0:00:00
Good morning, good morning, good morning. How we doing? How are we doing? Check our numbers. Hey, start throwing up some likes, get some likes on the stream, get some comments going in the chat.
0:00:17
How are we? Andy, good to see you. Rob, Casey, Steven, the Hunzi in the house sneaking in and out of the stream. Okay, no, no, no problem with that. Evan is here. Barlet’s here. Manny’s here. This live seems promising. Yeah, absolutely. It’ll be a good one. It’ll be a good one. I honestly,
0:00:36
this is one of those live streams that, um, you know, technically I should, I, I got so much stuff to be doing. I got so much stuff to be doing. Um, but you know, we can legitimately provide a lot of value here and I’ve gotta do it gotta do it gotta stay consistent with it gotta make it happen I could easily said you know I got I got documentation to write
0:01:00
for 3.0 I got some stuff to clean up for 3.0 I got funnels and I get this and that getting ready for the getting the sandbox ready I mean there’s just so much stuff so much stuff but I’m gonna hang out with you guys for the next hour or two or three or no it’s not going to go that long. Hopefully it doesn’t go that long because I do have a lot of stuff to do.
0:01:21
But I wanted to get you guys these insights because it is tremendously valuable. Stripe Goat good to see you, Vitt is here. Ground Pets, Patrick, some of you all’s names crack me up. I like Mark’s comment here, you got to pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers in this record. This is, yeah, we are talking about income today. We are talking about agency life. We’re talking about freelance life. Making sure that you guys are successful. Obviously, I peek at the admin bar survey
0:01:50
results every year and just kind of see what’s going on in the agency space, right? And you guys know that I am heavily involved in the agency space, especially with the inner circle. Most people come to the inner circle to get advice and training and such for making a better agency, making a better business, being more successful, making more money,
0:02:16
doing better for their clients, all of the above, right? Yeah, there’s a bunch of WordPress trainings and Bricks trainings and things like that in there, JavaScript trainings now. Yeah, there’s all that stuff. But to me, the core source of value
0:02:31
for something like the Inner Circle is what it’s going to do for your business and your personal growth as a agency owner slash freelancer, whatever you might consider yourself to be. So we are gonna go over the survey results from the admin bar.
0:02:48
There’s some eye-opening things in there. We are going to talk about those things as we go through them. There’s some insights to be gained of why I think the results are the way that they are. And then I’m going to ask you a series of questions.
0:03:04
And this series of questions is going to be absolutely critical. It’s essentially like, if you are in this group that the survey results describe, and we’ll see right off the bat, one of the key ones, which is like,
0:03:21
I just feel like, man, this is so, it’s such an imbalance, it’s such an imbalance, and it shouldn’t be this way, it shouldn’t be this way. And so if you fit into this group, I’m essentially at the end of this live stream or towards the end,
0:03:34
after we actually go through the survey results, I’m just gonna grill you with a series of questions and then I’m going to point you to resources based on these questions because these questions when you answer these questions, first of all you know the right questions to ask, second you know what the answer is supposed to be, supposed to look like, right? There’s no way you can’t be successful. There’s no way you can’t be successful. Some of these things
0:03:58
must be missing if you live in this group that we’re going to be talking about. And so I’m going to grill you with the questions. I’m going to point you to the answers. And then it’s up to you to actually go implement. Okay. Whatever’s missing, you go implement. Or whatever’s implemented incorrectly maybe needs to change, go make those adjustments. Okay. It’s like we’re going to look at the film. You know, I tell my softball team, see, I take everything, I take everything seriously.
0:04:26
They recruit me, I hate this chair. You guys hear this thing?
0:04:29
That’s the arm rest.
0:04:30
Every time you bump it, it’s like, do you wanna adjust? I didn’t wanna adjust, I just bumped you. So, I’m coaching eight you, all right? These are like eight and nine year olds. We do film review. I don’t know if anybody else does film review
0:04:43
for eight, nine year olds, but I do film review for eight, nine year olds. This is kinda like the film review today for agency owners. Like, let’s look at what’s been going on. You know, let’s ask some questions. Let’s see how we can make some adjustments and improve.
0:04:56
By the way, it does help tremendously. Eight and nine-year-olds, first of all, they love watching the film review, but it does help them understand the game better. To me, I was like, you know, the only time we can learn the game is when we’re standing on the field, that for that, you know, two-hour practice that we have a week, or, you know, during a game. I mean, God forbid you’re trying to learn the
0:05:15
game during the game that’s nobody feels confident doing that do they you know so I just started doing film review and it’s just it’s really really tremendous very helpful okay and it’s fun all right uh let’s see everybody’s ready to go let’s dive in yeah okay I think I’m gonna feel like a chump after this is over I mean maybe maybe maybe maybe not I don’t know. I think it will be insanely valuable though.
0:05:42
Let’s go ahead and share screen and see what we’ve got going on here. Okay, are we at the top? We’re at the top. First of all, let’s talk about, let me move this window over that you guys can’t even see and we will do Q&A at the end as well. Okay, so I do want you to bring all of your agency questions.
0:06:02
In fact, you can put them in right now. As long as you use hashtag Q or hashtag question, you can put those questions in right now. And they’re all organized for me on the back end as long as you use the hashtag and I’ll be able to go through them and answer them
0:06:14
when we get to the Q&A phase. Okay, so first off, I do want to make a note that this was a survey of 1,144 WordPress professionals. Now, I feel like this is a very low number. I wish we had more data. And the Admin Bar’s Facebook group is,
0:06:39
I don’t even know what the number is. It’s far more than that. Let me look on my phone. It’s, I mean, it’s gotta be, what, 8,000, something? Like, maybe even more than that admin bar community okay not yeah almost 10,000 members so how man like what 10%
0:07:00
participation rate and plus this was shared outside of that group I really would like to see this number be like 5,000 you know somewhere in there at least right we yeah definitely low sample size, as Mark says. We gotta get these numbers up so we have more accurate data. I mean, so we do need to take that into account,
0:07:19
but I still feel like it’s generally a decent reflection. In fact, I would say actually that people with newer agencies or smaller businesses in general are probably more likely to respond to a survey like this. So it’s actually the data is probably skewed towards them. So we do have to take that into account for sure.
0:07:41
We do have to take that into account. But still, there’s just large numbers of agencies that are fitting into the results that you’re going to see here. And we can we can easily, easily rescue people from some of the stuff that’s going on. It’s just about having the right mindset, having the right education, having the right direction to go in, okay? Now, out of the 1,144 freelancers and agency owners,
0:08:10
they have an average of 11 years of experience, which, you know, is that 11 years of doing web design, or is that 11 years that the business has been around? Maybe I need a little bit more clarity on that. If the business has been around 11 years and these are the numbers that we’re going to be looking at, that’s a little disheartening. 73% run their business
0:08:33
full-time. Okay, if you’re running your business part-time, obviously it’s a little bit different. I always ask people, I always say, okay, I know you’re running your business part-time, but like, do you aspire for this to be a full-time thing? Because there’s a huge difference between somebody that’s like, no, I legitimately want this to be a part-time thing. I don’t wanna ever do this full-time. If you’re in that bucket, right,
0:08:57
then we’ve gotta kinda set you aside because the numbers are gonna be skewed based on that mindset, okay? If you’re in the bucket of, no, I wanna be doing this full-time, I just can’t afford to do it full-time
0:09:09
because the money’s not there, the numbers aren’t there. I’ve got to do other stuff to supplement because the agency thing’s not quite working out yet, okay? So, you know, there’s that little deal that we’ve got to think about. And obviously, okay, USA, UK, Australia, Canada, great.
0:09:28
72%, let’s get to the first one. Average website project price. 72% of people charge less than $5,000 on average for a website. Let’s open this little plus and get a little bit more data here. Man, $100 to $999 is 11%. Now it says for a website and it’s like, was this a one page website?
0:09:52
Is this a five page website? Is this a 30 page website? A website is not a website is not a website is not a website. These are all very different projects. So I would like a little bit of clarity on that. But still, I mean the average less than $5,000. To give you an idea, I wouldn’t touch a website for less than $5,000. I wouldn’t touch. My
0:10:20
minimum now is $7,500. That would get you a one-page website. That would be like the beginning of the project. Okay? So, and that’s, we’re going to talk about setting minimums. We’re going to talk about taking projects less than the minimum. We’re going to talk about a lot of this stuff when we get to the questions phase, where I’m going to grill you with some really important questions. But the fact that 72% of people are charging less than $5,000 on average for a website. What do you guys think about this?
0:10:51
First, just throw in the chat. Just go ahead and tell me what you think of that stat right there. What was your take on that stat? What do you think about it? What do you glean from that stat?
0:11:03
Go ahead and throw that in the chat. I wanna see what people think when they hear that. Because I know what I think when I hear that. And these arrows, by the way, over here, I believe are comparing to like, you know, last year’s results maybe.
0:11:17
So like there’s an increase, there was an increase in, let me see, what does it say about the arrows? It said something about the arrows right here. Indicate change from last year’s results. Okay, so the, you know, the amount of people charging 100 to 999 went up.
0:11:31
We should see that going down. If they’re getting the right education and insight, that should be going down, this should be going down, this should be going down these should all be going up that these are all going in the wrong direction except this one right here but that’s still two percent of projects
0:11:48
ok but look the higher ticket projects are going trending down what’s happening here this is this all of these numbers are going the wrong direction People say regret, Chumpville prices, that used to be me. Disappointing, goes away to explain why we face such difficulty in explaining values to clients. Used to be there, it’s a safe spot for smaller sites.
0:12:16
There are too many people raising their prices before they have the expertise to back it up. Okay, we can talk about that. As a whole, we are not communicating value. I think pricing is hard as a freelancer. That top line is horrifying. Race to the bottom. It’s not surprising because I charge below five for years. People tend to think cheap is attractive but not attractive to the
0:12:37
right clients. Okay. All right. So think about this. I’ve used this analogy like lots, right? I feel like we’re all in some weird, cheap bubble or something. I don’t know what our industry, what is up with our industry. I think it’s the Wix mindset, the Squarespace mindset.
0:12:59
Anybody can build a website. You cannot believe that lie. Some clients will believe that lie. But you are working in this industry. You can’t believe the lie also. I feel like so many people charge less
0:13:13
because they’re buying into that philosophy. They’re like, well, I mean, I can’t charge, you know, $5,000 because I mean, anybody can just go to Wix and build a website. I mean, what your why are you believing that lie?
0:13:24
That’s a lie.
0:13:25
We’ve talked about this lie over and over and over ad nauseam. This is a lie. Nobody can know. Joe off the street is not going and building a website that’s actually growing his business on Wix or Squarespace or Gutenberg or anything else. They’re just not happening.
0:13:40
They might dick around in those tools and they might get something somewhat presentable but then it just sits there and it does absolutely nothing for them. And so you can’t believe that lie. You also can’t believe the lie
0:13:54
that these people don’t have any money. They all have money. They’re just not giving it to you. They’re giving it to everybody but you. Legitimate businesses in the real world and maybe it’s the fact that
0:14:03
the low barrier to entry to get into web design because all you need is a website or I’m sorry a laptop to get into web design ok you get a laptop or computer whatever you know a thousand bucks and then yeah I can have an agency you don’t really need anything else you don’t need any education you don’t need a certificate you don’t need overhead you don’t need an office you know you just need an internet connection and a laptop
0:14:27
and you’re an agency. Great, okay, so there’s no barrier to entry, which means that I think there’s a lot of people who haven’t actually run a business in the real world. Like if you go out into the real world with your human self in flesh and bones
0:14:41
and like go try to start a brick and mortar business, you know what you need to start a business in the real world, a brick and mortar? You need fucking money. A lot of it, a lot of it. You need a retail space you
0:14:53
need a you need to build that out you need things you need stuff you need overhead you need legit marketing you need a lot of money to go start a brick-and-mortar business in the real world even if you’re going to start like a mobile service business or you need a truck you need equipment you need this you need that you need money okay these businesses have money even if they’re more in the startup phase. They’re just not giving it to you.
0:15:19
I know a guy like with a pressure washer business. You know, what’s he start out with? He goes and buys a $50,000 truck. He buys $25,000 in pressure washing equipment. They have the money, they’re just not giving it to you. Why wouldn’t they be giving it to you though? Because if you can actually be like the lifeblood of their business
0:15:39
actually bringing them leads and sales and more revenue and growth and market domination in their local market in terms of SEO and visibility online Shouldn’t they be giving the money to you if you can actually do that for them Wouldn’t your piece of this picture be worth way more than five thousand dollars to them Certainly it would this is the real value of a website that actually does something Now the value of a Wix website and a Squarespace website that does nothing for a business. You’re right
0:16:11
It’s not worth $5,000 because it doesn’t even it doesn’t even bring in how much in in business But like a legit website should be bringing in tens of thousands of dollars if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in Revenue for most businesses for most businesses. So the idea that it’s only worth a couple thousand, that’s asinine. These numbers don’t make any sense.
0:16:33
And so they can’t make sense. You can’t allow them to make sense in your head. Like these arguments that people are made, oh, they don’t have money. No, they have money. Oh, it’s not worth it.
0:16:41
No, it is worth that much. You got to quit lying to yourself. You got to quit letting other people lie to you. And if you, the more people who believe these lies, our industry does race to the bottom. It absolutely does race to the bottom.
0:16:55
We need to go the other direction. Okay. We need to recognize the value that we actually can bring to businesses. So I’m going to ask you about project minimums later and we’re going to talk more about this but this this number is the wrong number. This is this highlights the whole problem because again if you’re like I’m going to make a hundred thousand dollars, you’re going to make $100,000 a year in income when you charge less than $5,000 per project.
0:17:21
You already, the math already isn’t mathing. The math already isn’t mathing. So let’s keep going. 68% of businesses surveyed had a gross revenue of less than $100,000 in 2023. This is gross revenue of less than a hundred thousand. We’re talking about income, income of a hundred thousand. Okay, so in order to have an income of a hundred thousand
0:17:46
obviously you need far more than a hundred thousand in gross revenue. So the fact that 68% and guys these are again, I don’t know how long their business has been around but people surveyed had an average of 11 years of experience. How do you have 11 years of experience doing the trade, doing the work, but you’re still not hitting $100,000 in gross revenue? Gross revenue.
0:18:15
And again, you know, even like a pressure washing business, any local business is like, I mean, they’re usually smashing through a hundred thousand. So the people you’re working for, right, who you’re doing websites for are making a lot more money than you, have a lot more in revenue than you typically.
0:18:35
So that’s another problem, that’s another problem. This 68%, this is, you know, I would say to think this percentage of people and this number of people putting in the amount of work that is required to do this job, to learn, to keep up with best practices,
0:18:54
all the stuff that we talk about constantly and we’re not even making $100,000 in gross revenue for all of that effort and work and we’re going to get to a stat about work-life balance that’s way out of whack and none of this stuff is in alignment. None of this stuff is lining up the way that it should. How much did you pay yourself in 2023? Less than 10% make a hundred thousand or more per year.
0:19:20
Well I mean that’s obvious because we’re not even there in revenue, right? But you start to see how you know when when one thing goes wrong and it’s a key thing and nothing else can go right after that. Nothing else that we care about can really go right and that’s what is great about what we’re going to talk about. There’s a few things that we can fix, and if we fix those few things,
0:19:41
everything will start going right. And that’s what we want. Right now, these numbers say everything is going wrong. We can make some easy fixes and start to make everything go right. That’s kind of the promise and the hope,
0:19:53
and the reason why we’re doing this live stream in general.
0:19:57
Let’s open this up.
