, you immediately get more eyeballs on your stuff. Now the only way you get eyeballs on your stuff is if you have more first connections. So if you look in the newsfeed your your newsfeed, pay attention, what shows up and you'll see what shows up is people you're either a first connection to or if something that's a second connection, it's only because the first connection either liked it or commented on it or obviously reshared. Right. So that that's that's it, you need more first connections. And then you need to put more content and the content that you put in front of them guess what it is? It's that interview content, right? Think Like a talent scout, interview other people who are really smart,
and stand beside them and ask them those four questions and put that in your LinkedIn newsfeed. And I suggest that you put in a very short 62nd two minute videos, because people consume this in snackable little bits. And with the impressions over time, they will get to know like and trust you. And often every once in a while you put a little offer out there. And you'll get you'll fill your inbox with lots of leads, perhaps to me all the time. So I get about a million impressions every quarter on my LinkedIn content by just creating this really simple, easy content like this every day and just by growing my connection, so I'm at 27,000 connections on LinkedIn. And so you can just slowly grow that over time. And the more you do it, the better it gets. And it's just a very simple, everyday repeatable strategy that you can do. And you keep them on LinkedIn. Keep them on like Dan Yeah, you don't want friction. So even like in general to like, like even like here's a here's a real tip that people will help people a lot is all these webinars and lead magnets you need to throw them in the garbage and stop doing it.
It's so 2015 like you like there's so much there's such great technology today. It's called a pixel, okay, and these pixels exist on Facebook.
And Instagram and pixels exist for, you know, Google, which is like Google AdWords and you know, Display Network and YouTube, right? And Twitter has them and LinkedIn has them. Everybody has these pixels. And what's really cool about a pixel is once you have it, that's actually a list. So what that you don't own email address. boohoo, right, like, you know what I mean, let your super fans do that. But what you do when, here's what happens when you send someone to a landing page? Well, you fire that trackable traffic, let's say you send over like, let's keep the numbers really simple, you send over 100 people. And let's say it's a really targeted list, or ad that you're running and you get a 20% opt in most people don't, it's more like 3%. But let's just say that you had 20%, less 20 people. So you already lost 80 people who are perfect to see your message. And then they go into your email autoresponder, which most of the time never ends up in their inbox, because there's so many filters on things and ends up in updates and promotion, and sometimes even spam. Like they just never see it. And then you want them to show up to your webinar, or do this particular thing, the time it gets through, you might get one person and like one person, right? So why are you doing that instead? Why don't you just take that webinar and play it in real time, or break it up into little stackable pieces of content and play it right in the newsfeed, you have an audience, they pixeled, they already went and showed interest in your stuff, just show them the presentation. If you just show more people that presentation without any friction, without all those different steps, they probably will buy from you. And it's so darn cheap to run these ads for video views to to people like this, that you just get huge conversions. It's so silly that people have all this extra steps. Like just think about all the extra steps you're creating, you're creating so much friction, that anytime you can remove steps until you can remove processes are when people remove steps to deliver the thing that they're looking for, the better it is, trust me at the end of the video, you can just say, here's how you get ahold of me, people will connect the dots, just put your you just put your email on the screen, email me here, people will email you text message me here. You don't mean let them do the thing that they need to do. I mean, it's 2020 it's crazy.
I will say though, like and I have had people tell me like consultants that we work with,
stay keep stay on the platform people contact you on however. So I'm a productivity consultant. And I don't have time to check 15 different platforms. And so and you know, I have a team and we we have multiple v A's. And what I have found, though, is that if we can follow a process, it keeps us more organized as a team. And so it even I mean, this still happens like yesterday, this lady that saw me speak somewhere at a digital conference, and she wanted a 30 minute, complimentary consultation on something. And she somehow got my phone number which was fine, whatever. And she was, so she was emailing my assistant, and she's texting me, which is causing confusion, because I'm telling her one thing. And really I don't control my schedule. Someone else does that because it frees me up to focus on teaching, doing things like this creating content selling and, and giving value and so
and so my assistants like can you please stop texting her and just tell it like, you're creating problems? Yeah, exactly. Like it miscommunication. She's like, please let me schedule her. I'll get her on the calendar, you know, so And I'm like, you're right, like I need to, you know, stop the back and forth. But what the lady what we didn't realize is she was never getting our emails because it was going to junk. So she's like, I'm texting you, because I'm not getting here. So you've got to ask questions, sometimes, like drill down the problem. But going back to what you're saying is thinking to the way they first contact me is somehow people will get my phone number and it took me a very long time to get my cell phone number off the effing internet. Yeah. And mainly that was because people have spam. It's so annoying. I probably have thousands of like spam numbers that I've blocked on my iPhone. Totally.
