Dan Bradbury is one of the finest and brightest marketing minds around, and one of the greatest authorities on becoming a self-made-man. He started out with nothing and built himself up from the ground up. He has created an entire business on teaching others about how to get there – and in just one hour he can teach you too.
Dan Bradbury
Dan is now one of the UK’s leading business and personal development coaches – but he certainly didn’t start out that way. That makes him the go-to expert on building something out of nothing. He is the go-to expert on all manner of business, marketing and personal development issues, as well as making a lot out of nothing. He has all of the secrets of of the 6% – and he’s willing to share them all with you.
The Audio Training
In this audio training – exclusive to us – Dan Bradbury tells us his story. Where he came from, where he is now… and, most importantly, how he got there. He is one of the 6 percent and he knows hows to out you there.
- How to create a 7 figure coaching, training, consulting business – from scratch
- How to grow your business and get more paying clients
- What every successful business owner knows about marketing
Click the play button on the player below, and in just one hour you will learn…
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Want to read along? No problem. Click the link below to read the transcript!
Click to Read the Transcript
Dan: Apparently, showing up in your pajamas isn’t okay for this conference. Hello. How are we doing? I’m really excited for this presentation, actually, because mainly I was asked to come up with it, with this presentation, so it’s completely new. Hopefully, you’ll like it because I’m pretty much clueless as to how it’s going to go, but there’s going to be some really good content. For this presentation, I really said, “Okay, let me look at the journey I’ve been on and let me look at the key steps or distinctions or key moments in that experience, the key distinctions that I made as I went from starting out from scratch to having relative success in the CTCS industry.”
Now the premise for this presentation is quite simple and that is a survey done by PricewaterhouseCoopers, some research that they did for the ICF back in 2012 showed that the average UK coaching income was £17,000. Yeah, exciting, isn’t it? By the way, that’s fulltime coaches. When you think that the average income in the UK is £24,000-25,000, that shows you that as an industry it’s below par. Now another interesting thing from this report, which if you just Google it, you’ll find it. I literally read it again this morning just to get the stats fresh in my mind for this presentation is that average coach, trainer, consultant or speaker, so this average is for people who just do coaching. Just do coaching, that’s what they do. They’re either a live coach or a business coach or a health coach, that’s it. All they do is coaching. For those that add in training, consulting and speaking i.e. they’re an expert, they might sell products, etc., the average is £32,000 a year.
At first, you might go, “Wow.” Well, obviously the distinction you could make from that is to go, “Well, okay, don’t just do coaching. Figure out how all this works together,” i.e. you might have a book, like Raymond said. You might do seminars as well, you might have other products that you sell and if you have different ways of packaging up your material together, your income’s going to be significantly higher. However, for me that’s not the most interesting thing from that report. The most interesting thing from this report was the fact that 6% of the people in the industry make 80% of the revenue, 80% of the money – and it’s a multibillion pound industry – is made by 6% of the individuals or 6% of the companies within that industry. What that means in plain English is it’s 53 times as much money. The average person in the bottom 94% of coaches is making £17,000 and then for the top 6% it’s £901,000 a year, annual income. For people that are classifying themselves as experts, trainers, etc., that £32,000 multiplied by 53 is £1.7 million average income if you’re in the top 6%. Pretty frightening, right?
Now I’m not one of these people that just subscribe and says, “Oh well, there’s this massive inequality and that’s not fair. We should share it out evenly amongst everybody.” The question that I ask myself or did ask myself was saying, “Okay, how can I become one of the 6%,” because my fundamental belief isn’t that the people at the top of the tree is screwing the people at the bottom. It’s just the fact that they found a way in which to package their business to add value in a more leveraged way, so they can attract more clients and create a bigger business. Clearly, it’s not inherited, it’s not them having some kind of passing down or controlling of the assets of the industry because this income. This is based upon the advice that’s given, the seminars that are given or the products that are sold. Therefore, the question’s going to be, “Okay, what are they doing that I’m not,” if you’re in the 94%. Here’s the crucial question. When you look at that stat and you think about that, the question you’ve got to ask yourself – and I’ve already give you a bit of a clue – is are they making 53 times as much money as you, assuming you’re in that 94%? Is it because they are 53 times better at the coaching, training, speaking, etc.? How many think yes? How many thing, no, they’re not 53 times better? Of course and I agree entirely.