0:19:58
Let’s take a peek at what’s actually, oh, let’s do this one too for revenue. Sorry I didn’t even do this earlier I was just looking at the top line stats. I just got more anxiety. I just got so much anxiety. Jesus, okay what? Alright we got to breathe. We got to breathe. And again this is not people that have been doing this for less than a year or two years or what. It’s at 11 years okay 0 to 49 is 46% okay breathe let’s
0:20:36
okay 50 to 99 is 22 and then 12 and then 5 and then oh okay all right mm-hmm Those are pretty scary. Let’s look at this. Less than, less. Oh God, I’m going to need a brown paper bag. Less than 20,000 is 41%?
0:21:04
Okay. Like I said, the good news is we can turn this ship around. We can turn this ship around. Okay. Going back to softball, you know, the first film review that I did of like game one, you know, you’re in, you can be in game one form, you can be in like, you know, championship
0:21:22
form, right? And I’m just, you know, I was having to do the deep breathing on our, our first, after our first series of practices, I’m like, we can’t throw, we can’t catch, we can’t, we don’t know what’s going, how is this going to come together? Yeah, it’s actually come together very, very, very well. But at the very beginning, I mean, it’s,
0:21:41
you’re like, I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s gonna be tough to play softball when we don’t even know what the softball is. Like, we gotta start here. Hey, guys, what’s this called? All right, similar, similar vibes here, similar vibes.
0:21:54
And again, I’m not hating on any, I understand everybody starts somewhere, okay? And everybody’s going through different things. And then there’s also, you know, location kind of stuff does come into play. But I’ll tell you right now,
0:22:08
if you want one of the keys here, and trust me, I was in this group at one point. I was in the less than $5,000 group. I was doing the, oh, $1,500 website. I was doing all of that. I was doing all of that.
0:22:24
Also, went through periods of being dead broke, okay? So I know what it’s like, and I will tell you, and I know this for a fact, because I lived it, being in these groups is 90, not 90, let’s do the whole 80-20 thing. I think 80-20 probably fits well here.
0:22:42
It’s 80% mindset, and it’s 20% what the hell am I supposed to be doing right with my time and and you know the questions I’m gonna ask will outline all of this but literally 80% of it is mindset 80% of getting out of this situation that we’re looking at right here is mindset and I’ll tell you exactly like I’ll give you details on the mindset as we go through this but it is 100%,
0:23:14
like that mindset side of it, huge, huge, okay? All right, let’s keep going. What percentage of your revenue is from recurring revenue? I actually don’t care a lot about this. You know, some people find recurring revenue to be super important, some people, I don’t, honestly.
0:23:30
Like, you know, you can easily get way out of these numbers and out of these groups without recurring revenue. I think recurring revenue is obviously if there’s good ways to produce it. In the agency world there are some what I think are some not good ways to produce recurring revenue. Website as a service kind of being one of them unless you’re going like some sort of high-end loss model.
0:23:54
But this is not this stat doesn’t tell a huge tale I don’t think. If you sell any of your time hourly what is your hourly rate? The average hourly rate for everyone surveyed is $94 an hour, which is two dollars lower than last year. Guys, okay, I will say $94 is too low, but I’ll also say I feel like inflation went up fucking 40%. So how are we two dollars lower than last year? Everything costs way more money.
0:24:26
How did our industry, this is why I say that we like, what bubble, what is this bubble that we’re all living in that’s not reality? Like where, oh, our websites aren’t worth anything and inflation doesn’t seem to matter, so our average rate should actually go down.
0:24:43
The prices that we saw were going down, now the hourly rate’s going down. Yeah, it’s only $2 lower, but it should be higher. These are going in the wrong direction. They don’t even make sense with the market that we’re all living in. I just don’t understand these numbers.
0:24:58
All right, accessibility. Nearly one-tenth of freelancers and agencies don’t consider accessibility at all when building a website. Let’s see what the actual breakdown is. Don’t consider it, 9.4. Strive for best practices, 81.2.
0:25:13
I mean, is that really an answer? Like it’s, you know, I feel like everybody would just, yeah, I strive for best practices. I don’t know what they’re actually doing, you know. Wouldn’t adhering to WCAG be striving for best practices? This is a little, I don’t know,
0:25:27
maybe this question wasn’t asked all that well. Maybe need a little extra clarity there. But I think, you know, 10% of people not considering accessibility at all is a huge problem. That is somewhat of a selling point, by the way, for selling higher priced projects.
0:25:44
When you can, and I don’t even sell it as an extra. I just let my clients know that that, you know, our work, and obviously, you know, a website is an ongoing thing, and it’s a living, breathing thing, and you kind of need to assess this, you know,
0:26:02
quarterly, every six months, and that can actually be baked into part of your website management fee, doing regular audits, depending on what level they want to subscribe at for website management. But you should be trying to hit the 2.0 guidelines
0:26:17
as much as possible. And by doing that effort, you can justify higher prices, just off that alone, just off that alone. 96% of respondents offer basic or thorough SEO. This is another one where you know you see this all the time asked and even the people that are like you know I do just the basics you know if you surveyed people on like what are the basics by the way you know they
0:26:41
would they would probably not give you a great answer and then even in the thorough which this is going down from last year I would like to know what people consider to be thorough SEO. Because the idea that you are going to do thorough SEO just in a normal website project, I mean that would almost always have to be an add-on. That would almost have to always be a retainer service. If you’re doing that correctly, it would almost always be a retainer on an ongoing thing with
0:27:08
an ongoing effort with a whole completely different set of deliverables not baked into the actual project. So, I don’t know the exact context of how this was asked or how people are responding to this, but it’s something that we can definitely talk about towards the end in terms of what I call
0:27:25
like growth engines for a website. Do you offer paid discovery? This is actually, this would be a critical one. Without paid discovery, only 12% average 5000 plus per project with it 68% do. So never is 45% always is 10% and then sometimes is a big chunk. You got to flip these two numbers right here. These top two numbers got to be flipped. 45% always, 10% never and then you can leave the sometimes where it’s at, I guess.
0:28:04
But absolutely, you got to flip these two numbers if we want to get anywhere close to being where we need to be. We’ll talk about that more in detail in just a little bit. What page builder do you currently prefer? Bricks was the only page builder to increase its numbers over the last year.
0:28:21
Okay.
0:28:24
Blocks down. Hmm. Elementor down, Divi down, Beaver down, Oxygen of course down. Blocks down. Interesting. Okay.
0:28:36
I felt like a lot of people were trying to get closer to core as they say, you know, with the blocks thing. Now some people, I saw some people criticize this on like, oh, it’s the community that this was asked in. This community, as far as I know, is all over the map. And in fact, Kyle, who runs the community,
0:28:56
does not use Bricks. He’s not a Bricks user. So I wouldn’t think that this is skewed in any form or fashion by the fact that it’s the community that it was asked in. Kyle uses GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks.
0:29:08
So if it was skewed at all, you would see blocks, which I assume, that’s all sorts of block stuff. I would assume that number would have gone up if it was skewed. So yeah, not looking good for blocks. I’m actually gonna do a whole live stream, probably diving back into the whole Gutenberg thing.
0:29:29
There’s some drama that’s been happening on the Gutenberg block editor side of things in WordPress with contributors that I think we need to talk about. It’s a serious issue. It’s a really, really, really serious issue. And they might try to sweep it under the rug. They might try to ignore it.
0:29:48
They might try to downplay it. It is a serious issue. And I think we need to do a live stream just dedicated to that. So maybe next week we’ll tackle that. What block package do you prefer? 50% of respondents who build with blocks to generate blocks that’s not of
0:30:04
any surprise to me. Generate blocks and as far as I’m concerned blows cadence spectra. You know, GreenShift you see on the map now I haven’t played with it enough I know that’s got a lot of good stuff going for it. These two in my opinion are just not professional tools. They’re more of the like, you know, the Wixie type block builder tools. GreenShift, you know, has a class first workflow.
0:30:31
Generate now has a class first workflow. Stackable, no. And then quickly, obviously, you know, rest in peace, okay? Where do the majority of your leads come from? Referrals remain the most popular way for agencies to source leads.
0:30:46
71% of respondents listing it as the number one lead source. This right here alludes to a problem, okay? Which, again, we’ll go into more detail on all this stuff as we go. I just wanna get the actual results out of the way. But this is a huge problem as well.
0:31:03
This is a huge problem. What kind of content do you create for your agency? 63% of people surveyed say they create written content. I see this as a big problem as well. I see this as a big problem. 63.
0:31:18
The good news is they’re all up. The good news is they’re all up. Uh, but I do see that as a big problem. How often are you creating content for your agency on a consistent basis? Less than 20% of agencies and freelancers are creating content on a weekly basis. That’s a huge problem.
0:31:33
That’s a huge problem. Now we do need to talk about content creation in the agency and freelance space because it’s not easy, it’s not straightforward, it’s not clear cut. So there is absolutely stuff to talk about there,
0:31:49
but this is a problem. This is a problem right here. Can’t know ifs, ands, or buts about it. That’s a problem. Do you have a well-defined niche audience? Does 28% of agencies without a niche
0:31:59
exceed 100,000 in revenue, while 41% with a niche broke the six-figure mark. This I believe if I was assessing this is maybe paints a picture that’s not all that accurate. We definitely need to talk about this more the niche thing. In fact I might let’s just talk about it now because I don’t think it’s in my list of questions. It’s not in my list of questions that I’m gonna grill you with.
0:32:26
So to make sure we don’t forget it and leave it behind, let’s just talk about it now. Should you niche, should you not niche? What is a niche? Okay? A lot of people think about niche as like, I’m gonna only build websites for local plumbers. That’s gonna be my thing.
0:32:44
I’m just gonna master the local plumber niche, okay? Is that a niche? Yeah, it’s a niche. Is that a good idea? I don’t think so. I hate that idea.
0:32:53
I hate that concept. There are ways to niche with larger niches, okay? Definitely, like my agency was, I say was, because it’s like on, it’s on pause. We’ve got ACS has framed like what we want to accomplish. We’ve essentially like time out, we got to go over here and
0:33:17
and focus hard on this stuff right now. But it was a niche but not like a niche like you would expect. So it was a service niche. It was like if you’re a service-based business then we work with you. If you’re an e-com, no we don’t work with you. That would be like one of the top-level niches and it would also be something I would say to immediately, immediately make a decision on. Okay, I see people bouncing back and forth between e-com and non-e-com.
0:33:49
That is true, in my estimation that is a tremendous mistake. These are massively different types of websites with massively different requirements, with massively different workflows. That is going to be very very very hard to manage and balance and scale to any degree right so you are holding yourself back if you are trying to do e-com and non e-com I would make a decision right away am I going to do e-com and if you go e-com go all in on
0:34:21
e-com or am I not going to do e-com and if you’re not going to do e-com, then stop doing e-com.
0:34:26
Okay.
0:34:26
Just do service based businesses and service can be local plumber all the way to like a SAS company, right. Wildly different in terms of like, you know, even maybe the design of the website, but that actually is good.
0:34:42
Okay.
0:34:43
A service based businesses to make a service based business successful. There’s, they all share similarities and how they need to generate leads how they need to do marketing how they need to do XYZ but when you go into e-comm you cross into e-comm that’s a wildly different game it’s a wildly different game SEO for service-based business is very similar SEO for e-comm wildly different so the idea that you’re going to bounce back
0:35:09
and forth and somehow be an expert in both and all of this other stuff, I would say no. That’s a no. You need to decide, am I gonna be e-comm or am I not gonna be e-comm? Make that decision, okay? And when you’ve made that decision, you just niched.
0:35:24
You just niched. So actually, you could say that you’re in the niche now. You’re in the niche group. Just by doing that, you’re in the niche group. You don’t have to go hyper-specific with the niche, okay? So I don’t know how people were answering this.
0:35:37
I don’t know what people consider to be a niche or to not be a niche. That’s, we would need more insight on those actual numbers and how this question was answered. But just by doing that, you’re in a niche. Congratulations.
0:35:49
And in terms of what I think, you don’t actually have to niche any further than that if you’re good on all the other things, which we’re gonna talk about when we get to the questions, okay? But if you get more specific, it can make up and I think this is why you will see certain people with
0:36:06
more specific niches appear to be more successful and it’s because it covers for a lapse in other areas. Okay, that they may not be doing something super great and but the fact that they have a focus niche makes up for it and here’s why it makes up for it. If somebody knows, let’s say you’re going to go try to get a plumbing client. There’s a local plumber and you want their business, okay?
0:36:33
And you start a conversation with them. And they say, well, you know, I don’t know, do you really know my business? Yes, of course I do. All I do is websites for plumbers. I know exactly how to make you successful. That’s all I do, okay?
0:36:48
They buy into that a lot. Like it doesn’t, it’s not actually a good argument, but the person, the owner buys into it a lot. They’re like, that makes sense. I mean, he all, he focuses on my industry. He knows exactly what we need.
0:37:03
Again, going back to service-based businesses, if you understand business and like fundamentals of business and marketing, you can make any service-based business successful. Okay, you don’t have to like, ooh, there’s something super special about these plumbers.
0:37:16
There’s some secret that you have to know about the plumbing industry to be successful. It’s not, that’s not the case, right? But it sounds good to the business owner. So you can get to a yes easier when they buy into this idea
0:37:32
that you’re an expert in their industry. And that’s how a niche can help make up for a lapse in other areas. And so they can appear to find success easier once they’ve started to actually build up a portfolio and land plumbing clients.
0:37:44
Now it’s like, it’s easier to land the next plumbing client, the next plumbing client, the next. But it also, as I’ve said before, is gonna murder your soul. Like, you just go ahead and prepare at some point to wanna jump off a bridge.
0:37:58
Because you get to the point where it’s like, another plumbing website, another just putting content into this, you know, same template that I’ve created for all these people, and you’re just not gonna have a life.
0:38:11
It’s just gonna suck. When you go from I’m working with this plumbing company to I’m working with this SaaS company, now your brain is engaged. You’re like, okay, now I’m solving new problems and new challenges.
0:38:23
I’m taking the same fundamentals of business and copywriting and marketing and UX and design But I’m applying it to a new challenge now. I don’t want to jump off a bridge now. I’m having fun now I’m using my actual skills now I’m putting my consultant hat on if you hyper niche you essentially create a factory job for yourself This is just an assembly line. This is next plumber in, let’s go.
0:38:53
And it’s just, it kills you. It kills your soul. It’s not fun. It’s not great. And yeah, you might cross the 100K mark, but you’re actually limiting yourself in a way.
0:39:03
So, that’s my story of the niche thing, okay? You don’t need the hyper-specific niche. You just need to niche in a way that makes actual sense. I think service-based businesses is a great niche. I think e-com is a great niche. Then within e-com you might find a niche that you want to focus on because there are different types of e-com. But same story goes right. You don’t
0:39:26
have to get hyper hyper hyper specific and in doing that you got to be careful because you might kill yourself in the process. Okay. You might kill your love for doing any of this in the process? Are you regularly and consistently putting effort into outbound marketing? Despite 26% claiming to struggle
0:39:43
with not having enough work, only 16% of freelancers and agency owners are doing any outbound marketing. That’s a big problem, big problem. 84% no. Mm, okay.
0:39:54
What percentage of your services are done in-house? 66% of agencies are, okay, I don’t care. Do you plan on hiring in 2024? 54% of people say they do not have plans to hire in 2024. My gosh, oh gosh, this is a huge indicator, red flag. I mean, what would you, let’s say you were just talking
0:40:16
to a business owner, just a random business owner. Maybe you’re on a discovery call with them, okay? And I’m not even gonna tell you what industry they’re in I’m not going to tell you anything about their business I’m just going to ask you to ask them one thing ask them do they plan to hire anybody this year and if they say no how do you think you should interpret that what do you think you
0:40:41
should think about that does that sound like oh my god like I just think what do you know about businesses what do you know about businesses, right? They hire people. And the growing ones tend to hire lots of people, right? And I know a lot of us are trying to keep it small. Okay, keep it tight, right?
