What Works? A Candid Conversation With Roland & Ryan

0:00Look, if somebody already decided they want to do business with you. by talking to them and giving them more information, you can only talk them out of it. They're literally there with their hand on their wallet, ready to do a deal with you. And then you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't act now. Let me give you a lot of extra information. You know, well, now I can only screw up the sale. How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success. Grab your seat at the table, because this is Business Lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice.

0:46Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch. And today's a snackable episode with Roland where he's going to get into some more tactical strategies that you can start using to live a rich and happy life. If this is the first snackable episode you're hearing, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to some of the other episodes that Roland has put out. And if you want to get notified every time we release a new episode, go to the new businesslunchpodcast.com website and we'll send you detailed notes along with every episode. That's businesslunchpodcast.com, www.businesslunchpodcast.com. And you can sign up for the free email newsletter where you'll be able to get all the highlights and resources from the episodes.

1:21Hey, everybody. Ryan Dice and Roland Frazier here with another episode of the Business Lunch Podcast. happy to have you guys here being effectively a fly on the wall or a seat at the table with us as if we were having lunch talking about stuff and one of the things we're going to talk about today actually the thing that we're going to talk about today is one of our favorite things that happens quite a bit at our lunches which is stuff that's working now ryan you want to talk about some stuff that's working right now for us i do and i want to in setting up one thing that's working now, I want to kind of demo it and get a little bit meta.

1:55Is that all right? Let's do it. So I'll say right at the start that we have our big annual event, Get Scalable Live, coming up in, depending on when you're listening to this, a matter of days, weeks, months, or years. So Get Scalable Live, but I mean, seriously, by the time this comes out, it'll be like a few weeks away. And part of the reason that we're doing this kind of shameless plug is what we do at Get GetScaleableLive is we share all the newest, coolest stuff that is actually working. Right. And so Roland, I know you're going to get up there and riff on some pretty amazing like AI stuff.

2:28But this is just us and our team getting out there, sharing some cool stuff, as well as our members saying, here are things that are working right now. So it's a great event. If you've never been, you should come. It's more workshop. It's in Austin, Texas. You will love it. GetScaleableLive.com. So what I did there was number one, shameless plug, but I actually demoed one of the things that is working now, which if you sell via webinar or you sell live events or any kind of event-based thing, maybe you use challenges. If you have any kind of event-based selling, recently I did a test where on a webinar, I took the clothes that I would normally do.

3:11So normally you teach for a little bit, you give some content, and then at the end you say, hey, if you like this, here's this thing we got where you have an opportunity to give us money. Right. Well, what I did on this webinar, just kind of to test and see how it would work, I took the clothes and I just pulled it up to the top. So I flipped the webinar on its head and I just did an introduction. Here's what we're going to talk about in full transparency. At the end, I'm going to talk about a way that we can help you out to actually implement this stuff. So here's what we do. Here's how we work.

3:43And I essentially pre-pitched. I essentially pitched the offer ahead of time, sold the thing ahead of time. And I said, now, if you like what you see, now I'm going to go straight into it. If you like what you're hearing at any point in time, you want to learn more, here's a link where you can learn more. Here's a link where you can sign up. Doubled conversion rates. We doubled the conversion rates. And I think it's really, really simple. Number one, everybody was on at the beginning, less people are on at the end. I think it's as simple as that. That's how these things work. But I also think, number two, people value transparency.

4:17They all know in general that some kind of offer is going to be coming up at some point. And so they either know and there's tension throughout wondering what it's going to be, or they don't and they're offended. And so if you're just transparent at the outset and say, hey, this is what we do. This is who we are. I'm going to spend the rest of whatever this thing is, event, webinar, challenge, showing you the best stuff, giving you our best stuff in the hopes of you saying, wow, I want to work with that person. And then at the end, if you want to, we can do it. But what you're also able to do, so that's the second reason, transparency, tension release.