So it's like, how do you what are your recommendations? When if you have people contacting you, you know, on all these different platforms, do you train a VA to go to all the different platforms? And you know, from a time perspective, like what, what what is your suggestion for that from a time perspective? Sure. So I'm gonna answer I'm gonna answer to you. I'm gonna answer two things in there. So the first one I want to answer is the the challenge that you are running into is really common. And really, what we're talking about is that's a technology stack issue. So so there are
CRM today. So I use go high level is the one I use, and it pulls everything into a single conversation. So whether it's email, text messaging, phone numbers, it's it all centralizes around one database, and then one person or the team can answer it there, whether it looks like you or not, but there's no confusion. So one is the technology of just pulling it into the right right way of organizing it, and then getting your email delivered the things is, again, a technology thing. So you need to figure out you got to get a couple things down really well to do that. So there's so when it comes to email deliverability and getting it to the inbox, you need to have some technical things set up, which are one time so one is DKM. I the the other one is demark. And the other one is, my God is escaping right now, I can't remember off the top of my head right now. But you gotta you gotta have that setup, right, you don't have that setup, right? It Miss communicates to the to the internet server providers that this may not be legit or spoofing, it'll send it to other areas. The second thing is you need to get your emails and get all the HTML out of it, because it just reads like a newsletter. And if you have a newsletter, there it goes there. And the third thing is the intent of the emails. So everyone sends their emails like a broadcast. And and these the Google and and all these tools, they're reading your email, not the words in it, they can actually understand the intent. And when you send it like a broadcast, they know that it's more like a newsletter versus a one to one communication. So you got to rewrite all the copy to your emails, write it as though you're writing to your best friend, like as a single email as a one to one and then send those emails and then all sudden they start getting to the inbox. Plus, you might have a domain quality score thing, and the best way to fix it is to just start asking for more replies in your emails versus the broadcasting before you send people the assets. Okay, so those are some very quick technical things that'll get it to the inbox and text that that'll fix that. Your second question about like, hey, how do I manage all these different things? Okay, so the first answer is do one platform at a time. Okay? So here's, here's a mistake a lot of people make, you know, let's, I always tell people, you, you, you only have 100 points, and you don't get the win anything, unless you get to 100 points, right. And so, here's your thing, you have 100 points of the day, and you only win if you get 200 points. And here's what most people do. They spend 25 points on Instagram, they spend 25 points on Facebook, 25 points on LinkedIn, and 25 points on their website. At the end of the day, nothing got done, and they won nothing. Right? Right, what we better is pick one, pick one and get it to 100 points and get that down to a system where you and your team can run that with without you, okay, as well as possible. And then you add another platform and another system on to it. But not until you do that. And the way you choose the best platform is you choose the one where your audience hangs out. So if it's b2b, the place you need to be is LinkedIn start, start with LinkedIn and just just do LinkedIn. Okay. Yeah, you know, if it's like, so you just figure out where your audience lives, go there, live there, get that down into a system, until you can do it where that no one needs you anymore, where you're obsolete, right? Where you've made yourself redundant, then you can move on to the second platform, and only until then, so that's that's how I would solve those particular problems. And, and it always comes back to that less is more anyways, like, you know, you don't need to be everywhere. This this again, this is the noise and all the mistrust and the lies that people tell you, you know, this is like, I love Gary Vee. But, but you know, bigger adventure is great. He's awesome. And I believe in a lot of his strategies, but sometimes it's just like too much like, you know, being every spray and pray doesn't work, be focus, pick, pick, pick up platform to go deep on.
We like our new clients that have no social media whatsoever. We say the exact same thing. Yeah, one platform for at least 90 days, like we have to investor to 90 days. And so then, of course, they're like, Well, what do you think? Where should I start? And I'm like, Well, people see Facebook, as I guess, like a second website, and the most people are on Facebook. But I know that the engagement isn't as good on Facebook. But for somebody who has no social media, and they're just starting what platform would you suggest they start on?
