Overview:

The podcast discusses how marketing agencies can increase their value and income by helping clients optimize different aspects of their business to improve profits and valuation over time. This includes helping clients improve marketing, operations, team development and more. By taking a more holistic approach to growth, agencies can position themselves to financially participate when clients have big events like an acquisition. Scott provides examples of how formalizing these value-adding services resulted in multiplying client profits and business valuations. He encourages listeners to think about how to communicate their expanded value to clients.

Takeaways:

• Agencies and digital marketers can add more value to clients by helping optimize their businesses, not just focusing on individual projects. This could lead to participating in clients' future profits or business sales.
• Business optimization focuses on areas like marketing, pricing, margins, employee development, and systems to increase a company's revenue, profits, and overall value.
• Helping clients understand how optimization affects business value can position service providers as strategic partners beyond just projects. This could mean longer/bigger engagements and referrals.
• Strong teams, leadership, and succession planning are important for business value and acquisitions. Service providers could help clients strengthen these areas.
• Financial reporting, metrics, and tracking results are important for optimization efforts and demonstrating business value to potential buyers.
• Customer satisfaction, reviews, and testimonials impact business value. Service providers could help clients improve in these areas.
• Different client situations require customized optimization approaches. Not all value drivers need to be perfected.
• Changing mindsets may be needed to gain client buy-in for optimization work requiring effort.
• Online and growing businesses can often be optimized for sale within 1.5-2 years if fundamentals are improved.
• Clearly framing missed opportunities and potential impacts of optimization is an effective way to educate clients on value.

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

Yeah, so, so the, the big thing that stands out to, for me, for this, this presentation is it's a, it's an opportunity particularly for, for anyone in the, in the agency land to, to be, to take a bigger interest in our clients.

And what I mean by that is really learn the skills where we can help our clients set up for that big payday and have that longevity and build that relationship at a much, much deeper level.

And from the guys who don't deal with clients, it's really about building your business to, to sell, knowing which leavers to press to sell for that big payday.

But I'll hand it over to you, Gilbert and then Scott, and then we'll get rolling.

Yeah, let's do it.

Really important point, Scott.

I, in the discussions we've had earlier leading up to this, it was, we're operating our businesses at, uh, a really high level and improving every day.

How is it that we're known to be the ones that helped?

And when Scott Bywater and myself were talking about the presentation, we thought of Scott Horman and for you, you Dunno, Scott's history, I'll share a little bit of it.

His first major company was H C C, which was Inc 500 listed 59 fastest growing in America.

And just say the 59th fastest growing in America of 29 million businesses.

'cause I think that's how many businesses are over there.

So, pretty impressive record.

Scott wanted to further his, his education.

So what he actually did was reach out to learn a little more, got involved with Jay Abraham, however, with Jay Abraham, instead of getting involved, did the coaching program to implement everything that people were learning with Jay Abraham.

When I, Scotty was coaching Tony Robinson was the core teacher for the content that Tony uses today.

Coached and, and worked closely with his dear friend Chet Holmes on stage with ePen Pagan, all the projects that I've worked on with Scott.

It's been a pleasure to watch businesses optimize.

And so that's a little bit of a history of Scott.

And the most important thing for me is a very genuine and very nice guy.

I like hearing the last part the best, right?

That's the best part.

And he's a j*****s.

Welcome Everybody.

You know, I'm excited to do this.

It's the first time I've actually ever put this together.

And I was challenged as we were talking on the phone and thinking about how I, how do I create this where it really a a a appeals and applies to digital, uh, agencies.

And I believe I've done that as we go through this.

I'm, I have no problem with being very interactive.

You wanna put something in the chat?

This is not, this is, I'm not up here on stage.

Um, but I am gonna go through things in a structured manner.

'cause a, that's how I'm wired and I think it'll be a better learning experience.

You're also gonna be learning things today that everything I teach is not applicable, but everything I teach is important for you to understand so you get the foundation, uh, of what the opportunity is.

But you'll see up there it says the entrepreneur's big payday.

'cause that's the title of my book that's coming out.

And it's how do you attract and get more big clients, accelerate your income business wealth and have a greater impact.

And then I wrote there the biggest opportunity of our lifetime.

Now, it may not be the biggest, but it's certainly one of the biggest opportunities of our lifetime.

And it, it's, it's just amazing to watch it unfold.

And, and, uh, so I wanna be able to share that with you, to get you excited about what the potential is.

'cause we, we have this current environment, it's a crazy environment.

I, I always felt like I was really smart business person until I tried to figure out the Covid economy.

Uh, and I go, how is it that everybody's spending all this money?

We've got supply chain issues, all this.

It's just crazy.

But it is a reality what we're dealing with right now, for sure.

So, you know, what I'd like to do is be able to show you, and one of the things that, that Scott and Gilbert challenged me with, he goes, can you show people how to five x to their business or 10 x their business?

I said, why don't we just start with two x.

We can show you how to double your income, whatever it is, double the income of your clients and then double the impact, whatever that means, whether or not it's a social impact or it's something else that you're doing.

I really believe that this opportunity creates us.

And by the way, I've been living what I'm gonna teach you today.

I've been living, I made the change in my model a year and a half, probably two years ago.

And I have some really interesting stories about the impact.

'cause I, I decided a long time ago when I started stopped being a C E O and building companies and I wanted to coach and I, as Gilbert mentioned, I went and did a Jay Abraham event that got introduced to him by Chet Holmes.

And I ended up doing three events with Jay, uh, on stage and did several with, with Chet Holmes, who was also a client.

And that really is something that, that launched my career into what I do today.

And, but you know, what, what was the opportunities back then are just so, so different now.

So let me just dive in, see if this works, doesn't work.

Let's see what I do here.

You should go forward if you're not going forward.

I'll just look at this one slide.

So what I want to talk about is the great entrepreneurial tsunami, which is really crazy.

And I'll talk about how it applies to you guys as well.

I'm gonna give you another level.

You probably all, because what you do, you're differentiating your companies as part of your, probably your core of what you do.

But I wanna talk about how you can differentiate yourself in a way maybe you've never thought about before.

And then this is the important one.

How to participate in the profits of the, not only the increased revenue you create from your clients or members or students, but also the value that you create for them on the back end.

And that's gonna be a central focus of what we talk about today.

So it's pretty amazing.

So here's some stats.

These are in the us.

I don't know what they are in Australia, but these are the us It's fricking mind blowing.

There's four and a half million US businesses that are gonna sell in the next 10 years.

Now this was in 2019.

It's a little dated from that perspective, but it, it's a s**t load.

I think that's the other other code word for it.

That's 450,000 a year.

The value of these business is $10 trillion.

It's just mind-boggling.

And it's being driven by the way, by the baby boomers who overheard in the US I think going to Australia as well.

It's driven everything.

They built schools and, and crazy couldn't build 'em fast enough.

They turned 'em all into other uses because then the next generation didn't have enough people.

And then now they, now they're driving the everything from travel to investment.

And yes, they're driving the, the greatest wealth transfer in the history of earth right now.

And it's, it's pretty amazing.

And so the baby boomers are doing this.

There's 450,000 businesses a year that they're gonna sell.

But some of those, they just go out of business.

Some turn their database over to somebody and that's the end of it.

Some of them sell to their employees, some passed on to kids.

So I just took a shot at this.

The best I could tell from the research, it's probably about 200,000 are gonna be on the market every year.

And to give you a perspective, there's 15,000 m and a deals done in the United States a year, 15,000, not 200.

So this is like nothing we have ever seen before.

And you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna have, um, a different couple different classifications of entrepreneurs, the ones you're really have it together and they're gonna be valuable and they are going to sell and they're gonna make a lot of money.

And then you're gonna have a whole bunch of other entrepreneurs who did not what I call pre-pa and they're gonna find that they are one of hundreds in their industry, that it is gonna be a glut of businesses for sale.

And if they don't prepare, they're gonna be in deep trouble.

So this is something that's gonna take on a lot of emotional energy as we go forward.

And the reality sets in of these entrepreneurs who say, Hey, I'm gonna retire in a year or two or three and realize that what they thought they were gonna get for their business, they can't get if they didn't do the work.

And, and what I'm gonna share with you today, is this amazing.

Are these numbers crazy?

You've probably seen 'em before, but don't they crazy Mind, mind blowing?

And they, they'd apply more than just a baby boomers too, eh?

Yeah, yeah.

It's just crazy.

That's, it's a big number.

So, so here's the thing.

Only 20% of businesses that list for sale with a broker ever sell one in five.

You list your business, you wanna sell it.

Imagine if it was your house, you're trying to sell your house and you go, only one out of five on the block are gonna sell.

But that's the reality.

And they just either shut down or somebody takes 'em over.

And this is again, this is you, I think believe this is something we can really emotionally charge.

And the timing is now the wave of people wanting to retire.

The wave of people, especially with Covid say, I just had enough of this.

I wanna go retire, I wanna move somewhere else.

I want to have quality of life.

Which is what is really changed in the Covid era.

There's a strong emotional drive here.

71% of entrepreneurs, I'm not sure I have this stat right, but it is, I'm not sure the stat is actually correct, but it's a big number of them where they're, the wealth is in their business.

That's where the wealth is.

They've put everything in it, their hearts, their souls, everything.

And here's the thing, the vast majority of entrepreneurs make more money when they sell their business than all the years they own their business combined.

Think about that Business.

What's that?

That's crazy man.

That's Yeah, really cool.

It is crazy.

You start the business, you sacrifice, you don't make much money in the beginning.

You're borrowing or you're borrowing, doing whatever.

You start finally start to make some decent money.

And then if, when you go to sell, you've got the opportunity, depending upon how you position yourself to sell for 5, 6, 7, 10 times the, your annual sales.

So depending upon how long you keep your company.

That's why this, if you've owned your company for 35 years and been profitable, this is not applicable to you, but it's a big number.

Alright, so again, I'm just laying the foundation here.

So I said, who's this for?

Because I've started thinking about the group and I don't know the group very well, obviously.

And so I wanted to to try to see if this appeals to as many people as possible, get you thinking maybe outside of the box a bit.

So I put, do you work with established clients?

I'm, I'm just curious how many work with established clients, um, business clients.

They're not ones that are just starting up or people that are just trying to break in and start an internet business but actually establish business.

If you can put that in the chat and Gilbert, maybe you just gimme an idea.

I'm just curious as to what that looks like.

Yep, yep, yep.

That's okay.

All right, cool.

That's good.

That's good.

So I've got you covered.

Clients have the ability to sell their businesses someday, right?

So if you have clients that you have good relationships with, you may or may not know whether they're planning on selling in six months or a year or two years.

But let me assess the sa same question.

Any of you have clients that you know are planning on selling in the next one to three years?

I'm running this biz.

That's cool.

I'm seeing lots of yeses.

I don't know if it's answer the first question or second question, Gilbert.