0:40:59
Run a tight ship. I get that. But just to not plan to hire at all in 2024, that tells me that there’s no growth planning happening. There’s no, I’m gonna, there’s no situation where you feel like you’re gonna need another hand
0:41:16
Right and that doesn’t mean hire full-time. It could be hiring part-time. It could be hiring a You know just somebody to help when needed I mean anybody anybody No, 54% to me. That’s a gigantic red flag Just in terms of business fundamentals huge red flag. How would you characterize the overall trajectory of your business?
0:41:42
Nearly 2 thirds of people surveyed say their WordPress business is growing.
0:41:45
But that’s down from last year. It’s down.
0:41:48
Stagnant is up. Declining is up. Okay, all right. 53% of the people we surveyed say they are now using artificial… okay I don’t care. 56%… okay I don’t care about that either. 7% of agency owners and freelancers don’t expect to be… okay
0:42:08
that’s not… that’s low. Work-life balance is the most common struggle for freelancers and agency owners. 31% of people we surveyed listing it as one of their challenges. Okay. So we have a problem with income, we have a problem with revenue, we have a problem with marketing, we have a problem with this, we have a problem with that, and we have no work-life balance.
0:42:30
So this is the tail of the tape, as they say. This is not looking good. This is not looking good. I’m gonna go into the questions. We’re gonna start grilling people. We’re gonna start pointing to resources
0:42:42
and answers and solutions to help this out, to change the game, to change the numbers here. Gotta get this going in the right direction. But I want to visit the chat real quick. Let’s visit the chat and see what people are saying.
0:42:56
With niching locally,
0:42:57
you could find yourself working for local competitors. Yeah, that too. Yeah, if you’re gonna do plumbers, not good to do that locally. I’ve seen people be like, I only work for local plumbers and we do a lot of SEO for them and I’m like,
0:43:14
hmm, how does that work? How does that compute? Let’s see. People mistakenly use niche in place of specialize. The one counter argument to this is that scalable business is boring business but I tend to agree that’s not fun.
0:43:31
Not really. I mean, you can scale, there’s a lot, you can still scale broader niches, so I Don’t see a problem with scale there because again service-based business. That’s a niche and you can absolutely process a tie is that and You know there’s a there’s a lot of scale that can happen there Okay makes sense to what you’re saying 80% of ours of service sometimes
0:43:51
I make the exception to extend a service that wants to sell not our shop window though partner with the e-commerce system. Okay, okay. So I’m in the niche of not doing e-commerce and not working with assholes. That’s a good niche, that is a good niche. I do say niche, by the way, I don’t say niche, okay?
0:44:12
I don’t, I know, I definitely don’t say niche, okay? But it’s, I never say, so if a word is like, you know, Spanish, for example, I don’t feel like I should say it with a Spanish accent. It’s so weird to me that people do that.
0:44:35
They just start, they just like adopt a Spanish accent just to say the word real quick. It’s just weird to me, I don’t know, I never do it. So it’s, you know, people say niche in the US, so I say niche. I know it’s French, but I’m not French, okay?
0:44:49
So I’m not gonna just quickly adopt a French accent to say one word. Would have been nice to see the year over year difference also with numbers, not just an arrow that goes up or down. Yeah, maybe in the, maybe if you, maybe, cause he does give you access to the whole database.
0:45:03
Maybe that does that in there. Maybe just visualizing it, it was easier to put the arrow. Okay, all right, let’s get into the questions.
0:45:11
Let’s start grilling here.
0:45:12
Let’s start grilling, let’s start pointing to actual solutions and resources and things that will actually help people. Okay, let’s start from square one. Do you have prospects who actually have money? Or are you targeting what I call business hopefuls?
0:45:32
Okay, so we can, you know, there’s, targeting what I call business hopefuls? Ok so we can you know there’s I’ll just tell you stories about you know prospects that I’ve come across because we’re all going to come across bit what I call business hopefuls. Ok and these are people with a business who they don’t really have any prior
0:45:53
business experience they have a business idea and this this will be rampant in e-commerce, it’ll also be rampant in service-based businesses. Maybe even more so in the service industry because there’s less overhead in the service industry, typically, because you don’t need like, to e-com, you need like inventory to sell,
0:46:17
and that does require some money. Unless you’re gonna, you know, I’m excluding the dropshipping people, but you know, if you’re gonna do e-com, you’re gonna need inventory. If you’re gonna do a service-based business,
0:46:28
you just, you can provide the service or not provide the service. Maybe you need some equipment and things like that. But still, there are a lot of business hopefuls. They don’t have any prior business experience. They don’t know business in general, like fundamentals.
0:46:42
They don’t know marketing fundamentals, but they’re going to contact you and they’re going to tell you that they need a website. And they are the exact people who buy into the Wix. Oh, I could do it on Wix, but I just don’t have the time. I just want you to do it.
0:46:56
I could do it on Squarespace, but I just don’t have the time. I just want you to do it. And so in their mind, they’re thinking a website is probably like $1,500 max. At least that’s the website they wanna get started with.
0:47:06
Okay, I will just tell you right now, okay? I’ve been around a lot of really, really, really experienced business owners. I’ve been around a lot of millionaires. I’ve been around a lot of very successful people. These people do not think like that. They don’t think like business hopefuls.
0:47:25
OK, millionaires that I’ve worked with and people with very successful businesses and other industries and such, and then they end up starting new businesses, they approach you with a checkbook out and they’re like, what is this going to cost? Let’s get it done. And they’re ready to invest tens of thousands of dollars
0:47:49
into anything that is about to make this business more successful or give it hope of actually being a success in the first place if it’s like a startup, right? These people know deep down that if I want to build a successful business I must invest in that business’s success. I have to hire the right people, I have to get the right amount of inventory, I have to have the right marketing channels, I have to have
0:48:15
people who know what they’re doing on the marketing side of things, I have to have good copy, I have to have video, I have to have photos, I need good photographers, I need… they know that to be successful they have to invest in the business. Business hopefuls are exactly the opposite. They’ve never really had a lot of success, they’ve never really built real businesses before, they don’t really know what they’re doing and so when they
0:48:37
approach you they’re going to be like I don’t have a lot to spend, I just need the bare minimum. And what they’re effectively doing and they don’t even realize they’re doing is they’re dooming their business idea to failure because they’re not really willing to invest nor have they found the money to invest right so you’re already starting off with somebody who wants to pay you as little as possible and is likely to run that business straight into the ground
0:49:05
ok so would that be a good client no no that wouldn’t be a good client and when you’re on discovery calls talking to people you need to start to recognize these red flags and be like, oh, okay, maybe this is not the best partner for us, right? Because clients, the other side of this is, it should be like, you should be looking at this
0:49:25
as like a long-term partnership. That when you bring a client on board, I’m hoping that I’m gonna work with that client for the next three years, maybe, five years, whatever, okay? And guiding them towards success because I’m a consultant, not a pixel pusher,
0:49:38
we’re gonna talk about that more in a minute, and they know they need good people and I’m those good people, and that I can help them legitimately grow their business through the work that I do. And so I don’t wanna just build them a website
0:49:52
and then just, okay, there you go, have a good day, all right, good luck on that business that you’re trying to build. I don’t want that to be the relationship. I want a three to five year relationship where we’re getting money from this person.
0:50:07
As their business grows, we’re getting more and more money from them. So what you would not want to do is sign up to do work for a lot of business hopefuls that don’t have a lot of money and are about to run their businesses into the ground
0:50:18
because they have no experience. They don’t know what they’re doing. And so I’ve had people start concrete businesses like, oh, what we’re gonna do? Well, we’re gonna pour driveways and there’s plumbers. It’s less than plumbers, it’s less than plumbers.
0:50:32
But like there was a driveway, then I did when I was doing my little stint in e-commerce, like do I really wanna be involved in e-commerce? There was a clothing line. You know, this lady had a, she had this fantasy of like, oh yeah, I’m gonna start a clothing line.
0:50:46
And she had a seamstress all picked out and she had all these designs picked out but no business acumen whatsoever no marketing acumen whatsoever and then skimped on everything wanted to skimp on the website wanted to skimp on the photography imagine imagine imagine guys how does how does Victoria’s Secret sell so much stuff how does any of these like top you know clothing brands sell all this shit.
0:51:14
They sell it with photography. That’s why they go to any like banging e-commerce business. It’s sold heavily with photography. Heavily with photography. Imagine skimping, finding like the cheapest photographer to show off your product.
0:51:31
No, no, you can’t do that. So again, this lack of business acumen, this lack of marketing acumen, these people run these businesses straight into the ground. You don’t want to be partnered with them. You don’t want these people hanging over your head,
0:51:47
okay, asking you for the next thing. You know, they’re hanging on by a thread, still asking you to do stuff, and you’re doing it at bottom dollar. You’re being dragged down with them. You’re being dragged down with them.
0:51:57
So you have to find people that have business acumen, that have successful businesses, at least in the past, if not the one that they’re asking you to work on, and that they have money to invest and they know they need to invest money. These are the people you need to find.
0:52:12
Okay.
0:52:12
Don’t do business with business hopefuls. Okay. That’s number one.
0:52:15
That’s number one.
0:52:16
Do you know how to get new prospects when needed? Okay. Um, I’m going to, let me open this actually in a new, can I, oh, it’s gonna open in this tab. Can I, okay, hold on, let me get the sidebar open. All right, let me bring this up.
0:52:32
Maybe it will open these in this tab from now on. I don’t even know. We’ll see how Arc behaves here in conjunction with Notion. So there’s this video in the inner circle, the top three places to get web design clients fast, okay? And this is not with cold calling,
0:52:49
this is not with cold email outreach, this is not with any nonsense, okay? It’s just three legitimately good channels to get web design clients fast. This is the resource that I would highly recommend you watch and implement.
0:53:03
Just, you have to implement it. Watch it and implement it. And then, you know, you’re good to go on that front. Is it the only three places? No, no, it’s not the only three places. But it’s three good places.
0:53:13
So what you want to do is watch the video and assess self-assess. Am I doing these three things? Oh, if I’m not doing these three things, I better start doing them right. These are like the must do things. Um, and then you can do anything you want outside of these three things for sure. But if you’re not doing these three things, that’s a big problem. Okay. You’re, you’re absolutely leaving money and opportunity on the table.
0:53:33
So you need to go watch this video, implement these three things, but you need to know how to get new prospects when needed we saw a stat it was like 73% of people get business from referrals and you know I know that to be true just in talking to agency owner after agency owner after agency owner but the problem with that is what they don’t tell you the other side of that is well we kind of saw it in the stat about outbound marketing is
0:53:57
literally them sitting around twiddling their thumbs until a referral comes in the door. They’re not really doing anything else proactive to get business. They’re just like, well, you know, I get referrals. And like, what else are you doing? I get referrals.
0:54:10
What else?
0:54:11
Anything else?
0:54:12
Pretty much referrals.
0:54:13
Yep. And it’s like, okay, that’s not, again, ask any random legit business owner. Where do you guys get your business from? They’re not gonna tell you, well, it’s just all referrals. Like, they’re gonna tell you they have a bunch of systems
0:54:28
in place for getting business. You have to have those same kinds of systems in place for getting business. If referrals is like your biggest percent, now, if you’re making millions of dollars in referrals as your biggest percent,
0:54:40
because you’re doing all these other things, but referrals still happens to be your biggest, that’s fine. But if you’re struggling and referrals is your biggest percent and you’re not really doing anything else outbounds
0:54:51
that’s a huge problem or inbound even there’s got to be some other channel you’ve got to have another at least one other highly productive channel aside from referrals if you don’t have that that is one of your key problems that is one of your key problems ok do you know how to run a proper intro call do you know what the key sales checkpoints are again I told you in the beginning,
0:55:16
these are the questions I’m gonna drill you with. And if you’re not answering these questions, you didn’t know how to ask them in the first place, and you don’t know what the answers are supposed to be, this is highlighting the gap. This is where the gap between you
0:55:29
and $100,000 in income lives, okay? So, resources for this. Okay, it’s gonna open every single freaking one in that window over there. Okay, it’s okay, I can bring it over here. So for this one, how to run a successful sales call,
0:55:47
or what some people refer to as a discovery call. I think people don’t like calling them sales calls, that’s effectively what it is, right? The reason I don’t like to call it a discovery call much anymore is because there’s actually, we need to be selling discovery,
0:56:01
then people get all confused. Well, hold on, are you talking about the free discovery call or are you talking about like a paid discovery? What are you talking about? So there’s too much overlap in those terms. Just call it a sales call.
0:56:12
Like the initial intro call, whatever, it’s a sales call. Just call it that and be okay with calling it that. There’s nothing wrong with sales. But you need to know how to run it. And guys, I’m telling you from the perspective of I coach people on doing sales calls and I do mock sales calls
0:56:28
with people. There is a huge difference between how a successful sales call is led and how an unsuccessful sales call is led and then there’s a bunch of gray area in there. What you have to understand is that some people will get on a call and they’ll sell a website for $3,500 and they will consider that to be a successful sales call. What they don’t realize or don’t know is that if you put that sales call in the hands of just another individual and in fact let me just clarify they’ll walk away from
0:57:04
that sales call going I think I got top dollar I just think I don’t think they had any more than thirty five hundred dollars to spend I mean I’m pretty happy with myself I’m pretty happy with that. That was a great sales call. That went fantastic. This is going to be a good project. I’m real excited about this project. You could take that exact prospect and put them on a call
0:57:25
with somebody else and that somebody else would sell them a $20,000 website. You have one person, person A, who thought they had a successful sales call and sold a project at $3,500. That same prospect just put them with somebody else who has a different mindset, a different way of running the intro call, talking about different things, hitting different checkpoints, sells them a project to $20,000. You just left all that money on the table and
0:57:56
that is where the gap lies in a lot of these situations between you having a really successful business and a really mediocre business. And you’ve got to get out of the mindset of thinking that selling a $3,500 website successfully was a great sales call. That was not a great sales call, okay? By any stretch of the imagination, is that a good sales call? It’s not. Yeah, you closed it, okay? But you closed it the wrong number,
0:58:20
a dramatically low number. You lost, you lost. So we absolutely need to fix that. How do you fix that? You start to recognize the difference between your sales calls and more successful sales calls. Here’s a training right here for you on exactly what that means or what that looks like. There’s another one. I’m going to bring up this one. Let’s go to, I’m using ARC now. I’m not an ARC specialist, okay? It’s probably the most inefficient way to do this.
0:58:57
10 key sales call checkpoints to guide your sales conversations, okay? We’ll go over, I’m just surface level right here. I’ll just give you the 10, surface level. But you have to watch this, get all the goodies in between.
0:59:11
Talking about primary goals. Okay, if you don’t know what the person’s goals are and then I’ll just give you a hint of what I talk about in this video, the stated goals of most business owners are not their actual goals. They will tell you here’s a goal you’ve probably heard. Well you know we want to modernize the website. I just feel like it’s um, feel like it’s not putting our best foot forward and
0:59:31
we wanted to look a little bit more you know. It’s just been three years and you know. That’s all bullshit. That’s all bullshit gold. Nobody should just redo a website just for that reason alone. They have their eye on the wrong area of what a website needs to be
0:59:48
and what it needs to do for their business. And so if you’re like, oh, well, yes, sir. I mean, yeah, let’s talk about that. You’re already talking about the wrong thing. You’re already talking about the wrong thing. So, and you’re already living now in like,
1:00:00
okay, what’s a new design worth? Not that much. Okay so you’re already underselling, you’re already going the wrong direction. That’s just checkpoint number one. We can’t even get out of the gate, we can’t even get out of the gate going the right direction if that’s if that’s the you know what’s being focused on. How does their funnel work? What is their ideal customer? How successful is the business right now? What drives that current success?