So So again, I would recommend wherever their ideal audience hangs out, right? So like, if I was doing young, younger generations, I would probably go to Snapchat and Tiktok right, or possibly Instagram, right? But it just depends if I'm marketing towards, you know, grannies and and, and boomers, I probably do Facebook right. And then if I'm looking at business entrepreneurs is probably going to be you know, LinkedIn. Now Now that being said, all of those things can be super simplified. Like there's there's the question is always to be
Asked as well to like, What? What does easy look like? How do I make this simpler and easier, there's always a way to back it down. I'll give you an example. I grew one of my companies, you know, very, very close, just under eight figures a year, okay, that I sold that company sold in 2018. And I almost entirely built that business on a very simple thing, which was just running mastermind dinners. I was at, I get once a month, I get five CMOS in the city to sit down, have dinner, I paid for it. And I got all of us to know each other. That was that was the only I did so just email like, you know, 10 to 15 of them a month, and I get five into a dinner to hang out and it would, you know, create a network and make the money. So, you know, it doesn't have to be a huge thing. That's a very simple, repeatable, I eat dinner anyway. So today, right, right. It's like the easiest thing in the world forget, like all these funnels and everything else that literally, you know, created a lot of business, you know, just doing that one simple thing. So I wanted to ask you, like, I know that you said you do like simple automation. And so what are some of the and I agree with you like there are way too many tools. And I am probably the person I mean, I feel like I've used them all we have we have worked on every platform. We have and mainly because we have clients that like different things. I got in bed with Infusionsoft A long time ago. Confusion soft Yeah, they unfortunately have that name. So I think why they've changed to the key points. Yeah, I guess they're trying to make it sticky. I don't know. But I mean, once you build all these, these things, and these automations um, what would you say now? You know, there are easier platforms. I think kajabi is way easier convert kits way easier, like,
I do think people, you know, they should have a CRM right to like, keep things organized and tag things appropriately. What are your favorite platforms if people want or they're looking to automate something? What would you suggest that they use?
So so I'm a bit agnostic on the system that you use, I say, use what works for you. I do have my favorites. So I have also used Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft was the first CRM that I actually ever used. How did you get out of bed with them? Okay. Well, I kind of went through the journey of moving into more enterprise tools for a while. So I ended up using HubSpot and Salesforce and Marketo because that was the audience that I sold to was larger companies for a while. And then, you know, now that I've sold those and I'm back to a smaller company, I do you prefer some of the smaller tools that are easier. my current favorite one that I think is a really good one is called go high level. And it's an excellent tool. So it does, it does everything you want it to do, which is perfect. So it does the funnels, like Click Funnels. Okay. Does he know, does the email automation does the text message automation does the ringless voicemails, I mean, you can connect it all together as a full CRM with a pipeline, you can put your courses in there, and it's all just one system that's pretty easy to use. I mean, at the end of the day, you can hire people to help you set it all up if it's too confusing under syntek can be very overwhelming. I mean, I can I can't tell you how many times I've spent, you know trying to do something all day. And then you finally get a hold of tech help and you find out that it was like one comma or one button.
Or, or there's literally it's staring at you in the face saying click this and for some reason I see everything but that one thing on the screen I don't know why, like I just literally cannot see until someone goes it's right there like and I'm just like, losing my mind and I want to throw my laptop you know out the window and give up forever. This this is tak that's just the way it goes. You know? So what I've learned to do too, is as you make more money, if it's not your strong point, like that's one of the first things you just contact other people like you got to look at it this way you gotta always be focused on your unique ability right? So like, what what are you really what are you really good at and what do you love doing and anything that's not that you're not really really good at and you don't really love doing try to get it outsource to other people to handle it for you. There's a ton of smart people because there's a ton of people out there whose unique ability is not yours. It's your weakness, right? So if you can make some money, do that as soon as possible and your life will be much better. Amen. So the the go high level is this the platform that you mentioned, where all of your messages from every platform can come into one area and then someone can handle it from there. Totally. So it connects to like Facebook Messenger it can ask to your your bot it could like connects to just about everything will go in there. LinkedIn doesn't but LinkedIn is just one
Have those platforms that still like, like you can't even like on LinkedIn schedule a video that you posted there because they don't open their API, you have to log in naturally, like LinkedIn is literally 10 years behind everybody else. But this is the good news. This is 2020. Right now, there's also a lot of opportunity there. So like LinkedIn right now is more like Facebook was 2012. So if you jump on now and build your following and can handle that they're their technology is behind all the other cool things that you can do on Facebook or Twitter and, and other places. It's a really, really great place to hang out. But just notice, like some, there's some things that are just so ridiculously silly, you know, like, you know, you still can't even get Facebook, you can't get LinkedIn live for everyone, like you have to go on a beta waiting list. And, you know, there's all these challenges with that, but they'll fix that it'll come and eventually they'll open up their API and assuming or hopefully Microsoft will and and then you can pull it into your your CRM. Now the other good news is this CRM is even if you have a tool that doesn't directly do it, they do support
with a tool called Zapier. And you can just zap it
by using web hooks and things like that. That's probably super confusing for a lot of people. But just note that there's a third party tool that if you can connect it to if you can export anything into a Google Sheet or a CRM into like a CSV file or something like that. You pretty much can use Zapier to go in and zap anything to any other system. So you should be able to automate it at the end of the day in Zapier. I mean, we have so many zaps that automate things like from our email to Dropbox to Google Drive, to our contract system through hellosign or DocuSign, or whatever the hell we use, but it is very addicting. Like, once you learn how to set up a zap, and you're like, Oh my god, that worked. And then you just keep going, which is what we've done over the years. So like Zapier, people like Zapier is that I'm like zap things. Zapier automation keeps you happy. So it's Zapier makes you happier. So the guy that founded it, his wife is also a productivity consultant.
