Throwback: Give More, Ask Less | Ep 892

0:00Welcome back to the game. Today I have a throwback for you. This episode discusses strategies for building a business without feeling bad about making asks. And so main points are how to give first and how giving first builds goodwill and brand value. And I'll translate that into more tactical stuff. How often to make asks back with actual data. So I think this kind of puts the debate at rest. And then finally, how to ask when you know that that's what you need to do. So you want to make money online, but you don't want to feel icky or sleazy to the people who know and love you when you ask them to give you money.

0:31So there's a good way to do it. And there's a bad way to do it. The good news is I can show you step by step how I got my first 20 clients posting on social media for my personal training business a decade ago, and how I've continued to use that in each company going forward, how you can build brand and goodwill at the same time. And this is a sneak preview from my upcoming book, $100 million leads, which you can check out at acquisition.com forward slash leads. So there was a friend of mine, a while back, who had a podcast that blew up like early days podcasts, like it skyrocketed. And very quickly, he had millions of downloads.

1:06And his business started to grow a lot and it was almost 100 % from people who were listening to his podcast. And so he realized he made an ask during one of his podcasts, he made a lot of money. And what happened was he learned the wrong lesson. He thought when I make an ask, I make more money. And so what I'll do is I'll just make more asks. And so he did make more asks and he then made a little bit more money and then he continued to make less and less and less until eventually his listenership dropped and dropped and dropped. And so then it got to the point where he didn't even feel like making them anymore, right?

1:37Because it wasn't worth it because he had lost the goodwill of his audience. And so the key point I'm going to talk about today is mastering the give to ask ratio. Now you obviously have to have an audience, which I talk about at length in$100 leads and other content that I make. So I'm not going to get into that part. I'm just going to talk about mastering how much to give versus how much to ask. Gary V popularized the whole concept, jab, jab, jab, right hook, right? Which is the idea of giving, giving, giving, and then asking, right? Not take, but ask. The good news is that this ratio has been incredibly well studied.

2:11Why? Because the biggest media companies in the world want to be able to ask on their platforms as much as humanly possible without losing viewership, listenership, audience. On television, for every 47 minutes of content, there's 13 minutes of advertising, all right? So you think about that as it's almost like a three to one ratio between how many ads three and a half to one between how many ads there are and how much content there is if you look on facebook facebook it's every four posts there's one ad right so four and then one four and then one what i want to do is give you my slight tweak on the give give give ask concept instead of give give give ask i'd like to just change it to give until they ask you.

2:57You can just consistently give and give and give. And then only when someone reaches out to you to say, hey, how can I find out more? How can I work more closely with you? How can you do this? Can you help me out, et cetera? Only then do you sell. And my personal preference here is actually to give in public and sell in private. Whenever you give, you deposit goodwill into the audience, right? And it basically precedes reciprocity because from a persuasion perspective, if you give someone something first, they're far more likely to comply with your request later. And so the idea is that you force people to get favors from you at scale by providing good stuff that builds goodwill that later when you do make an ask, many people feel obligated just through social construct to comply.

3:40When someone helps us, we feel indebted to them and we want to help them back. That's how society works. But with media, we can do that at scale. You can gain goodwill and provide value to millions of people at once, but then it all funnels back to one person. And that's why it's so powerful. And it's free. When you do it that way, your brand consistently is reinforced publicly and you continue to grow and expand. It will force you to keep that content amazing so that you continue to reinforce your reputation. Hey, real quick, guys. Are you a business owner or you want to start a business? Well, the first thing that any business owner needs is someone to sell their stuff to.

4:14And I spent the last decade getting proficient at advertising to the point that right now I have a 36 to one return on advertising, meaning for every dollar I put in, I get$36 back. And I spent two years and 2000 hours writing 19 drafts of my next book, $100 million leads, where I share everything that I've learned for you for free. And if that sounds at all interesting, go to acquisition.com forward slash leads to register for the event. It's absolutely free. Everyone's invited. It's virtual. I'll see you there. If you consistently give and give and give, then what happens is your audience compounds.

4:46And this was something that I didn't understand for a long time was that the audience is the asset, not the content you make. So when I make a video and then it disappears in three days on my newsfeed, what that one piece of content is, is it got me 300 more people to start seeing my stuff. And then they permanently enter the audience provided I don't ask too much too frequently. In the beginning, it'll be really small. And if you can hold off and you keep giving, you keep giving, you keep giving, you eventually never even have to ask publicly because instead of asking, you just start getting.