Yeah, I imagine I do, but I don't actually, I've never asked a question.

Ah, okay.

So one of the things I hope you do by the time I'm done for sharing, what I'm gonna share with you today is you learn to ask the question is in a very elegant way because they may, they're likely look at you as the marketing guy, the marketing woman, the the agency.

They're not looking at you as, can you impact the value of my company?

And I'm gonna show you how you can do that today.

And that's why you, you likely don't know if you want to participate financially in in more profit growth and create with your clients.

So I just was sharing with Gilbert and Scott before he got on the call is have changed my model.

So my model was since I gave up being a C E O I, I work with individual clients and I would charge them my my monthly fees.

And then I began saying, okay, I'm gonna charge you the monthly fee and a performance bonus, right?

Which some of you may do.

And now it's, I only take on, I take on clients that either are looking to sell their businesses or they represent businesses that are looking to sell their businesses.

And I now want to share in the back end and I'm not gonna share on the back end that's gonna cashflow strap 'em.

I'm willing to wait until there's an exit or there's a cash event.

Look, I have a client right now hired me under this arrangement.

They wanted to sell for $30 million.

It's been two years, we just got an offer.

It's gonna come in somewhere between one 10 and one 20.

It will close before the end of the year for tax reasons here.

It's by a private equity firm.

It's an absolute deal.

It's just a matter of them finalizing from the financials what the offer's gonna be.

So $80 million more.

So I want you to think about if you even had 1% of the share of that pie is $800,000.

And so these are the kind of the opportunities are there.

And the yes, I'm gonna show you how to set this up to where the yeses are really easy.

So I don't advocate getting with a client and they're saying they're gonna sell and say, great, I want 20% of your business or 10% of your business.

'cause you're just gonna get no, you make it real, you make it real easy for them to say yes in a way that is uh, doesn't put them in a situation where they've gotta make this massive decisions I'll talk about in a minute.

And the last one is looking for powerful differentiator.

I'm envisioning that there's an opportunity for some of you to be able to position yourself as a big payday is what I call it.

Drs big payday.

A big payday partner if you will.

And I want you to think about this too.

When we take on a big payday client, uh, a lot of times what I learned happening, they've run a really good business, but they may not necessarily have strong consistent marketing.

Word of mouth is really strong for them.

They have some marketing that works, but now as they understand that for every extra dollar of profit they generate, they're gonna put five to $7 in their pocket before taxes.

It changes the game on how they're going to look at those resources and it's pretty exciting stuff.

Scott, just, just a little bit of a heads up for you.

19 outta the 25 of us agreed to the first question and four out of the 25 said yes, but the reason was that the most of the others are not asking for the sale or getting exit ready.

And one was, uh, most clients are wanting to be exit ready.

Okay, good.

Thank you Gilbert.

And Gilbert, I just wanna add in there quickly the fact that when you do ask a client sometimes they haven't even thought of it.

They they're not care on that.

Yeah, I oftentimes it's it's great.

Was that, was that Grant you popped up the name?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

What's interesting that happens is I have clients all the times I'm not looking to sell.

I said, yes you are.

They said, I'm not looking to sell.

So dollar, the guy who wanted $30 million for his business, he didn't wanna do anything for five years, but he is got 110 to $120 million offer on the table.

And then he goes, maybe I get 150 next year.

I grabbed him and said, this is burden of hand f you money and it's the time to go.

Things change.

People's circumstances change, medical things change, uh, in their lives.

And so it's just, you wanna make 'em aware that that's something that, that you're looking out for their best interest and something to ask about.

And somebody who doesn't wanna sell today may wanna sell down the road.

And the cool thing is about what I'm gonna share with you is even if they don't sell, they're gonna have a far better company.

That's the cool thing, okay?

Build, buy, sell or buy build, sell craze.

It's, there are all kinds of training programs out there right now.

Just go buy a host company and then add your secret sauce, whether it's marketing or it's operations or it's, it's horns and, and then add some tuck-ins, which is just means you're gonna buy some other similar type businesses and tuck 'em in.

And then you're ma you're basically gonna add the elements I'm talking about today.

And then you're gonna return around and sell it for the massive r o i and I put there, the a hundred to 500 uh percent r o i is annual.

Because what you wanna be able to do is you wanna be able to show, we wanna show clients how they can sell or they can build and sell and the build and yeah, and, and be able to do that with not a lot of money.

So we do two things.

We take on clients that wanna sell and then we take on clients that wanna buy.

So on the buy side, we have a, we are helping them to be able to identify the company, structure the deal, and put as little money down as possible when we're helping them sell.

We want as much money down as possible.

Two sides of the coin, okay?

Build, buy, sell cra So that this, again, this is driven by the baby boomers and it's about putting in the, putting in the secret sauce, whatever it is in your case, your secret sauce is your digital agency's ability to get these businesses more clients and to help them convert and maximize the monetary, uh, aspects of that.

Paul, I, I couldn't actually probably share his story.

So Paul Kin was in Chet Holmes's book, the Ultimate Sales Machine.

And he's been my client for 20 or 20, 21 years.

He's built one of the most successful rug cleaning factory businesses in the US where they take the very expensive oriental rugs and they put 'em in through their $7 million cleaning factory.

And that's what he does.

And and he's built a really successful business.

So he decided to get into the window tinting business.

'cause I run a window tinting mastermind and, and he's, he bought a company, so he bought a host.

Now he's bought two other companies and tucked them in.

And the cool thing is we know that he's valued at about five times his profit or ebitda, but we're buying these companies at three.

So they're just tucking 'em in, putting 'em into his best practices.

Neither one of these companies had any marketing whatsoever.

So you imagine taking your secret sauce and saying, my God, we know, what could I do with that?

And, and then that, so that's the model.

And then you, you end up building it up and selling it.

So that's very popular right now.

Now the, this is baby boomers I'm talking about, but I wanna make sure you understand.

I have as many clients in my program that are young, um, millennials that are doing something similar.

They're just doing it online and they look a little bit different.

They're still buying a host, they're adding their secret sauce, they're adding tuck-ins and they're making a lot of money, but they're doing it online, right?

So it's a little bit different.

And I, I wrote here, wrote here, it said, coupled with these young entrepreneurs inherent rapid boredom rate, right?

They, they get bored real quick.

They actually want to flip these businesses way quicker than the baby boomers do.

And this is something that they're able to do and learn a skill and be able to flip 'em.

And there's companies like Raio, you know who they are.

They're over here in the us.

They gobble up these online companies, especially Amazon companies, product-based companies, once they hurt, hit a certain level, they got a model of paying them 4, 4, 4 and a half times earnings and they just, they take 'em out.

So there's an opportunity for the online folks to be able to build a business.

They know they're gonna get four and a half times, they look to do tuck-ins where they, they bring in businesses at a lower rate, improve their marketing, improve their systems, and turn around and sell that business.

And there's companies like, this is my client for full disclosure, but they're called eCommerce lending.com.

Their pure, their entire purpose is to show entrepreneurs how to get funding to buy businesses online.

So they're, they specialize in getting the funding for businesses to buy online.

So it's easier than ever for people to be able to buy these online businesses.

There's actually established marketplace for this.

Now is it the same over in Australia, do you think?

It's slightly getting there.

We're a little bit behind on that.

There's a lot of, um, centers now where you can actually go into virtual rooms for that, um, sort of service.

But it is a fee-based.

Got it.

Okay.

So what does that mean for you?

What does this mean for you?

Because I'm trying to paint a I'm trying to paint the opportunity, I'm trying to paint the opportunity that says that if you can understand the fundamentals of what I'm gonna go through here, you begin thinking, how do I position myself?

'cause when I'm, when I'm coaching and my coaches are coaching people, we're effectively doing very similar to what we used to do.

We're just getting twice as much money through it and sometimes way more than twice as much money.

And that's a real opportunity here is to be able to, it's a matter of positioning.

Since you're all digital marketers and marketing experts, you'll be able to do that better than I can.

Okay?

We created this seven value max drivers.

I'm playing around with this.

I've got maximizers and max drivers.

I'm still playing with it before I put it into my book, but right now that's what we're calling them.

And there are way more than seven triggers to build a business.

But I think if you apply, you know, Pareto principle and you say they're, we'll just focus on these seven, it's an 80 20 rule.

And for many businesses, by the way, you probably have that where your clients get overwhelmed.

They don't implement what you're trying to work with them on because they're just going crazy, especially during C O V I D.

And so they can't handle a lot more.

So when somebody comes to them like an m and a firm and says, here's the 633 things you do it, just forget it.

They're not gonna do it.

And quite honestly, usually there's a handful of things they need to do to drive their revenue really high.

So lemme tell a, I'm gonna share a story to set the stage before I go into the, the actual value max drivers.

So I was speaking on stage and I went to the airport in St.

Louis and uh, there was this guy sitting there and I was p****d off 'cause my plane was delayed.

And we got talking and he told me that he owned this business.

And I said, oh really?

What's your business?

And he told me he's his auto body supply.

So things that autobody shops need is what he supplied to them.

And so I began digging, this is what I discovered the habit of doing and started asking him questions.

And he, he shared with me finally, he goes, yeah, I, I have an offer for $6 million.

I'm actually under contract right now.

I said, good for you.

That's really awesome.

So I was intrigued.

I started asking him more questions and I asked him like, tell me about your systems that you have in place and tell me about your KPIs and tell me about your employees and tell me about your employee development and financials.

I started asking him all these questions.

I was just curious as to what stayed his business with him.

What's funny, the more I spoke with him, the more these little antennas in the back of my head started going, oh my God, I realized here's all the things he's not doing.

He's under contract.

And all I could think to myself is he's another business where he is gonna get way less money than he should get because he didn't, what I gonna, you're gonna hear me talk about pre-pa, he wasn't ready.

He thought 6 million was a good number and it was a good number.

It's a lot of money, but there's so much more that he could have gotten if he simply understood the fundamentals.

Now maybe as I said, maybe some of your clients are interested.

It sounds like there are five, did you say Gilbert?

Five, five of the people on the call that know somebody and maybe they may, maybe they're interested in selling their business in the next six months or year or or five years or sometime in the future.

So they can create that security and be able to go and play and do the things we talked about.

Let's go back to Jerry.

For Jerry.

I got on the plane, I met my way, he got on the plane, he went his way and didn't think much of it.

I think I might've sent him a follow-up email.

It was just a nice conversation.

And about three months later I get a call from Jerry and he goes on to tell me the fact the $6 million deal fell through.

And he said, I was intrigued.

You were asking me those questions and talking to me about ways that the, I could increase the value of the company.

Let's have a chat about that.

And we did that.

We looked at at how we could help him to be able to actually implement those things.

Remember his baseline is $6 million.

And by the way, Jerry is probably in his early sixties at the time he's slowing down.

He is now bought a house in Florida, he lives in in Iowa.

So it would be like he lives where it's real cold, he wants to go where it's real nice Australia maybe or something like that.

So we helped him to tweak his profit drivers as I call him, get more leads and convert more, take him through the funnel, get more out of that.

'cause that's the fast track usually helped him tweak his pricing a bit and his margins a bit.

And so that he could basically increase his, the value of his company as much as we possibly could, helped him with employee development.

There's, we only had a short period of time in order to be able to work with him because what happened within four months is he got another offer, not at 6 million but at 9.2 million.

Same company.

That's why I talk about this 80 20 rule.

Same company four months later.

So there's not much you can do in four months, but he was able to do that in, in, in just four months.

Now that's $3 million extra.

Just doing a little bit, just doing some of the fundamentals.

But that's how big the gap is if they're not prepared.

Does that make sense?

Anybody have questions before I go any further?

Um, thi this was all before the broker got involved with the valuation.

Scott.

Yeah, he the, I don't even remember actually Gilbert, if he had a broker at the very beginning, the company that bought him the second time is the same company that paid offered 6 million.

By the way, how's that first story?

It's like you effed up, you had your chance, you didn't close on it.

Now it's more expensive, but it doesn't end there.

And I'm gonna tell this story just so you can see.

It's not just about the money because maximizing the price is great, but it's not near as important as maximizing the terms, right?

How you get paid.

And it's amazing how entrepreneurs, and I was one of them, I'm going for the total big number.

Gimme the big number of what I can make out of this thing.

Like some badge of honor.

And I always tell all my clients I will take terms over money any day.

'cause when you get paid more money, you take more risk, uh, and less things are controlled and you wanna be able to understand what the terms are.

So that's really important.

So we structured it in a way to where we made sure he was gonna get paid, but it didn't end there.

If I tell, I think there's a good story to be able to show the overall dynamics of selling a business.

There's something called life after the sale.

And, and that means it's once the deal closes, it's no longer your company anymore.

There's a whole bunch of psychological elements to this.

But Jerry, remember I told you he was at the point in his life where he wanted to to slow down.

He wanted to, he wanted to have more freedom in his life.

And a lot of times what ends up happening, if you don't pay attention to this, the deal has you there.

Like for me, for three years, I had a stay for three years and it was hell, by the way, you want to negotiate what the terms are to be able to have that flexibility.

So we arranged to have him only have to come back to Iowa certain number of days, a a month.

And they had to give him so much notice and all these things that protected him.

I'm echoing all of a sudden on somebody's line that way I get to say things twice.

There you go.

And, but there's still more, there's a carve out.

So we get close to the end of the deal.

And this is real, real common and people make this mistake all the time, is sometimes a business has assets that aren't valued by the buyer and yet they just go along with the, the business.

So Jerry's case, he had started manufacturing company that that manufactured in China and the, the company didn't want to, they didn't value it, they didn't wanna do it, they didn't wanna mess with it, they just wanted to buy through distributors.

And so we carved that out, that cute little business.

Once you took the overhead away from him, Jerry sold his business and made $200,000 a year off of his manufacturing business, selling most of what he produced back to the company he sold.

So that's like adding a million dollars to the value of his company.

So when I talk about how you can double the value of a company real, real quickly and see how these things stack on really quick, if somebody's prepared and takes a look at them in advance, does that make sense?

I'm a teacher by the way, so sometimes I teach too much.

Do do you want to interrupt me at any time?

Feel free to do so.

Again, my goal with this was to be able to create a foundation to get you starting to think about how you can play in this world.

And you don't need to be an expert on that.

You just need to under understand how it works and understand that there are really significant leverage for most businesses that can be pulled really quickly to make a real big difference in the value of the company.

So how does Jerry's story apply to you?

How, how does it apply to you?

I'd, I'd be curious, just pause here real quick.

Just get some input about, does anybody see how there may be a way for you to integrate in what I'm teaching just so far to be able to create more value for your clients?

Scott, we've got a question from Eric.

Eric, What's the most commonly missed lever?

You probably know my answer.

So I've lived and breathed this whole concept of profit optimization and to me it's the fastest, quickest way to be able to lever a business.

It's really around the profit drivers I created years ago where it's about how do you maximize leads?

How do you maximize each step?

Oh, the profit driver by the way is just think of it as a step in the sales, marketing sales funnel if you will, that's measurable.

And when it's measurable, if we can start thinking about how I can tweak that three to 5%, I can show most businesses how they can double their profitability.

If you've been to Business Mastery, you watched Tony do Business mastery, that's all my licensed content.

And when I worked with, with Tony, and I could tell the story now because it's, he tells it publicly, but we, we first dove into his coaching division and his coaching division wasn't making a lot of money.

Let him share that story with you.

But within three months of us focusing in on profit optimization, we had a run rate of 4 million, a increased run rate of $4 million a year in the profitability of that business and 32 million added value to the company.

So to me that Gilbert, that's just the fast tracker Eric, that's just the fast track.

It probably incorporates some of the things you're already doing.

But if you're doing digital marketing, what we also do is we look at that's great.

So if you do digital marketing to generate a lead, the lead comes in and it's a phone call to your mechanical H V A C company, for example.

The minute that phone call comes in, it's no longer digital.

And there's a whole element of profit drivers in that as well.

How quickly they answer the call, whether they answer the call live, how quickly they return the phone call lags of 30 minutes, which can drop their success rate in half.

So we begin looking at all of those types of things to say how do we now maximize once it's part of a sales process as well, how do we maximize the pricing, reduce discounts so we can increase margins.

All those things are ways to be able to increase the bottom line profitability.

It's probably a longer answer than Eric you wanted, but there it is.

It kicking my passion tone Pro.

Probably back to your original question with most businesses just, if someone comes along and says, Hey, I'm interested in buying it, you're like, oh really?

Oh awesome.

That's not a bad amount.

So you'd slip into s**t, I'll just take it.

'cause I wasn't even thinking of selling the business.

Yeah, it's a really great, that's happens more often than not.

It happened to Scott.

So I had no interest in selling.

Somebody came along, offered me a bunch of money, I was 29 years old, I grew up poor and I jumped on it and made a, as I go through these seven profit value maximize, I probably muffed on four or five or six of 'em and I left a lot of money on the table, which I will share with you.

That's what happens.

It's almost, hey, a pretty girl me, they wanted to go out with her or pretty guy asked me, or handsome guy.

And it is the way that is and that's the moment where you realize I wasn't prepared.

So the key is to be able to prepare so that when that happens, you know exactly what your company's worth.

You know exactly what it, and you can talk the talk and yeah, it's exactly, it's a great insight.

So actually lemme just tell you, I actually have this story built into this here.

'cause I wanted to talk about the cost of being unprepared.

It's a perfect segue actually.

Now is and what was your name?

I didn't catch the name.

Steven.

Okay, Steven, thank you.

Yeah, thanks for setting this up really well.

So the cost of being unprepared to sell.

So I sold my first business in exactly what you just said.

He's 29 years old and all of a sudden we were in contract, I was in contract, like, wow, they're gonna pay me all this money.

And by the way, I was focused in on the big number, right?

You're gonna get this debt, you're gonna get this plus the earnout plus this, plus that, it's this giant number and didn't even understand the concept of terms.

And by the way, I lacked a trusted advisor.

This is real important.

So we are trusted advisors to our clients.

We're not m and a firms.

We completely keep them separate 'cause an m and a firm.

And they have huge value.

Did we lose them?

Yeah, we did.

Unfortunately.

I'll get back.

How good is this beauties of Zoom?

Hi, it's Gilbert ing, how are you Meetings?

It's Gilbert, how you going?

Recording in progress.

Recording progress, progress.

Hey buddy.

Hello.

Hey Gil.

He sent a message.

He said the power is out.

He is coming back on Zoom.

Thanks.

The beauty of Zoom sometimes.

So while, while, uh, while Scott's getting back in, I'll share a quick little story with you guys.

Me, Eric, and Gilbert are sitting in a strategy session with one of our clients.

They come in and they say, Hey, we're, they're currently doing $15 million revenue, they wanna get to 20 million and they wanna sell.

And so we said, okay, cool.

And we started going through a little bit of an audit of what they have in their business and we told 'em, Hey, you should try sending out emails to your database.

And they said, no, we don't wanna do that.

People abused us.

And we said, oh really?

That's really bad.

And they said, yeah, we sent out this email.

I said, how big is your database?

They said, 200,000 said, what's your average transaction value?

They said, a thousand dollars per, you know, per person, their strategy of growing their company was to open up more stores.

And so we said, okay, cool.

So when you send out this email, how many people abused you?

They said four.

We said, so you stopped doing email marketing because four people send you an email back saying don't email me.

So we happily told them, we'll get them to 25 million.

And yeah, with a big smile on our faces.

It's, it's really important when you think about that assumption, uh, can destroy anyone instead of looking at it in a positive view.

Here we go, John.

If you're not getting abused by midnight, you're not, not Back.

That was fun.

All right.

Pattern interrupt.

Launch meeting.

It's says launch meetings still.

You can see me though, right?

So it must be good.

Let me just see if I can show my screen.

Bear with me a sec here.

So say something brilliant you guys or something.

Enter entertaining or something.

Let's see.

Scott Bywater has got some great jokes.

Okay, that's what we need.

I think.

I think you're far better at the jokes than me.

Gilbert?

No, Scott.

Scott.

He's not.

He's not.

Okay, we should be back.

We back?

Yep.

Yep.

Okay.

Anyway, when I was born, no.

All righty, let's move you over here.

Okay.

Oh, I saw about the trusted advisor.

That was really important because the when, if you're, when you're working with clients, it is, you can be somebody that they can trust.

You give the opinion what's good for them.

And it, it is, I've had two deals in the last three months where I would've made a lot of money in the back end.

I talked both clients outta selling because it wasn't good for them.

And, uh, it's the right thing to do and we'll see what happens down the road.

It's really important that that's, that you have that element.

And I didn't have a trusted advisor at all.

Everybody wanted to make money.

I got, I look back now, I I didn't give it dig, didn't get, you know, any real valuable advice except for how to close the deal.

And, uh, I didn't, I ignored the terms and all of a sudden I was in a real bad deal and I said I would stay for three years, but there was a clause in there that if I left sooner than that, I basically got screwed outta all kinds of money.

And I probably got two thirds of my money max.

That would've been it.

And, uh, it was real, real painful.

So it's part of why I do what, part of why I'm so passionate about doing this is because it, it was very, uh, painful experience for me.

Lemme tell you how painful it was.

So these are some actual numbers.

So the price of being unprepared, I could have doubled the money I received in my business, like the auto body guy did, if I just had just a little bit more time, a little bit more guidance.

But this is what's real painful.

And I, Gilbert, I shared this story with you.

My company later sold for 33 times the money that I received, 660 million, I got about 20 million outta the first one, 660 million.

And, and I'm sure there, there were some acquisitions and whatnot along the way, but my, my major competitor sold for five times as much as I did.

And I was bigger than him and, and more profitable than him.

But he held onto the company.

Sometimes you need somebody to tell you no, it's not something you should do.

So let's look at these seven, uh, profit, uh, max drivers.

And before I do, I think maybe what we'll take a, I'm gonna pause for questions.

Any questions, um, that haven't been asked already.

I just, I was just curious about how long it was between you selling the company and, um, the company that brought you up selling it again.

What was the question?

The lag, the lag time.

Yeah.

It actually sold about four times.

So I got bought out and then, and there was a private equity firm involved.

And then they sold to, they sold to another company.

And then at that time you started seeing, we, we were in the medical field and so you, you started seeing a roll up in the medical field.

And so it was, it was takeover, if you will.

So there were, it probably, this is probably the fourth time it sold and it was probably three years or so.

I could have bought my company back for fraction of what I, so I sold it for 20 million.

I could have bought it back for 5 million 'cause they ran it into the ground be after I left and I came back, they actually hired me as a C E O for a year to turn it around.

And that would've been a, a good investment.

I just didn't have the interest in doing it anymore.

So, yeah, it's a good question.

All right, so the, the, the first one is the profit maximizer, right?

You see it highlighted there.

This is just all about think this is optimization.

We're looking at looking at what the business is already doing and saying how do we tweak it?

How do we make it better?

Probably similar to what you're doing with our marketing in many ways.

And, um, you may play it in this arena.

This is how do we change the ad?

How do we change the landing page?

How do we get load speeds quicker?

How do we make different calls to action on the website?

How do we do better job retargeting?

All the things that you do to try to maximize lead conversion and ultimately conversions to a sale is what fits in this bucket.

And the reason is it's the fastest, easiest, almost cost doesn't really cost any money.

You're just improving what you're already doing.

And I start here because most of entrepreneurs, they're crazy.

They're on a hamster wheel, they're too busy, they just don't, they can't get around to it.

And so if you try to do something more sophisticated, they crumble, they'll stop, they'll stop it.

It is probably, you probably find the same thing if you try to get too sophisticated with your marketing in the beginning of somebody who hasn't marketed before, your stick rate's probably pretty low.

Does that make sense?

Hundred percent.

So I know I'm gonna go, got little sidetracked here as far as my little being off.

I'm gonna cover a couple more of these and then I'm gonna, we're gonna do a, a little breakout session here.

So the first one is optimizing the, the, the, the is profit optimizing what they're currently doing.

The second one, and by the way, who plays here?

Who, who plays in this arena here?

Where you're helping clients with this is don't think about lead generation right now.

Just think really about helping them with their conversion process, their maximizing upsells, maximizing pricing, getting repeat buyers, getting them to buy more of the SKUs.

If, if if they sell more than one item.

Who helps clients do that?

How many of you?

I'm proud of you Gilbert.

Good.

You've been taught well, Scott, Yes sir.

Scott Whitewater does as well.

We do.

And EarthLink Alliance does Johan And you, if you do, you probably find likely find that this just is so easy to find added revenue and profitability in this area.

And, and one, one of the things we do, we start all of our coaching engagements here.

That's where we start.

And we just tell people basically, we're gonna go through this first session section and we're gonna show you how to pay for us for years to come.

Is that okay, this, we're gonna just show you how to pay for three years to come.

And as we have breakthroughs, we're going back to them and saying, okay, you just added a hundred thousand dollars a year.

I think that's probably repeatable.

So now I'm free.

And it's just, it's, we wanna create a relationship that says we're gonna take the expense off the table and I'm now part of the team, or my coaches are now part of the team.

It's a game changer with that positioning.

Hmm.

The second one is performance maximizer.

Just think about this is strike zone for you.

This is how do, you've locked in your predictable profits and you have your KPIs and your reports put into place are are, are now gonna be put into place here.

And if you don't have those measurements in place, it's very difficult for companies to even determine if what you're doing is effective.

Is that fair to say?

I'm gonna guess.

Most all of you have some kind of reporting to show, hey, what we're doing is working.

If they don't have that in place, it's very difficult to be able to track.

So think of performance maximizer as putting the systems in place, best practices of things that are working, having the KPIs and the metrics and the reporting in place so they can re really begin to track results.

And also see the things that they did in profit maximizer number in the first profit maximizer that they, that this still working.

We don't slide off the cliff.

And then that positions for the next one, which is the growth maximizer.

And this is where you likely all play.

This is marketing, increasing your marketing, trying new marketing things, new marketing channels, increasing your spend, uh, justifying it by the increased do profitability you're generating per client that you put in place from one and two.

I would say that, is that fair to say you and Scott and the others, it's all strike zone for you.

This is where you play what you do.

Yeah.

I think a lot of people would play in there like your Facebook ads, your, your Google ads, all of that sort of thing.

And that's often where the client wants to focus 'cause they're not thinking more laterally in many cases.

Yeah.

What's interesting, so what we tell clients is, look, let's focus on this first one.

Let's optimize your profitability, get your systems in place, take that money that you generate and now you can spend it getting more aggressive on marketing and spending money on digital agencies.

Right?

So that's what we teach.

And so it's, this is really a, a, a key element here where if you start, if you, oftentimes before, if you start here before they've done the other two things, then it's all about they're spending money and they're focused on the spend that they have and they're try, try to focus on the return on investment that they're getting.

Versus if you could make them money early on, it takes the pressure off of that and they get, they, they're willing to experiment more.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The way I like to enlighten is you start with a low hanging fruit, like the email, if they've got an active email list that they're not nurturing properly, that sort of thing.

Yeah.

And then move across to the other, to the other areas.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this is where if you have a company, if you were focused on going on, on working with companies that are looking to sell, and you can go to them and say, this is really great, what are you doing with marketing?

And you find out they don't really, they either don't have a consistent, predictable marketing element in place, or they only have one pillar and you can add pillars, then your discussion with them is, again, it's not just, I will help you do that, will charge you this much money, we hope to be able to generate this much money for you as far as return.

But it's, have you ever thought about if you're gonna sell?

Have you thought about what that does to you going forward?

We're gonna tell you what buyers wanna buy.

Companies that have predictable streams of, of lead generation and conversion.

They don't just want the company that they're gonna buy that generates most of their business on referrals.

'cause the owner's been in business for all these years and he's got real strong relationships.

So this is, again, I believe how you can change the game.

And again, it's the first time I've done this, I'm feeling it out.

So you guys can gimme input on this, but it's important to be able to do it.

And in, in this growth maximizer, by the way, is also the ability to buy companies.

So when we in, when we're teaching this, we're also saying, this is the time to think about those Tuckers.

This is the time to think about acquiring companies.

So when I was building my company that we were taking public, we, we had our host company was called One Inc.

And we strategically acquired eight other companies.

We're buying them for five times ebitda, five times profitability, bolting them together so we can service the entire nation and expand our service offerings and primarily internet based.

And so we were buying 'em at five times EBITDA and going public at 120 times.

So it's just, it's another example of how the upsides are could be really exciting.

Okay.

Let's take a, let's take a break for, we can do questions.

Let's take a pause here.

And what I'd like for you to, to do, uh, take, uh, some time, how do you work these breakout sessions?

Gilbert, how's this work?

So Scott manages the breakout sessions.

What, what we do is just have a, a discussion about what we've learned so far in the breakout session about how we could apply it to our business and any of the learnings that we've come up with from what we've seen so far.

Maybe if Scott Bywater, you could throw with Scott Hallman into each room or handle it which way you think is best.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

What I'll do is I'll set up eight breakout rooms and just assign them automatically.

And so what, what was the question exactly, Scott?

Well, I Think what I want everybody to think about is what are the opportunities for them to reposition what they currently do to add even more value to their customers in a way that would allow them to be able to participate when that client has their big payday or they have their, they have a large liquid event.

Yeah.

You know, what are the opportunities to do that?

I want you to begin thinking about how you might do that and in what changes you might have to make.

So we don't have to make this real in depth.

I just want you to think about it a bit, dialogue, a a bit about it and, uh, say how can we apply this?

How can we reposition ourselves to, to double our income just by adding more value and communicating in a different way and beginning to teach people about this, the fundamentals of these, uh, value max drivers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No.

Awesome.

And h how long?

Maybe five, 10 minutes?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Five minutes or so.

I thinks probably five minutes is enough.

You're gonna break into small groups like that.

How many of it are gonna be in a group That, uh, probably about three.

Yeah.

I just wanna get the juices going and flowing and then we, and we'll come back and I'll cover the other four.

Yep.

No, perfect.

Great.

Well, we'll, uh, we'll break out now, so we'll, we'll see you in the rooms.

Okay.

Yep.

So Gilbert, he's gonna see me in the room.

Do I hang out?

Yeah.

Okay.

We're All disappearing into rooms pretty quick.

I already disappeared once.

Okay.

Join the make stop and join.

So it says join the breakout room.

It says stop and join.

Does it wanna do that?

Yeah, if you just click on join it, it'll, it'll connect you in.

Hey, Scotty, I don't, Hey Gilbert, how are you?

Good, mate.

Are we in a room?

No, I don't think we've gone into a room, but we can just chat for now.

I think we're, I think it's just, it's just us and, and another version of Scott.

So Yeah.

I've got three Scotts.

Two's enough.

Yeah.

Um, so I, I think this is still being recorded too.

This room.

Yeah.

Because we're in that 'cause we're in the main 'cause we're in the main room.

Yeah.

That's really cool.

I'm really enjoying the technical understanding behind what Scott's saying.

I'm thinking to myself with the technical side of it, is there an understanding in depth, not in depth understanding?

Is there some clarity about the infrastructure that goes into, um, an additional level of service for the people on the call?

So, for example, any digital marketing or marketing company has an opportunity to get involved on more things than just the project at hand from what Scott is sharing.

So is that understood?

That's something that I think is a really cool to think about and I might bring that up.

Hey, I think a really good, a good topic or a good focus is yeah, how can you as a digital agency or not everyone's a digital agency, but yeah, how can you then make, apply this, make it practical, all of that sort of thing.

Yeah.

That, that's what I'm saying because I see the same service as a marketing company multiplied across different areas, that people are not, people are not, that's the wrong way to say it.

That some people may not be aware is possible.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Because no, if that can be, it opens things up to a whole new level, right?

Yeah.

In terms of the, in terms of the approach and that sort of thing.

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Hundred Percent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So no, I I that's very, yeah, very true.

So I might bring that up because I think, do I say this?

Uh, one of the most amazing things that we do as an organization is think about that next layer that we can contribute to without taking away from the shine of our capability.

Yeah.

It's like, uh, what we did with Matt, I can see that project getting a lot deeper where we're really good at something, we help set a business up that when somebody starts looking at it, they're gonna see what the marketing's actually doing at the front end.

And yes, now that becomes one part of the information in the data room.

Now we're into strategic growth, but with a strong background in marketing.

And you are seeing the things that you need to see as a, a marketing business to stamp your gold nuggets in that business and be able to, how do I say this?

Be able to measure it, be able to announce it, the dollar value, which is really cool.

Yeah, Yeah.

Yeah.

No, ab ab absolutely.

Absolutely.

Do you think it'd be okay for me to talk about that for 30 seconds And Yeah, if you wanna, if you wanna start the session by talking about that and then just then Scott comes bounce off From Yeah.

And I think that would be a really good thing for Scott to bounce off on because even though Scott's stuff is much deeper structurally, infrastructure wise, it'll be a good connection for all the listeners in the room to make about their business and the other layer.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

No, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Because, because I think some people will get this, but they'll, there's obviously a lot to it, you know?

So Yeah, there's a lot of depth to, to pulling it off sort of thing.

Yeah.

And, and you've seen it firsthand just with the, the dashboard that was built for Matt, but, and that's only just surface stuff.

Yeah.

Oh, oh, that, that dashboard is very, yeah, very impressive in terms of, yeah, in terms of what it shows and all of that sort of thing.

And it's just scratching the surface.

Yeah, that's right.

Like, I'm looking forward to that dashboard going really deep.

Yeah, I know.

Like to those next levels.

Yeah, I can see that.

Because nobody does that stuff.

No, that's right.

And I'm looking at, I'm looking at your questions and I'm like, man, there's gonna be a lot of work here.

We've gotta really prep Matt to be implementing implementation ready, because that's not even included in the first section.

Oh Look.

Yeah.

No, you Come back.

You were moving Before.

I've been having, I've been having some issues technically on this end, but it's, no, it's all good.

You can see me now.

Yeah, Yeah.

Yeah.

I've always seen who you ask, Scott.

This is, this would be a good little section to leave in the recording, to be honest, but just the conversation we had in this breakout room, which is the main room, but e even the conversation we've just had here really supports what Scott Hallman's wanting to get across as a message.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Darren.

Hey Darren.

Um, do we wanna close?

Well close the rooms now.

Yeah, Yeah, go for it.

I'll come back in.

Yeah, It'll be a minute.

It takes a minute for it to close.

So it, it's all, I got It.

Scott.

All fixed up.

So nothing's as, um, you're too fast for everything.

Bywater.

We won't get a, did we have we closed that?

Yeah, we've closed the rooms, haven't we?

Yeah, we're all coming back.

Can you see my screen?

I'm not yet.

What we might do, just while we're, we'll just wait for everyone to, everyone to come back and then we will all might just get, um, one or two people to share what their biggest takeaway from the breakout rooms, rooms was.

Anyone wanna wanna volunteer?

Yeah, I'll, I'll volunteer.

There's, uh, there's low hanging fruit in pretty much everybody's business.

And when you just take a moment to sit down and think about your business, rather than running around doing everything that you do, you can sit down and find so much low hanging fruit and Yeah.

That, that's a to takeaway we get.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, excellent.

Excellent.

No, that's, that's good.

How about you, Rob?

Any insights, any pearls?

Uh, I was actually in the same group as Johan, so what he said, I can, I can share.

It was the two of us.

Yeah.

Scott Baker and I got put into a room together and we're contemplating, uh, the question that, um, Scott's so many Scott's in this, this group contemplating the question Scott had about, uh, rethinking our value proposition as service providers and how we could potentially play this game.

And we were able to determine that there might be a lack of ability within us, the service providers, in being able to articulate these additional points of value we can provide.

'cause we're talking about something like, have we ever articulated the revenue that we help the business generate?

What that would actually mean for the asset value or, or, or the evaluation itself or the valuation itself when we implement a marketing system for them, what does that do to the valuation that is all numbers and quantifiable perspectives that, um, should be presented, right?

So lemme ask you a question on that, which is, do you know if you stay right within your lane, what right within your lane of what you do, would you be able to communicate to a client what the, the revenue impact is that they're seeing from what you're teaching them and doing for them?

If, if I stayed just in my lane?

Yes.

If you, the question, the question is, do you now?

Yeah.

So we definitely, I definitely do in, because in EarthLink I've received fortunately the training from Gilbert to do, but I understand the crux of what you are trying to ask here.

And I find that before I got some of the training with Gilbert, I never did back before then, I never did.

I never really asked that I had a bit of a tunnel vision in what my value and the value that I've added and what it actually provides to be very limited to what I could see right in front of me, which was purely just the money in and that was it.

Yeah.

So I, my intent here is not that you're all gonna leave this call, um, and, and be able to articulate all these seven, uh, it's to understand them at a high level.

The, the messaging for you is if you're selling your business and I do what's in my wheel lane, I'm doing what's right as what in my wheelhouse, here's the impact I can have on you.

And by the way, not just on your revenue and your profitability now, but ultimately here's how I can help you impact the value of your company going forward just within my lane.

Yeah, I was definitely missing that.

I was definitely missing that when I first started for sure.

Yeah.

So I apologize for that again, I I, it's good to get the feedback so I don't confuse people what we do.

Part of this is the opportunity to, when we have a client and we're not marketing experts in, in, in my company, uh, we are optimization experts.

We're not our marketing experts.

We don't do what probably most all of you do.

And so getting the client to engage somebody like you as part of how they'll bolster up their profitability is what we do and position the way I'm suggesting you position it, it makes it an easy investment.

They never would've made before.

They were trying to sell their business, but now they're thinking about it completely differently.

Does that make sense?

Yep.

I I, I'd like to share the breakout room that I was in the conversation.

Luckily I was with Scott Bywater, his good company.

The conversation we were having was around when we're approaching businesses and we're understanding the impact that we're having to that business for their valuation, all of a sudden our service, the layer of our service becomes more impactful and we can do more within our specialty for those businesses.

And I shared an example of, um, a client we're working with by the name of Matt.

And we created a dashboard to show how his marketing was affecting his business, so that when Scott Bywater wrote the message, we could actually value it to the cent for the return he was getting.

And that fits in to one small section of what you were sharing, Scott.

And so there's so much more opportunity to optimize on many layers with the infrastructure you're talking about at a deeper level.

Yeah.

It's, it's good.

And I think from a practicality standpoint, for all of you so far, it's hopefully what ends up happening is you, you, you, you begin to think, is there an opportunity for me to communicate differently to my clients just to build the value of what I do now that's gonna lead to, to, to more engagements, longer term engagements, more referrals, because I'm now being looked at differently.

So that's one hopeful takeaway that I, that I'd love for you to be able to have.

And the other one, is there an opportunity, if I don't do it, can I partner, can I be part of the solution that would be offered to a company that's looking to sell?

Because we're looking, we're not looking for the person who has been guided along in a sophisticated en environment and they know exactly how to maximize their business.

Not a lot of 'em.

They got an m and a firm and, and the PE firm and they're heading down that track.

That's not the avatar.

The avatar is Jerry, right?

The avatar is the so many baby boomer businesses.

The avatar is the inpatient pure online player that's gonna flip his business and think that they're doing well and they leave so much on the table and be able to point out, excuse me, Hey, there's, there's a lot of value here.

So again, I appreciate the, the, the clarity 'cause it's about staying in your lane.

I'm not asking you to learn a new skill just to learn a new concept that you can integrate in what, what what you're doing.

Scott, one other thing that we talked about in our breakout room was not only are we able to bring this knowledge to our clients, but even if they're not looking to sell, even if they're not in that free preparation phase, changing some of the aspects of their operations so that they're optimizing their business, their conversions, they're optimizing their systems will increase and improve the valuation of the company, which will then lead onto other subsidiary benefits for them, such as being able to have a higher valuation if they're looking for investment to be able to get investment at a lower equity but higher rate or have other benefits within their business, including attracting different types of employees.

So that was another sort of a subsidiary to what you're saying.

Yeah.

I have another, I have a presentation I do, it's about the five challenges businesses face and I can't remember what I call it, but I, what I talk about, and it's all around optimization and it's all about improving their marketing and you know, couple what we do in the profit optimization of what you do to say what's holding you back, what's holding us back is we don't, we're that one key hire away that general manager, that brilliant, that brilliant person for to deliver our services, that superstar salesperson, we can't afford.

I'm making this much money, can't really afford 'em.

I go, yes, you can this go and optimize your business, eke out the extra profitability and you can fund that.

You can fund if you don't have money to go and invest in marketing to, uh, increase your ad budget.

Yes you do do, that's where you're gonna find it.

If I'm in your, if I'm, if I'm a digital agency, I'm very focused on this 'cause I'm constantly wanting to show 'em, let me show you where the money is, you can now take that and let's go do some fun things without you feeling like you're taking something outta your pocket.

Like it's a game changer.

Personally.

Anybody else have any insights in the breakout group?

I is this, does this resonating?

Is this feel like something, is this valuable to be able to learn?

Again, I you're, you're the first group I've done it with.

You're, you know, digital marketers.

I try to take it and, and make it relate to what you do.

So it'd be just good feedback to find out whether or not this resonates.

Loving it.

Scott, Just dropping your notes or thoughts in, into the comments or any questions?

Yeah, Scott, I, I'll make a quick comment.

Again, I'm really enjoying this particular subject matter because one of the sport that I'm into is mixed martial arts, right?

And I wrote the comment in the chat regarding the history of the, uh, U F C where they sold for 2 million from the original owners to the newer owners who were basically a marketing slash media type of company that was their approach to growing the business.

So that was about 20 years ago.

And then last year they sold for $4.5 billion to W M E.

But there has been, if you think about it, there actually has been no change in the actual product.

It's still fights being broadcasted.

However, it was what the new owners, Dana White and the Ferida brothers brought in terms of strategy and advice around not only the marketing, but also thinking about what the business structure would be like.

So switching from the boxing style where everyone is independent to yeah, a more regular business corporate style and having them as independent contractors and employees and growing different arms of the business around the actual fighters and, and the event itself got it to that evaluation.

And yeah, they presented themselves originally or Dana White did as um, bringing marketing and media as the main service offering.

It's fabulous.

It's brilliant.

It's brilliant.

And, and it, it's really interesting because they just, they just pivoted.

They just did a twist, right?

That, that look at the valuation increase there.

If you, are you guys familiar with Alec Hermo by chance?

Alex Hermo started off as a, as a personal trainer.

He then got promoted to salesperson and realized he's really good at it.

And I think he, he said he claimed he, he closed 4,000 people to gym memberships.

And so somebody sponsored him, he opened up his own gym and then he opened up two, two more gyms and then he was raising money to go open up gyms and he had a mentor advisor say, timeout, you have this incredible intellectual property, optimize intellectual property of how you generate, generate leads, how you take it to the pipeline, how you convert 'em, how you get 'em to stick and stay, how you get 'em to add personal training, et cetera.

You have this whole system, why don't you just license your system out?

So think about that.

He optimized, he systemized, he did our first two value max drivers and he probably did the third one as well.

He added the marketing element around it.

That's what he had.

And he taught other people how to do that.

He said, how did he do?

But he started doing this in 2017.

So in the last 12 months he put up a slide and he said, I'm doing pretty good.

He goes, I made more money last year than the c e O of McDonald's.

I made more money last year than the c e o of Nike.

And he put up 200 other companies, I can't think of what they were.

And then he wrote combined, he's making something like $10 million a month in licensing fees.

So you know, this is somebody, so if you think about that, you go, if you stay within your lane and you say, here's what I do, how do you now approach, use that what you do for those customers to approach your avatar marketplace to be able to teach them like kind what you're already doing.

And again, adding the elements I'm talking about here to where it's just a way bigger value proposition.

I make sense.

Yeah, that's good.

That's good.

Um, so we, we've got lots of people just saying it all resonates.

Steven has asked, you know, or just said, looking forward to the other four drivers and yeah, Let's do that because the other four drivers, so these first three are all very much in your wheelhouse and the other drivers are team maximizer.

This particular value max driver is really become important.

You, you think about what's happening right now, what I originally said is you wanna have a strong synergistic team.

Here's the important thing.

When a company goes to sell the acquirer will wants to see that there's a strong, solid team in place that can run that business without the entrepreneur, right?

They don't want the entrepreneur to be in, they don't want the entrepreneur to be the one the, the rainmaker in the business.

As a matter of fact, if the entrepreneur's rainmaker in the business, they will pay 40% less for it.

You take the entrepreneur, take 'em out of the business, put a quote professional manager in there, it doesn't have to be as good as the entrepreneur and you're gonna get 40% more for that business.

And the thing is, there's a saying that it says entrepreneurs make bad employees, right?

They're bad employees, right?

They don't stay, you know, the vast majority of 'em stay very long.

They're disruptive.

If they didn't do go into the deal, they didn't do the emotional preparation we teach 'em to do.

They've got a lot of strong emotional feelings losing their identity.

There's a whole bunch of things that go along with that.

And so this is one of the value the drivers.

A real value max driver is replace yourself with somebody else.

That's who you need to move to.

So if you think about it, by doing the first couple value max drivers, I'm generating more income, more revenue, more low hanging fruit.

I get to invest it in and I systemize therefore I get to invest money into making sure I solidify the team.

Whether or not that's bringing somebody else in new or getting my team members a whole different level of training and tools that let them do their jobs even better.

So this one's real important and there's a couple elements to this.

One is getting the right people on the bus.

The other one is with the covid impact.

There's a massive shortage of labor.

I dunno if you have the same thing over here, but you, it is crippling companies here that can't get workers, can't get people.

Is that same thing over there?

Yes.

Yeah.

It's crazy.

Doesn't make any sense to me.

So retaining and attracting top talent more important than ever.

Having a solid culture where you feel like you, you're there, you're purpose, you're part of a team.

More important than ever.

I'm not talking about slapping a a value statement on the wall, but living those values and having somebody feel like I'm part of something, especially if they're working remote.

So we've spent a lot of time with our clients saying, how do you create culture when people are remote?

What are the things you need to do to be able to enhance that experience so they feel part of something and not just sitting behind a computer or a phone in their house.

Yeah.

Really important.

So this is a key driver.

Strong team entrepreneurs ask is out of the president of the CEO's seat and you're, that's 40 to 50% increase in value right there.

One thing.

So again, for you it's just awareness B six, have you, have any of you ran into the frustration where you know, what you're gonna try to share with them will work?

You can't get 'em to take the next step and implement.

You wanna be doing some new things.

What's gonna ring the cash register for 'em, but they can't get their s**t together to get it implemented or they can't get their s**t together to make a decision, right?

It's the most frustrating thing in the world, especially if what's going to work, it's about everything's not on the c e o or the founder.

We need it to be on other people who could make decisions and drive the business forward.

So team maximize are really important one.

Any questions before we move on from that one?

Yeah, I, I suppose with that one in my business, I'm really spending a long time systemizing 'cause I want to exactly do that.

I'll get myself out of the business.

But you, the staff look at you like, why are we spending our day writing standard operating procedures?

Why are we asking, there's all this s**t that doesn't help me deal with the clients and it just gets in the way.

So there's this real tension between what's really valuable for the business long term or medium term and their day-to-day work so they can buy in as much as you'd like them to.

It's a really interesting tension, Steven.

So I have a different philosophy than a lot of people.

I I certainly love the book, the e myth and document everything.

And I remember one time one of the, the coaches that there were 30 or 40 coaches wanna come be a part of what I was doing.

And they, they said the challenge they have is there's 18.

They, it is an 18 month program.

I'll tie back into your, to your question.

It's an 18 month program.

And so you start with, I'm being a little facetious, but you start with documenting the coffee maker and coffee duties and you're documenting all this stuff and you're not getting to the real meat of things until it might be 15, 15th month is the thing you need the most.

And so the reason I bring this up is that whole emit thing said you wanna basically document everything.

And I don't believe it's true.

You wanna document the important thing.

So to me, if I look at your employees, I go, the the SOPs are great, but you don't need SOPs on everything.

You need 'em on the important thing.

So I need SOPs around how do we generate leads?

I need SOPs on what our marketing calendar looks like and how we determine what our, what our, what all of our key metrics are.

They're gonna say we should spend money or not spend more money.

I wanna know, I wanna document what is the client path where I'm gonna take somebody enters here and take 'em on this path and ultimately expand their journey.

And what's the, what is the documented procedure for those types of things?

If you are, if you have a delivery of something you need SOPs.

Like I had a my IT consulting company, we had our functional specs and our delivery document and there there were 12 step process they had to go through.

That all had to be documented so people knew how to follow the 12 step process, which by the way, they should want to do 'cause they're doing it.

So the one thing I would encourage you and everybody to do is to say, um, let's start with the most important things that move the needle and drive this business forward and let's document that.

'cause I think people can get into that.

How do we document what you are doing in your function to make it even better?

And what are our opportunities to improve upon it?

'cause once you document it, then you can have team meetings that say, how do we one up it?

How do we optimize it?

How do we take it to the next level?

Uh, is it working?

If it's not working, how do we break it and re pivot and redo it?

So I dunno if that's helpful or not, but I I I you could tell I have pretty strong feelings about this one.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Okay.

The next one is financial maximizer.

I'm not gonna go into this a lot other than I can tell you that when clients come to us, nine out of 10 of them don't get regular financial statements each month.

Nine out of 10 of the one, and I have to expand that on.

But of the ones that do a fraction of those, look at them, understand them, and know how to utilize it in their business.

So when you're now, when somebody's going, it can have all these other things that are really working well.

All these other value maxs, uh, drivers in place, but their financials are a mess and it destroys credibility of the buyer.

So you don't need to know this.

All you need to know is that they need to have these things in place.

They need to have the metrics in place that drive that are important in your industry.

They need to have the financials in place, the cash flow, uh, things in place, not perfected, but it can't be shoe boxes and stapled receipts either.

That's all I'll say on that one is just, it's a, it is a very important one and most clients are just not qualified to do it.

It always blew my mind when I would see Keith Cunningham when I was, when him and I were doing business mastery and he is teaching these really basic concepts.

And the crowd, the audience who's paid $10,000 to be at this event are glued to the screen.

And I'm thinking, you should, you don't do this.

But they don't, this is, uh, most entrepreneurs are not financial focused people.

That's why they're entrepreneurs.

And this is pretty loose in most organizations.

Customer maximizer, this is so critical, so important.

The we all know now to getting positive reviews are, are, are critical.

If you are referral based or a word of mouth business or you want to build your business virally, be having raving fans that are gonna spread the words important and this needs to be activated.

It's one thing to say we do a really good job.

We have our SS SOPs in place and we do a really good job of making sure our people are happy, but we need to get them to understand how happy they are.

So it's, it's, you catch them in what I call a peak referral state.

So you do a service for a company, let's just say your H V A C, you do a service for a customer.

The person calls up and says, how did it go?

And the person said it was really great.

And you say, what'd you like about it?

And you just get 'em to, to, to think about the experience, right?

You wanna make sure that they're happy and, and unhappy customers don't repeat purchase.

And this whole concept of repeat purchase, especially if it's reoccurring revenue, is a really, is a really highly weighted, um, value max driver right now.

This is a real, real important one.

If somebody's just doing the job and and taking care of the customer and they're leaving, they're making a mistake.

If they're not trying to get testimonials or reviews to remind people how happy they are to create some energy and excitement, they're missing out on huge opportunity.

Thoughts about that?

Or any other?

Anybody wanna add anything to that?

Just a little bit of a a question.

So retention rates, um, on creating quality client base is part of a business valuation, is that right?

Absolutely.

Huge.

As a marketing business, it's critical to create that.

So we've got a contribution on many levels here, meaning that the service that we're talking about can be more easily adopted with what we're already doing that, Absolutely.

So I have a pure online, I have a pure online supplement company client.

We, we started out, they did 7 million, then they did 14 million, and this year they'll do 56 million, 80% on one product.

And they're just crazy about customer service.

They're crazy about communicating with the customers.

They're crazy about, one of the things we taught them to do is you reeducate people.

So if you have somebody takes a supplement, you send 'em a supplement, and then you wanna do a reorder.

If the supplement actually works, it actually produces a result like reduces pain or it makes you feel better, or if it actually works.

Or I had a cli, I had an Australian client who sold something for prostate to reduce for prostate issues and it took six to 12 months to work.

So what do you think their reorder rate was, right?

It just sucked.

And so what we did and what we did, I, I'm doing for this client right now, what they're, I'm guiding them to do is they send out the supplement and then we're following up and, and we're educating them on the supplement and we're reminding them what they might be feeling.

They might be feeling that their pain is reduced a little bit.

They might be finding that they're more, might be finding that they're sleeping, they're planting all these subconscious in their brain to go, this stuff really works, right?

So you are actually creating the experience, right?

And then as you get them to that peak state, now they're in a peak referral state, whether they go viral or they tell their sister, mother, brother about it.

And that's basically how you grow that business.

And then you have to keep repeating.

You have to keep reeducating them on why it works.

So they don't just get used to working it used to it and then stop taking it.

Cool.

Scott, James has a a question.

Um, would you agree that value of a business is based in the likelihood of the profits being maintained under new management?

So the, when most businesses are bought on a multiple of EBITDA with earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.

So it's a form of profit for those of you that are unfamiliar with it, and that's what they're bought.

It's bought on a stream of that income going forward.

And so when a buyer's now buying the confidence they have that will continue, will dictate the premium of the price they pay.

If they're doubtful, because too much of that is reliant on the current entrepreneur, that business is gonna be discounted significantly, right?

They're gonna significantly say, look, I'm gonna buy the business.

We're gonna probably lose half the revenue.

I'm gonna pay for half the revenue.

So if that's, if I, I think I asked, answered the question.

If I didn't, please ask it again.

Okay, thank you.

That must have answered it.

Yeah.

So the the last one, oops, going the wrong direction here.

So the last one is on mindset.

And I, I don't wanna go too much in, it's, it's, it's one of the most important things.

And if you were selling your business right now, uh, I could spend a lot of time on this.

It's just so important because the, there's a prep when we talk about pre preparing and we, we, I gave the example of me not being ready to sell and, and it being a miserable experience and Jerry not being res ready to sell.

And so for most businesses, when they're the baby boomers and they're ready to now sell this is, I think this is important for you to know they're tired, they're spending more money going to Florida than an example of this guy or going to wherever you vacation there in your neck of the woods and they're not working as hard, they're not willing to take as much risk.

They're partially checked out.

If they've got a good team, they're on autopilot a bit.

And that's a bad place to be if you wanna prepare your business to sell.

So the that they need to be re-energized.

They need to be reengaged and have a new game.

You need to create a new game for them to kick off what I call that passion gear.

Because getting, doing the things we're talking about requires some effort and, and, and they need to be back engaged, right?

So it's real important.

There's an emotional element of this and emotional preparation for this as well.

And also, if you really have done the work in advance when adversity happens or you get an offer that's really low, you see it instantaneously.

So covid hit, right?

Think about covid.

Think about people who are looking to sell her business.

And one of the, one of the, I had a former client contacted me in April and she basically said is in her own way, she's so polite, but she basically said, we're screwed.

We're not allowed to do our business.

We're shut down.

We, we don't have any revenue coming in.

I don't know what's gonna happen.

I have somebody who's that I've been talking to that'll basically take our business over for under a million dollars.

And I'm thinking of taking it.

I go, time out, dunno, time out.

So my first job is walker off the cliff, right?

To get walker off the plank, come back, let's look at your business, look at where it was.

Let's wait until we see.

So let's plan for how we're gonna get from where we are in April to the end of June.

And that first quarter, let's just see where it lands, right?

Take a breath.

Right?

Then she had another offer that came along.

She still wanted to sell it.

She got offered four and a half million dollars.

It was a convoluted deal.

It was one of those deals where the term sucked, but the, the four and a half million looked good.

We evaluated that and I, again, I I had to get back inside her head to say, what is it you really want?

Looked the money you're making now, let's future pace your earnings.

And she walked away from that deal and let her business get even stronger after she's been able to go back and, and delivered on the pent up demand.

And I'm happy to say that she just got a letter of intent week and a half ago, not for a million, not for four and a half million, but for nine and a half, no, 9.1 million cash, 9.1 million cash.

This is just about, that's the mental part of, I'm prepared.

I know what I value.

I don't want to, I don't wanna make a mistake.

And this is this scenario where you probably won't play with most of your clients.

You would be if you were more engaged with them.

But it's just something to understand because I think how it applies to you is if you have a, a client who's relatively checked out, you can't get 'em on the phone, you're dealing with their team, their team can't make decisions, you're frustrated.

They don't value what you do with their highest level.

Uh, it's probably because the entrepreneur is, it has this mindset, um, where they're just, they don't wanna take risks.

They're going through the motions and they don't understand what the upside potential is.

Scott, we've got a question from Albert.

Are these steps laid out in order of importance from your experience?

Is the mindset a maximizer?

Is the mindset maxim, um, maximizer the lever that drives the other six?

Uh, it's a really good question and, and, and you won't like the answer because we might like, the answer is when we do this with clients, it's every one of them is customized.

Because if we have somebody in the state that this client, woman of mine was, I have to start with mindset because she's all messed up.

We're not gonna get anything done.

And it, it, it, there there's a blend.

I can tell you that in almost all engagements we start with profit maximizer almost always.

And we actually, the cycles are, we start with profit maximizer and then how they move through the next elements depends on the company.

So for example, if we start with profit maximizer and they're struggling to get their team to implement 'cause they don't have the right people on the bus, they don't have the right, they don't have their team maximized, I'm not gonna get perform, I'm not gonna get the assistance put in place.

I'm not gonna be able to grow.

Right?

Financial's nice, but I I need to get the team on board.

So with each one of these that we look at, it is what, where is the opportunity?

Where is the lever?

You have other companies who they operate really well, but they just don't have metrics in place.

They don't have financials in place and they're just not believable.

They don't budget.

So there's no way to get confidence in what they're doing.

They got a good company, but they just have never done the financial piece.

Then we would start there.

So, uh, hopefully that answers that.

And understand too that my whole concept of optimization, you don't have to, companies don't have to go in and perfect all of these companies have to go in and identify where the gaps are, where the opportunities and just within their world that they're operating in do the best that they can.

That's why I'm not an advocate of trying to take each one of these and just maximize each one and go to the next one.

It's too hard.

People are running around, they're running their business, there's problems coming up, they're dealing with things.

And what I've learned, and then the real world, there's only so much most entrepreneurs can do.

We wanna make sure they're working on the right things at the biggest impact.

So Scott, with the, I'm just saying we've got about 20 minutes left.

What is your Yeah, like, like uh, I think we'll either leave that open to where people can ask questions or is there a, something you want to drive home in terms of how people can execute this in their own businesses with their clients?

That's that sort of thing.

Yeah.

So let me just show that real quickly.

One of the things I said for you I think is, is in applying this is the, they're gonna need you more to hit the growth target.

So, you know, part of what we've already talked about is can you motivate your clients to do more for you than the other one more with you and spend more money with you and look to you more than they do before.

And is there a way with certain clients, if they're looking to sell, that you can somehow participate in the upside value impact?

It doesn't have to be tremendous and I don't have time to share with you right now four or five strategies for how you could do that that are really acceptable to clients.

But if this is, if you are, Scott, this is really interesting.

I'm in my lane, I wanna stay in my lane.

This is really helpful for me to have that dialogue and I think I can add value by having, sharing that with clients.

That's great.

If I come across a client who's selling, I know I can now provide a level of, of value to them I couldn't provide before and really educate them.

And I really appreciate that's great.

If you say, I want to de dedicate a certain amount of my time going after clients that are potentially looking to sell as a way of helping them to be able to do what you do in your strike lane, but also have a significant impact on them.

You're at, you're at at a next higher level.

So I, I think there's, depending upon, I, I'd be interested to dialogue about this and we can even talk about it and say, I don't really see how I apply this or how do I apply it in a way that's comfortable with me, I'm more than happy to dialogue about that.

Mm-hmm.

The one thing you might just have, one of the things we do right now is, you know, this is what we do.

So if you have clients that are looking to sell or somebody that's looking to sell, you can send them our way.

We'll train 'em up and let you do your wheelhouse stuff.

So we'll work with you so you could do your wheelhouse stuff and we'll help 'em do the rest and then, and also include you in on any upside that, that we would experience from that relationship.

So you could participate on the upside without changing anything you're really doing, just making the introduction to us if in fact you think there's a good fit there.

So that's a way, that's one way you could play where you don't have to do anything different than you're doing, but you just have a different mindset hopefully after this that opens up the possibilities of adding even more value.

Really, you, you're getting to be known as the one that helped.

What's that?

You, um, with the services that you're doing and the effort that you're already making working alongside, it's like you are being known as the one that helped.

Yes, absolutely.

I think it is and I think I, what we try to carve out, look, there's lots of people there.

There's value builder, there's a whole bunch of 'em out there that have the six or seven or 10 steps or they can all sound similar.

And I, I believe that one of the things that we do is just, we come at it with a very customized approach.

As I just mentioned, it's not going through this cookie cutter thing.

We're, we're not having a company come in and pay the super high fee to put together a bunch of crap that they don't really need put in place yet.

Um, and we're helping 'em determine really working with them, with what is good for them, what is good for them, their long-term goals, short-term goals, and trying to make sure there's a right fit.

I hope, I'm hoping that passion and that desire to be able to really help and, and help them to achieve what they wanna achieve that's really right for them.

Their family is one of the di distinctions that we have.

Yeah.

So let me open it up to questions about, I'd just to hear, how does this apply to you?

How can it apply to you if you have questions about how you might utilize this within what you currently do?

Let's just open it up to that.

Scott, I've got a question.

What stage would you need a business to be at in terms of from a spectrum of startup to someone who's been around 20 years?

Or is it based on revenue?

What are you typically looking for?

Yeah, normally we're looking for somebody who's, if they have, if they're an online business, like an Amazon business, they can actually make this turn in as little as 18 months.

They've, they have to be able to build up the business and show it's sustainable and that they, that somebody's not gonna come in and copycat their product and they have to show sustainability since probably 18 months to two years is the quickest they're gonna be able to flip our avatar is, um, the, the million to $25 million US dollar business is the avatar and as low as 500,000.

'cause those are still worth doing.

And so as a general rule of thumb, that that's what we're looking for in the baby boomer world.

A lot of those are gonna own their companies for a long time.

And, but remember they're highly motivated sellers and they're likely, many of them have not invested in staying hip on technology and hip on marketing.

And so the impact you can have in that particular arena is pretty high.

As a general of thumb, we're we're thinking somebody's been in business three years or longer, $500,000 or more in revenue, ideally a million dollars more in revenue.

And when they get larger, they get above 25 million.

If they're not already a client, they've got access to other vehicles and people that they know and influencers and, and they're just much more difficult to work with.

Sorry.

So I was gonna, I was just gonna reflect on something that you said before in regards to, to your client avatars.

How do you treat clients that are brick and mortar compared to online?

And then how do you treat clients that are service-based compared to product-based when it comes to your, your, um, maximizers?

Yeah, so we've applied, we've, we've applied our maximizers to two companies in 290 industries and we do this a lot.

So in, in our training and when and when we apply these, we're constantly saying, here's how it would apply to a pure online business, like the supplement company I told you about and here's how it applies to a brick and mortar business.

And they're different, but they're all the same profit drivers.

So if we talk about lead generation for example, we stay with the profit maximizer, whether you're generating leads for online business or offline business, it's very, all the principles are pretty similar.

One, once that lead comes in, how you're gonna handle them is, is different.

I, we teach four models, right?

So if you have a brick and mortar business, which is walk like a a a men's clothing store, you don't have all the steps you have, you get a lead, which means they walk in the door, they interact with a salesperson and they make a decision and they leave.

We don't have all of these, we don't have all of these make a proposal and set up a follow up meeting.

It doesn't usually work that way.

They're just gonna buy or they're not gonna buy.

And so the steps are different.

So we have four different models of profit drivers and say, I'm a pure online business, I'm a service-based business, I'm a product business or I'm a pure brick and mortar business.

It's just a matter if you think about it, you're just identifying what are those steps in their process.

Yeah.

And Bri bringing it all together 'cause 'cause I get it all conceptually, but it's a big job to bring it all together, right?

That it's, it's um, yeah, I know you've got some pretty incredible models.