1:00:25
Painting a picture for them. How do you do that? How do you paint a picture? What do you what does that process look like? Talking about their past experiences, talking about your process, and then let’s just hit on this one and you guys know if you’ve watched my channel for any length of time, almost every agency process, if we did the survey, survey says 85% of agencies have a bullshit process that can’t sell a damn thing to anybody that nobody cares
1:00:53
about and isn’t worth jack. Okay? This is reality, okay? And I’ll tell you right now okay let’s just go to well I think I’ve got it in the list we’ll get there it’s in the list it’s in the list but those of you who attended my master class called it’s a free master class on YouTube I’ll show you the link. Process is everything. It’s criminally underrated. It’s got like 5000 views. My gosh. I mean, it’s just free million dollar game. Okay. Just people just, you know, don’t even know that it’s there. Part of it is YouTube’s fault
1:01:26
because when you do a live stream like this, YouTube then buries it on your channel and nobody ever sees it again. Part of it’s that, but I mean, it’s just criminally underrated. It should be shared everywhere. It’s the number one video that you should watch as an agency owner or freelancer. If you haven’t watched it, I mean, you’re just stupidly leaving, you know, six figures of revenue on the table. Process is legitimately everything.
1:01:46
I can look at a process and be like, that’s going to be a successful business or not be a successful business. That’s going to, they’re going to be able to market this successfully or not market it successfully. A process is legitimately everything. Price range and timeline and then next steps.
1:01:58
And then there’s ways to, how are, how are you supposed to talk about the price, how are you supposed to talk about the timeline, how are you supposed to within that talk about price actually find out what they’re willing to spend not just like you know what they want to hope you say as a price okay there’s a lot of details in here that you need to you need to check out. Okay let’s go back to our questions so that was just how to, you know, do you know how to run a proper sales call?
1:02:28
Do you know what the key checkpoints are? Do you know how to approach them? Do you know how to discuss them? Next is, okay, there it is. Do you have a legit process? Do you know how to communicate your process?
1:02:38
Do you know when to communicate your process?
1:02:41
Okay.
1:02:42
So I’m going to give you a link for this. This one is a hundred percent.
1:02:45
Free.
1:02:46
It’s a hundred percent free. You can go right here right now. I own and watch it, okay It’s called it was WDD live 025 Process is everything okay. It says it’s at 7.8 thousand views still criminally underrated I mean there is this is for anybody who runs an agency or this should have a hundred thousand plus views easily
1:03:07
Just absolutely criminally Criminally underrated and if you don’t watch it, that’s your fault. This is on you. It’s long, it’s long. It’s almost three hours long. And people whine, they wanna whine and bitch and complain.
1:03:22
How long, I mean, you could invest three hours and dramatically change your entire understanding of what you need to be focused on and doing and saying. Or you could just dick around for the next three years. I mean, I don’t know why, be more concise, nobody’s got three hours of time. Okay, you don’t have time to make six figures then I guess.
1:03:45
I don’t know what to tell you. Quit whining and bitching and complaining and watch the free content. That’s all you have to do. So that one right there, 100%. If you haven’t watched that, you must absolutely go watch it. Next one, do you sell discovery?
1:04:00
Do you sell discovery? Okay, remember I said that that number on the on the survey need to be flip-flopped Here’s a training for you right here add $1,500 minimum Minimum that’s minimum to every website project with this easy to sell discovery package You literally go in you watch the video you add $1,500 minimum Okay to every project that you sell and you have to be doing discovery you have
1:04:29
to be doing discovery for every single project it makes no sense how can you possibly do your job right if you’re not doing any discovery whatsoever ok and if you need help with like what is the discovery actually look like do I have that link in here somewhere let’s go back to okay yeah so the next question is do you know how to do
1:04:45
discovery do you know how to use discovery to sell more services. So not only do you get to charge the fee for discovery, the discovery process and findings actually help you sell more services. So they increase the overall project price in two different ways. And so how do you do it? Alright let me get this link right here for you. I’m just showing you exactly exactly where all these things are, okay?
1:05:15
Discovery deliverables overview. I just go do a whole overview of a real client’s discovery deliverables. What did we do? How did we get these things? What did we do with them?
1:05:26
Yada, yada, yada, okay? So that’s a good one to watch and do. Let’s go back to our list of questions. Do you know how to write a winning proposal? I’m not saying do you know how to write a proposal. Everybody writes a proposal. Do you know how to write a winning proposal? Do you know what needs
1:05:45
to be said in it? Do you know what order you need to say it in? Do you know when to send the proposal and not send the proposal? Raise your hand if you send a proposal, if you’ve ever sent a proposal to somebody before they knew the price that you were going to quote in the proposal. Let’s just do, be honest, be honest. Go run to the chat right now. Run to the, I’m gonna look in the chat
1:06:09
and just see how we’re looking, okay? But answer this question in the chat honestly. Have you ever sent a proposal to somebody before they knew the price that was gonna be listed in the proposal? Yes or no?
1:06:22
Just answer that question, yes or no? Let me look at the chat while those are coming in because I know there’s a little bit of a delay. Okay, Mark says the prospect is applying to work with you. You are not desperate for the work. Use that mindset, that’s good.
1:06:39
These terms like discovery call are not client friendly. I never invite a client to a discovery call that is not our lingo. Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I call it a sales call. Like yeah, I am about to sell you, my friend.
1:06:49
That’s what we’re doing here, okay? Just be honest with them. They know that’s what’s going on, okay? That’s what’s going on, let’s do it. There’s a huge gap in getting to actually have conversations like this.
1:07:01
There are too many small business and not nearly enough people who fit the profile of what’s being discussed now. There are, there are. You just have to know where they are. Let’s see, I think about 10% of Kevin’s extraversion,
1:07:15
self-confidence, and marketing skills would suffice, I guess. I’m an introvert, actually. I’m not, well, I’m an ambivert. I’m an ambivert, so I’m a shape-shifter, okay? Now, I trend towards introversion, but there are certain contexts
1:07:29
where I can express extroversion, and that’s what they refer to as an ambivert, I guess. Okay, I can pull in good contracts where I struggle with is maintenance contracts. We can talk about that. We can we can talk about that. Make sure to ask questions. Okay, so if people are saying yes, yes, yes, no, nope, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, no, no, no, no, yes, yes, I did it once with price range, yes,
1:08:05
now if you’ve done it in the past, it’s obviously, right, we all have. I have too. I’ve sent proposals and when I’m asking you, have you ever done it? I think anybody being honest would be like,
1:08:17
yes, I’ve done it at some point, right? But the point we’re getting at is stop doing that. Do not ever send a proposal to somebody when they don’t know what number is going to be in the proposal. Okay, you already know every proposal, I do not ever send a proposal unless they’ve already said yes to the number that is in the proposal. And in the
1:08:36
sales call checkpoints I talk, I show you exactly how to talk about the price in the call and how to get to the price that they’re willing to say yes to. And that’s the price. Here’s the other thing about proposals. Do you know how to sell a winning proposal? The proposal that you send is crafted for the price they already agreed to. The price is all about deliverables.
1:09:01
It’s not knocking off price to give a discount. You’re giving them the amount of deliverables they can afford. That’s all you’re doing. And we’re already well above, we need to talk about the project minimum thing, right? So some of you that are doing $2,500 websites, you’d be like, I mean I can’t take any deliverables out of that, there’d be nothing left to give them.
1:09:24
But if you’re at $15,000, okay, there’s a lot of wiggle room. There’s $20,000, see we could do a lot of this, or we could not do a lot of that, right? And so it’s much easier to play with. That’s why you can’t be at $2,500, right? You’re already giving the bare minimum essentials at way less than their worth, and so you have no wiggle room.
1:09:42
And you’re gonna send a proposal and they’re either gonna say yes or no and it’s a $2,500 website. I mean, that whole situation is lose, lose, lose, lose. Everybody’s losing, including the client. Including the client is losing.
1:09:54
If you sell a legitimate business, a $2,500 website, they’re losing too. They’re losing too, guaranteed. And that’s what they have to understand. That’s what they have to understand. And we need to talk about more about overcoming price objections because there’s a lot of really good advice and
1:10:12
examples that I can give there. I just did a call with somebody the other day who, you know, I was essentially telling them they need to, you know, be in the $25,000 range. They wanted to be in like the 15. They needed minimum be in the 25. I would have liked to see them at the 40, 50, somewhere around there. They weren’t comfortable with that.
1:10:30
They wanted to be somewhere around 25. But we started to get into talking about like how to talk about this $25,000 price if the client is like, well, our last website was 10,000. And I’ll tell you exactly what I told them, okay?
1:10:44
But save that, save that. Somebody ask me to get back to that. I wanna make sure we don’t forget it. We need to get through this list of questions here, then we’ll get to the Q&A. But I think it’s super valuable the way that I explain it to people. Because it’s just telling them the absolute honest truth, okay? And which is, by the way, the best way to sell. The
1:11:03
best way to sell 100% you tell people the full truth and nothing but the truth. Okay? When I talk about sales, I don’t mean like trick people, I don’t mean, no. The best sales is giving them the 100% honest truth, okay? All right, we talked about selling discovery, how to do discovery,
1:11:24
do you know how to write a winning proposal? Okay, do you have a legit project minimum? Do you know how to say no? And do you sell with positive indifference. The other key aside from telling, like giving them the honest truth about everything that you guys are talking about in the sales call, the other magic bullet to sales ingredient that has to be there in every sales call
1:11:51
is called positive indifference. Okay, it is an attitude that you bring to the sales call and what positive indifference is, is I am positive about this opportunity positive in the sense that I’m very happy to have this opportunity I’m very excited about this opportunity I’m excited to be talking
1:12:12
with you today I’m excited about these goals and challenges that you have in your business I’m not saying all these things but my attitude in general on the call is an attitude of positivity and excitement. However, I am also a hundred percent indifferent
1:12:30
as to whether I get this project or not. Couldn’t give a single fuck. It’s kind of like the other side of my attitude. Not in the sense that I don’t want to work with you. It’s that the stars need to align, okay? If I determine that you’re a good client
1:12:45
and this is a good project, I am ecstatic to move forward. But I don’t need you in any capacity. We can hang up right now, and I am not gonna be sad, I’m not gonna be depressed, I’m not gonna be broke, I’m not gonna not put food on my table. I just legitimately, if it’s not a good fit,
1:13:03
it’s not a good fit, which by the way is why I can be honest, which is why I can say, I don’t think we’re a good fit for this. Or is why I can just not have to embellish it on the call or try to trick you in the sales. Because I’m not trying, I’m not like desperately
1:13:19
like I gotta get them, I gotta close them, I gotta tell them anything I need to tell them to make sure that they say yes. They don’t want to be on a call with somebody and by the way successful business owners can sniff that shit out from a mile away.
1:13:32
They can sniff out desperation, they can sniff out bullshit, they can sniff out all this stuff that goes on in half the sales calls that they go on, they can sniff all that out. The minute you show up with like,
1:13:47
hey, I am super excited about this project, about this opportunity, but if they get the sense that you’re telling them the truth because you literally do not need this project, that you’re gonna take it if it’s a good fit, and you’re gonna leave it,
1:14:02
if it’s not a good fit, guess what that makes them wanna do? That makes them want, like they’re like, I need this guy, and they’re gonna make their wants and needs almost conform to what you need to have happen, right? You’ll see that a lot. But it’s just positive indifference
1:14:18
is like a critical ingredient to these sales calls, okay? You cannot be, and this is hard. If you are in the broke group, okay, I’m making, what was that percentage? 48% of people making less than $20,000 a year or something. I understand, when you’re broke,
1:14:37
when you actually economically need the project. Like economically, I need the project. So how can I then go into a sales call with a mindset of not needing the project? That’s really hard to do. I’m not saying that’s easy, okay?
1:14:51
But I am saying you need to do it. And then when I asked you, do you know how to say no, and do you have a legitimate project minimum? Let’s say your project minimum is $5,000. That’s our target right now, $5,000. You get on a call, and you get the sense that this person is that business hopeful, and they don’t want to spend a lot of money. They just want to start a website. You heard that?
1:15:17
I just want the minimum, whatever I need to get started, okay, and you’re feeling like, you know, they have a number in their mind like 3,500 or something. And now here is the problem. I need this project economically. Like I’m fucking broke, I need this shit.
1:15:34
I need to put food on my table. But it’s not at my project minimum. It’s under my project minimum, okay? Most people will say yes to the project. Most people will say yes to the project. And they’ll justify it by saying like,
1:15:47
I got, economically, I gotta have it. I gotta have it, economically, okay? You just said yes to being in that exact same situation for another six months. That’s what you just said yes to. Yes, you said yes at $3,500. I understand. And I understand you can justify
1:16:06
it from now until the next six months. But what you also said yes to is another six months of being in this situation. You cannot, we have to be very clear about this, you cannot escape the bottom by taking bottom projects. You cannot, it’s impossible. It’s impossible. Because you run out of effort. You run out of runway. They take too much work for too little money. You always run out of money before the project is done. Always.
1:16:38
Which then gets you on to the next project, which by the way, is not fair to any of the clients you’re working with because you’re cheating on them. You have to cheat on them. You have to be a cheater to live that life because you got $3,500 and then when it runs out, the project’s not completed yet, you’re back to just, I gotta have this next one,
1:16:59
put food on the table. So you go take another one just like that and then on and it never, it only gets worse, it doesn’t get better. So every time you say yes, you’re committing to another six months
1:17:08
of actually what probably amounts to a worsening situation. This is why it is more valuable to say no to those projects and what you need to be hell-bent on doing is going and finding somebody that can say yes to your project minimum. At minimum. Hopefully they say yes to more than that which you get your sales skills up, you get these other areas shored up, you get your process shored up, you get, okay, you do all these things that we’re talking
1:17:35
about and again if you, we have to address the mindset side of things because there are people now who are going to be like, Kevin, I can’t even fathom. I can’t even fathom. There’s I’ve never sold a website at $7,500. I’ve never sold a website at $10,000.
1:17:49
I know I’ve talked about this in the past on live streams. The difference between selling a website at $3,500 and $15,000 is mindset. Take me every person you’ve closed at $3,500 and I will sell them a $15,000 website, the majority of them, or I will walk away indifferently.
1:18:05
But not a single fucking one of them would I sell a website at $3,500, not a single one. So everyone that you said yes to is why you’re in the situation you’re in. You have to say no, you have to say no, and you have to set a minimum,
1:18:19
and you have to stick to the minimum, and then you have to work your ass off to get above the minimum, way above the minimum, and you gotta get all this bullshit baggage in your mind about, oh, I’ve never done it before, I’ve never done that number before,
1:18:31
that number doesn’t make any sense to my brain, that is all holding you back, it’s all nonsense, because the people that do for the first time sell a website at 7,500 when they’ve never done it before, and then they actually do the project at 7,500, and they get to, here’s the magic,
1:18:47
they get to the end of the project, and there’s still some money in the bank. It wasn’t, it’s not all gone by the time the project is done. And they go, well, that’s fucking refreshing. That’s so refreshing. You know, I don’t like that old life anymore.
1:19:00
And then the next call they get on, you know what they’re saying? $7,500 with like full confidence as if, as if they’ve been doing this for the last three years at $7,500 because their mindset just switched. It just, they had an experience that completely changed how their brain processes these numbers. And then the same thing happens when you hit 15.
1:19:20
And the same thing happens, guys, I remember, it happens in just, money is a weird thing. Money is a weird thing, but this happens with money in general. There was a period of time where, and I’ve always been the sole earner for the household,
1:19:36
and so it’s all been on my shoulders, and I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I was in the mindset of I will fucking figure it out before I go get a job, okay? And I don’t care how bad it gets, I will figure it out before I go get a job.
1:19:49
It’s not in me to like work a job, okay? I am an entrepreneur like through and through and through and through and through. I will figure it out, okay? It doesn’t matter how bad it gets, it will be figured out at some point.
