S3E21 – Bob Diamond – A roadmap to exit the rat race

Key Timecodes

• (00:55) – Show intro and background history
• (02:02) – Deeper into her background and career path
• (07:06) – The importance of a good network
• (08:11) – How he made his transition to build a passive income stream
• (17:49) – The SaaS business model
• (23:27) – Deeper into his business model
• (30:07) – Ho to create and sell valuable content
• (35:03) – Deeper into his numbers and strategy
• (37:18) – How to couple and sell multiple products that solve people’s problems
• (41:46) – A key takeaway from the guest
• (45:45) – The importance of great customer service
• (48:57) – How he elevate his customer service and sales team interaction with clients
• (51:13) – An strategy to make some extra cash
• (52:21) – The advantages of living in a low taxes economy
• (54:03) – How to get help to create a book as a product
• (59:21) – How to provide value to others and build a business from that
• (64:26) – The worst advice she ever received
• (64:47) – The best advice she ever received
• (66:29) – Guest contacts

Transcription

[00:00:03.920] – Intro

Hey, this is Sean Tepper, the host of Payback Time, an approachable and transparent podcast on business investing in finance. I like to bring our guests to hear authentic stories while giving you actionable takeaways you can use today. Let’s go. My next guest is a real estate attorney who ran his own practice, worked for a small practice, and worked for a large firm. He came to the point where he was sick of trading his time for a paycheck and realized he needed to figure out a way to create passive income. In this episode, he breaks down the roadmap on how he monetized his knowledge and started selling through infomercials, which led to selling information through the internet. He breaks down the steps on how to generate leads, create a value ladder, how much to charge, and how to build an amazing team. Now, today, he lives comfortably in Puerto Rico, enjoying the fruits of his labor. Please welcome Bob Diamond. Bob, welcome to the show.

[00:00:57.280] – Bob

Thank you so much, Sean.

[00:00:58.140] – Sean

Great to be here. Thanks for joining me. So why don’t you kick us off and tell us about your background?

[00:01:02.760] – Bob

So I’m a by trade real estate attorney. I don’t do that anymore. I gave that up quite a while ago. But I’m really more of a business owner, I think is a better way to describe me, and entrepreneur. So I’ve owned quite a few businesses, I own a nice business now. And that’s really my passion. My passion is among other things, obviously, business and finding ways that you can not trade your time for money, because as an attorney, that’s what you do, literally. And it is a terrible idea. Terrible, terrible idea. So I’ve had to unlearn quite a few things and learn to leverage other people’s times and efforts, leverage systems, and leverage opportunities so you can have a great life and still have a great abundant financial life on top of a great life with time available. So that’s who I am. It’s been a long journey. I started my first entrepreneurial activity when I was 12 years old, cutting down firewood so people could put it in their wood burning stove. Long time ago. Moved on to owning a franchise in college, paid for college with that, and then launched my entrepreneurial career later.

[00:02:00.610] – Bob

So it’s been a great journey and lots of fun.

[00:02:03.140] – Sean

Let’s put this on a timeline because we have a lot of listeners that are in a position where they have maybe a business that is a service business. They’re trading their time for a paycheck, which can be fine if they enjoy the service, but it’s not scalable, of course, as we both know. And then we do have a lot of people that are working a job. They either work for a large corporation, they want to find a way out, and they want to create passive income. So to put this on a timeline, when did you make that transition from working as an attorney to creating a business that has passive income?

[00:02:34.680] – Bob

2005 is when I really made that move. I was an attorney for 10 years at that point. I had worked as a solo, I had worked as a small firm and worked with a very large 500 lawyer firm. So I tried all the different iterations of that. I realized I didn’t want to be a lawyer when the head of the large firm, Cozen O’Conner, which at that time was 500 lawyers, was still billing 2,100 hours a year, meaning you have finding a client to bill for 2,100 of your work hours per year, which if you do the math, is over 40 hours a week. I was like, This is crazy. If that’s what the head of the firm is doing, and that’s your highest aspiration, that’s for the birds. So I bailed out and started my own thing. And at first I was buying investment real estate, putting that into production, meaning getting it and rent it out, doing some flips. That was an interesting business, not my favorite, but it was interesting. And I started doing teaching and also online marketing, and it’s been really great. I think one of the things I would say to everybody out there is that anybody can do it.

[00:03:36.760] – Bob

It is not without drama. It is definitely, from time to time, a roller coaster, but it’s doable. And the rewards are tremendous at the end of it because I don’t have a boss to answer to. I have my customers to answer to, certainly. I don’t have a boss to answer to. I don’t have face time where I just have to be there wasting my time, which I find very frustrating. I never want to do that. So this is all doable. It’s just you got to pick where you’re going to go and not be afraid to try it. And this is especially, I would say, for your people that are currently employed with the Corporation, it could be scary giving up that paycheck. And so what I’ve done with that and what I did at the time was I started in parallel. I started a side gig, side hustle and got things going, saw that I could get revenue. And then I made the leap, but not before then. I didn’t just dive off a cliff opening the swimming pool at the bottom of it. Instead, I got some traction.

[00:04:28.560] – Sean

And there are entrepreneurs that make that mistake and they lean into you only live once so you got to take this chance now. And it’s like, no, you want to do this a little more strategic. So let’s drill into that. You’re working full time now. You’re working full time for the large firm or the smaller.

[00:04:44.910] – Bob

Firm at this time? At that point, a medium firm was like 30 lawyers. It’s a medium sized good firm, but 30 lawyers.

[00:04:51.080] – Sean

I was going to say the pressure cooker wasn’t as strong, I imagine.

[00:04:55.170] – Bob

It wasn’t. But I also realized that just wasn’t what I wanted my life to be like. The pressure for billable time and trading your time for money is just not a good life plan. It’s a bad life plan. So I wanted to help. And so I started looking around and what could I do? And strangely enough, the first thing I did, well, I back in 1999, I’d written a book on buying properties at foreclosure and flipping properties. And actually, I was so new and green, I didn’t know that I wrote a book and did an infomercial. And I was so unknowledgeable that I didn’t realize my infomercial was a smashing success, which I know may seem odd to people on this thing. But in a business like that, the way it works is the infomercial is just about gathering leads. Whatever you pay on the front end, if as the infomercial producer, you can break even on what you spend. It’s what you spend on media versus what you generate in revenue. If you can break even, you just have a billion dollars thing right there. I didn’t realize that because I thought this is stupid. I spend $20,000 on TV time and I get $20,000 in sales.

[00:05:59.410] – Bob

That’s just a treadmill. Who wants to do that? And I was so not knowledgeable at the time that I didn’t realize that is the keys to the kingdom. If you have it, if you can get free leads into your business, it is the keys to the kingdom, especially if you do it at scale, which infomercials do work at scale. And it also led me to one of my big life lessons, and that is find great mentors and coaches and follow their advice. And I, at that time in my life, was not good at that. I was not good at taking advice, number one, much too much ego to do it. That’s just where I was. And I really missed out on a lot. I missed out, literally, I would say conservatively on $500 million that would have been at the end. If you took me today and my team I have today and gave me that same thing, it’d be a $500 million payday. No question. Now, the people were there. I didn’t look for them nor did I listen to people, so I didn’t even know. So one of my pieces of advice to anybody would be find people with great expertise and whatever it is you want to do and listen to them.

[00:06:58.820] – Bob

Actually listen and implement. Don’t pretend that you know and you don’t know. And that’s just me almost talking to myself.

[00:07:06.260] – Sean

You coach yourself through this every day. Remember to listen to people. I do like that. And I think we’ve all gone through those phases where I know what I’m doing. Don’t bother me, don’t get in my way, I’m doing my thing. And you realize afterwards that you wasted all this time hitting all these landmines and going in different directions and missing opportunities. It is wise to find some people out there to lead into get.

