How One Conversation Led to 70 Million Dollars Online with Tanner Chidester

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Science of Scaling. Today, we'll be breaking down how one conversation led to$70 million online. To drop these value bombs, I brought Tanner Chidister and EO Fire Studios, founder and owner of Elite CEOs. Tanner has generated over$70 million online. He's on a mission to help as many people replicate the same levels of success and become their best selves. We'll talk about starting a business with no cash,$20 million of ad spend in a short period of time, how we did it, cold direct messaging, having a team to do conversion conversations for you, and so much more.

0:51And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Tanner and our sponsors. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work. A recent episode on whether vulnerability is a superpower and business is a must listen. Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Tanner, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:27I believe that you're in full control of everything that happens to you. And so some people will disagree that obviously you can't control, you know, where you're born and who your parents are and maybe the situation you're in. But I choose not to let that affect my outcomes because it's not a helpful thought. So I'm not saying that those things can't affect you, but I choose to believe that I'm in 100 % control of my situation and the outcome. And, you know, obviously a lot of people will disagree with that. Well, Fire Nation, I think your interest should be peaked because we're talking about how just one conversation led to$70 million online and growing, of course.

2:06But Tanner, let's be honest because there's a decent segment of my audience that simply does not have disposable income at this moment for one reason or another. So let's start with the best way to start a business with no cash. I just want to tell you exactly what I did. So my expertise was in fitness. I'd been a division one athlete, worked out my whole life. Typically, I'd recommend someone starts in health wealth relationships because, you know, 99 % of people on earth, they want more in those areas. So I started as an online fitness coach. And really, I just started with kind of the low hanging fruit.

2:44So comments, likes, followers on my social media, specifically IG. I pushed a few people to calls and then once I got them on calls I started to close and so obviously there's a lot that goes into that I'm happy to delve into that John but that's really the only process it was and then I would sell it for a high ticket price so instead of selling something maybe for 50 bucks I'd sell it for three grand for four months and then what happened was I quickly replaced my nine-to-five income and I was able to scale the company very quickly because you know when you're selling a high price you have a lot of margin so you You can hire, you can train, you can run ads.

3:19But that's really what I did to start. And then I accelerated that with paid traffic after I got those first initial sales. Now, we have a lot to cover today. So don't go into super detail. But what were some of those big first conversations you had? What did they look like? What were those first couple closes? How did that sound? So when I first reached out, most people who were following me, I could just say something as simple as, hey, thanks for following me. What are your fitness goals? goals and then we walk through that conversation where then I'd say hey you know I don't know if you care or not but I've been doing this fitness stuff you know for x amount of years I'm down to give you some advice if you'd like some and then they get on a 10-minute call which was basically a triage call so for anyone doesn't know it's kind of like a intro call and then I'd set a sales call and then on the sales call the biggest thing I would do John is I would get them to understand that I was different than every other trainer and the biggest way to do that is you think about what people want.

4:14And everyone, you know, and this was in fitness, obviously I've progressed, but in fitness specifically, I'll just give that example. People want to eat bad food, still look good, and they don't want to move and they still want to look good. And so what I would do is I came as close to that promise as I could ethically while still, like I said, being ethical. And that's what made the difference. And I was able to make millions of dollars that way. Fire Nation, I want you to understand that if you just repeat and parrot what everybody else is already saying online, you're just a pale, weak imitation of other people.

4:44And nobody wants a pale, weak imitation of something they've already seen before. You're going to bled into the crowd. Your message is going to just completely go unheard because they've just heard it so many times. So what is the one thing? Maybe two things. If you're lucky, maybe you develop into three things that really set you apart, really make you unique. Maybe it's polarizing. Maybe it's controversial, that's okay because you're going to only have to resonate with a certain number of people when you're talking about these high ticket offers. Now, cold direct messaging is really scary for a lot of people, Tanner, and it's actually ineffective when it's not done correctly.

5:25So let's talk about a good strategy that you would recommend when it comes to cold DMs. I'll stick with fitness just the whole way through just so it's simple for people to understand. And what I did is I looked for hashtags on Instagram. I did Instagram hashtags versus Facebook groups, John, because Facebook groups get flooded, right? So I would type in fit mom, fit dad, fitspo, anything with the word fit. And then once you get there, there will be 30 million, 20 million different posts. And what I would do is I would go to the most recent post and then I would scroll as fast as I could. You know, for anyone, I wish they could see, but literally extremely fast.

6:01I'd look for an overweight individual. hold my finger stop click on their profile make sure that they were a good fit meaning they're not a beach body coach or you know something like that where they wouldn't think that they need help and then if they were good I would start sending the intro message and it was always something personable so hey you know hope this isn't weird to say your two kids are super cute I'm from a family of seven just had to give you a compliment or if it's a guy it's a dude sick for you know sick uh Corvette really awesome you know whatever it may be um And then from there, I could go into the whole script if you'd like, but I would go down and then just convince them to get on a 10 minute call and then push them to a sales call.