4:52But the third reason I think it works is you're now able to anchor back to that. So every single time you say something that's interesting and you hit a high point, you can remind them, you know, again, if you want help implementing this, here's a link, here's how we do it. All right, let's move on. So we're going to keep trying it. We're going to keep flipping this. I did it on a webinar kind of on a whim. We just hosted a challenge at Digital Marketer where I did the exact same thing and it worked great. And people were actually saying, wow, thank you. So the first thing that's working well, which again, you saw a demo of, and I'll say again, if you like this kind of what's working now type stuff, come out to get Get Scalable Live, go to GetScalableLive.com to get your tickets.

5:29If you like this kind of what's working now stuff, that's what we do there. But yeah, so that's the first thing that's working out. Flipping the pitch, pre-pitching, and then going to the content. So Ryan, does that differ from what we've been doing using the kind of the Angela Loria thing where we put the video in front? Because I know like on our challenges for Epic and some other things we're doing, we've got that. We've got basically a banner that allows them to click on that video at the beginning in the challenge community. And then when they register, they get the video that basically says, you know, Hey, some of you are here to go through and learn a whole bunch of stuff.

6:14And others of you are people who know that you already want to do, you know, to work with us. here's what it's like to work with us if that's what you're interested in. And then I kind of go through that is, is what you're doing different from that? It's not different from a, from a strategy perspective, right? But I do think that the difference when you're actually there live, whether you're live and in person, you know, live virtually and you just let it be known, um, Hey, here's what we do and here's how we work. and you just say it right at the outset so that it is native, it's embedded into the content itself, then I think it makes it more effective because now you can always anchor back to it.

6:58I don't know that you can assume that just because you had a banner on the thank you page or a video on the thank you page, that number one, everybody saw it or number two, they're going to remember that they saw it. But when you kick off with it, I think you do. Now, I will say also, I think this can be overdone. If every single social post that you do, and certainly if every time we did one of these podcast episodes, we kicked off of the pre-pitch. Well, that'd get pretty freaking obnoxious pretty quick. I don't think you could do it with all your top of funnel content, but no, to answer your question, I think it's just a continuation of that strategy of letting the challenge in the challenge that you did.

7:32What is the opener and how long is it? I was about five minutes or so in the challenge. And I just said, Hey, everybody, welcome. Welcome to the challenge. You know, our goal of this challenge is to do this and I want to be completely transparent. Our goal is to get you buyers from scratch, let's say. I'm going to be giving you all of our best ideas. I'm going to be laying it all out for you. Here's the ideas. Here's the process. What we found though is no matter how much we give, people just want help actually implementing the thing. They want help doing the thing. So what we're looking for is 20 of you who would like help doing this thing.

8:14so over the next five days i'm going to be showing you and you can take it and try to do it yourself and that's great if you can amazing i know there's people out there who are pure do-it-yourselfers fantastic get lots of value tell your friends i also know there's people out there who would rather um you know have a little support have a little help or depending on what you offer just have it done for you which is the most powerful uh type of thing but so it was that i said so uh and the way I said, we now have the next few days for me to try to impress you, uh, both with how good we are, how smart we are, how fun we are to work with.

8:49This is us kind of dating. Um, but also to maybe even overwhelm you a little bit with, there's a lot here, you're going to see there's a lot here. And so at any point in time, you're like, this sounds great. I want it. And I want some help then amazing. Okay. Let's get into the, into the content. And then the transition was that, that hard. Okay. And, uh, then was there a call to action that like, do you send them someplace or say message or how did you call those people out that now have raised their hand and say, I'm interested? Yeah, really great point. I do. Cause I think at that point, if you go into like a full blown value stack, you know, and then when you sign up, you're going to get this bonus and this bonus and this bonus.

9:26Yeah. That now feels just, yeah, you haven't, you haven't delivered enough value to go, right. You know, were you doing so? No, we don't. We very briefly cover the category of program that it is, right? So we've got a coaching program, we have a mastermind, we have a service where we do this for people, we have software that will automate all these things, right? Whatever category your product or service occupies, we have a thing that does this. And if you're interested in learning more, then you invite them to raise their hand and you sell in private. So in our case, we said email, you know, email this, this email address, or you could text this number.