She's been on our on our podcast A long time ago. And I got to know them, like very early on. And so to to use them and watch them grow has been incredible, because it's a it's one simple tool that just zaps all the systems. And it's the, you know, some people like it's one more platform to pay for I'm like, would you rather pay for two full time employees? Or would you rather pay $100 a month for hundreds of zaps, that are automating your shit? Like, come on? Totally. There's a lot of money in this of connecting tools. It's kind of like the Internet of Things, right? Like we have all this technology now that it now needs to be connected right from your thermostat to your cameras to your phone, and it's slowly, slowly happening. But the problem is it's democratized and everybody owns their own IP around it. A company like Zapier connects all that mismatch that's out there now companies are getting better. Like the one thing about go high level that's really great is they literally are making a lot of other tools obsolete. So Heck, you don't need the contract one, you don't need the like literally, you can save probably about two grand per month by just consolidating to that one tool. And the best part is they don't charge you by seats. So you can have unlimited amount of people like the biggest problem a lot of this these tools is they charge you by seats. And that's how they get you right, like yeah, so as your team grows, and like when I was one of my problem HubSpot like next thing I knew my HubSpot bill was like 20 grand per month. I'm like, Whoa, like, I mean, not a month. I mean, a year Sorry, I 20 grand. I know people who paid 30 grand a month for HubSpot because they have humongous lists you Yeah, they were they, they probably that's a good problem to have, though. If it's that big. As long as it's converting, as long as it's making you double then you know, we're good. Well, that's the that's the thing that once they get you you don't want to switch like switching is so hard. And it's sometimes people don't want to switch because it's the Devil You Know, versus the devil you don't know. Right? And and you just you've had so many experience, you're like, Damn, I'm gonna switch. It's gonna be the same old crap over there. And there is that learning curve and changing your muscle memory. It's all that stuff. It goes back to like that old saying that people say nobody ever gets fired for hiring IBM. So everybody just goes with the plain vanilla Bay safe bet, right? There's like, hey, already here, but this is why those companies are worth so much like Salesforce is worth a lot of money for a very good reason. Because it's hard to get off of it. Like once, especially enterprise. You know, once you put your enterprise account of like contracts of thousands of people on the one platform like good luck trying to get off of it. Never gonna happen, right? So, but small people like I'm just a small company. For me. I can just switch like this. I'm like a speedboat. I can just switch from tool to tool, the tool, the tool I want if I needed to, but it's something worthwhile to really spend some time on and figure out what is the right tool. You're going to live.
With for the next five to 10 years pick pick, pick wisely what was that Indiana Jones one where the guy didn't pick the cup wisely and then all our faces melted off. That's kind of like what happens if you don't pick wisely Your face is gonna melt off, you know? So pay. Pick wisely.
That's awesome. Well, if people want to connect with you, where should they go? What's the best place to go to? So please just go to automation wolf calm, it's spelled exactly where it sounds. It's just automation, Wolf, w o l f.com. That's, that's where you want to go. Awesome. So if you guys want to apply, and to be in Matthews community, then go to automation with.com. We'll put it in the show notes. So you guys have the direct link. And anything else that we have for you and follow up to this, we'll put all of that in the show notes, we should probably have a free guide for you. coming out soon on how you can really leverage LinkedIn. And it's not as hard as it sounds, or seems like it really can be simple, y'all. So don't discount the platform, if you don't know how to use it, because you can simply follow Mac's best practices and really see an ROI. But you got to be consistent. That's the number one thing. So Matthew, thank you so much for your time today. This was awesome. And I learned a ton. So much for having me. That was great. Lots of awesome, and I know that our listeners learn a ton to so everybody that's listening. Thank you so much for your time today. And be sure to tune in next week to another episode of business unveiled.