6:39But the biggest issue, John, that most people have is they're too slow. So I would send between probably one to two messages per minute. And a lot of people, they'll send one message every five minutes. So they say it doesn't work because they don't get enough volume. And so the biggest thing I would recommend people do is you have to be very fast. You have to know what you're looking for. If you go slow, the process won't work and it will take too long. And I can just imagine maybe a little additional copy to that Corvette guy is like, hey, nice Corvette. What if you had abs to go along with that?

7:13Because you know what? That guy's trying to lock down. So Corvette and abs probably going to get there quicker. And John, like just to follow up on that, what a lot of them would do is when they would respond, I would just go, yes, what do you do for work? And they're like, I do this. And I would say, well, does that keep you busy? And every person on earth says yes. And then once they said, are they busy? I'd say, does that make it hard to work out? Does that make it hard to eat? And that was actually my shift into the sales pitch without it coming off too pitchy. Fire Nation, this is how you do it.

7:45Now, I want to talk about ad spend because it's scary to run even$20 of ad spend. I mean, because a lot of people just feel like they're letting$20 on fire. Nobody wants to do that. but you ran$20 million of ad spend. And of course, some of that you lit on fire, but you learned some lessons. And of course, it's effective over time because you made it happen. So talk about spending$20 million in ad spends. Yeah, well, so for beginners, my advice would be first, have$2 ,000 to$3 ,000 to budget. And what I did is I did 100 bucks a day. I would do 10 ad sets, 10 bucks a piece. And the number you come up with should be your maximum lead cost.

8:22So for fitness, usually you want about five to 10 bucks a lead if it's a B2B offer. So, you know, business to business, maybe 15 to 20, maybe 25. So that's how I would start. And then I just pick different audiences and kind of scale from there. In terms of spending, you know, as high as 20 million, John, just when something's working, you just do a lot more of it. So we were at one point doing half a million a month between YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. and I don't know if there's anything more complex than the fact that once it's working and you have good cost of acquisition, the more you spend, the more you'll make.

8:57Obviously, as you spend more, you got to be careful of margins and your team and stuff like that. But, you know, people think scaling a business is really complex. It's really not. The complexity is in that the team's getting bigger, more employees, et cetera. But really all scaling means is doing the same thing in a faster rate, right? If I do a million bucks in a month versus a million bucks in the year, the only difference is how fast I did those same actions. So in all transparency, scaling was just hiring the team and then just pushing a lot more spend, bigger sales teams, more setters, stuff like that.

9:27Fire Nation, lots of great feedback here. A lot of great standing up on the shoulders of giants, learning from people who have come before us, who have tested, who have tried, who have failed, who have succeeded. Let's learn from those failures. Let's emulate those successes. And we have a lot more to talk about around this topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Starting your year off strong and accomplishing goals like increasing revenue and faster growth starts with the right selling tools. And for that, there's the all new Sales Hub from HubSpot. Sales Hub is an all-in-one platform thoughtfully built with the tools and insights you need to communicate on a personal level with every lead, prospect, and customer.

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12:04And you believe having a team to have the conversion conversations is key here. So tell us more about this. Yeah, so conversion conversations, I don't know if I would say I came up with that term, but it was a nice buzzword we used in our marketing that essentially is talking about ads to DM strategy. And what I found in my company and a lot of my clients is that by doing that personable one-to-one messaging, you're not only able to bring up more doubt and more certainty in that the fact that they need help, but it also makes you different than everyone else in the marketplace trying to run automatic webinars and you know automated vsls and stuff like that so at scale obviously for beginners you could start this yourself but at scale we will have two peoples in the inbox at the same time so one will be starting messages one's responding um and we just have you know six hour shifts so usually have someone comes on for six hours to hop off someone else goes on for six hours and all it is in short is we have a script right?

13:06And we have certain things to do, but they're going in there and having a personalized conversation, really figuring out what their goals are, what they're struggling with, what they've tried, have they had a coach? And when you do that, it just goes so much farther with leads. And I think that's been a big reason for our success and a lot of success of our clients. At what point do you jump on an actual video call? Does that ever happen at this point? I mean, does it have to be a certain level of high ticket? Like what does that process look like? That's such a great question. I would usually say yes, it needs to be at least$1 ,500 or more.

13:38When you're selling a$47 product or$100 product, you can't afford to hop on a phone call to close that. And so for most people, that's why high ticket is actually easier. Because once you're on a phone call, it's much easier to close at, let's say,$1 ,500 or$3 ,000 than it is to sell a$47 product through a DM. And a lot of people don't believe that, but it actually is true. And so you do need to have a high enough price point. If it's too low, it doesn't make sense. And that's also why I'm a big proponent of high ticket for beginners, because they need the cash to be able to get out of their situation.