Therefore, it can’t be dependent solely upon your skill as a coach or as an expert or as a speaker. It’s got to be based on some other aspects, other factors. I consider myself lucky to be in that 6% bracket, but of course, I didn’t start there. I started out with no clients, no money, etc. and I made a few distinctions along the way over the last – I don’t know, it’s probably ten years now – certainly over the last five, six, seven years. I’ve put together a little presentation that gives you the full key distinctions that I made along the way from starting out from scratch to the position that I find myself now. Sound interesting? You don’t have to say yes, we could talk about something else. Alright, here we go.
First of all, understand their background. My background was squash, so this is me teaching a lesson. I’m the man on the left, not the lady on the right. I wanted to be a squash professional, so what I did while I was training to be a professional because professional squash does not pay very well at all was I would teach people how to play. That was my background in coaching, if you will. It was teaching people the skillset of playing the game of squash. When I was 17, 18, 19 years old, that’s what I did fulltime and that’s how I made my money. However, I was working seven days a week, pretty much just trying to work with anybody. Whenever you wanted the lesson, I would make myself available because I was single at the time. I didn’t have a family, so I could be at the club any day of the week dawn to dusk and I pretty much was there. Wasn’t on court coaching all that time, but I was pretty much there seven days a week, dawn to dusk.
That’s how it worked, but I quickly figured out that it would burn me out. I would get tired, I would get jaded. Nick, I’ve just realized I have literally no Scooby Doo of time and don’t have a watch on. You’ll need to give me time prompts. Where was I? I was getting quite jaded and quite burnt out and then I figured out that I could do group coaching. It’s about leverage, so I started doing group coach and whether it be for juniors or whether it be for adults. Rather than having somebody pay £10 for a 40-minute session or what have you, I would have people pay £2 each for a 40-minute session and I would have a group of people on multiple courts. It was about leverage and immediately my income started to go up. I was still trading time for money, but it was much, much, much more leveraged.
I wish I could say I was intelligent and figured it out magically, but I didn’t. I stumbled across by good luck more than anything. In my downtime, when I was at the club – I might have a few sessions in the morning and then I might have a few hours before my next session – I said I want to do something to be productive in this time, but nobody wanted the lessons during those times, so what can I do? Just because I was a club professional at the Hallamshire Squash Club in Sheffield, a lot of people would break their racquets and they would bring them to me. I was still trading time for money and then I figured out what if I started repairing people’s racquets, restringing their racquets? There’s a racquet restringing machine, so I bought a machine and in my downtime, I would utilize that downtime by repairing people’s racquets, but as I got busier as a club professional, as a coaching professional, as I got busier I didn’t have the time to restring the racquets.
I went to a friend of mine who was a few years younger. He was like a good promising junior at the club and I said, “Look, I will teach you to restring these racquets. You can use my machine and you can use my string. You can do it and I will pay you an hourly rate. I was making a margin per racquet, so even though I was making less money because I wasn’t doing it myself, I figured out in the time when he’s stringing the racquets, I’m making some money and at that same time, I can be on-call coaching and making some money. It was the positioning as the club professional, which caused people to give their racquets to me. I’d say, “Yes, I’ll get this restrung for you by next week.” I would hand them off to him and it created a nice residual, if you like, income because the machine was paid for. It was just the string and the young lad’s time. I can’t remember his name now, which is quite shocking, but it was for his time. He was happy, he was getting paid and I was making a margin from utilizing my position as an expert in that tiny, little micro-niche. Does that make sense?
It was my first business idea that wasn’t dependent on me because the racquets, every week at this club because it was a place where people played tennis and squash and racquetball. Strings would break, they would bring them to reception. The reception would take them and then pass them over to me or to the junior that I employed and we would just redo it. It was a business, it was actually a business. It wasn’t just, “Oh, this is what I do. Thanks very much.” Unfortunately, I knew exactly how I could screw it up and that is I was having some injury problems at the time, so I wasn’t really making the progress as a professional player that I wanted to make. I was trying to figure out how I could progress whilst I was injured and I started studying sports psychology and things like that. I started reading these books and it was really interesting to me because I was new. I didn’t know anything about NLP or psychology or anything at this time, so it was like a fascinating, brave, new world for me.