[00:07:33.980] – Bob

Their tips. That’s what they say. That old saying, your network is your net worth. I think a refinement of that or what’s under that is the people that you listen to, the people that you ask advice of and actually take are going to have a profound influence on your success in life. And that could be financial and nonfinancial, how you handle your family and your kids, your spouse, those relationships, all of it. You want to surround yourself with smart people and listen to them. Really listen to them.

[00:08:03.030] – Sean

All that wisdom. Cut years of trial and error down to weeks in some cases or days. Yes. Let’s circle back to the business transition because this is a key point as people are thinking about, how do I turn the corner? To make that it’s such a good feeling when you reach that point where you’re now generating passive income and you don’t serve anybody else with your time. I mean, of course, you can have some customers, but you’re on your own watch. It’s an incredible place to be. It is. What I’m gathering is you were doing some fix and flips while you were working as an attorney, and then you were selling infomercials as passive. What were you selling in those infomercials?

[00:08:45.010] – Bob

The infomercial is education on how to buy properties at foreclosure auctions and how to do that fix and flip process, which at that point I’d been doing… I started that in ’89, so I’ve been doing it when I did the infomercial for 10 years, just as a little side hustle, just as strictly a side hustle.

[00:09:00.410] – Sean

So you were pushing DVDs alongside Denice Richards in her health and fitness apps?

[00:09:08.700] – Bob

Yeah, but no one would want to see me in a bathing suit.

[00:09:12.010] – Sean

I’m thinking of all the late 80s and 90s infomercials of these DVD products, but hey, they were legitimate ways to make money.

[00:09:21.260] – Bob

That had the reach. It had the reach. And just because it’s on TV doesn’t mean it’s junk. It might be. As seen on TV, you see those somebody’s gun store. As seen on TV, I’m like, Okay, this is almost guaranteed to be junk.

[00:09:34.910] – Sean

But.

[00:09:36.280] – Bob

It doesn’t mean it has.

[00:09:37.380] – Sean

To be. Don’t just buy one. You get two right now. Yes, it’s just so cheesy. I think of Talladega Knights, the Jackknife 3000 or whatever Will Ferrell holds up at the end of the video. That right there, that’s the epitome of infomercial. Sorry, I’m just cheesy.

[00:09:52.330] – Bob

Yeah, it’s no question. But that’s that market. Back then, that was the way to reach a lot of people very quickly and easily. And that was the way. Youtube is another example of that today. It’s like a modern version of that, YouTube or any TikTok, whatever, all those things. Podcast. It’s all that visual medium. But anyway, actually, here’s each other’s the first, I would say, failure in an entrepreneurial journey. M y infomercial failed because I didn’t know what I had, which is interesting. I was so uneducated, I didn’t know what I had, didn’t know I had a success. So I shelled that, was working as a lawyer. But of course, the bug is still going in there. I think for all of us entrepreneurs, you always have the bug. It’s always in there. In 2005, I was like, all right, it’s time to do something, get out of this place and head out. I had an opportunity to essentially buy a radio show. T here was a guy in the Philadelphia market where I was at the time who had had a radio show for decades, at least 20 or 30 years. And he was retiring.

[00:10:52.710] – Bob

He was just at the end of his thing. I got the opportunity to essentially buy that time. This is a Saturday morning talk show. People may not know this, but people paid for that time. Mine was about $1,800 an hour. And so at the time, my wife was a realtor. I was a real estate attorney. So I thought this guy’s thing was about real estate and estate. So I thought, all right, I can just take over this radio show as a built in audience, and I’ll be able to serve them as an attorney. That’ll keep the lights on. I’ll be able to get my wife business as a realtor, and this will work out. So I committed to this, essentially $100,000 for the year, $1800 times 52 episodes, about 100 grand, which was a scary step, honestly. I actually took a home equity line out of the house to do that. So pretty scary step. And three months in, it wasn’t working. But I was committed for a year. Nothing was happening. No customers, no income to my wife, no income from anything. I’m like, oh, what do I do? At the time, I had a full head of hair until three months later, then all my hair fell out.

[00:11:51.800] – Bob

Just kidding, it really didn’t. But so I had to adjust. Is that what we do as entrepreneurs? We adjust because you shouldn’t expect that your first thing is going to work in its first iteration. But I thought, all right, what could I do? And so those guys used to come through with real estate seminars and be like, oh, meet us at the Hilton on City Line Avenue, Tuesday. And so I just said, I’ll just do that because I got my radio show. So I just said on the radio show, hey, if you want to learn about buying foreclosures and flipping properties, come down after the show to the Hilton on City Line Avenue, literally. And I did something smart, which is I made them do a $29 seat deposit because otherwise, I have no idea who’s going to show up. So just a nominal amount. And so I went after the radio show just Saturday morning, I drove over to this Hilton on City Line Avenue. I had 33 people in the room and they came and I sold a weekend seminar three days with me for a weekend seminar for $1,200 a piece. And so all of a sudden, the ballroom wasn’t much to rent, a couple of hundred dollars.

[00:12:52.430] – Bob

I don’t remember the exact number at this point, but a couple of hundred bucks. So anyway, I made thousands and I thought, okay, here’s a workable start to a business model. And then I did the three day seminar, which is no problem for somebody I’ve been doing at that point for 15 years, which was buying properties, fixing them up and either renting them or flipping them. I could talk to you for a week about that. So I did my three day seminar and then from there, I sold people into a Mastermind. Really simple, 500 bucks a month. We meet once a month. If you want any help with something, you can call me. And as a bonus we’ll go down and see a couple of auctions. You can come with me to the auction and I’m going to buy things. You want to buy something, feel free, I’ll help you out with it. And I got 18 people ultimately that took me up on that. So all of a sudden I had 500 bucks a month times 18 people, which is like $9,000 a month, which at that time almost replaced what I was making as an attorney for the firm, like 100 grand a year.

[00:13:42.030] – Bob

So I was like, That is so cool. And I finally was getting a catch of it. And then I finally started becoming coachable, finally, because the advice to do things like offer a Mastermind and all had come from people. And I finally thought, you know what? I am not the smartest guy in the room, and I need to just listen more. And I think it’s a hazard of people to consider themselves smart. I think it’s a hazard that you just feel like you need to pretend you’re smart. You need to talk too much. You need to show people how smart you are. And it really limits your growth because.

[00:14:12.460] – Sean

You.

[00:14:13.770] – Bob

Can’t grow if you’re just talking to yourself, basically, or just saying the same thing as you say to everybody else, just so they’ll hopefully admire you. It’s a terrible thing. But anyway, if you go back over the years, that was 2005, I essentially launched being really in the educational side as well as doing the business. And at this point, we have a team of 40 people. I have a big real estate portfolio, but my days are spent in something a little bit different, which is helping people who’ve lost a house at foreclosure sale get refunded back part of the money that their house sold for. And it’s pretty simple. If your house sells for more than the debt, then as the former owner, you’re generally entitled to that money. You think about it, say that you owed $100,000 in your house, it gets foreclosed, it sells for $200,000. Who should get the extra $100,000? Sold for $200,000? You only owed your mortgage company $100,000. So it’s equity. Your financial bills, it’s equity. And the same thing with tax sales. Your house gets sold, it sells for more than the taxes, which it virtually always will do, and you can get money back.

[00:15:17.970] – Bob

So for a contingent fee, we’ll go and do the work to get the money back for people. So reach out to them, break through their natural skepticism because they never believe that they could possibly be getting any money. Do it all in contingent fee and really help people. So I like the business because it’s more of a helping model. When I was doing the… When I buy places at mortgage foreclosure auctions, I did not want to be the guy that showed up at their house, said, Oh, you have to move because I bought your house. It just was… I didn’t have the stomach for it. And after a while, I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I thought, I got to find a new model here. And so I switched models and now I help people that have lost everything. So it’s good for me. And I think for anybody out there thinking about this, when you think about a business, you always want to think about how can it be scaled up? And most businesses can be scaled up. May not be apparent, even the attorney business. How is the attorney business scaled up?