14:11And the only way to get that cash quickly in a reasonable amount of time is you get one or two clients who pay three grand instead of get 100 clients who pay 50 bucks, for example. Now, you've figured out how to get a 27x return on IG shout outs, Instagram shout outs. So first off, talk to us about what Instagram shoutouts are and then tell us how this is possible. Sure. Well, the first thing is when you don't spend a lot, those numbers will get inflated, right? So if I do a 4x return on a million dollars in ad spend, that's 4 million. But if I do 10 ,000 and I do 270, that's 27x. So just for all the audience, just understand that's what happened for us.

14:53One month we did 10 ,000 and we did 270 ,000. And really, all it comes down to is the quality of the pages. And so when you're not spending a lot, what happens is, one, if you have good pages. So pages meaning if I'm a fitness coach, right? I want to go to pages that might be workout tips or healthy eating plans or whatever. And what you do is you pay them a small fee. And in return, they will post you and tag you and drive traffic to your page. And then you can go in and engage with the new followers, likes and comments. and it's a lot easier at a lower level of spend because you don't get so much trash.

15:29Trash meaning when you do shout outs, you can get bots or you can get spam or you can get people who aren't really targeted. But if you spend a good amount of money and it's good pages, you can really optimize that spend and make a lot of money. So if you're selling a$10 ,000 program and let's say you spent$10 ,000 on shout outs, typically if you do a good job, you're getting a new follower for every 50 cents to a dollar. So when you get that amount of leads, you get 10 times the amount of leads you might get with Facebook ads or Instagram ads. It's a lot easier to get those crazy ROIs. Tanner, I want to hand you the mic.

16:04The conversation today has been about one conversation that led to$70 million and growing online. So what is really the big theme, the big takeaway that you really want to make sure our listeners get from our conversation today? I think the biggest thing is not to avoid the hard work. I spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs, John, that they're constantly trying to automate things and hire it out to VAs. And, you know, they're all in the attempts of avoiding the work. And at the end of the day, if you want to grow a business, you need cash. How do you get cash? You need sales. How do you get sales?

16:43You need leads. How do you get leads? You either message cold, right? Which is the I know it's terrible. I know it sucks. but you either do that or you spend money on ads and people they don't want to learn as they don't want to learn messaging they don't want to learn sales calls and so my message really is don't avoid the hard work there's no getting around it a lot of times the work is very clear and it's actually not that complex it's just hard and so if there's any advice I could give over the last six years or like what I want my message from this podcast to be is not to avoid that hard work because the longer you do that, it doesn't go away.

17:18You just kick it down the road. And Fire Nation, I just want to echo what Tanner has been saying throughout this episode, which is a different version of putting in the reps. Like he had to cold DM thousands and thousands of people to start figuring out what worked, what didn't work. You know, he had to do thousands and thousands of reps in the gym to get the body that he has to be able to show that like, hey, what I do works. Like I'm a living embodiment of what I'm preaching here. This is why it works. You know, I've had to interview over 4 ,000 entrepreneurs to get to the level that I am as an entrepreneur, as a podcaster, as a communicator, as a facilitator of conversations, put in the reps.

18:00We're all obsessed with AI and automating and scaling and leveraging. And guess what? Those things can help you in your business if and when you've put in the reps to make it happen first. So Tanner, Fire Nation wants to connect with you, wants to learn more from you. What is your call to action for our listeners today? Yeah, for anyone listening, John, I'm in a season of giving right now. And if they can just DM me at Tanner.Chittister on IG, type in the word entrepreneurs on fire. I have all kinds of free content and courses on just messaging, sales, all these things that we just discussed. And I'm super happy to give it away for free.

18:40I could go into that as not, we don't have time on this podcast, but I'm just really in a season giving, trying to help people. So that would be the best way to connect. And I'm happy to kind of share those resources. If that's some of that message. Fire Nation, take advantage of Tanner's season of giving because you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with TC and JLD today. So keep up that heat and head over to eofire.com. Type Tanner, T-A-N-N-E-R in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And of course, his Instagram is Tanner Chidester.

19:14That's C-I-D-E-S-T-E-R. So make sure you type that in correctly. Or again, we'll have a link up on the show notes page, eofire.com. Tanner, I want to say thank you, brother, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks for having me. Hey, Fire Nation. A huge thank you to our sponsors and Tanner for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals. That's B-I-G. That is why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days.

19:50And we're talking step by step. So visit thefreedomjournal.com and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work. A recent episode on whether vulnerability is a superpower in business is a must listen. Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts.