The Exchanges

Q I haven't heard you talk at all about conversion, really. Like, how much do you think about landing page conversion, conversion rate optimization?

A We, well, we definitely always, we think about it more like return on ads, ad spent essentially. So our ROAS and we are aiming, we're basically aiming for like, okay, we spent one dollar. We want to make one dollar 50 back. Right. And we have our funnel laid out essentially in every step. So we'll have a funnel. We'll have like 12 steps, 12 different things that are going on. And we're constantly, constantly tweaking it so that like our workshop or master funnel, which was, which is our kind of most successful program. We have been tweaking and like poking at this funnel to increase conversions for four years now since, since November, but it's not just landing page conversion rate. It's sales calls. It's like tweaking the video on the second page. It's like the survey we're constantly tweaking it. So the answer to the question is we obsess about it, but we don't obsess about it in the very beginning. We get the funnel out there and then we can really quickly see which things are broken, which things make no sense. Um, but yeah, a funnel from day one to day 100 usually looks pretty different or a landing page.

AI assessment note: “So the answer to the question is we obsess about it”

Q Why? That, that business has generated, like, millions of dollars of profits for you. Why would you go and just decide, hey, it's no longer for me?

A Well, first of all, I'm very grateful for the revenue and profit it generates and I love the business and it is a big part of my life. Um, it's just sort of part of how my brain works. I would say like, sometimes I just hit a wall and get sick of something and I just want to move on to something new and interesting. Uh, I generally hold myself back from doing that and like stay on the core business. Uh, and, and the problem is sometimes it's also worked out really well. Like I remember a couple of years ago, uh, like seven or eight years ago, I was so sick of just focus or relying on client work to make money. And you maybe know the cashflow kind of variation when you're just doing client consulting work. And we started the education business with the in-person training and then online training. And that complete, like that moved our run, like burn rate from like three months to like, 15 months to 18 months. And I was like, holy shit, just being super annoyed at something sometimes generates interesting things. Um, yeah. I mean, what I often say is I'm not the right person to be the CEO because I'm the, the, I am the person when I get annoyed with something, even if it's making money, I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want us to do this anymore.

AI assessment note: “sometimes I just hit a wall and get sick of something and I just want”

Q Wait, how did you spell out? Cause a lot of people are gonna be like, how is that even possible?

A Well, we, we did a, I mean, my system for that as always, we did a webinar to our, like we had a, um, a week of inviting people to a webinar to talk about like, uh, what, like, I think the idea was like, take a look at our, our first in-person retreat in six years or something. Um, but for people who didn't know us, I think we had a separate name for the webinar, which was like, Where we see facilitation going in 20, 22. Um, and at that presentation, I just basically told people about how much reminded people about how much they miss in person, like for about an hour. And then at the very end, I announced and we have this retreat. Um, obviously people are going to say, yeah, but you need an audience to do that. Actually. Yes. Um, for this particular event, we needed an audience because this was a big, expensive event. We had 75 people coming to it, but Summer camp only has 35 people coming into it. I only have like 1000 people or 1000 to 2000 people listening to my podcast. And all my podcast is the only audience for the people coming to my other in-person events. And still I can fill, you know, one to two, 35 people events per year and add a high ticket price. That's still a nice little business. So, okay. The facilitator.com retreat. That's a big expensive thing. It cost us like a hundred K to rent the village. But the thing that I did in August, I like last summer, I just as…

AI assessment note: “my system for that as always, we did a webinar”

Q Um, okay. So what are we looking at here?

A So this is probably one tiny sliver of the amount of emails Alex Harmozy sent. So there's more, when you're doing a webinar campaign and most people don't know this, there's like three phases for a campaign like this. Phase one is the registration campaign. Phase two is the live while you're live campaign. Actually there's four phases. Phase one is registration campaign. So this is for everyone who has not registered. Phase two is the making sure the people who are registered know that the thing is coming up repeatedly. Some of this is built into Zoom already. They have the one day and one hour thing. Phase three is while you're live, you're telling people you're live. And these are little emails that are going out while you're live. You would have gotten at least four of these while Alex Harmosi is live. And then phase four is the actual public campaign Post the webinar post the live event where you essentially show your audience the thing that you're selling and show them like that they can get this stuff, et cetera, et cetera. Normally, if you're selling something that someone can buy immediately, the hack is to only offer something specific and special if they are doing it, if they're still live. So if it's on the live stream itself, Um, but yeah, that really depends. So the emails, I think that, uh, Alex Hermozzi probably sent approximately six preregistration emails for r…

AI assessment note: “this is probably one tiny sliver of the amount of emails Alex Harmozy sent”

Q might be, you might be working with a CEO and, and see that the CEO is making the wrong decision. And you, you have to be like, you know, you have to be kind of like out of it, right? You can't just be, don't do this, or I would do this this way. And that's, that's the hardest part. That's going to be the hardest part of your role.

A It's very, very difficult, very difficult for me because we did hand, I did hand over the corporate side of my business just to, to a CEO a couple of years ago, and they did eventually sort of lose track of it. And, and it did pretty much crash and burn and had to be rebuilt. Uh, I obviously left it go a little bit too far because I was like, I just need to, I went so hands off that it actually went too far. So I, I try, I've tried kind of that approach where I'm like, okay, I'm going to be almost like ignorant of it. Um, and now I'm taking, I think it was helpful for me to be, to have this partners business where I'm an advisor to others so that I know how to advise while being checked out a little bit while being like, I'm going to answer your question, but I'm also not going to check up and see if you did it right or something. Um, But yeah, I mean, look.

AI assessment note: “It's very, very difficult, very difficult for me because we did hand, I did hand”

Q And why don't you just hire a CEO?

A Um, Laura and I have talked about this and multiple times, and I think, yeah, one part about it is I, is the idea of looking for someone sounds annoying. Um, and I, and I've heard that process is very difficult and, and like, often doesn't work out. Um, the other part is like, maybe I'm just not ready to let it go just yet. Um, the other part is I did bring in a CEO for the consulting business and fucking shit hit the fan majorly. So I did let that one happen. Although it did work well for two years, like brought in a CEO, kept the numbers stable. It didn't really grow. And then it was like, um, yeah, it's, but.

AI assessment note: “the other part is like, maybe I'm just not ready to let it go”

Q Question. Of the, call it, 90 minutes, would you say that it's 90% giving value, 10% talking about the offer? Like, what's the breakdown?

A The breakdown is, structurally, I use the structure from Russell Brunson, like, 50% of the structure I take from Russell Brunson's book, um, Expert Secrets. So that structure is basically I'll just tell you the structure I'll use for this one. It's going to be, Hey everybody, here's what the last few years have looked like for me. And the last few years for me have been pretty stressful because loads of things have gone on in my life. And I believe that that will touch on a lot of people's issues they're having as entrepreneurs. So I'll talk about sort of my story for, I'd say, 20 minutes. I'll talk about the biggest learnings I've had in those, uh, couple of years. And from those biggest learnings, I'll distill down, like what big things I'm going to do to move forward. And at the end of that, I'll say, then I'll start talking about the event or the thing, or even the service, like this could even be a coaching service, uh, that would accelerate that learning for other people. So it's, Not even.

AI assessment note: “I'll talk about sort of my story for, I'd say, 20 minutes.”

Q So Talk to me, why is Russell Brunson someone you look up to, and why is ClickFunnels something that people like me should take seriously?

A I didn't think I'd be doing a sales pitch for Russell Brunson here. Um, okay. I'll tell you that. So as, as AJ and smart, we were, we were a normal design agency up until 2016. We were selling in-person training. We were doing a lot of content marketing based on like Gary V. Um, we even went to this like in-person mastermind with Gary V where there was just 12 people and it was great. We have a YouTube video on that actually of, Of, of doing this mastermind with him. And so we were all in on this Gary V method, which is kind of like creating shit tons of content, building up your brand. And then that almost automatically leads to sales and et cetera, et cetera. But then I was introduced to this book called expert secrets in. And this is when I was trying to, when I was thinking about this idea of digitizing the in-person training we were doing. And the idea was actually just to digitize it for our clients, uh, because they were asking for videos of the in-person training. I read the book expert secrets and it completely blew my mind. Like I read it and I didn't know anything about this Russell Brunson guy. And I was like, holy crap. Like I've never heard of a webinar. I don't know what this one to many marketing is. Uh, I don't know what direct response marketing is, but then I realized I actually had been exposed to it For a very long time, you know, Noah Kagan, who was on you…

AI assessment note: “I read the book expert secrets and it completely blew my mind.”