1:20:00
There’s also the law of averages on my side, okay? If I just keep fucking trying, there is the law of averages. At some point, something good is gonna happen, I’m sure. But there was a period of time where it was actually after I lost a six-figure income
1:20:15
where I was dead broke, dead broke. And then by the way, within that dead, I don’t journal, right? But I considered starting a journal because I was like, I’ve got to write down all this bullshit. Because not only was like just stuff not going great,
1:20:30
income wise, but like every car that I came into contact with, every part of my house that I came, was just like something was wrong that required more money. And this and that, and it was just a terrible time. And I got to a point where I was like, I’ve got to start journaling just to document the bullshit.
1:20:48
Because this is outrageous. It just felt outrageous that like all this shit could go wrong at the exact same time. And I remember at that time, the whole point of it is, there were some things, I was also in debt. I was in debt, I had like $10,000 of credit card debt.
1:21:04
I had a car loan, right? I had this mortgage, right? And if you look at one piece of debt, you know, like credit card payments, like when your debt broke, it sucks to make like a credit card
1:21:16
payment right? Which I don’t have any debt now but it does suck legitimately to make a credit. So you’re thinking like, God if I just had $10,000 like I could just clear this credit card debt and that would be another payment that I don’t have to make or I owe $5,000 on this car and if I just had $5,000 I could just pay off that. I wouldn’t have that car payment anymore and like look what the breathing room would give me.
1:21:40
I’ve been there. I’ve lived all of that. And I will tell you, it’s crazy. I don’t know. There’s something about money. It’s really weird.
1:21:49
You in that situation think that $10,000 is a lot of money. You think when you’re making, if you take somebody in college who makes $30,000 a year, they’re working a job, they make $30,000 a year. They think that $100,000 a year is a lot of money.
1:22:06
When I made my first,
1:22:08
when I got, the first time I got to a million dollars, I was like, this is hardly anything. Which, back then, I would have, that didn’t even make sense to my brain. But then when you get, and then you realize how fucking far off
1:22:29
your expectations and reality were back then. You have, but you have to, it’s like you can’t unlock that until you experience it, which is why I think coaching and mentoring is really good, because somebody has to push you. They have to shake you, right?
1:22:47
And wake up. These numbers you’re talking about are not anywhere near where you need to be. And until you realize that through the first experience, then it suddenly unlocks something. And then you can go to the next level,
1:23:02
and the next level, and the next level, and the next level, okay? And that’s why I said in the very beginning, it’s like 80% mindset, this stuff that we’re talking about. You are locked in a prison of low expectations, okay?
1:23:14
And low numbers and everything, you’re locked in the bottom. And you’ve got to unlock it. You’ve got to escape that. And there’s no magic to escaping it other than being like, well, it starts with saying no.
1:23:27
You’ve got to start saying no to $3,500. Just like a millionaire would say no to some other bullshit opportunity. They’ve learned how to say no. And you have to learn how to say no too. I did a, the December of last year,
1:23:41
I did an inner circle office hours. We do a monthly office hours, an open Q and A, but I started this one with half of it was, let’s get our mind right for 2024. And then I did a bunch of Q and A, okay? The theme of getting your mind right for 2024 was,
1:23:58
does anybody remember? Put it in the chat. If you remember, I’ll tell you in just a second. I’ll tell you, okay? But put it in the chat if you remember what the theme of that was. It was a really good theme. It was a very direct theme. Tell me what the theme was.
1:24:11
Okay, as a white, okay, I’m just checking the chat real quick. Okay, while those roll in. Okay, nobody remembers? Somebody’s got to remember.
1:24:27
We’ll get to Q&A in just a second.
1:24:28
We’re almost done with the questions list. Okay, the theme, I’ll just tell you, the theme was stop doing broke people shit. That was the theme. There’s a lot of broke people shit behavior going on, and then people are like, I’m tired of being broke.
1:24:43
If you’re tired of being broke, you have to stop doing broke people shit, okay? And there’s a lot of examples of broke people. Oh, there it is. Andy, see Andy Tate was right on top of it. Don’t do, no, it’s not don’t do shit.
1:24:57
Well, that too, don’t do shit for broke people. Yeah, but don’t do broke people shit either. And by the way, doing shit for broke people is doing broke people shit. So yes, that was the theme. And I think that hit hard, that resonated a lot with people.
1:25:11
I got a lot of really, really positive messages after that. A lot of people committed to stop doing broke people shit What are some examples of doing broke people shit? Okay, well one of them is taking bad projects that you should say no to right because it’s gonna keep you broke It’s gonna keep you broke, but another one is I mean I see people I you know I see people having you know big car payments. They’ve got nice new cars. That’s broke people shit
1:25:34
They’ve got a house that is way too big for what they need that they can’t really afford them, that’s broke people shit. Buying chains, buying shit, that’s broke people shit. There’s a lot of examples that I went through of doing broke people shit.
1:25:46
And then in the agency model, there’s a lot of examples of doing broke people shit. But you gotta commit, you do have to commit. Is what I’m doing right now, is this behavior, is that what broke people do, or is that what super successful people do?
1:25:58
And you can just use that as a measuring stick. Okay, we talked about, oh, okay, next one, next one. Nope, nope, we didn’t do that one yet, hold on. I gotta go back to ones we’ve already done. Do you have a legit project? Okay, we did the project minimum.
1:26:12
Do you know how to position yourself as a consultant and not a pixel pusher? Okay, we’ve talked enough about that, I’m not gonna go into too much detail, but if anybody wants any, you know, go deeper on that, you can ask about it in Q&A.
1:26:27
Do you know what your time is actually supposed to be worth realistically to reach your goals? Okay I’m gonna open this up, I’ve got a link for you. Alright I’ve got, and this is free, it’s 100% free. You’re gonna go to this link, you’re gonna hit make a copy. I’ll put this stuff in the notes down below
1:26:46
in the description. It’s gonna open this little spreadsheet which is called a personal financial freedom calculator. Ok and what you’re going to do is you’re going to put in your income period like monthly right and you put in your standard of living number not like your current standard of living number like your your I’m super comfortable standard
1:27:08
of living number like it would be really nice if I had XYZ right and so the example here is just seven thousand dollars that’s seven thousand dollars a month right the amount of money you want to live on then you need a certain percentage of money above your standard of living to have a growth engine this is what you allocate to investing in asset building and maybe getting a business started or investing in your early stage business or whatever it’s a growth engine you can you need to use it for growth.
1:27:39
See, the thing about when people think about money and they think about income, they almost always just think about their expenses. Like, how do I cover my expenses? But you need more than that. You need money that you could just freely put into growth channels, right? If you want to actually build wealth and stop just getting by.
1:27:56
So you need, what is it? 35% extra. Okay? You can put whatever percent you want here, right? But this is some recommended default. What is your tax load, right? Because, you know, if I need $7,000 in expenses,
1:28:09
well, I mean, I got to make a lot more than that just to pay taxes to get me down to 7,000 to have that to spend, right? Okay, so we put in 25% there. How many working days are there? Oh, we just talked about work-life balance.
1:28:22
You can’t say all of them, okay? And you’re not, this is not a corporate life. You can’t be like, well, I’m just gonna take two weeks off every year. I mean, come on, be better than that, right? So 240, right?
1:28:33
Working hours per day. This can’t be 15, okay? This can’t be 10 if you want work-life balance. And realistically, I mean, productive hours, productive hours. How about five?
1:28:46
Okay, so we just use the defaults right here that are in here. This is what your time needs to be worth per hour. $175. Now go back to the survey. What were people at? 97. Well we could clearly see there’s a disconnect there, right? So this calculator helps you and this is what you actually if you have seven if you
1:29:05
want to live comfortably on $7,000 you need to make $17,500 a month. See that’s not, people don’t think like that. They think oh well I want $7,000 a month in income so I just need to make a little more than that you know after I pay taxes I’ll be at 7,000 and that’s their life that they live. That’s their life that they live but that’s not going to get you to where you want to go. Ok so I would do this calculator. Throw whatever numbers and percentages in here
1:29:30
that you want to throw in here but this is going to help help you get you know your mind right in terms of money. So again that’s that’s free you can copy that and use it and leverage it however you want to. Let’s go back and do the next one. Do you know how to scope a project?
1:29:45
Do you know what an SOW is? Are you doing a lot of work for free? So I’m gonna give you this link right here. Let’s open this up. How to scope a website project. We literally go step by step by step by step. It’s 55 minutes long.
1:30:05
How to scope a website project. How to put together a statement of work. I give you the template for an SOW. I give you the template for a winning proposal. We go through all of this step by step by step by step. You need to know how to scope a website project. I’m going to give you another link I think. And this one is 100% free. Let’s open this together and take a look at it. This is a web design itemization exercise. Now I go through how to scope a website project like you know what are the deliverables, how much the deliverables cost, how do we
1:30:39
get to a final number, yada yada yada. But really before you do any of that you should do this exercise. Here are some deliverables that would probably exist on your projects. Now you need to make this look like yours. Okay, so you need to put the exact deliverables in here that you would do. Then you need to put in your hourly rate.
1:30:59
You need to put in the estimated time every single deliverable is likely to take realistically. And then you’re gonna see a number that is far fucking larger than anything you are charging. And it’s gonna open your eyes and you’re going to be well shit there’s a disconnect there’s a massive gap I’m way under charging just based on reality of how
1:31:23
long deliverables take and what they should be what I should be charging hourly this is be another wake-up call okay but there’s also a lot of things and the reason I say list every deliverable every single one because there’s an epidemic of agencies and freelancers who the client’s like, well, what about this? What about this? And they’re like, oh yeah, we can throw that in too.
1:31:44
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, pause. When did you calculate throwing that in? When did you charge for that? You didn’t? What is this, a charity now? Are you a.org?
1:31:53
What is going on here? No, you gotta stop doing all this free work because it just sucks the margin out of your, this is why you get to the end of the project and you’re like, man, glad that project is done. Let me check my bank account. Oh, that money ran out a month ago. Oh, well, that sucks, doesn’t it? That needs to stop happening.
1:32:14
This is why it happens. You’re scoping projects with no idea of how much, how long these deliverables cost, what they actually cost in an hourly rate that we just, I showed on that spreadsheet, was $175 an hour, right? Here’s the next thing you have to understand. That’s your personal hourly rate. That’s your personal hourly rate. That didn’t say anything about your business. Now, how can you have a personal hourly rate at $97, that doesn’t compute, that math doesn’t math.
1:32:54
Now I’m not saying your agency hourly rate has to be well over 175, or well over your personal hourly rate, because there’s other ways you can make money. There’s other ways that you can bring in income from your activities in general, right?
1:33:09
In fact, there’s a lot of people just, you know, they’re raking in thousands of dollars per hour, right? So that was just, I want to make it clear, a personal hourly rate. So my agency hourly rate is actually like around 175. But still, my personal hourly rate is higher than that.
1:33:29
And so I can’t rely on, and I’m not the one like doing the hourly work in the agency. It’s a different model. I just want to make it clear that those are two completely separate things. Ok so I would do this. This is a big eye-opener. 100% free. Big eye-opener.
1:33:45
Let’s go down to… yeah we did that and this is how long projects actually take. How much time each deliverable takes. Ok. Do you know how to funnel your money for maximum profitability and growth? Now you can do this training, okay? I’m gonna bring it up right here. Or, or, I’ll give you a different method.
1:34:07
Now, I recommend the training because, oh, it looks like Vimeo is pissing down its leg right now. I’ll check on that. But I would recommend watching this version of it because I tailor the information to agencies and freelancers, right?
1:34:24
I talk about it in our context and I give you specifics related to our context. But you can always just read the book. It’s a book called Profit First. This is the number one most important book, after another one that I’ll talk about, that you should read if you are going to be in business in any capacity.
1:34:42
The first book is called E-Myth. Everybody should have read this. I mean, this is just like, this is like 101, okay? The E-Myth. What the E-Myth describes is the business hopefuls that I talked about in the beginning
1:34:59
that you don’t ever want to do, excuse me, you don’t ever want to do business with, but you also don’t want to be one, okay? The E-Myth is essentially this, that somebody who is good at a trade thinks that they can build a successful business
1:35:11
doing that trade. So like someone who’s good at cooking thinks they can start a restaurant. Somebody who’s good at painting thinks they can open a painting business and be successful. Somebody who thinks that they are good at web design can just run a successful agency. This is the e-myth.
1:35:23
This is the myth that entrepreneurs like beginner starting out entrepreneurs believe. And it’s a total, it’s a lie. None of that is connected. Being good at something and running a good business for it are wildly different things. And so the E-Myth describes all of this
1:35:41
and talks about what a successful business actually focuses on and so on and so forth. And a lot of those business hopefuls that I talked about earlier are buying into the E-Myth. They’re like, well, I know this thing or I’m good at this thing
1:35:53
and so this business is probably gonna work out. They don’t know a fucking lick about a successful business. So they have bought into the E-Myth and they’re marching to their business death. And you want to be nowhere near them as they do that, because they will bring you down with them.
1:36:08
So stay away. That’s business, that’s book number one. Book number two, you immediately go into this one, profit first, okay? And then I did the training on essentially profit first for agencies and freelancers here.
1:36:23
So you don’t have to read the book if you don’t want to, you can just do the training. And it is extremely practical, like implementable. It gives you step-by-step. You need to do this. You need to set up your bank accounts like this. You need to funnel your money in like this. You need to do your accounting like this. You need to think about business finance like this. It’s very, very, very practical. And it will absolutely, completely change because if you use a profit first financial mindset for business you either
1:36:54
run a profitable business or you decide the business needs to be closed. One of those two things is going to happen. There is no middle ground. Ok and it shows you how to run a profitable business and what the numbers need to look like. Ok alright so that’s that one. We got to I realize we’re taking a bit of time here so we need to we need to get through this get to Q&A.
1:37:15
Do you sell anything besides UI and dev? You cannot just be a web design agency in 2024. Oh, we design websites and we build websites. No, you’re like, that’s like, if I had a car lot, and I was going to sell all these beautiful, gorgeous cars, I like, you know what I do, I sell high performance vehicles, I sell Porsches, I sell BMWs, I sell this and that. The problem with them though, that you’ll come to find, is that none of them have an engine. They’re just, it’s just the outer, it’s just, they’re beautiful. They’re gorgeous. Like, you want to buy one? They’re like, but
1:37:49
I can’t go anywhere in it. Like, it’s not going to take me anywhere. I can’t get the performance out of it. Like, why would I just buy, why would I just buy that? Because that guy down there on that lot has, those cars have the engines in them. And that sounds like it’s a lot better. Yeah, I don’t know what web designers are doing. Because we all know, if you build a website, they will not come.
1:38:10
There’s a gazillion websites on the internet. They need a growth engine behind them. They need SEO, or they need PPC, or they need social media, or they need this, or they need that. They need something to push traffic to them.
1:38:25
They need a consultant behind that process, okay? So you can sell web design, you can sell development. You better sell one, at least one other thing that amounts to a growth engine to actually ensure that that website is successful, okay? If you’re just selling web design and development
1:38:46
and then saying like, good luck, right? That is not enough in 2024. That is not enough. Don’t, stop with the brochure sites, stop with the, oh, I just do design and dev. Sell them one growth engine minimum.
1:39:00
Now, what are you gonna sell them, okay? SEO, if you know a lot about SEO. I have a lot of SEO trainings in here. That’s absolutely a viable thing. Now, it depends on the kind of business, okay? There’s some businesses that just SEO
1:39:15
is not the best thing for them to invest in. This is where you need to get back. If SEO is the only growth engine you sell, now you got to get back to positive indifference. Now you got to get back to just telling them the truth. Hey, SEO is not a great fit for your business and that’s all I do. So I’m going to recommend you to somebody else. PPC, email marketing. What I
1:39:36
would highly stay away from, unless you’re going to be a really hands-on, a specialist, and you are going to charge a shitload of money, is social media. Social media, to do it right, requires an assload of money, and time, and creativity, and attention, and almost anybody, like,
1:39:55
just take an average agency selling social media, it’s bullshit, it’s all bullshit. So, keep that in mind. I wouldn’t recommend going that route, unless you’re gonna do it right and you’re gonna charge a ton of money for it
1:40:07
and you’re gonna have a big team for it. It requires a lot, a lot, a lot to do social media right for another business and more than one business. A lot, a lot, way more than almost anybody is doing.
1:40:22
That is the number one thing
1:40:23
that social media is being done wrong. 95% of like small time agency freelancers that are selling social media packages, it’s just all nonsense. So I would stay away from that one. Most small agencies don’t have the resources
1:40:41
to do social media correctly for multiple companies. Probably even one company, much less multiple. But there’s a lot of other opportunities that you can sell in terms of a growth engine, all right, that are actually doable and executable and scalable and on and on and on. All right, are you using growth engines yourself?
1:40:59
This is the last question, then we get to Q&A. Are you using growth engines yourself? Are you actually marketing and advertising your business? Please tell me you’re not sitting around twiddling your thumbs waiting for referrals to roll in. You’ve got to be going out and getting business.
1:41:15
You’ve got to be advertising your business. You’ve got to be doing. There’s so much that you could be doing. And I told people, number one thing, number one piece of advice, if you want to grow an agency, you want to grow a freelance business. And I know some people don’t want to hear this and some people don’t want to do this.
1:41:31
Some people wish this wasn’t the case, but you have to get your ass out of your seat, get out from the computer screen, and you have to walk out into the real world. And you have to converse and build relationships and talk to other real human beings. And I know all of the introverts are sweating bullets right now.
1:41:54
The extroverts are probably happy, right? But then there’s people who are like, no, no, no, Kevin, I live the digital life. I’m a digital nomad, Kevin. I just do all my things digital. Everything that’s possible can happen on the internet.
1:42:07
I know, I wish that was the case too. But I’m not saying it’s not. I’m not saying it’s not. And if you’re not struggling, if you’re not struggling and you wanna do that, then that’s fine. But if you’re struggling, you know what I’m gonna tell you
1:42:20
is to get your ass up out of the chair and go out into the real world and build relationships and talk to people, okay? And you will get business, absolutely. And I’m not saying walk into people’s businesses and go, can I talk to your owner?
1:42:31
Like, that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s not what I’m talking about. Go play golf, go to the fucking gym. You gotta learn how to talk to people at these places. And I learned this from a guy that I was a partner with for a very long time, who is a talented designer.
1:42:49
And that dude doesn’t do a lick of marketing or advertising or anything else. But he also doesn’t just rely on referrals, okay? But I was like, you know, I actually worked like directly with him in his office. He had a physical office for a little while there.
1:43:05
And I went there, not full time, but just like, you know, every now and then. And like every time I come in, he’d be like, oh yeah, I got this new thing. I got this, and I would just ask him, like, well, where’d you get it?
1:43:14
Oh, well, I was at my daughter’s school, you know, I was coaching her lacrosse team and you know, one of the parents that just started a conversation and now he’s got this like $30,000 project. It’s like this happened over and over and over and over again. And it doesn’t make sense to my brain. This is a mindset shift I had to personally make.
1:43:34
Because guys, when I go to the gym, when I go to the grocery store, when I go to, you know, my daughter’s games, when I, I don’t like just naturally just start talking to people. I don’t like that’s not my personality. Like I said, I trend towards introversion, right? So I can go and my wife is the opposite. My wife will talk like, and it’s not, she doesn’t even act when I’m with her. She doesn’t really
1:43:59
seem to talk to anybody. But when I’m not with her, she tells me all these stories. Oh, I ran into this mom and da, da, da, da, da, da. And she knows their whole fucking life history now or something. And so it’s something about like just connecting with other people.
1:44:14
Now, in terms of business, this is a goldmine. It’s an absolute goldmine. So I would say, get your ass up out of the chair and go out and make relationships and talk to people and you will absolutely get business. But it can be a little bit uncomfortable at first.
1:44:28
It’s a mindset shift. Again, you’ve got to get a little bit uncomfortable to get unstuck, right? But that’s a huge reason why you’re stuck. If you spend your life in front of the computer screen, you are going to be frustrated.
1:44:40
If you’re frustrated now, it’s not gonna unfrustrate you. Okay, you’ve got to get out into the real world. This guy just drummed up business after business after business after business just by talking to people, just by talking to random people. And it blew my mind, absolutely blew my mind. And a lot of people don’t like to hear that, but it does absolutely work. By the way, it’s why people who make millions of dollars play golf,
1:45:01
and it’s like, hey, you know, you got any new people that can golf with us today? Like, they do that for a reason, right? It’s why they go to parties, it’s why they go to events, it’s why, with other successful people, by the way. Like when you go into politics, what do like politicians, these fucking politicians that make, what’s their salary? $200,000 a year and then they’re worth gazillions of dollars. They’re all doing backroom deals, okay, and their biggest thing is like, no they don’t want to go, they don’t want to get elected so that they can go sit in Congress,
1:45:34
they want to get elected so they can go to all the fucking parties and things and then make themselves rich. That’s what they want to do and I’m not saying that’s the right thing to do or that that’s what we should be doing. I don’t think that we should. But in terms of business, my gosh, I mean, yeah, you do have an obligation
1:45:49
to make your business successful, right? Just follow the, like, they’re giving you the recipe. This is how these people do deals and make lots of money and meet successful people. And these successful people have their own successful businesses.
1:46:02
This is just how it works. It’s connections, it’s relationships. Really hard to do from behind a computer screen. Really, really hard to do from behind a computer screen. Okay? Just telling you what I’ve seen in the real world
1:46:14
and then what I’ve experienced when I started, hey, oh, I show up at the party. Ooh, suddenly I’m seeing these opportunities that I didn’t see before. Oh, I show up on the golf course. Suddenly I’m seeing these opportunities
1:46:25
with these specific people. Now I’m seeing opportunities I didn’t see before. Getting into networking relationships with other successful business owners who know successful people, who are like, I know somebody who’d be a great fit for you.
1:46:37
They need X, Y, Z. I’m gonna connect you. Now we’re on a call. This is not sitting around twiddling your thumbs waiting for referrals from people you already did work from.
1:46:46
This is actively going out and doing relationship building and networking, like real networking. See, when I say the word networking, people are like, oh, you mean go to the Chamber of Commerce and go to that networking event where everybody’s drinking coffee and handing out business cards?
1:46:57
No, that’s broke people shit. That’s how broke people network, okay? There’s a broke people version of networking and there’s a rich people version of networking. You should probably do the rich people version of networking, right?
1:47:10
Okay, anyway, we’re harping on a bunch of stuff. Let’s go to Q&A. Hashtag Q, hashtag question. All right, let’s get it. I’m going to search. Hashtag Q. Oh, good. We have a good list. Okay. What’s the latest on ACSS 101? Should be beta public available this week. I need ideas for Mother’s Day. I can’t help you there. Advice. You see if I help you there now, now, now my wife knows what’s gonna happen
1:47:40
and can’t reveal the secrets. Advice for an 82 year old agency owner who just transitioned to white label branding and website design with no marketing budget. Well, I think I need a little bit more insight and information on what you’re wanting to do.
1:48:01
Are you doing part-time thing to supplement income? Are you, what are your ultimate goals with this? What kind of businesses do you like to work with? Give me some more to work with and I will see if I can answer that for you. Do you know of Troy Dean of Agency Mavericks?
1:48:16
Just curious, I started listening to the Agency Hour podcast show. No, not really. I think somebody’s brought it up before on one of these streams. His name’s, he’s got one of those, you know,
1:48:28
Troy Dean, it’s like, he’s got a kind of a memorable name. But no, I don’t actively listen to that. When all the local plumbers meet, they trash you because all the sites look the same. Yeah, I mean, that could be a niche, you know, another problem with niches.
1:48:46
The problem is with hunting high paying clients. Okay, we just talked about that a little bit. It’s not necessarily that you’re hunting them. It’s that you are connecting, and connecting, and connecting, and connecting. And then the more people you connect with,
1:49:00
the easier it becomes to connect with more and more and more people. And then it goes back to, by the way, I think this was a rule in elementary school, right, that teachers used to say, and parents used to say, which is, you know, you are a product
1:49:13
of the people you hang around, right? If you hang around a bunch of broke business owners, like those people I talked, the business hopefuls that I talked about in the beginning, if that’s like the majority of your network, you’re stuck at the bottom with them.
1:49:25
You’ll never climb out of that. So you’ve got to start elevating the people that you come into contact with and the people that you surround yourself with, and that does absolutely make a difference. What length of time do you suggest a business we work with has been in
1:49:37
business to ensure we attract quality customers? It doesn’t actually doesn’t the time frame doesn’t matter. So it could be a startup brand new and not even launched yet. Here’s our idea for the startup but what I look at is the people behind the startup. If they can tell me we’ve had five other successful businesses, we’re millionaires, we’ve been through this rodeo, but this is our new concept, let’s go, let’s go. But if
1:50:05
they go, oh we’ve actually never built a business before ever, ah ok, big red flag, big red flag. And then if they’re like, yeah we actually don’t have that much money to get started, ok well we’re not a good fit, sorry. That’s when you learn to say no. That’s where positive indifference, excuse me, comes in. Where you basically say, you know, we’re not a good fit. You don’t even have to tell them why you’re not a good fit.
1:50:28
But just, you know, this is not the kind of projects we’re taking on right now, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever you want to say. But you got to be positively indifferent and you got to learn to say no to those projects. Any roadmap for a freelancer to start charging high
1:50:43
who belongs to a poor country crowded with poor mindset people? What country is it? Tell me what country it is. By the way, we are in a global market, okay? It doesn’t really matter where you live.
1:50:59
Now, you are limited in terms of, you know, you can’t go bump elbows with like super successful people in a non-successful town. There’s been people before where, you know, and it’s not a country thing, it’s actually just a US city town thing where they’re like, well, you know, my town that I’m in, I mean, it’s just a super limited
1:51:21
local market. And I’m like, well, what town are you in? And it’s like population 1500. And it’s like, you know, there’s like one strip of little local businesses. And I’m like, I mean, well, you’re either going to have to find a way to, to just dramatically branch out or you got to move like, and then if you’re like, well, I grew up here,
1:51:40
I don’t want to, well, all right, that’s a decision you’re making, okay? But like, it is limiting you in your capacity to get local business. This is why, you know, you see, there’s plenty of just really poor,
1:51:52
run-down areas in the United States. There’s just whole towns where it’s just, everybody’s broke, everybody’s poor, half the businesses are shut down, everybody’s on government assistance, okay? Now think about a 22 year old person.
1:52:09
22 year old, that’s still kind of a kid, right? But an adult, it’s a legal adult, who’s like, you know, they grew up in this family that’s broke and poor and is there, are they surrounded by opportunity? Or should they be like, mom, dad,
1:52:27
thanks for getting me to this point. I gotta get the fuck out of here, right? Get on a bus and go, and you’re 22. You don’t have a lot to lose, okay? But go to somewhere where you are legitimately surrounded by opportunity.
1:52:39
Sometimes that’s people’s position. And you’ve just gotta, yeah, would it be uncomfortable? Probably, for sure, right? But you know what’s, do you wanna be uncomfortable maybe for the next three years or do you want to be uncomfortable for the next 30 years or 50 years or whatever. Sometimes you just need to go
1:52:56
where there’s more opportunity. Now if it’s a country thing probably not doable right but thankfully thankfully we do have the fact that this is a global market. We do have the fact that you can go on the internet and do business with people anywhere and I will tell you that there’s a lot of businesses, a lot of agencies that they don’t care where you’re located. That’s a good thing.
1:53:21
They don’t care where you’re located. There’s a lot of clients that you could just get your own one-off clients like somebody in the US, a business in the US. I think maybe people in some of these countries think that US businesses care a lot about where they’re located, they really care about your knowledge,
1:53:39
your talent, and what you can do for them, okay? And so, yes, are there some that are gonna be like, no, I’m not gonna do business with them, I wanna find a US company or a Canadian company or whatever, yeah, probably, but there’s a lot that don’t care.
1:53:52
There’s a lot that don’t care. So there’s still, still, a tremendous amount of opportunity available for you. Is it harder to find? Is it harder to land? Maybe in the beginning, okay?
1:54:03
I will tell you right now, there are YouTubers who I watch who are in not great areas, not great locations in terms of like the economics of that location. But you wouldn’t really be able to tell
1:54:18
from watching their YouTube channel. They’ve got a good camera, they’ve got good lights, they speak really good English. You know, they have an accent for sure, you can tell, right?
1:54:29
But I don’t actually know where they’re from. I would have to ask. They could be in fucking Chicago, for all I know, right? I don’t know. But they’re putting out really good content, demonstrating their expertise. They have a portfolio of really good work.
1:54:43
Do you think that a US business would be like, you know, find out, oh, you’re not actually in Chicago, we don’t want to do business with you. If they like your personality they see that you’re talented they see that you can help them they’re going to hire you okay. So it’s a matter of what kind of content are you are you putting out what is your portfolio look like how are you communicating how are you getting into contact all of that stuff matters.
1:55:07
What I’m getting at is I don’t like to see anybody using their location in the world on this planet as an excuse when the internet is worldwide and when there are plenty of examples of people in not great locations getting really successful projects and getting really successful incomes especially income related to that area ok so if a hundred thousand dollars is not fantastic for Atlanta. It can be gangbusters for you know, whatever Location that’s not great that you happen to live in so keep that into account as well
1:55:47
But I just I’m not big on excuses because nobody’s ever gotten out of their situation making excuses I’ll just tell you that right now So, you know, even if the excuse is has a high degree of legitimacy. It still isn’t doing you any good. So find a fucking way around it. Okay, let’s do the next question. Can you recommend a good HIPAA policy page creator or lawyer or whatever have worked with HIPAA businesses? I, you know, that’s an area where you’re probably gonna say, do I want to specialize in businesses that need HIPAA? Or am I just not gonna touch it?
1:56:26
Like personally, I just said I’m not gonna touch it. It’s too much of a headache, it’s too much of a hassle. I don’t care about it, it’s not like, it’s not my passion, my passion is not like getting HIPAA compliant websites up. So I just said we’re not gonna do HIPAA based projects.
1:56:40
So that’s just, now if you’re gonna do HIPAA based, I would absolutely hire a real physical lawyer. I wouldn’t buy templates, I wouldn’t do this and that. Buy an actual lawyer and have them on your team and make sure the work you’re doing is actually legitimately HIPAA compliant. If one is at the beginning of their
1:56:59
freelancing journey and making simple sites for less than 2,000, how many sites should they ideally get in their portfolio before raising their prices? You can sell, I would tell you this right now, like it’s a personal challenge to myself.
1:57:14
In fact, I’ve actually done this.
1:57:15
Not that I didn’t have the portfolio, but that they’d never asked, never saw, never looked. I’ve sold $25,000 projects without the person asking for to see an example and without the person looking at any sort of portfolio link. Now, how could that possibly happen? Do I think a portfolio is important? Yeah,
1:57:42
it’s somewhat important. Actually not even like a full portfolio. Like you could have a stream of like these are our latest three projects or something like that. But you actually don’t, you could close like big projects without a portfolio. And I’ll tell you exactly how it happens. Now let’s go down the track of this prospect that you’re talking to came from your networking. Remember when we say the word networking don’t think cocktails and business cards. Okay that’s broke people networking. Think rich people networking. Think hey I
1:58:18
got this longtime buddy right he’s going to go golfing with us today and we’re out on the golf course and we’re chatting it up and they introduce us and they’re like yeah this guy’s got an XYZ company. Let’s say it’s a SaaS company, a big SaaS company guy and actually it’s been 3-5 years since they’ve had their website done or their PPC agency just left them or their SEO and I’m connecting you because I know you do that and yada yada.