5:15Transparently, this is something that I've now personally experienced. And I was like, I don't know, but you know what? I'll give it a shot. Let's just see if I can make a bunch of business content and see if that will attract 1 million, 5 million, $10 million profit per year businesses, not revenue, profit, so that I can invest in them and help them grow. And it turns out it did. Now, there's two ways that asks work in content. And so I want you to think of your asks as commercials. You're interrupting your own content with a commercial about your stuff. An integrated approach would be like during the content, I'm like, hey, if you wanna learn more about this stuff, got$100 million leads and you can go check it out.

5:47It's as cheap as I can put it on Amazon with them still considering it a book, which I think is$1.99 because it's so much thicker than my first book, they wouldn't let me put it at 99 cents. There's too many images inside of it. So that would be an example of an integration. It's natural, it comes up as you're talking and then you can point to it and you get back to what you're saying. Integrations work better for long form content, PDFs, books, videos, podcasts, blog posts. Those are all things that lend themselves to integrating in very small percentages of the total amount of time it takes someone to consume something.

6:15For example, if I made an integration and I started with a minute about something valuable, and then I spend five minutes in the middle talking about my thing, and then I spend two minutes on the end, you still need to keep the ratio of minimum three to one. Because remember, television's 13 minutes to 47, right? For a 60 minute slot in terms of commercials. So that's the max. And so for me, I would rather be at like 98 % give, 2 % ask. The other way is intermittent, which means in between things. Intermittent is typically better for short form platforms. If you have 10 Instagram posts or 10 TikTok reels, on the 11th one, you make one that's a little bit more about your credit repair services that you offer, or your national lawn care franchise that you have franchise opportunities for people to buy into, right?

6:59Whatever it is. And then you go right back to the pre-programmed show. It's even harder because if you're doing multiple posts a day, I wouldn't do more than 3%. So once or twice a month, one post. That feels reasonable and you're not gonna lose audience. And so fundamentally, the actual cost of the commercial is not money, but goodwill. How much of my audience am I losing by making this ask? I, though, to be clear, I always wanna under-ask my audience personally. So if you're new to making content, now, hopefully, you've been using social media. If you haven't been using social media, then what I say, what I'm about to say doesn't apply.

7:34but if you've been using it like a person, so like you post on Instagram, like when you go out with the boys or whatever, like you use it like a user might use it, right? Believe it or not, you've actually been providing value to certain people for an extended period of time. And so you actually do have a decent amount of goodwill. And I wouldn't normally say this, but I think there's some element that I can appreciate of if you took an action and you get immediately reinforced for taking it, then you'll believe that this could actually work for you. If you make your first post, what I would just call like a declaration of business, which is just saying like, hey, you know, you guys have maybe been following me for a while.

8:05You might know me, you might not from personal, from college, from work, from out of the bars. This is what I'm doing with my life now. And I would love to give you guys something for free that would benefit you. And if that sounds cool, awesome. If not, keep following me, be posting more about this stuff. Very quick, very simple. And I was actually able to find my first public decoration of business. This is April 9th. I'm actually coming up on 10 years. I took my decade in business. How about that shit? For those of you who know me, you know, two things. One, I am terrible with all things technological.

8:31Still true. For example, I just heard about Spotify a few weeks ago. Seriously. Two, I love training slash nutrition and fitness more than well a whole lot. So today is sort of special because it marks a day when my love of training vanquished, see me trying to use fancy words, vanquished my fear of technology. What do I mean? For the better part of a year, I've been taking part in a free personal training project that I would give away free personal training to anyone who's willing to give$500 to$1 ,000 to a cause of their choice. Give value for an extended period of time for a small group of people to prove that you know what you're doing so you can get testimonials, by the way.

9:00This way, they wouldn't have to be motivated by the same thing as me, but be motivated to give to their cause and benefit themselves. When I first introduced the idea, I was happily surprised the amount of positive support I received. So almost a year from my first client, I now have a website to formally show some of the transformation that have gone underway using my programming and as a formal means of contacting me about signing up. I currently have a few slots open on my roster, so drop me a quick note if you're interested. Thanks so much. Take a second to check out some of these ridiculous transformations in record time.