Q And they still, to this day, 10 years later, more than 10 years later, they have that Buddha and they send me photos. They send me photos, and they're like, hey, hope all is well, and it's like, dude, you're like the SBP product of a trillion dollar company, and I'm on your mind for this five dollar Buddha from this Jewish guy? How does this make this make sense?

A That's so cool. You are very, very good at this game, I have to say. Like, you are one of the rare people, like, you do have a superpower of, like, keeping in touch with people and keeping, like, making people feel, and I think it's real, like, making people feel thought of. Like, I am, I, for your audience, just in case you think you need to have superpowers like Greg, I'm the opposite. I'm like a disaster with keeping up with people as Greg knows, like Greg, you are, you have like the absolute mastery of just, I'm going to send a quick message to Jonathan. I'm going to reach out to this person, you know, everyone on the planet. And I think you have like, almost like a natural inbuilt dream, 100 machine inside you. And I'm lazy as fuck. So what I do is I like have my dream 100 and I like focus on one person per year or one thing every two years or one thing every three years. And even that, you know, if you're not trying to build a hundred million dollar company, if you're just trying to do what I'm doing, which is bootstrapped under ten million that you can do this and be lazy and still it's like, not true. You can't be lazy. You can do this, be good at what you do. Keep it consistent and still be pretty successful with it without Even what do you think about the angle? Actually, Greg, I'm saying here without building any sort of content, without doing any sort of, you know, …

AI assessment note: “you do have a superpower of, like, keeping in touch with people”

Q And it was a business show and You know, in terms of viewership, it didn't have a huge viewership, but it had a super high value viewership. So the idea here is what are other high value audiences that need live shows?

A Yes, exactly. And live, it doesn't have to be hyperscripted. Like you wrote in your tweet, this guy, Jeff Gerstmann, again, who's one of my favorite examples, he just turns the stream on and he has a couple of broad topics and he'll talk for hours and hours. And I think anyone who has that skill Of just being able to talk long form about anything is going to have, I think, I think the ability to make just to go online, just to be able to talk while you're maybe doing something else, especially in the business context is going to be huge and is going to be really differentiated. Like almost all business content out there is very polished. It's very like, for example, almost every Like pure business podcast, like the diary of a CEO is one of the biggest, uh, purely business focused ones. It's hyper polished. It's all about interviews. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to take all of this inspiration from the Twitch streaming world and turn that into the very unpolished gamer style mess, but with the business context. So that's something that I think from your list is going to be Bigger and bigger and bigger as AI sanitizes a lot of stuff. I think more people are going to want, want to listen to more authentic people speaking long form, unedited, unscripted, and live. So I think that's a huge one. And it's exactly a bet that I'm making for my own business. It's what I'm doing pe…

AI assessment note: “What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to take all of this inspiration”

Q Um, but I think that for a lot of people doing what you, you say, just like get in the door, get some customers, get some feedback, and then you can always create content afterwards, right? Like, That no one's stopping you.

A Yeah. And I think like it is. One of the strategies I use, it's not the only strategy, but I think it's one, it's, it's one of these strategies, by the way, I didn't come up with it. I just learned it somewhere. I don't even remember where. Um, but I was like, ah, this seems too easy. You just write the names of the people who are talking to your audience and you reach out to them and that like gets you clients. Um, the, the only catch is you have to be good at what you do, like, as in, you have to be able to talk about the thing. So if you're a web designer and you absolutely suck at web web design, it won't work at all. Uh, so it's only going to work if you are like the real deal as in, if you can do the thing, but then it really works. Who's trying to. Oh, sorry. Nevermind. Someone's trying to call me. I was telling you before we started this call, I'm having a really annoying day. It is the most annoying day at AJ and smart. Of the year.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. And I think like it is. One of the strategies I use”