[00:16:07.420] – Bob

Well, you got other attorneys working for you is the way you scale it up. And you get out of the delivery of the service. Instead, you manage the business instead of being the deliverer of said service. And so that can work with anything as simple as dog walking, house painting. I owned a house painting franchise at one point in my young life. I think when you think about a business, that’s a great thing to think about. I think what you do with offering software as a service is obviously one of the most easily scalable. If you can get something that hits.

[00:16:36.260] – Sean

Then.

[00:16:36.750] – Bob

It’s amazing. And those solid high multiples if you decide to sell your business.

[00:16:40.840] – Sean

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[00:17:45.370] – Sean

Again, Tykr. Com. All right, back to the show. Touch on what I’m doing here for a second. I know it’s not about me, but you’re right with SaaS. My story is somewhat similar as I had a service business in the 2000s. In agency, we built software and websites and did video for small midsize businesses. Not a lucrative business model, not a scalable business model, especially during the recession. Oh, yeah. 2010, we did grow actually because we started bringing up some bigger brands and went through a merger. There’s no paycheck. It was not like, hey, here’s a million dollars. You get to ride off to the sunset and go to Puerto Rico and live with you, Bob. But it was a great learning experience because the number of businesses I get to work with was like, I got to pitch like 400 businesses. Got to work with 100 for years. So that was the inside look at what’s scalable and what’s not. And then I knew creating a SaaS was the goal. Wanted to create it because I love Salesforce and Mailchimp and even Netflix was starting to peak, or not peak, but enter the market a little bit.

[00:18:51.480] – Sean

I’m like, Man, if I could create Netflix, that’d be amazing. No good ideas that had a wide moat. So I just went to work for corporates. And then to gain experience really is a key to learn how do these businesses really build and scale. So yeah, it took me essentially a solid 10 years to come up with an idea, execute it, get it going. But yeah, SaaS is not for the faint of heart, but it’s a ton of fun. It’s super scalable.

[00:19:18.750] – Bob

Yeah. And what’s the new customer really cost you? Probably the actual marginal cost is probably zero. Oh, yeah. I guess if you get a lot of them, you might buy some additional bandwidth or something.

[00:19:27.590] – Sean

Yeah, right. Because there’s so many different ways you can have it. Podcasts are great. Youtube is actually really hot and we’re not even advertising as of the recording this video. It’s March of 2023. We don’t do any paid ads. It’s all organic.

[00:19:42.770] – Bob

Wow.

[00:19:43.440] – Sean

Yeah. But yeah, going back to your model, a key take away, this is hot for the audience, is the transition point. You were an expert at real estate and law. I mean, you being an attorney, so you combine the two packaged up and did weekend seminars. And these days, you don’t have to do that. You can do these online seminars via Zoom, much more convenient. You put a price on that, and then you put a price on Mastermind’s fee every month. And I noticed that with… That’s something we’ll be doing here very soon with Tykr, but there’s other people that do the same thing is take the knowledge, bundle it up, offer the hands on approach to a select group. Don’t offer it to 100 people, but a higher price. You mentioned 500 bucks a month. Great starting point because it’s actually falling in line with what other guests have talked about on this podcast. But if you get 20 people, like you said, you had 19 or something. It’s like 18 at the beginning. Right. Okay, that’s solid. Okay, we’re making about close to $10,000 a month just on that revenue. I wanted.

[00:20:49.160] – Bob

To pay for my show. That was my big thing because I had the radio show eating me alive. I got to pay for the show. I was so happy. I’m like, I paid for the show. This is amazing.

[00:20:58.760] – Sean

That’s what I was thinking. I’m like, Well, he made that one mistake, but my gosh, his debt burn down strategy is coming together really quick here with his new model. So that’s really exciting. And that’s something the listeners can execute. They’re an expert on something. They can create something. They can You get Zoom, you get Teachable to house some of the content or whatever. You’re off and running pretty low cost. Now, leading up to today, you have 40 employees and you like a part of your business. I want to break down your revenue streams here, but a part of your business is helping these people out with the foreclosures. That’s not the most lucrative or the most scalable segment of your business.

[00:21:39.580] – Bob

No, it’s not. You’re right. But my thoughts on it, that is a lot of pain and suffering, that part of the business. Because you get clients that have often very poor life habits. When someone loses a house at a foreclosure sale that had an enormous amount of equity in it, they made a terrible decision. I’m sure they made many, but they made one really terrible, which was allow your house to get sold at an auction rather than just listed with a realtor and take your cash out and move on to fight another day. They didn’t do that. So we often have people that just sometimes the substance abuse problems. It’s often just ostrage or it’s not just puts his head in the sand. They stick their head in the sand. They don’t deal with problems. They live in denial. So that person needs a lot of hand holding, needs a lot of just direction, and you have to do everything for them. It’s like having a kindergartener around. So it’s fine. But I think if you’re going to teach, you cannot not do the business. You can’t teach, Oh, I’m going to teach you about overages, which is the title of what I do.

[00:22:40.790] – Bob

Oh, but I haven’t done it for five years. No, I’ve got to have the biggest overages business in the country, which I think that I do. I don’t know what everybody else has, but we have at any given time about 70 claims going. And we’ve recycled about two and a half times a year. So it’s a good number. So I can say to a student, if they’re like, Oh, do you really do this business? I’m like, yes, I’m neck deep in it. I’ve got a whole team doing that. And we’re handling 180, 200 claims a year, and we’ve been doing that for 10 years. Because I think you want to be credible. I also want to be giving people good information that’s current, not something somebody did 10 years ago. So that’s why I go through the pain and agony of actually having the business that I teach because I think it’s the way to do it. That’s all. You don’t want to do something else.

[00:23:26.990] – Sean

Just to clarify, the overage is that this foreclosure model or is that.

[00:23:31.010] – Bob

Something else? Yeah, that’s overages. Overage is the word for the money that’s left over after the foreclosure auction, whether it’s for loss of not paying your real estate taxes or not paying your mortgage. When the property is sold, as long as it sells for more than that debt, that extra money is generally available for the former owner. Got it.

[00:23:49.410] – Sean

Okay, so let’s talk about the rest of your business. Again, 40 employees, that’s a sizable business. You got a lot of payroll here. So how is this business making money?

[00:23:58.580] – Bob

So what we do is most people have a small base or no base for some of them, but they’re paid a portion of what they bring in. So, for example, we have a sales floor with three full time callers who are calling on overages leads, a sales floor manager, and then a manager above that. But those folks, they get $1,000 a week base, and then they get 7 % of company dollars, 7 % of what we get in. So $1,000 base doesn’t kill me. It’s not really a lot. Our average deal is $52,000, and we typically charge 40 %. So it’s a $20,000 payday when we manage to cash in on the claim. I’m expecting my salespeople to sign up a couple of week so they can cover that $1,000 and 7 % very easily, and I can cover the management overhead. So we’re doing that. I want to make sure I get your point. So the model. People are getting spiffed and all these… When good things happen or we have a success, a little bit goes to everybody. Salesforce manager gets a little bit. The people that got lead get a little bit.

[00:24:58.960] – Bob

The people that process the lead, meaning made the application for funds, they get a little bit. So everybody has an upside, which also means that we’re remote working, like pretty much everybody these days, I think, I got to make sure people are actually doing something and I can’t be everywhere all at once like that movie title, but I can make it so they really make money if they bring results. And if they don’t bring results and they don’t make any money, nothing significant anyway. And I think that’s the key. If you’re operating a business, especially remotely, tie a lot of your compensation to the results that you actually want. I think it’s very important because you can’t be there like a babysitter and you’re not going to everybody in one office either. So I think that’s important. So we make money with that. And then the education side, so if anybody wants to build an education business, you want to give a roadmap to what that looks like? I’d be happy to. Yeah, please.

[00:25:48.140] – Sean

Break it down for us.