9:29Would I make this post again today? Probably not. But I'm proud of the kid who did it because I had given value for free to people, free because they didn't pay me. I had them pay someone else because I wanted them to value it. But making that first declaration of business post was actually how I got my first 20 paying customers. I got 20 people who messaged me because to be fair, I had always been in shape and people had known me my whole life as a guy who was always obsessed with fitness. So it made sense that I would make that my next natural thing. And so you've provided value to people for a long period of time.

9:57you can make your first post a light ask which is just declaration and asking for support and then you can start the business. Now if you have no content up to that point show them what you've been up to and then you can make your ask. I would encourage you to make that first post because I think it'll show you it's possible and I think if I can get you that first win you'll be far more likely to continue. And if you're wondering well at what point do I fully right hook my audience and just drain it of goodwill? Real talk part of the game is quote leaving money on the table. So let me give you an example.

10:25Friend of a friend had a tequila business that was pretty big. Big enough that The Rock approached him, Dwayne Johnson. And The Rock said, I would like two thirds of your business. And mind you, when he did that, that might have been a big ask. I don't know. They said no. Now, fast forward years later, The Rock started his own tequila brand, which is now worth six billion. So they probably would have made out really well with that. But here's the thing. If The Rock had done that deal at that time, he might have actually lost out on what he ultimately made with Terra Mana. And so that means if someone says, hey, Alex, can you endorse my thing?

11:01If I say yes today, it's probably going to be a bad deal for me because in two years, my audience would be significantly larger. And so will yours. When you're thinking about these right hooks, there's a huge time component. And the thing is, is that compounding gets crazy near the end. Every time you decide to make the right hook, if you hold it, it could be 10 or 100 times bigger 12 months, 24 months later. Could you imagine if two years ago when I started making content and I just started getting early engagement, my YouTube videos and Instagram and people started DMing me. They're like, hey, can you mentor me?

11:30Which I don't do. If I had said, sure, I'm going to do it. I would have stopped my growth curve and I would have just been just another dude. But by holding back and it takes a lot of self-discipline, self-control and patience, which by the way, if you want the definition for me, operationalizing patience is just figuring out what you do in the meantime. You don't actually wait. You just figure out what you do in the meantime. Because I am in the game of making money, my goal is to always have significantly less supply than I have demand. And I always want to keep that demand because that is the holy grail of what you want, which is far more people who want to do business with you than you have capacity to do so.

12:05The strongest driver of pricing power and profits is supply and demand. When we make content, what we're actually doing is artificially shifting the demand curve in our favor. And the other side of this is that if you are the business owner, you control supply. And so you can inflate your demand in terms of the amount of people who want to work with you or buy from you, and at the same time, cut your supply. And when you have that happen, price goes through the roof. And so do your profits. And so for me, I'm all about growing as fast as I possibly can, which means you got to give as much as you possibly can.

12:35Just keep giving and people will start coming to you. You'll start not even having to ask, you'll just start getting. And if you're going to ask, because you need to put food on the table, which I understand, then make sure for me, I would be way more than the three to one ratio, more like 10 times that would be like a 30 to one ratio of giving to asking. So I keep maximizing my growth and keep my brand compounding while still making a little bit of money for me because I know that long term, the more I hold back my ask, the bigger it will be. If you just liked that episode, then you are going to love the free virtual event that I have for my next book,$100 million leads.

13:08And before you click away, listen to what I'm about to say. Fast forward three months from now, Your friend is using something that you didn't have access to and their business is growing. Another person posts about how grateful they are that they went to the event because they're using these skills that they learned from the free thing that I'm going to give to only people who are there alive. And to give you some context, we have the tech now that we are going to scrape every single person who is at the event. And they will be the only ones who gain access to a project that I've been working on for four years.

13:38which means that every person who is not on the link live is not going to get it. And I'm doing that because I know I'm going to piss off 99 % of people who are not there. And it's because the next time I say, I'm going to give away something, it's going to be awesome. You're going to want to be there. I want people to believe me. And if you haven't taken action on it yet, go to acquisition.com forward slash leads. I'll see you there.

14:05real quick guys i have a special special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast leila and i spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap it's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business so you've got marketing you've got sales you've got product you got customer success you've got it you've You've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages.

14:40Once you enter the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap. R-O-A-D map. Roadmap.