1:58:43
Now we’re talking, okay. We have a great round of golf together. We go back, we get on a call the next day, go through all these sales checkpoints with them, 100% truthful with them and honest with them, just telling them like it is and just putting my consultant hat on and I’m not positioning myself as a pixel pusher and I’m not desperate, I don’t actually need this work, I’m just helping them out and providing the value.
1:59:05
We’re talking about what price points might look like, yada yada, and he’s just, they come to the conclusion that like, you know, I like this guy, I think he knows what he’s talking about, I really want him doing work for our business. Think we should hire him. Not a single question about, well, well, hold on. I mean, can I see some of your work?
1:59:24
Can I see? There is a type of conversation and relationship building where they just don’t care. They just, I don’t know if it’s like, I don’t know what it is. But they just don’t care. They don’t ask. They don’t ask. And so you could like I could legitimately I feel like if I went to a city
1:59:48
where nobody knew me and I just had the skills that I have and I just got in with a group of people and started talking with some of these people that I could legitimately just start selling them websites at like high dollar websites without a website myself, without any inkling of a portfolio. I just feel like I can still close the projects and then do them.
2:00:10
Because they get a sense, first of all, when you have a sales conversation, you hit the checkpoints that I’m talking about hitting in the way that I’m talking about hitting them, the way that you’re talking, the things that you’re saying can only be said and talked about
2:00:24
by people who know what they’re talking about. So you instill a tremendous amount of confidence within the conversation. They come to the conclusion that like, the things I’m hearing, the guy has to know what he’s doing
2:00:37
and what he’s talking about. And even just mentioning past clients. Well, I had this client where we did this and this and this and this is the process that we went through,
2:00:45
da da da da da,
2:00:46
and that’s all they need. People think of like a visual portfolio that’s like a link on a website that people are gonna go to and browse through. They put way more stock in that than is actually necessary, okay?
2:01:00
It’s just really, to me it’s like an afterthought. I’ve sold so many projects where the person just never asked to see existing work that I just know it’s not that necessary. Not saying you shouldn’t have one, but it’s just not necessary. Okay, as a white, oh, we talked about that one.
2:01:22
Okay, any tips for, we talked about that one. Where are the links for these calculators? Are they in the inner circle? They were on live streams. I’m going to compile them all into this one. So after the stream is over, come check the description area and I will put the links all down below.
2:01:39
For $3,500 versus $15,000, you better know your stuff. We have people come to our WP Help Desk sessions trying to sell high dollar sites, because they hear this, yet they have no expertise. You need expertise in general. The problem is, there’s a lot of people with the expertise.
2:01:53
Let’s go back to the reality of this survey. What’s the reality of this survey? That’s the reality of this survey. You can’t have an average of 11 years of experience in this industry and not know what you’re doing. Hopefully. I mean, what have you been doing this entire time? So we just went through stats of a reality that paint a picture that is completely the opposite of what should be happening for people with
2:02:21
this amount of experience. So the epidemic actually is people who know what they’re doing dramatically underselling their services. Dramatically underselling themselves and their services. That’s the epidemic that we face. I think we have less of an epidemic of people selling high ticket
2:02:39
that actually don’t know what they’re doing. The epidemic is the opposite. It’s a lot of people who know what they’re doing who are dramatically undercharging and underselling themselves. But yes, if you’re going to charge $15,000 you need to know what
2:02:53
you’re doing for sure. Okay, advice for someone who has web design and development covered but is still pretty clueless on the growth engine side of things. You need to start reading business books, marketing books, copywriting books, and then you need to start translating that into digital. So you just need one channel. Learn Facebook ads or learn really display advertising or you know what’s called like interruption
2:03:23
marketing. PPC is a little bit different because there’s some specific skill sets related to PPC. I would study direct response advertising. I would study, you need to study the actual fundamentals of marketing a business, right? Because then that can be translated into certain digital channels. Then SEO is kind of another old beast on its own.
2:03:46
Content, you know, winning content production can be something that you can consult on. But again, that gets you into the realm of social media, which it takes an entire team and entirely too much energy and effort to actually do correctly. For businesses, you should be doing it
2:04:02
for your own business, for sure. But to do it for other people’s businesses, that’s a beast, that is an absolute beast. But you just need to study marketing, you need to study marketing. Web design and development is not marketing.
2:04:14
There are tons of examples of websites, beautiful, gorgeous, horrible, horrific for actual marketing and conversion and everything else. So those two things are not one in the same. You’ve got to study marketing, you’ve got to study copywriting,
2:04:31
copywriting specifically, and that could be one of your, for sure, it has to be. I mean, somebody’s got to do good copywriting for every website that gets made, or it’s going to have shitty copy. And that’s another way that you can elevate
2:04:44
the price of the project.
2:04:45
Okay.
2:04:46
How often did you physically meet with your clients? I would say 30% of the time.
2:04:56
30% of the time physically meeting with clients.
2:05:00
And I actually, I prefer to meet physically with clients. The times where, like I would want it to be more like 70%. There’s probably 30% who just can’t, like they’re not in the state and, it’s like, do they wanna pay to like fly you out to talk? And that should be a massive project, right?
2:05:25
So it’s just not necessary. Then we went through the whole COVID era where everybody realized, hey, nobody really has to meet anybody anymore. So it’s actually dropped because of that as well. I prefer to meet clients in person,
2:05:38
and I have a higher close rate when I meet clients in person. Still have a very high close rate in general, but you meet them in person, it’s another level of connection and trust and all of that, right?
2:05:51
So I would like it to be around 70, it ended up being around 30, and I think the gap between 30 and 70 is literally because the client was like, I just don’t have time to meet in person, or I’d rather do it this way, or whatever.
2:06:01
My preference was to meet in person if they were a local area client. And I would push to meet more clients locally. So if you’re currently avoiding that, I would say maybe push to be doing that more.
2:06:16
And it is inefficient.
2:06:18
Like I drive out 45 minutes an hour to meet with a client and that’s another 45 minutes or an hour back that you feel like God I could be getting so much done if we had done this on zoom I that’s two hours that I could have been doing other stuff you know but there’s value in it there’s value in it how can we enhance our customer experience so they stay with us longer I mean it’s just if they’re getting
2:06:46
tremendous value from you then they’re going to stay as forever, forever. It’s the, you know, every client that we’ve, that you and anybody would have a discussion with in terms of advertising budget, for example. Well, how much do you want to spend on advertising? Well, a smart business owner will be like,
2:07:05
tell me what the return is, you know? If I give you 10,000, if I’m going to risk 10,000 and you give me $12,000 back, that’s a lot of risk for a little bit of return. But if I give you 10,000 and you give me $100,000 back, I’m gonna fucking find a way to give you a million dollars.
2:07:21
Like, can the same thing happen if I just go get a lot more money? So, same thing. How long will they stay? Depends on how much value you’re getting them. They will literally stay till the day they die
2:07:33
if they’re just getting a tremendous amount of value. So, it’s all about what they’re getting from the relationship with you.
2:07:39
I have not so great social skills.
2:07:41
Would you recommend that I practice cold calling, emailing, and networking in person far away from my location? No, I would recommend that you do something completely different, okay? Are you in the US, Derek?
2:07:55
This would be like, actually Toastmasters, isn’t Toastmasters like an international thing? I would recommend you do something like that. Or go find a, something like Toastmasters. Like Toastmasters is for public speaking, right?
2:08:13
I’m sure there’s organizations for, you know, like other types of social skill development. I would go find those. But like Toastmasters in general, I think would be absolutely fantastic. Like learn how to get up and speak in front of people,
2:08:25
learn how to craft messaging. There’s, I know there’s for sure a lot of online coaches and things like that, and there’s good ones, really good ones, who have courses on developing relationship skills, developing communication skills.
2:08:39
And then they might even put you in workshops, okay? So go do workshops where they’re guiding you and leading you through, hey, here is literally how you start conversations with people. Here’s how you talk to people. Here’s what you say when it’s like awkward.
2:08:52
Or here’s what you say when the other person’s hard to talk to. Okay, like you might be hard to talk to, but maybe they’re hard to talk to. Okay, that’s what I would focus on. I wouldn’t just say, well, just go do more of it. Like, just go to networking events and do your best. Probably wouldn’t go that route.
2:09:09
I would like look for somebody that can structurally help you with wherever the gaps are. Okay, visually design wants to know why his questions are not getting answered. Okay, well, it’s because you’re asking about a non-business related thing. Updates on frames for Figma. Frames for Figma has to, obviously, that can’t, so automatic CSS, the framework itself is changing for 3.0, right?
2:09:39
So frames for Figma can’t possibly come out before that. So 3.0 has to come out, then there’s a little bit of a lag for those things to carry over into frames for Figma, and then it can finally be released again. But it’s literally in a holding pattern because of 3.0.
2:09:58
So I don’t know, other than that, that is the update. The two things, it’s reliant on automatic CSS. So we have to get through this period of development in automatic CSS, then frames for Figma can follow suit. All right, let me go back to the chat real
2:10:17
quick and then we’re going to get out of here. Just want to see, was this helpful for you? Let’s just do this in general, drop in the chat, was this helpful for you? Did you have some insights? Do you have a little bit different of a mindset
2:10:29
maybe going forwards on these things? This is the, I’ll just tell you the reason why I was like prompted to do this is because I’ve been monitoring this survey for the last couple years. And it’s like, it’s more or less the same conclusion
2:10:45
every single time. And I really want that to change. I didn’t like it when I was broke and unsuccessful and struggling and frustrated. And so I’m sure you don’t like it either if you’re in that same exact situation.
2:10:58
So I’m doing what I know to do to help snap you out of that and pointing you to the resources that are available to structurally help you. And I wanna see these numbers change. I love our industry, I love the work that we do, I love the value that we bring to businesses,
2:11:15
I just hate seeing the numbers look the way that they look in these surveys. Okay, good. People are saying that they got the value out of it. How do we not sell customers on working directly with us to prepare them for following process
2:11:29
and working with our team as we expand? Oh, you mean work with you specifically as a person and a human being. That’s the way you present the project in general. Like when you talk about your process, you’re gonna be talking about your team.
2:11:48
You’re gonna be talking about like, if you’re the only one doing work, there is gonna be a transition at some point. Where like, if you’re doing everything, and then suddenly you start to expand and scale, and you’re bringing people on,
2:11:59
and suddenly they were talking with you all the time and now they’re talking to these other people there is a transition period for those clients but it’s all about expectations and preparation so communicate with those clients proactively and say hey by the way we’re growing a lot we’re scaling and you know what I’ve done in the past is for example if a client was on a $50 a month or even higher,
2:12:28
right? But I also have this mindset of like, I had an agreement with you, but I’m just going to, even if I’m losing money, I’m going to, I’m going to uphold the agreement. Like, so what I would tell them often is like, Hey, we’re growing a lot. We’re bringing on a lot of new clients. We’ve actually raised our rates. I’m not going to raise rates on you for like the management fee and stuff.
2:12:48
Our hourly rate is going to go up for new work in the future or things that we scope out in the future for you, those are gonna be at higher rates. But what we’re also going to be doing is expanding our team because of our growth. And so within your project,
2:13:04
you’re gonna be talking with more than just me and be setting this up way ahead of time, right? So they know that there’s gonna be this transition, but I also assure them like, I’m still behind your project. I’m still putting eyes on your project.
2:13:17
I’m still the lead consultant on your project. I’ll still be the one on calls with you. Because as an agency owner, even though you’re gonna step away from pixel pushing, right, you’re gonna step away from development, you’re gonna step away from whatever you happen to be doing.
2:13:30
Some of you do design, some of you don’t do design. Stepping away from those areas, maybe I step away from PPC. Maybe somebody else is gonna implement the PPC. Maybe somebody else is going to implement the SEO. The easiest thing for me to stay attached to, which the client actually really cares about, is the strategy and the consulting, okay?
2:13:49
And the overseeing, like the, is my business being taken care of in terms of where we’re going with this website, with this project, with this growth engine, whatever. So stay attached to that and they won’t care that you’re not the one actually coding the website They won’t care that you’re not actually the one designing things. Okay It’s just all about communication and expectations
2:14:10
Can you give an example of a $5,000 website
2:14:12
my like
2:14:13
So my minimum now is $7,500 and that’s a one that would be a one-page website But what that includes is we’re going to do the discovery first for the project. And let’s make this point too. The idea that you would do a whole website, like a whole brochure site, like let’s say seven pages for $3,500, crazy to me, crazy to me. The difference between the price of one page and two pages, okay,
2:14:48
if I tell you a one-page website is $7,500, what would you think a two page website is? Would you think that it’s $15,000? Well, I mean, one times two is two, right? So 7,500 times two, like, that’s not how this works. Do you know how much work and attention to detail and understanding of what needs to be done for a project is front loaded.
2:15:16
So much of our work is front loaded. If I have to figure out what to say on the homepage, well, I already have done a lot of work that leads me to what I need to say on the second page. And all the work that I did to design and lay out the homepage has so much carryover
2:15:35
to the next page. So the idea that I would do an entire site for $3,500, no, no, no. Like, it doesn’t matter how big the site is. To get to the first page, there’s a chasm of work that we have to do
2:15:52
to understand the client, understand their goals, understand what needs to be said, understand how it needs to be designed, how it needs to be laid out. What is the conversion that we’re going for here? What is the call to action?
2:16:03
What are their competitors doing? What needs to happen in terms of SEO? What needs to happen in terms of site architecture? All this planning, all of this understanding has to go into whether it’s one page or 30 pages. It all has to be done.
2:16:18
So $7,500 is what it requires for me to do all of that. Now, that gets you to one page. Now we talk about what it’s gonna cost to get to five pages or 15 pages or a CPT and then this and then this big form that you want over here and then this other thing
2:16:38
that you want over here. This event system that you wanna add and yada yada yada, right? Then it just starts going up. And then it’s the degree to which we’re doing certain things because remember what I said about,
2:16:50
I’m talking with local service businesses for example. What is basic SEO? What does that look like? What does advanced SEO look like? Well, to me, we can take a project from 10,000 to $25,000 just in a service area network,
2:17:08
depending on how many service areas there are, and the copy that needs to be written for those, and the templates that need to be created for those, and the actual pages and content that needs to be put into those, and the underlying architecture for that.
2:17:21
So there could be a big jump just because we’re actually doing SEO the right way, which is building a legit service area network. Long tail service pages versus service pages. You might have five core services, but then when you do SEO and you start targeting long tail,
2:17:39
there might be 25 pages that have to be created. That just took us from $10,000 to $30,000. So these big jumps come from understanding what a website actually needs to dominate, because I’m very SEO-minded. So SEO can, if you’re doing legit SEO
2:17:58
and creating the pages that actually need to be created with unique content on them, that immediately jumps projects up. Which is why I said, quit just doing these little brochure sites. A five page brochure site, which I wouldn’t build,
2:18:10
because it’s like, what are we doing here? You might end up at 12,000 or something like that. 10,000, whatever. So it’s not a huge jump from the $7,500 that we started at. But there’s, you’re either not doing the work you’re supposed to do up front, or you’re doing a lot of work up front, baking
2:18:30
it in to the price of the overall project and still charging 3500 is way under charging, way under charging for what needs to be done. There are copywriters, you got to understand this, okay. Again, this is like, you got to have these mindset shifts. I was in a mastermind with a couple copywriters,
2:18:52
high-level copywriters, okay? Let’s not even talk about websites. You’ve heard the concept of a sales page, right? Sales page, you’ve probably been to a sales page, like a long-form sales page. They work like gangbusters, okay?
2:19:07
They work like gangbusters. Think about the inner circle page. Let’s go to, this is not, I wouldn’t call this long. This is a short version.
2:19:15
Okay.
2:19:16
So this concept right here. Mine’s not even, mine’s like, it’s a fucking, it’s a $25 project, or $25 product. It’s like, you know, it’s the bare minimum that needs to happen. Because again, the value is in it.
2:19:31
People know that it’s in it. I don’t need to convince them with like, you know, 8,000 words, okay? But I’m just using this as an example. Sales pages, not a website, sales page. Very little design, very little development.