[00:25:49.390] – Bob

So what you’re doing first is you do videos like YouTube or TikTok or talking about any of those, and you want to show off your expertise. Give people really high value content where you don’t say, I’m Bob Diamond, I’m an attorney. I know all about this. This is great. You can say that. But what you really want to do is say smart things where it goes, Oh, I didn’t know that. Oh, that’s really interesting. Things that they can understand and they perceive as very high value because what you say about yourself is not very powerful. But when you say things that make someone pause or think or say, Oh, that’s a really great insight, that’s powerful. So you want to really give away great value on your videos and you want to do as many of them as you can. Youtube, TikTok, whatever. And what you then want to do is give someone a very low cost or free way to start going deeper with you. So it might be right now free plus shipping books are very popular. We have a mini course, a three part mini course that tells people how to make money at a mortgage foreclosure auction and a tax foreclosure auction, buying the properties, or this third way that I talk about, which is overages, the excess money.

[00:26:54.220] – Bob

Much easier lifting, by the way, than fixing up houses, way simpler. They can get that course. It’s free, they can get it. Then they can start to learn. They learn really great things about the mortgage foreclosure auctions and the tax foreclosure auctions. I bought at those for many years. I have lots of great stuff to share, and I do. I don’t hold back. But then I’m really pushing them towards overages because I think it’s a better idea. I mean, why? You don’t have to take out a loan to get an overage. I don’t care if the property goes up or down in value because there’s just a little pile of money that I’m going to go get and it doesn’t really cost anything to do it. It’s just you’re performing that service. So I push them towards that. And then we have a $1500 course. So if they decide, yes, I really want to learn from this guy. No one knows what he’s doing. Then they can buy the course. And when they buy the course, super high quality, very complete and thorough, they’ll buy the course. And then somewhere, 3 to six months later, they’re going to receive an invitation to a live event.

[00:27:53.550] – Bob

Now, we’re somewhat dinosaurs. We actually have live events with humans, including me, that we run. They run a couple of times a year where I’m actually teaching people the same thing I teach in the course, but from the stage, four days long. T here we sell basically a consulting service. So that’s the end of that. And so some of the things, if you’re trying to translate this, what could you do? Identify, I would say, an intersection of you and your skills and qualifications and something you really know. Like you identified properly with me, Sean, I’m an attorney and I know about foreclosures. So those two things intersect and that makes me unique. That doesn’t just make me like… There’s a guy named Tommy Vue who used to sell real estate stuff. I don’t remember, years and years ago. He’d be in this little boat with like 10 women in between. I’m Tommy Vue, I come, I teach you. I don’t want to compete with Tommy Vue for how many girls in bikini is going to get on my little tiny boat. Instead, I’d be like, Yeah, I’m an attorney. I’ve been investing for years. I know how this works, and I can share it with you.

[00:28:55.670] – Bob

Let me share good stuff. So you can do it cleanly, but you want to find the intersection of who you are and this thing that you know because that makes you somewhat unique. If you can find three intersections, it’s even better. But anyway, do that. And then you want to put up some videos because that’s free advertising. You don’t have to do paid advertising, which I would very much suggest against at the beginning of your life and your business because it’s expensive and risky. Just put up some YouTube stuff and put it out there. And if you have to film it with your cell phone, just film it with your cell phone. You don’t even need a tripod. You don’t need a microphone. You don’t need a fancy camera or camera man. Hold that cell phone in front of you and give out the best content you can give. People say, Oh, that guy knows something, or that woman knows something interesting. If they want more, they’ll ask you for more. Then you want to offer them something free, ideally. Just so.

[00:29:50.450] – Sean

We’re clear, don’t buy a radio station. No.

[00:29:55.270] – Bob

Don’t take $100,000 home equity line loan. Okay. Although you can do that today in Google, I could relieve you of $100,000 in a week with Google if you did paid ads. So don’t do that.

[00:30:08.060] – Sean

No, but all seriousnessist this just to summarize this. We’re taking the same approach here with a value ladder approach, which give free content away. I have seen for years the book you can buy. It’s free plus shipping, which got to figure out how to optimize your costs on that. You’re not taking a loss or maybe it’s a slight loss leader. But then you could do PDFs. Give me your email address and get a PDF. There you go. Give that free. Then you can give them an introductory course that’s maybe a low price, maybe 100 bucks or less, I’m thinking. And then what you’re doing is you’re working them up to that. You’re building trust. That’s the key. You’re working them through the process. And then $1,500, that’s when… And now just curious here, is it the $1500 one down swing with a credit card or you break it up into three easy wins? So we’ll.

[00:30:58.000] – Bob

Let them do $1,500 or you can do three payments of $600. And I do that because I don’t want three payments because typically we’re only about a 40 % collection rate on the third payment. So just assume a third payment that you’re not going to get it a lot of the time. And we’re not sending anybody collections because then they’ll just hammer you on every social media thing they can find. So someone doesn’t pay us, honestly, I don’t do a thing. Let it go. I send a reminder to and then say, oh, well, that’s that and I’ll do anything with it. So I think that’s a good model, by the way, is make your multi pay a little more expensive and just assume that you’re probably not even going to get half of your third payment. Our average order value for a multi pay is $1,250 versus 1,500. So you get breakage on the second payment and breakage on the third payment. Still okay. It’s digital delivery. We do videos and we do PDF, so it’s digital, so it doesn’t cost me a lot. And that reminds me, I wanted to share something because when we tell someone to write a book, they’re instantly terrified.

[00:32:00.710] – Bob

So let me tell you how to write a book the really easy way. What you want to do is just make an outline number one, of whatever it is you want to talk about, break it into chapters, so spend time in the outline, and then hire a writer that you will find on Fiverr or one of the other online sites where you can find people that do things. Fiverr or Upwork is another good one. Find a writer and have them interview you one chapter at a time. Because you can talk, we can all talk much more easily than we can write, especially if we’re not professional writers. And then the writer writes up the chapter, and then you just proof it to make sure the content is correct. But leave it to the professional writer to do his or her thing. And that’s how you get a book done really easily. Our typical book is 12 chapters, about 10 pages per chapter. It’s as long as it needs to be, but that’s typical. They’re one hour interviews. Then it’s edited down. This way, you don’t have to go through the gruesome pain of trying to write it, which, frankly, you probably won’t do.

[00:32:59.890] – Bob

That’ll probably be the depth of your business right then and there. That’s a pretty painless way to get a book out. Then you can do print on demand. That’s one possibility. So print on demand, it’s probably going to cost you $10 to $15 for a print on demand shop to print a paper back. So then your free plus shipping might be an 18 dollar offer or $20 offer. Or you could, like you said, just make it a loss leader and just say, I’ll sell it for $5.95, but I know it’s going to cost me 10 bucks per order. As long as your lifetime value of your customer is higher than that, that’s fine. When I talk about that, when you’re putting a business like this together, you want to measure a couple of very important things. One is what’s your cost to get an order? So if you’re doing a paid advertisement, what’s it cost you to do that? Or maybe you’re doing a loss leader, so it costs you $10 per order because you’re not making up all your money for your book. Okay, cool. So it’s $10. And then you want to have the next thing they can go to, which is a seminar by Zoom or Mastermind or whatever it is you want to offer, consulting services, whatever.

[00:34:04.890] – Bob

You want to say, all right, how many people take me up on that next offer? And what’s the average value of that? So if you were doing… If it was a hundred dollars thing and one person out of a hundred bought it, then your average value would be a dollar. So you’d know that your next value point is a dollar additional. And obviously your numbers should be much better than that, but I just wanted to use an easy math example. So for us, I can give you some of our numbers. So we have the $1500 course. About 5 % of the people that will see our sales presentation will buy that. And then we offer the three day live event, which after you take away incentives that we give is about $1800 cost for someone to come to the event. I’m sorry, it’s four days, not three, four days. So it’s about $1,800. And about 5 % of the original buyers buy that. So if you divide $1,800, divide it by 20, that would give you that marginal value. And then we sell a consulting service after that’s a $50,000 price ticket. I was going.

[00:35:04.120] – Sean

To ask what the price is. And is that spread out over a year or do you expect a big chunk up front?

[00:35:09.200] – Bob

We expect at least half up front. We don’t take credit cards because I don’t want someone extending themselves out with money. They don’t have to buy a consulting service. I just don’t want it because people get very upset because lots of people don’t succeed in any business and mine is no different. And I don’t want someone that’s making credit card payments for the next 18 years because they bought our consulting service because I realized I can’t control other people, whether they implement, whether they’re successful. I can’t. I can give people the world’s greatest information. I could be behind them. I can encourage them, but ultimately I can’t make them successful. I just can’t. We don’t merchant that stuff. The other thing I would say to anybody who is thinking about this as a business, if you can even get a merchant services provider to do that, meaning when someone pays you by credit card, I have an account called a merchant services account that I apply for, that I personally guarantee, and that if you get returns that are more than 10 % returns or more than 1 % chargebacks, you can lose that account very easily and not be able to charge anybody for anything.

[00:36:13.910] – Bob

Those companies hate merchandising high ticket items like any coaching or consulting. They really don’t like it. I think it’s a mistake to merchant that stuff, so we don’t do any of that. Companies that do similar things that I’ve done that have gotten into trouble, they do things, it’s just unbelievable. They do things like they’ll bring people into an event, either virtual or live, and they’ll say, Hey, we’re going to teach you, Sean. We’re going to teach you how to increase your credit limits on your credit cards. T hey teach you that. They have you go call your credit card companies, increase your limits. T hey’re like, Great. Now you have $50,000 available. Oh, we have this program. Go spend it on us.

[00:36:50.890] – Sean

Yeah.

[00:36:51.580] – Bob

It’s terrible. You don’t want to do that. It’s unethical. It’s terrible. It gets you in trouble. The FTC hates you. It’s just bad news. What you actually want to do is treat people really well, like roll out the red carpet for them, over deliver on everything, and still realize everybody’s still not going to be happy. Even if you do that, and then you just have to do what you need to do to make even unreasonable but unhappy people satisfied. Just going backwards.

[00:37:17.400] – Sean

So many lessons packed in here. What I really like what you’re doing is you’re not only offering the course, but you’re offering the services as well. I’ve seen through the years and it drove me nuts is when you get these course creators and it’s usually young men in their 20s hooking some course, but they’re not providing any service and they’re just looking to make as many sales as possible. You got to have some other product or service coupled with it, really showing you got skin in the game, which you and your team do, which is amazing.

[00:37:47.960] – Bob

When you get someone always wants to ascend up to the next level of relationship. It’s like if someone sees me and they go, Oh, he has… Or say that you build your product or service. They see you and like, Oh, that’s really interesting. I want to learn if you’re in overages business, I want to learn about that overages thing. Then they learn about it. The next question people always have is, can you help me with this? Always, it’s that. It’s not everybody, it’s a percentage. Only a certain percentage can afford it. But where we go from the course, which you basically do at home by yourself, to the live event, that’s a version of, can you help me with this? Can you show me this? Because we’re talking for four days about the whole business to break the whole thing down. So that’s show them. And then a percentage of those people, for us, about 10 %, want to go to the next step and say, All right, can you guys do this with me? And essentially the consulting is that. The consulting, we’re right with them in the trenches. And it’s like that in all things.

[00:38:41.870] – Bob

That’s not just my business. That’s the way that it is. People want that.

[00:38:45.030] – Sean

I remember, gosh, going back about 10 years ago, I read that a good key take away from Frank Kern was talking about that. There’s the teach me how to do it. You’re going to get a certain amount of people that want that. T hen they’re also going to say, not only teach me, but can you do it for me? And if you offer that, that’s that another level up of quality service that a lot of people aren’t willing to go to. You’re going to trade some time, but it really shows you care and you can make a huge impact on people. Yes, because.

[00:39:17.610] – Bob

You really need that. I mean, if you think about even gyms, how many people go to the gym? Even people that actually go, which is a smaller percentage. But even the people that go, if they don’t have any guidance, they didn’t have a trainer, show them anything, a lot of times they really don’t get any results just because they don’t know how many reps to do, they don’t know what exercises to do. Maybe they’re doing the exercises wrong, looking hurt. But the person that gets a trainer, and even if you don’t use it all the time, but if you get a trainer and just say, Hey, just show me, like, lay out a program for me. I’ll go do it. That person will look great and be healthy. I think people are smart about that. I also think if you build anything like this, you’re only going to be selective about who you attract. One of the mistakes I made at the beginning, I used to have this language pattern that I wish I’d never thought of, but it was no money, no credit, no problem. So it was that you could buy properties without having your own money, without having credit, without a problem.

[00:40:09.040] – Bob

And that brought the most problematic customers to me that you’d ever have because I had this completely bad life habits, unreasonable expectations. It’s just that was not the customer I wanted. So as I grew in business and got the confidence that I can get customers, I know that I just discovered I want to attract the right customers. And that comes from your language. When I sell overages, if you ever heard my sales pitch, I’m tying two things together. This is a great business for people who really, truly want to help someone who’s down flat on their back financially. They’ve been devastated by the loss of their house and who also wants to make a lot of money for themselves and their family. But I tie those two together because that gets me the right people. It gets me people who have a good heart, who are like, Yeah, I really want to help. They’re motivated not just by selfishness, but by wanting to help. I get the nicest people. It’s a really great people who are not snively whipplashy like, Oh, I’m going to take advantage. I’m going to… Because you could do, like in the overages business, you could go to these people who have lost their house and say, Hey, Sean, I’ll give you 500 bucks if you sign these papers.

[00:41:10.740] – Bob

And really, you’re signing over your $50,000 overage, but not knowing about it, you don’t know anything about it. So I give you 500 bucks and go collect 50,000. It’s horrible. It’s horrible. It’s terrible behavior. It’ll get you in trouble. It’s just terrible. If there’s such thing as carma, you will get run over by a bus and you’re going to have to tour.

[00:41:28.350] – Sean

That’s it. That’s it. You’re going to get your butt kicked on the side of the road or something’s going to happen. Great advice here. Great wisdom really behind not only the business model, but how you’re building it. I think you provided a lot of key takeaways here. And okay, before we get to the rapid fire round, I’d like to ask you, what is one key take away you can give our audience today?

[00:41:55.640] – Bob

It’s possible. You can do this. I know it may seem like seem overwhelming. It may seem like too much, but you can do this. And if you were going to follow one person who would lay all this out, this is very old school, but it would be Dan Kennedy to me. There are lots of great guys out there, as Frank Kearns you’d mentioned, who’s great. But I think the one guy who probably has it all in one place is Dan Kennedy. He’s been at this direct marketing for decades. He’s a grumpy old man that’s earned his grumpiness. And just whatever he does, just do it. Whatever he says, just do it and you can be successful. It’s possible to bootstrap these things. It’s not about raising capital and bothering your friends and family to buy things from you. These are very bootstrappable, especially with places like YouTube where you can just put videos up. The YouTube algorithm will send them to you. There’s a good guy, a book on that called Nate Woodbury, who I think has a great book on free advertising, 250 page book. That is his free plus shipping offer, by the way.

[00:42:57.070] – Bob

But it’s really good, really great content. Just think about what is it that you know that other people could really be helped by. And that’s what your product or service is. It’s not about you pretending to be an expert in something. Okay, here’s some examples. I wanted to launch something new, and you’ll see a bunch of the stuff launching now. If you wanted to be an expert in chat, GPT and things like that, you could dive in for the next couple of months, learn everything you can, and you could sell even the most half baked thing. You do the best you could with it, but you realize it’s only going to be so good. But you could do that and you’d bring a lot of value because you have people who know nothing. What do they say in the land of the blind, a one eyed man is king. So you could do that. But I would say look at things that you’re an expert in that you really enjoy, and that is your topic or subject. Follow the Dan Kennedy stuff. And if you’re going to put out your book, which I would very much suggest, then do it by hire a writer on Upwork or Fiverr and just have them interview you, record the interviews, let them write it up.