10:06You could probably send somebody to a phone, but I would not give extreme details about the program product or its pricing. I wouldn't do a bonus or a value stack. Wait to do all of that until you're actually talking to somebody. Either maybe you're sending to a sales team or you're sending them a video where you're doing the actual selling. You've essentially got mission. Got it. Okay, cool. I like that. So, um, because just to share also then along that same line, what I was mentioning is that we had, um, a mastermind member who was putting a video on the front of her challenge. And, um, it was a multi-day challenge.

10:49And she basically said, um, Hey, uh, kind of what I said earlier, this, this, you know, you're about to learn some amazing stuff, but not everybody has the time to go through this. Some people just know that they want to do this right away. And if you do, then watch this video and the videos, I think about 20 or 30 minutes long. The one that I did, I think is about 15 or 17 minutes long. And it basically walks through then says, if you would like to work with us, here's what that looks like. Here's kind of what the program is like. And if this is something that sounds like a fit, then go ahead and message, email text, whatever your call to action is.

11:23And that for us currently, we're selling about a hundred thousand dollars on the front end of our challenge before it even gets started by doing that. And, um, and it's been consistent for where we're, I think over three years in of doing, uh, a challenge basically every single month in one of our businesses. And, uh, that consistently generates significant upfront money, which is great when you think about if you're concerned about how do I get my media costs back? Because I've got my credit card, I've been putting money on my credit card and I spent 50 or 100 ,000 or 20 ,000 or 300 ,000 in media, whatever you're spending.

12:07And I've got 30 days basically to pay that without having to get hit with interest. So does it make sense for me to see if I could do something to get money in quicker? Yes. Does this get money in quicker? Yes. So could you potentially lose those people by making them go through the whole challenge and then pitching at the end? Abso-frickin-lutely. And one of my favorite stories of that, like where this really came home to me is when we were selling live at TNC, our mastermind. And I was there, one of my business partners was there and we're both selling in the booth for a whole day. And at the end of the day, you won't say, I want to set this up a little bit.

12:56This other business partner, most would consider to be a, like a world-class salesperson. Yes. Right. Not like just like all this, like world freaking class. And then there's Roland who at the time, let's be honest, you were kind of like the SEO guy. I'm the attorney. I can help you with strategy, but nobody would have seen you as like, you know, some like sales shark, not a belly to belly sales guy. Yeah. Not a belly. So we got a world-class salesperson against you. All right. I wanted to make sure that's fully set up. Keep going. Yeah. Uh, who also, you know, is, is very well known for making a fantastic offers, right?

13:33Not, not as I am not. So, uh, so anyway, at the end of the day, he comes to me and he says, he says, all right, you know, how many did you get? And, or I said, no, I said, I said, how, how'd you do? And he said, he said, man, it was really tough. I got one. And this was selling a, I think it was at the time of 25 or$30 ,000 mastermind membership. And he said, I said, oh, man, that's, that's tough. And he said, how'd you do? And I said, he said, how many did you get? I said, 19. And he was like, what the hell? Which is more than one if you're keeping score at home. How the hell did you get 19? I didn't even get to talk to that many people.

14:16And I said, well, what were you saying to him? I said, all right, hey, let's sit down. Tell me about your business. Tell me what are the biggest challenges you have? How can we help you to get past those? And then kind of consult with them into that. And then at the end, I would say, I would love to have you in the mastermind. This is the kind of stuff that we do, which is certainly a legitimate, that's a consultative sale, right? And he said, what did you do? And I said, I said, so is this something that you already know you want to do? And if they said yes, I was like, okay, here's where we can take your payment.

14:51And because so many of the people already knew that they wanted to do this, right? This is the theme around what Ryan said, what I said, we're doing on the front of our challenges as well and at that live event. So this applies everywhere is the only thing, this is what I learned from both Gary Halbert and John Carlton in, in separate conversations was that, look, if somebody already decided they want to do business with you by talking to them and giving them more information, you can only talk them out of it. they're literally there with their wallet with their hand on their wallet ready to do a deal with you and then you're like wait wait wait wait don't act now let me give you a lot of extra information you know well now i can only screw up the sale and so all of this is just about you know hey if you already are interested in having us help you with this or want to find out more about that right now, then here's how you do that.

15:53It gives them another path to go. And it's important because I know for you, Ryan, and I know for me and most of the people that we know, none of us is going to ever sit through a challenge anymore, even though we want to, even though we're interested, even though we plan to, even though we ask our people to record it for us so we can watch it on triple speed later, we're literally never going to do it, which means we're never going going to hear the offer. But what I can tell you is that we're very frequently, if we could have a conversation with you and understand that what you've got is so cool that we want it, we will on the spot make a decision to do it.

16:29And I think successful entrepreneurs do operate that way because time is their most precious asset. So if I can have a comment, if Ryan's trying to sell me something and I go on this thing that I hope I'm going to watch, I really mean to, I want to, this time I'm going to make it through, but I'm not. Uh, and the very first thing he says is, Hey, this is what we're doing. Uh, but if this is something that you might be interested in, then you can just talk to us. I mean, like, Oh, thank God I'm going to call him. I'm going to talk to him and I'm going to probably buy it. I did it as recently as this morning.

16:59Right. So that that's the thing to take from all three of those stories. I think that could be very, very helpful to you guys. So totally agree. That's kind of a, kind of a shared one. Let me, throw another thing on there. Let's talk for a minute about book funnels. When we think about book funnels, I want to talk about it in a couple different ways. First, I think books are one of the best ways that you can lead gen that was ever invented. And so we're very, very big on that. One of the biggest challenges that you might find is that you can't get yourself to write a book. I know that's something that both for Ryan and I had been a challenge throughout the years.

17:47Despite getting through a couple of them, it was just a slog and a pain to do it. Speak for yourself. And so I want to give you guys a couple of strategies. Since he's flashing books, I can flash books too. But how did you go about getting that book? You want to be on YouTube so you can see the, uh, uh, you can see us yet flashing books. That's the only reason to be. How did, how did you get that book written, Ryan? I, that book, I wrote the fricking thing and it took about one 42. It took about 42 years. Okay. All right. Right. So it was a slog, right? It took a lot of work and there are all kinds of strategies like, you know, Hey, uh, have somebody interview you and ask you 15 questions that are generally the 15 things that you want to talk about in the chapter, you can go and do that.

18:40But I have never found that to be effective either. We've even hired services that we owned part of the company to write books for us that the books never got written. So if you are one of these book writing challenged people, as we are, one thing that was very, very effective was for me to get this book written, which I'm book flexing now. There we go. This book is called Zero Down, and it's in the neighborhood of 120 to 150 pages. And I didn't write it, but I didn't have it ghostwritten either. What I did was I took the challenge that I created for that particular thing, which is how to buy businesses with little or no money out of pocket.

19:27And I sent it off to an editor and said, well, I took the recorded challenge, which was about five days long at the time. We had it transcribed, sent it to rev.com to have it transcribed. You don't have to do that anymore. You can load it into Descript and it'll do it in a second for you. Then we had, we sent it to an editor who we said, turn this into a book and they turned it into a book. And so I never had to write that book. I had already vocalized it in this challenge. So if you've got any kind of content or even a series of videos or a training or a fulfillment or a course or anything like that, then you already really have everything that you need to get a book done super fast.

20:11And it's not perfect, yet we've sold thousands and thousands and thousands of copies of it and it consistently generates leads and significant revenue for us. So that's one way to do it. The next way that you could do it is this book is called from, let me get it in the right spot, is called From Wrenches to Riches. Wrenches to Riches, The Ultimate Guide to Building a Thriving HVAC Business. I don't know anything about HVAC businesses, so I didn't put my name on it. I put Epic Network on it because that's our company. But I wanted to use the book to get leads for HVAC companies that we would buy.

20:51And so that book was written entirely by my assistant and chat GPT. We then created an Amazon listing for it. We then put it on Kindle. We had the paperback, which is now a print on demand. And then we took the text of the book and loaded it into 11 Labs, which had a voice clone of me, and it has one of Ryan now as well. And then I had the narration of the book, rather than me having to read it for four hours, put into an audio book. So now you can buy all three versions of that. And both of those are ways that if you want to create your book super, super fast, you can definitely do that. And that's strictly through chat GPT and, uh, and 11 labs for that book strictly through transcription of your course, your challenge, your webinar, whatever for the other book.

21:44But if you're trying to get something done fast, that's a great way to do it. Now I want to jump to saying why you want to do that. Why you want to do that is because you will find that your book can lead directly to high ticket sales. And so for this, uh, this book that I mentioned that I took and had transcribed from the challenge, it is imperfect. It is now being rewritten. Uh, and I'm, I'm updating it. And by the way, editing is so much easier than creating from scratch. Uh, but I'm adding all the cool stuff that I have developed over the last couple of years, since I wrote that one. And it's going to come out, you know, as a new book.

22:24But I'll give you two examples. In March, just a few months ago, we had somebody that came in through the book funnel. So these are ads on either YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok typically. The ad is to get somebody to buy the book. The book, when they buy it, is$7.95. There's a million ways to do it. That's just how we choose to do it here. and they buy the book and then they're offered an upsell for$37. And then they're offered another upsell for$97. So in March, we had somebody that came in and this is fairly typical. It's not like everybody, but it is not atypical, let's say. Somebody came in, they bought the book for$7.95, they bought the$37 thing and they bought the$97 thing all in one series of transactions on March 10th.

23:17Two weeks later, on March 24th, they paid$35 ,000 to join one of our high-ticket masterminds. So that's straight from a book into a high-end mastermind. Then two months later, in May, another person bought the$7.95 book. They bought the two upsells. And seven days later, Seven days later, they paid$42 ,000 to join our high-end mastermind. So going from your book straight to this high-ticket offer, flipping the funnel, which is something that I'd love for you to talk a little bit about, Ryan, that is something that we've found to be very, very effective. So get your book written. There's a couple of different ways we told you to do that really, really quickly.

24:04It doesn't have to take you 42 years to do it. then put your book in a funnel and let your offer that they get after they buy the book, let your first offer be the highest ticket thing that you have to offer because they might just be interested in that. And if you don't tell them about that, if instead you say, oh, well, here's my$197 or$495,$995 thing, then they're going to buy that. And they're not going to buy the other thing, at least maybe not right now. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. Maybe they'll scratch the itch completely and they're good. Maybe they'll get distracted like most people do and never do anything else because they didn't make a significant enough investment to have to get vested in being successful.

24:49So you might be actually doing them a disservice by not having that. But I wanted to share that with you because that's, again, a super, super effective thing. and it generates leads for us for free effectively because they're paying$7.95 to get the book that for people that then come into our marketing funnel and end up about 50 % of the people that come in end up buying something else that is significantly higher ticket down the road. So do you wanna comment on that and or share anything about the funnel flipping? So in terms of flip the funnel, we actually did an episode on that. I think we should link up to the episode.

25:27Maybe Ryan can figure out which episode it was earlier this year. We did an episode and it was one of our most downloaded. So I think it's worth linking up to again because I explained it in great depth. I think I'll do a poor job if I attempt to do it here again. What I will say, and I think what a broader theme that you're hearing is, I learned this from Dean Jackson. In any market, three to 5 % are ready to buy right now. Some percentage will never buy. Call it 10%. And the rest, they're in the later category. Yeah. Right. They will buy later at some point. So much of marketing, so much of growth, so much of business today is figuring out how do you get the now people to raise their hand and self-identify.

26:12And so both of the, you know, the strategy we talked about, they both accomplish that. If you're a now person, give them an opportunity to raise their hand, you know, pull them aside, sell them now. And what do you do about the later people? The later people, we obviously want to keep them engaged with content, like what we're doing, you know, here right now with this podcast, social posts, you know, blog, you name it. But I think that there's no better mechanism for ascending a later person to a now person than a book. And I have undervalued books. I mean, there's a reason, like, I mean, I've written a couple, but I should, for as long as I've been doing this crap, I should have a dozen books.

26:50I mean, it's stupid. I've just been so precious with it. And also just, I don't, you know, I felt like, ah, we've got some courses. We've got some lower ticket offerings. A buyer is a buyer. It's not. When someone buys a book, they are adopting an idea. And to a greater extent, they're adopting an identity. We identify with our books in ways that we don't identify with other sources of information. We put our books on display for all to see, right? And so I think there's still incredible power in a book. So if you're running a business and you don't have a book and you may be like, ah, but I don't sell consulting or information.