Yeah, it it is, it is, again, I'm not looking for anybody on this call to say, Hey, I wanna sign up to license this whole system and we're gonna go teach our clients.

'cause it, it is involved and you stay within your wheelhouse.

So the, if you really think about what I had had said earlier, when you go back and look at this and you start thinking about, I play here, I probably play in four of the seven, I don't have an ability to, i I don't have the expertise in these other areas.

You either partner with somebody or you just don't, you don't even work on those.

The, the business has to work on those.

You could still add enormous value.

So I don't wanna overcomplicate this, which is for most of you, if you, if your messaging is just broader, that you can help them more than just the revenue you're generating from them, I believe it's gonna help you dramatically increase your income with that company.

And when we do this, we do a strategy session.

So a company comes to us and we spend an hour and we just, we're all we're doing is learning a little bit about their business and finding out where their gaps are here real quick.

And then we're gonna just zoom in on one or two things that they're doing or not doing and show 'em what the impact can possibly be when they engage with us as a client.

We're gonna do a three to four hour version of that and we're just literally peeling back the onion and finding out what they do and don't do.

It's a standard set of questions.

So it it's actually quite simple.

And then from there you have a game plan of of where you're gonna be working, what you're gonna be working on.

Again, I'm not looking for you to do this, but just to understand this is what's possible for your clients.

Is that, does that answer Scott?

Or if not, drill deeper.

Yeah, yeah.

I really like that as a model.

'cause I can see how important all of those aspects are in the Yeah, in the, yeah.

In the process of building and selling a business.

So it's good to have it all on one page.

Yeah, for the most part.

Jerry, Jerry the auto guy, he did these two only, yeah, Only four months, he just did these two.

It's just going back and saying it's little things.

You start looking at, we, we just went through a period of time up until the inflation hit right now where 2008 happened.

Everybody got scared to raise their prices, but they don't realize they're paying their employees at consumer price index at 2% and all of a sudden their 10% profitability gets eroded over five years.

They're afraid to raise their prices that they, they have bad discount policies.

We can jump in there and pick up five to 10% profit impacts just in that one area.

It is, it doesn't have to be complicated and ha it doesn't have to be a lot of them to have a big impact.

Yeah, absolutely.

Eric, Eric, we had a Question.

You've got your Hand up.

I see.

Yeah, it was just more about a comment towards, um, the question and the framing you established for this section, Scott.

Um, I think we do a lot of go-to market strategies or market expansion if they're an existing business and looking to launch some other product or or service.

And these are the sort of things that we, um, discuss with them as they, a lot of them are looking to sell, like we had that conversation with them regarding these plans.

But from what you've shared in this content, it's actually quite clear, uh, how to frame the elements that they're missing and a really great way to give them the understanding and also the insight into what these things could potentially mean.

And we would love them to have perhaps get you in to help us with, um, those particular clients because it'd be highly beneficial.

The framing is really good here.

I really enjoy what you've shared so far.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's good.

And so as I mentioned before, if you, once you understand where your wheelhouse is in the wheel and you, I believe that if, if somebody were to be sent to us, for example, and we're gonna be working with them, I believe it will lead to an expansion of what you're doing.

It, it, it is strengthened and and they will be internally grateful to you for you to be able to help it open their eyes.

So I I I think that's one of the big wins as well.

Who else, who else sees even maybe even just a small application of this or that that might help them?

Scott?

Great presentation.

I work with helping businesses get business reviews.

So Google reviews and those types of things.

Had a client recently sell a business for seven figures.

They're a one operator and they said when the purchaser came in that the reviews had played a significant, hi Scott, I think you're breaking up.

Is that him breaking up or is it my internet?

Uh, I think I could hear you All right.

Try again.

Scott Baker.

Yeah, we had, I had a client, I helped get business reviews for clients and he sold his business recently for seven figures.

But when the purchaser looked at the business, they were really impressed with how many reviews do you see it as an asset class or have examples of increasing reviews has increased value.

So I think what I just heard is that do it, do re positive reviews have a an impact on, on the business and in and more so on the, on the value of the business?

Is that the question?

Yeah, So I I believe there's a cer I believe that the answer's yes, but let me explain a little bit.

So if you are a pure Amazon seller, you know, and once you get, you don't have to have 10,000 reviews.

Once you get above several hundred reviews, you're a legitimate player.

And the incremental benefit of getting more reviews for most products is not really that valuable.

Matter of fact, it's probably 50 or so.

It's really interesting as you start off with a product, you don't have very many reviews and then you get above 10 and it, it's incredible what happens to sales get above 10, the sales bump up again and give above 50 the sales go up even more so in a pure online business like that, there's a point where you have enough.

I think the same thing is true when, if I'll go back to H V A C to use a brick and mortar version as well, which is, um, what I always teach clients to do is go and look at your competition.

If the most reviews and there's eight and you get 20, you are going to get more business and you get 25 or 30, you have a systematic process to do that.

That is definitely something that's going to bump the value of your company.

And it's, there's not a direct correlation of I have x number of reviews, I'm worth this much more money.

It just basically says that I'm above the competition.

We have strong positive reviews on our business and, and so this is something that adds credibility to the longevity of the business.

Yeah, it's a, it's a good, It's important distinction 'cause people think, oh my God, I gotta get, I gotta get a million reviews.

You don't, I've I've had clients, we go on and, and and there's seven reviews is the most reviews anybody has and nobody has a system in it.

All we gotta do is get it up to 20 and you'll just be a go the go-to company.

Yeah, no, that's good.

So we've got, I'm just aware we're, we're coming up to the, coming up to the hour.

If people wanna get in touch with you, Scott, how do they do that?

Yeah, let me do this here.

As I mentioned before, if you want to just jump on it, I'd love to meet you.

I I don't have any problem with jumping on, on my, on a, on a call and I probably could have had a link here to my calendar, but this is probably easy.

This is my, these are both my, my will come directly to me.

I don't know how to convert this to Australia and adding the 0 1 1.

So if somebody could help me with that would be great.

That's my us number.

Um, and just reach out and I'd love to just jump on a, on a call with you and answer questions.

And I I'm, I'm sure there'll be a lot of questions in your mind about how do I apply this?

'cause I'm just giving you a, a broad brush, right?

That's all I, that's all I could do in, in of the, we have spent here together.

If you have somebody that, that look is looking to sell a business and you wanna just have a have us have a conversation, I'm happy to do that.

If you wanna talk about how you might, how you might participate in what we're doing, maybe, uh, you wanna talk about that you have a real strong skillset that if we plug you into our clients, but something where you can produce results and help them generate more revenue and profits in a predictable way, that's really valuable as well.

Yeah, yeah, no, perfect.

And you've also got a, a book on Amazon as well, don't you?

Yeah, so my book, so this was number one in entrepreneurship and number one in management.

It's called Hypergrowth.

It's not a cool, it was a cool book.

It's called Hypergrowth, it's seven Success Drivers to Hypergrowth.

I like drivers by the way.

And so the seven success drivers to hypergrowth and normally if you were in the US or whatever else, or maybe I could ship over a bundle, I'd be happy to do sign copies of it or whatever.

But lemme tell you about the book real quick because I started off as a cheesy marketing thing as best I can think about it.

'cause somebody contacted me and said, Hey, we can help you get your book ranked really high.

Go interview 12 businesses in your industry and it's gonna lead to clients because the fact that they were in your book, they're gonna wanna hire you.

And I didn't actually engage us in this.

Somebody on my team did.

And so I got on the phone and I thought, I'm not doing that.

So we, I said, I'm gonna do it on Ink 500 clients.

I'm an Ink 502 time Ink 500 rank company.

I would've been third if I didn't sell my company and I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go reach out.

So we reached out.

It was amazing.

The, the, it was overwhelming.

So we had so many inquiries that I was able to say, I'm gonna interview 12 people, 12 entrepreneurs from 12 different industries ranging from super high tech to super brick and mortar.

And I'm gonna, I only want them in my book if they'd been on the list three times or more.

'cause that says they're sustainable.

They weren't a one hit wonder.

They were able to sustain over time.

And then I just interviewed them and I interviewed them in a way where it wasn't, I'm asking questions.

They're answering, they're asking questions.

I'm interrupting them, adding my elements to it, and really digging to find out what is, what are the seven success drivers they all have in common.

And it's really fascinating, man.

I just, there's a, the, the first guy in the book is, is just a fascinating, I'll just as quick as I can.

He is a fascinating story.

Carl.

He starts off, he is an attorney and one of his clients owns Pawn Shops and he is gonna be running for a government office.

And so he doesn't wanna be related to the pawn shops that are next, next to the adult bookstores.

And so he doesn't want anything to do with it.

So my client takes it over and decides why are these all equipped it away, but make people feel sleazy coming in.

So he, he basically redid them to look like jewelry stores in the mall and treated people with utmost respect.

Built that into 77 locations and sold it.

And then it, that turned into him not knowing what he wanted to do.

He started buying factories in the US that make processed foods that didn't invest in their factories and don't really have marketing.

And I'll share the rest of the story.

I'll save the rest of the story with you.

When, by the time I interviewed him, he, he had done a quarter billion dollars, three quarters of a billion dollars in revenue in that business.

It's just fascinating.

So it's about, it's about these seven success drivers.

It's, it's a story.

It's more of a story and a dialogue versus any intense reading.

It's much easier to read than this presentation is to absorb.

Probably, hopefully you'll enjoy it.

Yeah.

No, no.

Awesome.

That's, that's great.

Thanks.

Thanks, Scott.

Yeah.

Gil Gilbert, do you wanna, I'll hand it over to you to, to wrap up.

Yeah.

Um, Scott Horman, thanks a lot for, um, the education as always.

There's so much depth in your, from the breadth of experience that you bring to the table on the content you share.

It's been really good to do this in such a relaxed environment and have really good vulnerable questions asked of you and for you to share.

I'm really looking forward to the future actually, because in this session alone, the impact that I saw, not only for others, but for ourselves, it's just, it's massive.

Thanks Scott Bywater for, uh, allowing this to happen on, um, the Elite Marketers Forum.

It's real pleasure to be around good people and have good education.

Thanks Scott.

And it's great meeting everybody.

It's a great group.

And that's just, it's been a pleasure.

And again, I know it's drinking from fire hose, but hopefully the takeaways will be something you'll be able to apply in, in the real world in your businesses.

And again, feel free to reach out to me.

I will send, uh, Gilbert, I'll send you a, a, a calendar link which has a 15 minute and 30 minute and 60 minute option.

Somebody wants you just have a quick chat.

They can, and, and that, that, that'll be, they can write this down, but that might be easier to do as well.

Yeah, We're getting some comments coming through just saying, you know, really valuable from Jane or from John and very interesting and applicable from James.

Yeah.

Thanks guys.

And if you've got any, as always, if you've got any feedback about this session or stuff you'd like to see for future sessions, just, just reach out to me.