[00:44:03.270] – Bob

And then you’ll have two things. You’ll have an audio product that you can sell or give away, and you’ll have a written product you can sell or give away. And when you want to build your course, also tell you how to do that. That’s very easy. Invite people to a three day virtual seminar and then just teach the seminar and that becomes your course because you have, again, get your friendly writer back again, take the videos. You’ve got that. The original unedited videos are awesome. But have the writer write it up into a book or a manual or course guide, whatever you want to call it. Let them do that heavy lifting because you’re going to be talking about for three days about something you’re knowledgeable about and great about, which will be easy for you. That’s how you get your product. Then over time, you refine it. The way that you refine it is when you get questions from people, think about, Oh, did I not cover that in the course or the book? Oh, great. I didn’t. Time for revision one of the course. Just put the stuff in that you didn’t include, just add it in.

[00:44:58.780] – Bob

That’s all. Add a video, add it in. The other thing I would say it’s very important, and Sean, you touched on this, you have to have customer service. That young guy you described in his 20s who just wants to sell everything. He doesn’t have customer service. He has a cell phone that he won’t answer or rarely will answer. And it’s just your reputation could be ruined by that very quickly. But at the same time, if you provide good customer service, if you have someone answering the phone and answering questions, say, Hey, let me check with Bob, I’ll get you the answer. Then you get a good reputation and those people will buy more things from you because you’re doing a good job. So customer service to me is a money maker. And it’s an upfront investment, but a big time money maker because people are like, Oh, my God. They answered the phone. This is amazing. As these days it is. Brilliant.

[00:45:45.280] – Sean

There’s so much packed in there in the key take away. I’d like to just touch on a few things. N umber one is customer service. I always tell entrepreneurs, you can have an okay product and great customer service and you’ve got something. But if you flip that equation and you’ve got a great product but horrible customer service, you’re dead in the water. And I see this with a lot of new entrepreneurs, they’re so focused on creating a great product but their customer service is terrible. You’re not going to get anywhere. And it’s only a.

[00:46:14.430] – Bob

Few companies can get away with that, like Facebook, because it’s so enormous and it’s all encompassing. They can have non existent customer service. And when their business matures, they’ll eventually get customer service when they stop just being in hyper growth mode. But for most of us, we’re nothing like Facebook. We don’t have that much demand. Yeah, you.

[00:46:33.800] – Sean

Got to get to a certain size and then you can take your foot off the gas. Customer service can be lackluster. For example, PayPal is a company I’m not giving financial advice here. They have customer service? Well, I was going to say I invest in them because they have a great business model, multiple streams revenue, but their customer service is abysmal. Yeah, I was asking if.

[00:46:51.310] – Bob

They even had any. I’m not aware that they actually had any.

[00:46:54.590] – Sean

If you’re a small business owner and you’re going to try to get on the phone with them or communicate, oh, boy, you are asking for trouble. But they are 20 years long and huge company, so they can unfortunately get away with that. But yeah, us as little people out there, if you will.

[00:47:12.350] – Bob

We’re not unicorns generally. And I think the other one I would bet you is, well, it’s just as bad, if not worse, is Google, my Lord. And Facebook, too. We actually lost an account we’d have with Facebook for, I don’t know, eight years. Someone managed to hack in, change the password, and lock us out. I don’t know why they did because it wasn’t anything to it. We were running paid ads and we couldn’t even adjust our ads. We couldn’t stop our ad spend. It took us a month to get in touch with anybody to stop billing our credit card. And I’m like, This is unbelievable. We lost the account, could never recover it. And we were spending at that point, I would say, 30,000 a week on ads. We weren’t worth enough at that an ad spend. We weren’t worth enough for them to even pick up the phone. Isn’t that something?

[00:47:55.430] – Sean

But for.

[00:47:56.000] – Bob

The rest of us, just invest in that. It’s pretty cheap and easy to do. You can use Filipino VAs. Here’s the way that I developed customer service, if you want that tip. We would have a customer service person go through our course, so that gets them a founding. When they get questions in, they send them to me. I answer the question, give them the answer. Then anytime that answer, that question comes up again, they have the answer. You do that 20, 25 times and they’ll have the vast majority of questions that will ever come in. I still get questions from time to time. It’s cool. I don’t mind that. But they build their own little knowledge database, but I make them rewrite the answer to the customer because that’s part of the memorizing thing. But that will get them so they’re knowledgeable. It takes some investment of your time to do that. The Filipino VA is like $4 an hour. And you.

[00:48:45.840] – Sean

Only have to have.

[00:48:46.630] – Bob

Customer service nine to five. You don’t have to have a 24 7. So if you think about nine to five is eight hours, that’s $32 a day for a customer service person. Right. That’s solid.

[00:48:58.130] – Sean

And I have a few people that are motivated to help you and help your customers. That’s the key because we use a platform called Free Scout, and you can save these FAQs, these frequently asked questions. So they’re already teed up to answer. And you can add your own flavor to the email at the top or bottom like, Hey, Jim, good to hear from you again. And then you got your templated response right below it, hit send, and you’re off and run into the next response. We have our customer service.

[00:49:28.160] – Bob

People also sell people into events and things like that. That’s great. And they get obviously a little piece for doing that. But people, if you’re calling, Hey, I want to help with this, I’m going to say, Oh, by the way, we’re having an event in May. If you’re interested in learning live, I can send you some information on it. So it’s not a hard… It’s not like slamming them in the head. It’s just letting them know that there’s some opportunity. Some people say yes. Most people say yes, I’m a Sim phone. It’s great. We don’t want to be a jerk, so we’re careful not to cross that line. But we do want to let people know there’s something. We get so many people and we bring our customer service people to our live events. They’ll meet Christine or they’ll meet Mike and they’re like, Oh, it’s you. Wow. I’ve talked to you on the phone or, Oh, email back and forth. T hey’re so excited that they’re meeting this live human that they have this relationship with. T hat’s been a big key to our success is that we don’t have a separate salesperson from the customer service people.

[00:50:20.060] – Bob

It also keeps the customer service people engaged because otherwise they’re waiting for the phone to ring like the Maytag Repairman in his old commercials.

[00:50:28.620] – Sean

Let’s take a quick commercial break. Hey, this is Sean. I’d like to say thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts you could be listening to, so thanks for taking the time to listen to this one. I have a quick request. If you have a moment, could you please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a five star review? The reason is the more ratings we get and the higher those ratings are, the more Apple will share us with the world. T hanks in advance for doing that. And then I have a quick comment. If there are any questions you want me to ask the guests, please head over to our Tykr Facebook group. You could drop a question right there. I’ll go ahead and make a note and I’ll do my best to ask that question on the podcast. All right, back to the show. I love what you did there. It’s a little incentive just to mention a product or service you offer and then share some of the profits with them. That can be a really easy way to make some extra cash.

[00:51:23.370] – Sean

They get $50 when.

[00:51:24.580] – Bob

They sell a course for live at $50.

[00:51:28.460] – Sean

Amazing. they’re on.

[00:51:30.290] – Bob

The phone anyway, being paid to be a customer service person. Say, Oh, by the way, there’s a live event. Do you want some information? I’ll send it over to you. They send the info. If the person wants to register, they register. It’s $50. Our phone rings a lot. Our customer service people are making six figures, which not too many CSR is making six figures. No.

[00:51:50.440] – Sean

You got a solid business structure, solid team. I like what you’re doing. This whole Puerto Rico vibe is really permeating through the rest of the business. Those listening here, so this is video I’m watching, and the view that Bob has behind him is palm trees. It’s just beautiful. Right back yard.

[00:52:14.130] – Bob

Yeah. And do you want to be telling anybody about the Puerto Rico thing, in case you want to become an entrepreneur and not pay taxes? I will if you want.