2:19:49
All content, all content. A good copywriter, a good sales page copywriter. Write in the chat right now, write this in the chat. Just guess, if you don’t know, just guess, okay? How much? How much just to write the copy for a long form sales page?
2:20:09
Throw out a number that you think is realistic. Throw out a number that you think is realistic. Just copy. Just one page. Just a sales page. No design.
2:20:21
No dev. No website. No nothing. Just the copy for the sales page. That’s it. See what people are saying.
2:20:31
5,000, 2,500, 3,500, 10,000 minimum.
2:20:36
Okay.
2:20:37
Dave B says, what’s the return? Good question. 2,000, 1,000, 1,500. Guys, let me, let me, let me, for an established company, and I think actually what Dave said here what’s the return is a really
2:20:54
that’s hit the nail on the head there’s finance companies finance companies who sell financial newsletters and they use sales pages to do this and copywriters charge them fifty thousand dollars for one sales page knowing that they’re gonna make hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? So that goes into Dave’s question about, you know, what is the return, right?
2:21:22
But I know the copywriters that I worked with in this mastermind, they just happened to be in the mastermind that I was in, their minimum was $20,000 for a sales page. Just process that for a second.
2:21:34
That you’re like, I don’t even know
2:21:36
if I can sell a whole website for $3,500. These people will sell a sales page for $20,000. Just a copy for the sales page. Why? Well, as we’ve talked about on WDD Live, I mean, so much copy is tremendously important.
2:21:52
It’s make or break. So the idea that, and this is why I tell you, what is the number one, number one, do not ever do this. Don’t ever get your content from the client. One, you’re gonna get bad content. Two, that bad content is gonna make their project less successful. Three, you’re not getting the revenue that you should be getting for either writing the copy or hiring out the copy. Okay? The
2:22:22
copy is a good chunk of money that they need to be investing in. Because it is make or break, right? So the idea that I’m gonna just get that willy nilly from the client, man, you’re selling yourself short and you’re selling the client short. That’s not being a consultant.
2:22:39
A good consultant would be like, I’m sorry, I can’t get the content from you because you guys notoriously suck at creating content. Now obviously you don’t want to tell them that, but that’s the reality. That’s the reality.
2:22:52
Clients are terrible at creating their own content and their own copy. It’s just that’s the reality. So don’t let them do it. A good consultant wouldn’t let them do it. You got to push back strong on that. So yeah I mean guys like it’s just the words.
2:23:07
They’re already way more making way more than you’re thinking about making on this entire website. Aren’t we creating websites that have content and copy? Aren’t they effectively all sales pages? The home page is a sales page. The about page is a sales page.
2:23:22
All the service pages are sales pages. The service area pages are sales pages. They’re all sales pages. They’re all trying to do the job of selling people into being a lead or a customer. They’re all, so they all have copy, right?
2:23:35
So are you selling copy? That is one way immediately you could just add thousands and thousands minimum to every single project.
2:23:44
You cannot compare the price of the website against the balance in the bank
2:23:47
compared to the expected value brought. You cannot compare the price of the website against the balance in the bank. Expect a price of the website against the balance in the bank. Uh, you mean like how much money they, they have already?
2:24:05
Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. It’s, it’s, it’s the return that they’re going to get. Just like Dave said, with this question, what is the return that they are going to get? But again, this is why I said the $3,500 price point is just
2:24:14
laughable for, for a website. Find me a business. It’s not going to make a huge return on, on like the, the return would be so lopsided. If you’re doing a website for $3,500, and then they’re gonna make, what are they gonna make?
2:24:32
$7,000 from this website? 10,000? That’s a failing business. A website that’s only making $10,000 from their website? Hopefully they’re just making tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars,
2:24:44
because at that point then, the $3,500 you charge them makes no sense whatsoever. Something like that again, the math is not mapping. Now $3,500 and then it just sits there and doesn’t actually generate revenue. We have to ask why that happened. One probably they’re hopeful, they’re a business hopeful, they don’t know what
2:25:02
the fuck they’re doing in general. So their business is just not doing anything in general. Two, you didn’t have a growth engine attached to the website. Should have listened to what I said about selling them a growth engine, right? So you just, you built it and thought people would come and they’re not coming. That’s your fault.
2:25:21
Okay. You didn’t add a growth engine onto the website or you made a bad website. The copy sucks. You got, maybe you got the content from the client and it’s just not selling anybody. Do you guys remember the, the live stream where I did, where I, I said I was looking for a cleaning company for my house,
2:25:39
a green cleaning company, and we went through every single website, and I was like, God, these all are just really terrible. The designs are not good, the copy is not good, they’re not hitting on the right things, they don’t have good offers.
2:25:50
What ends up happening in a lot of these industries is it’s a battle of the bullshit. It’s like, which website is just like, they all suck, but which one’s a little bit better? And all this required is like a company, like an agency, a legit agency comes in
2:26:07
and just knocks it out of the park. And then suddenly that company can just dominate that local area. That’s worth a tremendous amount of money. See, the problem is, and this is why, where was it?
2:26:21
I’ll just do this one last thing, then we’ll get out of here because I’ve been on the stream way too long. I’m too busy for all this. Ten key, was it this link right here? Let me look.
2:26:30
There was one of them that had a,
2:26:32
ah, yes, yes, yes, right here.
2:26:35
There’s a sales call checkpoint called past experiences. It is imperative that you ask people on a sales call, have you ever commissioned a website before? Have you ever gone through this process before? Have you ever hired another agency? What was that experience like?
2:26:59
Tell me about it. And they’re either gonna tell you that, oh, it was fine, it was whatever, or they’re gonna give you, probably, they’re gonna give you this nightmare scenario. Well, I mean, let me tell you about this company, right?
2:27:12
And they’ll just go off with this nightmare experience that they’ve had in the past. Or they’ll be like, it might be a typical brochure website client where it’s been three years since we’ve had a website. We just wanna refresh things.
2:27:25
And it’s like, how much business do you get through your website? Well, not a lot, but it is a good representation of our brand. We know it’s important to have an online presence. You hear these key words all the time, right?
2:27:39
Their past experience, if it’s a nightmare scenario, you actually, it’s good. If it’s a nightmare scenario, it’s good. And if they, let’s say, oh, you guys didn’t remind me. We’re going to talk about overcoming price objections. Okay, here we go. We’re getting right into it now.
2:27:55
Just based on past experiences. Let’s say they’ve had a nightmare scenario. You know what your sales call is geared towards? Sure, and this is why process. Let me get into our process because what I can guarantee is the agency that you worked with, their process looked nothing like ours.
2:28:13
And in fact, if they were like the agencies that we know exist that don’t have much of a process or they don’t really have a legitimate process, of course the project went off the rails. Of course it was a nightmare scenario. That’s to be expected, right? And when you go through our process,
2:28:29
you’re gonna see why that would never happen, okay? And so your process, because what I say, process is everything, right? But now you’re showing them, you’re building trust in the sense that, here is why, it’s not just me promising you,
2:28:42
me going, well, I promise you’re gonna have a better experience than you had with that other agency. No, no, no, I can show you. I show you exactly why that project went off the rails and exactly why our project is set up, our process is set up such that that doesn’t happen.
2:28:58
Because we know that that’s the norm and we don’t want to have our projects end up like that. And this is why they don’t end up like that. And they can see a clear distinction. Because when I start going through my process, the same thing happens every time.
2:29:12
The person goes, nobody’s ever talked about these things before. I’ve been on call after call after call. Nobody has touched on these things. Nobody has said any of this. And I’m like, exactly.
2:29:24
Now, see why that project clearly went off. They didn’t talk to you about discovery. They didn’t do it. They didn’t do a wire framing face. They designed it as they went. What they did.
2:29:33
And they’re like, yeah, can you.
2:29:34
I’m like, exactly.
2:29:35
This is why the project went off the rails. And then I say, key question, how much did you pay for that project? Oh, well, you know, we, I think it was, you know, $4,500, $3,500. And so now you have a price point
2:29:53
that you can juxtapose against. And this is the same question I always ask. Let’s say that they are in that brochure website mode. It wasn’t a disaster, but you know, the last agency built them a nice website at the time, but it just doesn’t do much for their business.
2:30:09
And so, you know, they don’t see a lot of return. So they kind of, you know, they don’t, they want to keep the spending down because, you know, why would I spend a ton more when I’m not really getting anything out of my website? But then it’s so easy to just,
2:30:22
okay, how much did you pay them for that brochure website? $3,500.
2:30:25
Okay.
2:30:26
Remember I said, be a hundred percent honest with them? This is what I tell them right now. If I spent $3,500 on a website I would expect to get no return whatsoever. So it’s not surprising that you didn’t get any return. I would expect that to be the case. To get a return on a website certain things have to be done and those things cost way more than $3,500. This is the reality of the situation.
2:30:54
See, and I’m telling you this because I don’t need your money, right? Like I’m not actually talking to the client right now. I’m just, this is where positive indifference comes in. I’m not going to feed you a bunch of bullshit. Whoa, whoa. You can pay us $3,500 and we’re just going to do it right.
2:31:06
And it’s, you are going to get a return or maybe just pay a little bit more, you know, pay the $7,500. You’re definitely going to. No, I just tell them, yes, I understand you didn’t get anything out of the $3,500 website.
2:31:19
I would expect that to be the case because the things that are required to get a return out of a website cost far more than $3,500. And now in their mind, they’re like, their wheels are turning, well, how much more is it?
2:31:31
And then when we get to the part about the actual price, okay, so to reach the goals, what is this? To reach the goals that we discussed earlier and to make sure that this website actually grows your business, we’re going to need to do X, Y, and Z. And that’s going to be in the neighborhood of and then you throw out a range. You don’t give them a price, you give them a range.
2:31:54
Okay, it’s called, this is a technique called price bracketing. And so the range might be, let’s go conservative, fifteen to thirty thousand dollars. So we’re going to throw out that range. Fifteen to thirty thousand dollars. And then I just give them a second to digest that. And also you want to just gauge their reaction, right?
2:32:13
Do they go, do they clutch their pearls? Do they like, what do they do? Successful business owners, by the way, would just be like, okay.
2:32:21
That’s it.
2:32:22
By the way, successful business owners hear numbers all the time. The numbers don’t shock them at all, right? Now if they’ve never paid that for a website, they might start questioning like, well, Bob down the street only charges $5,000, why are you guys… And again, it goes back to, well, Bob down the street makes websites that don’t do anything to grow businesses.
2:32:46
This goes back to that coaching call I was doing the other day. I explained this to him on the coaching call because I’ve literally done this in a real sales call. I said, hey, listen, I can sell you a website for $5,000 right now. I can take your check and I can go cash it
2:33:07
in my bank account. And I can build you whatever I can build for $5,000. It is going to sit there and do nothing for you. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want that money. I don’t want that project. I don’t want that client. I want a client that I can build them a website because I I’m given the
2:33:26
appropriate amount of money to do so. I can build them a website that actually builds their business and I can be like a partner with them with their online experience year after year after year helping them legitimately grow and get to new levels. That’s what I’m after. Now I could say
2:33:45
yes to you and just take your $5,000 and none of that will happen. Ok, but what I would rather do is charge you the appropriate price, do the appropriate things, and then actually make this website do something for you.
2:33:57
You can just tell them the truth. This cannot be done for that number period end of story and if that means that you don’t hire me that’s fine I’m just telling you those things you want the goals you talked about you want X amount of leads you want X amount of people in your sales pipeline you want to feed your sales team you want to you want to dominate your local SEO you want to those things cannot happen for that price. If you want those things to happen this is
2:34:30
the range. Now how aggressive are we with these things? That’s what determines whether we’re at the bottom of this range or at the top of this range. If you want to be more conservative I will give you a proposal. Now let’s go back to what I talked about creating proposals for a number you already know is going to be said yes to. We talked about a range. We asked them what part of this range can you live in, right? And they may ask, well what determines the range? How aggressive
2:34:59
do you want to be? So if we want to be conservative we’re going to be toward the bottom. That was $15,000. You want to be aggressive? $30,000. Now where do you want to live in there? And they go, let’s live around 20. Now you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna go back and I’m gonna craft a proposal with a statement of work that equals $20,000 in deliverables. The top things that I can fit in there for $20,000 that I think are gonna make a big difference.
2:35:24
That’s it. That’s how the process works. Okay? So the idea again going back that you can’t say yes. You can’t say yes to numbers that just don’t make sense. You absolutely can’t do it.
2:35:40
But the problem here is no one knows how to generate leads
2:35:42
and bring in actual results of the clients. If that’s the case, then that is a legitimate problem. That is a legitimate problem. But there are a tremendous amount of ways to learn how to do that. In the inner circle, you can learn the SEO side of it.
2:35:56
You can learn the start of the PPC side of it. You can learn the start of the copywriting side of it. Okay. By the way, by the way, there are plenty of sites. They’re already getting a lot of traffic and attention and eyeballs. Okay. But what sucks is the design and the copy. Now you might come in already and say I’m gonna do the design and dev, but what you’re not selling them is the copy. And you can add $10,000 of extra revenue to that project by writing kick-ass copy for them. You don’t even need a growth engine. They
2:36:33
already have the traffic and the eyeballs. What they need is much better copy and a much better offer. You could come in and just do that for them and make thousands and thousands and thousands of extra above what you would charge for a normal website just because you ticked that really important box for them. So there’s a bunch of different scenarios and a bunch of different ways to skin the cat, okay?
2:36:55
But again, it’s about consultant, not pixel pusher, focusing on growth, focusing on achieving real business goals, not the bullshit goals that they told you about in the beginning. What did I say?
2:37:06
A lot of business owners, they come, oh yeah, well, we just wanna refresh the website. We just want an updated look. Stop it, stop it, stop it, timeout, flag on the play, 15 yards, none of that is important. None of that is important.
2:37:18
You run a business, sir. Your goal is to increase your business. That is, we have to get you leads, we have to get you local SEO domination, we have to get you something. We gotta get you PR, whatever I specialize in.
2:37:32
We’re not in the refresh the design business. That does jack shit for your bottom line. So you guys have to be on the same page about this. Don’t let them tell you that those are their goals. Because if that’s their goal, they ain’t paying you shit. Because it’s not worth anything.
2:37:49
We just, we already know that, right? That’s not, the design is not worth anything. Nobody goes to a website and be like, oh God, this is so gorgeous, I just have to do business with this company. No, it’s what does the copy say, what is the offer,
2:38:05
those two things are really what matter. It’s nice to have a good design, and it’s nice to put your best foot forward, and it’s nice for people to have a good first impression of the brand, but ultimately, that’s not why we’re building websites.
2:38:18
We’re building websites that convince and convert. Period, end of story. So don’t let business owners tell you, we just want a refresh, we just want it to look better than it is. Stop it, stop it.
2:38:28
That’s not what we’re here for. That’s not what we’re here for. We’re here for more important things. Now, tell me what your real important goals are, right? Now I’m gonna show you how to reach those, and then that’s gonna cost more money.
2:38:39
All right, I gotta get out of here. I got work to do.
2:38:41
Hopefully this was helpful.
2:38:42
We do, you know, monthly in the Inner Circle, we do this stuff all the time. We do monthly office hours. You can come in and ask questions. We can have these conversations. We can get your mind right.
2:38:52
I pointed you to a bunch of different resources. Some of those resources are free. You better 100% go do those free resources immediately if you haven’t done them already. There’s a three-hour masterclass that’s free, there’s those worksheets that are free,
2:39:05
there’s so much that you can just get started on doing. And again, 80% of this is mindset. 80%, you’ve got to snap out of the prison of low expectations and low numbers and low value work and low everything. Alright and we’re going to we’re going to do our best to snap you out of that. Love you guys thanks for being here.
2:39:24
Love you guys thanks for being here.
2:39:28
Peace.