[00:52:21.190] – Sean

Well, they know about this already because there’s other guests that have been on the show talked about this, the tax benefits of moving to Puerto Rico. The thing I’ll tell you might be different.

[00:52:29.880] – Bob

That you may not know. Sure. Super family oriented. The people that move here have a little adventure in their blood because otherwise you would not move to a foreign culture and have whatever it is to do that, that inner spirit to do that. So you get a lot of people are very independent thinkers, far more conservative than liberal or even going towards libertarian, which is interesting. That’s been an interesting… What I didn’t expect is that. And as people often say, like I said, if you come to Puerto Rico, you can make more friends in a year here than you’ll make in 10 years somewhere else. Because it’s like the first month of college, everybody’s like, Oh, where are you from? Oh, you just moved down from wherever, Saint Louis, Los Angeles, LA, whatever. That’s been an interesting and unknown thing. The other thing is you learn not to depend on the government because they’re so terribly incompetent and they can’t keep the water on, they can’t keep the electric on. So you get more interdependent with your friends because they may have electricity when you don’t.

[00:53:28.280] – Sean

Nice. Anyway, that’s a.

[00:53:32.080] – Bob

Little insider scoop on that. I love that.

[00:53:34.970] – Sean

The last individual I was on definitely was selling it, but didn’t give them more the human touch there. That’s something else. Okay, I’m going to circle back to my wife after this call and go back to her with that new knowledge. Before the call here, audience, we’re talking about I can’t get my wife sold the moving down to Puerto Rico. We’re going to stay in Wisconsin. We love the seasons. She loves the seasons. I happen to grow to love the seasons. They do have flights that.

[00:53:59.310] – Bob

Go both ways.

[00:54:00.610] – Sean

Yeah, right on. I want to touch on another thing real quick here. I know we said we’re going to get to the rapid fire round, but you’re providing so much great value, the book idea. I love and I like this idea of having somebody else write it. They record, you get on a Zoom, they record the Zoom. Now you’ll laugh at this. I had somebody in the last few weeks pitch me 30 grand where they would write the book for me and I laughed. You should laugh. Yeah, right. I was like, No, you should never be charging anybody that much. My idea here, love your feedback, is people like something they can do real quick. Here are five great tips or 10 great tips to do X, Y, Z, and each tip could be one page, two pages, three pages, but something like that. You can have somebody in five or up work probably record that, write a rough draft for a few hundred bucks, and there you go. You got a PDF ready to rock. You can use as a lead magnet, or you could charge 20, 30 bucks. You couldn’t. But honestly.

[00:55:01.250] – Bob

To get a writer to write up something like that, you’re less than $2,000, even for a full book. Oh, yeah. Usually for a talking about. So I think financially it’s feasible for most people to do a book if they wanted to. It’s not a $30,000 thing. It just shouldn’t be. No. But people are entitled to ask for money, see if they can get it. I think what you’re saving is just the pain and agony of trying to find spare time to write a book. I think how many friends do we have? I always wanted to write a book. How many people ever do it? Because it just seems too hard, too heavy lifting. Let the writer do what they do. Because the writers that I’m getting are typically they came out of newspapers or magazines where they’re used to deadlines and get things done quickly. So generally for us, it’s a recording a week, usually. And then at the end of the week, the chapter is due. So if I do the recording on, say, Friday, the end of the next week, like the following Friday, I want that back. And it’s draft form. And I just have to check it for content.

[00:55:59.350] – Bob

I don’t check their semi colons because I don’t think I’m that good at that anyway. I do check the content, make sure that I didn’t misspeak or misinterpret it, then I could fix that. But it makes it pretty painless. It really does. And you have this great product. And then the second thing I gave about the course, even if you want to offer people a free course, like here’s a free course on buying foreclosures, people are going, oh, cool, free course. If you can have five people at your free course, it’s great. It doesn’t matter. All you’re really trying to do is force yourself to get the content out there. And if you’re lucky, you get questions because the questions are things you didn’t cover yet or you didn’t cover at all. Like someone says, Hey, wait a minute. When I go to auction, do I need cash? How does that work? Oh, I didn’t go over that. I need to go over that again. Or how do I get the cash to do it? People are doing you a favor asking the questions. And that’s another thing when you do a sales video of some kind, which you’ll need to do a couple of things.

[00:56:50.550] – Bob

Number one, upfront, give them something catchy and hooky. Like, hey, I’m going to show you how to buy houses for half price, even in the hottest market. Something that catches them. That’s what I’m going to talk about today. You have to deliver on that, by the way. Don’t do the fun plan, but you have to actually deliver. Deliver that and give a call to action at about the middle of however long this thing is, whether it’s a VSL that’s 20 minutes or full webinar, it’s an hour and a half. At some emotional high point where people, Wow, this is so cool. Give people a chance to order because a lot of people can’t stay on for the whole time. You have a lot of people that are fast buyers that just like, Yeah, I want this. How do I order it? Don’t make them wait. Don’t. Just say, Hey, if you’re interested in this, you maybe can stay the whole time. But if you want to get this, let me real quick just give you the order link and just leave it at that. Don’t go on and on about it. Just go and do that.

[00:57:39.160] – Bob

Also upfront, tell them you’re going to sell them something because there’s a thing that new people in sales presentation suffer from, which is when they shift from teaching to selling, they get all stressed out. So what you want to say is, Hey, I’m going to teach you about this over just business today. At the end, I’ll give you a chance to get a course that I wrote on this if you want to do that. But either way, whether you order or not, you’re going to learn a lot of really great stuff today and you’re going to be really happy over here. I’ve let them know that I’m going to tell them something at the end. So when I get to the end and I got to sell my thing and shift from teacher to salesperson, I’m not all stressed out about it. Instead, I could be like, hey, remember I said I had this course, here’s what it is. Here are the 12 modules, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and here’s what it costs. You can be cool about it, but what you don’t want to do is feel like you’re shifting roles in such a way.

[00:58:22.610] – Bob

It’s like you’re the teacher and then all of a sudden, tada, I’m here to sell. It doesn’t work. I would do that and just stay at a high level, stay out of the weeds. Whatever you’re selling, nobody cares how it works. People care about how they will benefit from it. I don’t know how an automatic transmission works. I have no idea. I like that I can put the car in drive and just push the gas pedal and it goes. I do not want to know how an automatic transmission works. I don’t know. I don’t. And you don’t. Sometimes technical people, especially, will get totally in the weeds about it. We program this in Python 4.6. Who cares?

[00:58:59.430] – Sean

Who cares? It’s a reliable.

[00:59:00.940] – Bob

And it works in any platform. Oh, cool. Okay, that’s it. Whatever. That’s all I want to know. Think about from the perspective of your user or buyer, how will they benefit from this? Because that’s all that they want to know is how will they benefit. That’s it. They don’t care about anything else. So just address things that way. So that covers your sales part. Great advice here.

[00:59:21.630] – Sean

Packed with value. Really appreciate it. Breaking down your business model. A great take away our audience. I can think about what are they an expert at or what do they know enough about that other people don’t know about, and you can provide value to others. Start with Fiverr up work, get that PDF or something created. Go to I like Teachable for courses. You can start to create a free course and then monetize one. You can be off and running here and create your passive income stream and create your exit strategy out of whatever job you’re in today. Yes.

[00:59:51.260] – Bob

On exit strategies, by the way, I like your business better than mine because one thing that you should face, if you build a business that is about your expertise, it’s very hard to sell. If you build something like you built with a recurring revenue software as a service, that’s saleable at a good multiple. And if you build the highest thing, you’re Tony Robbins. There’s no one to replace Tony Robbins, period. There’s just not. And I’m a much smaller version of that, but there’s no one to replace me. And it’s very, very difficult to sell, very difficult to anything. Bottom line is think about what you’re building. If you’re like, Cool, this expert thing is good. It’s very easy to start, by the way, make money. Just know you’re going to have to commit to it and you’re going to stick to it. You can make great money. You can have… Like in my business, other people are doing all the aspects of the business, but I do show up at the live events and I teach them. I do serve as the ultimate expert to customer service. Do I have to do much with it anymore?

[01:00:50.160] – Bob

No, but it was a lot of work to get it to there. And ultimately, it’s not saleable. Everything’s a trade off. Exactly.

[01:00:58.400] – Sean

And with our model, we have Tykr, which is a SaaS. And then as of the recording of this video, it’s middle of March, and we’re working on the courses, which is actually another segment. It’s under the same umbrella, but it’s actually a different business model. We call it Tykr E DU. And that I’m committing to that. That’s me. That’s me providing not only the courses, but the services. And I can’t sell that. I can’t sell Tykr E DU because that means I’m selling me. Another one of our guests that was on well over a year ago, his name is Jason Shappard. He’s got a courses business on obtaining certifications for flying planes, teaches people how to get their certifications. Very niche, but he’s doing very well. Got a team of people. Yeah, it is really cool what he’s doing, what he’s built. But him and I have talked about, okay, I can’t sell my business because it’s me. I’m attached to this. So you have to think about what is a product outside of this that you can build that eventually you could sell. Now, listeners, if you’re listening to this, don’t worry, we’re not selling Tykr anytime soon.

[01:02:07.570] – Sean

My whole team and I, we love this business. We want to continue the next five or 10 years plus. But you get the point. If you want to build a SaaS, you can couple on or attach courses to it, but keep them separate. That’s really good advice.

[01:02:24.430] – Bob

A friend of mine built a business that he sold for a great multiple, but it was in the real estate space. And he had the education side, which he had integrated together and it was a big issue in his sale. And he, thankfully, found a strategic buyer, so they were able to get through it. But it caused a couple of sales to fall through because they didn’t like the education side and they weren’t interested. Yeah. You think about your.

[01:02:46.920] – Sean

Buyer, they start asking those questions, then they’re like, Oh, courses and consulting? What human being is attached to that? And what price tag comes with that human being? And right, right. And all that noise. So yeah, we’re keeping it separate. Keep it clean is the strategy. And how do you sell as a founder at.

[01:03:06.930] – Bob

That point? Because you’re giving up control, yet your image and likeness and reputation is there. Yeah, right. Which for me.

[01:03:13.230] – Sean

Is.

[01:03:13.810] – Bob

That I wouldn’t want that. I wouldn’t accept it. Exactly.

[01:03:18.460] – Sean

Can’t do it.

[01:03:19.280] – Bob

All right, we’ve arrived.

[01:03:21.390] – Sean

Let’s talk about the rapid fire round here. We got a few fun questions where we get to find out a little bit more about yourself. If you can try to answer each question in 15 seconds or less. You ready? I’m ready. All right. What is your.

[01:03:33.250] – Bob

Favorite.

[01:03:34.300] – Sean

Podcast?

[01:03:35.070] – Bob

Dan Kennedy, for sure. Okay, nice.

[01:03:38.770] – Sean

What is the recent book you read and would recommend? Persuasion by Caldini.

[01:03:44.380] – Bob

Teaches you how to sell, how to connect. Word patterns that work versus word patterns that don’t. Love it.

[01:03:52.220] – Sean

All right. What is your favorite movie? Any James Bond movie.

[01:03:56.040] – Bob

In my fantasy life, I’m James Bond, so any and all James Bond movies.

[01:04:00.970] – Sean

The.

[01:04:01.120] – Bob

Audience knows me.

[01:04:01.870] – Sean

I’m a movie nerd. I’m going to drill in. Who’s your favorite Bond? What actor?

[01:04:07.170] – Bob

I just had a brain fart. Connery? Roger Moore?

[01:04:12.090] – Sean

Roger Moore. Roger Moore, really? For your eyes only? For eyes only is fantastic.

[01:04:18.790] – Bob

That whole era, that whole 10 year period was fantastic. Awesome.

[01:04:23.390] – Sean

Good choice. All right, we got a few business questions here. What is the worst business advice you ever received? If you wanted to tell them, right, do it yourself.

[01:04:32.780] – Bob

Is that not good? We do things around here ourselves.

[01:04:40.540] – Sean

You’re just choking yourself.

[01:04:41.830] – Bob

You’re creating a choke point in your business. Yes, good call.

[01:04:46.760] – Sean

All right, let’s flip the equation. What is the best advice you ever received? To be coachable.

[01:04:52.260] – Bob

And surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and whatever it is that they do. They don’t do smarting in every aspect of the system. Whatever they do, find the best people you can find and work with them and listen to them. Just really listen and follow through. It’s great. Tied back to the earlier.

[01:05:09.830] – Sean

Part of the episode. That’s great. All right, last question here is a time machine question. If you could go back in time to give your younger self advice, what age would you visit and what would you say? I would be.

[01:05:21.550] – Bob

In my early 20 s and I would say two things. One, it’s all going to be all right because I was very motivated and just too pushing too hard. The second thing I say is trust your gut. If your gut says no and screams no, then listen to it. Because every time I’ve had something that has worked out badly, sometime very early when I think that idea was presented to me, I had a bad feeling in my gut and I chose to ignore it, which we do because someone will dangle a shiny object. Oh, you can make a million dollars. That’s just a shiny object they’re dangling. But your gut says no and follow it. Because the two or three times that I didn’t, those things cost me agony, hours, money, millions of dollars. And just a couple of those things being avoided would have been worth everything. And to a person, every time I had a gut instinct about it to say no, but I chose to ignore it because I saw some shiny object, like I had another goal, like, oh, I want to make that million dollars. It’s just a distraction from someone who couldn’t deliver that.

[01:06:26.640] – Bob

Good call.

[01:06:28.570] – Sean

All right. Where can the audience reach you? You can go to the rise of overages.

[01:06:32.870] – Bob

Com. You can learn more if you want to get some free information. But we do, you can do that. So the rise of overages. Com. It’s where we are. Awesome. What we’ll.

[01:06:41.940] – Sean

Do is footer the actual post because you’re going to have location on our website, syndicate you off to the social channels and whatnot. People will see that link. They can just link right over. Much easier. Okay. Awesome. Well, Bob, thank you so much for your time. This was packed with a ton of great value. Really appreciate it. I definitely have to have you on again. Thank you. I appreciate you.

[01:07:01.880] – Bob

And if you ever do decide to come down to Puerto Rico, please come to Dorado Beach. I run a guy’s dinner every month. We have about 60 guys that we hang out, we talk. We specifically don’t bring business cards to look up anybody in LinkedIn, but you just get a feel for who’s here. And my wife usually runs a small ladies dinner at the same time so the women could just meet and just meet interesting people. And so if you ever want to do that, just please just reach out. I’m happy to have you here. It sounds like a ton of fun.

[01:07:28.140] – Sean

You can count me in. I’m going to bring my wife down. It’s fun.

[01:07:32.410] – Bob

You already know there are lots of interesting people here. You should bring her down during the winter when she’s tired of freezing. Much easier cell.

[01:07:39.700] – Sean

It is. Not a.

[01:07:41.250] – Bob

Nice summer day in Milwaukee, but she’s like, so cold. It’s been 10 below zero for a week here. I got a place to go. I got to go to Puerto Rico. Right on.

[01:07:50.370] – Sean

All right, Sean, thank you so much. It’s really great.

[01:07:53.000] – Bob

You did an amazing job with the interview. Thank you. We’ll talk to you soon.

[01:07:55.920] – Sean

Thanks. Bye.

[01:07:57.760] – Bob

Hey, I’d like to say thank you for checking.

[01:07:59.740] – Sean

Out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts you could be listening to, so thanks for spending some time with me. Also, if you have a moment, could you please head over to Apple podcast and leave a review? The more reviews we get, the more Apple will share this podcast with the world. So thanks for doing that. And last thing, if you do hear any stocks mentioned on this podcast, please keep in mind this podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Please do not make a buy or sell decision based solely on what you hear. All right, thanks for your time. Talk to you later. See you.