I really got into accelerated learning. In fact, this was one of the first products I ever purchased. It’s called Mega Speed Reading by a guy called Howard Berg, who has the Guinness world record for the world’s fastest reader. Now I started studying his material and managed to literally triple my reading speed with the same level of comprehension. I thought, “This is amazing.” All of sudden, my eyes were opened and I thought, “Wow, if I could just learn all this cool stuff that I need to learn much, much, much quicker, then I’d be able to get ahead much faster and I’d be able to get better results. My life would just work at a higher level. This will be amazing.” I’m a little bit OCD, if you know me, so I got a little bit obsessive about speed reading to the point where I actually entered the speed reading world championships and on my second attempt, I came third in the speed reading world championships. Whoo! Yeah, it’s not quite the glamorous lifestyle you might imagine. It’s just a lot of people in a room with books and stopwatches.
I got really good at speed reading, but the squash thing, the injury problems were continuing. I said, “You know what? I really want to actually teach this,” because from the squash, I acquired a passion about working with children and teaching children how to play squash, but I just liked working with children. It was something my dad did. He used to teach children, so I just enjoyed that. I said, “Okay, I want to teach speed reading because if you could teach children to love learning…” because most children love what they’re good at, so if they hate learning, they’re always going to trip up in school whereas if they learn to love learning, then that’s going to totally transform their life. How many would agree with that? Show of hands. That’s what I said, so I said, “Great, I’m going to teach this stuff in schools.” The problem was I didn’t know how to make the business work, but I knew somebody who trained at the same gym as I did that was about my age, but he’d been really successful in business, so I came up with this genius idea.
I said, “Okay, I know all this speed reading and accelerated learning stuff. You’re good at that business stuff, all that selling and marketing stuff that I don’t have a clue about.” I said, “How about we go into partnership together, a joint partnership? I’ll do all the delivery and you could do all the marketing, selling and the getting of clients.” At first, things were going really well. How many of you know this guy on the screen? This is Les Brown, a quite well-known and respected speaker, very, very good speaker. Tim, that was my business partner in the speed reading thing, Tim managed to get us a meeting with Les Brown and we demonstrated what we can do and Les said, “Okay, boys, you think you’ve got this speed reading stuff, prove it. I’ll bring you out to America, I want you to go into this school, this inner-city school in Kansas City, Missouri. We’ll test the children, we’ll get you to do your magic. We’ll test them again and we’ll see the results you’ve got. If this stuff really works, I’ll be very impressed and I can open some doors for you.”
I was 20 at this time, I think. We went off to Kansas City, Missouri and without sounding to Hollywoodesque. It was like a Hollywood movie. It was a hardcore inner-city school. Tim and I are both White and we were literally the only White people in this school. I’ve no racial prejudice whatsoever, so I’m entirely comfortable, but even I, if I’m honest, I felt nervous because I was at an inner-city with teenage youths who are like seven-foot tall and seemed quite intimidating to me. We were just kind of thrown in thee, me and this other scrawny, little, White kid saying, “Teach these kids who are only a few years younger than you how to read faster. By the way, they don’t know you’re coming and they’re not interested in what you have to say,” – click. We went in there and, fortunately, we produced a pretty exciting result. Sure enough, we managed to double most children’s reading speed with the same level or better of comprehension, so it was fantastic. The school was thrilled and gave raving reviews to Les, raving reviews.
I remember we flew down to Orlando, Florida, met up with Les. I can remember it to this day. He looked at me square in the eye and he said, “Dan, I’m going to make you a millionaire.” For me at the time, as a 20 year old, I was like, “Oh my God, this is the best thing in the world.” I remember I actually rang up my dad and I knew it was 2am UK time, but I didn’t care, I was so excited. I was like, “Dad, I’ve made it. This is it. It’s great. My business is taking off,” and my dad said, “Dan, ring me in the morning. Tell me then.” I thought, “That’s it, we’ve made it.” Les is this mega-successful speaker and he’s going to introduce us onstage at a big conference of his. He told everybody, “You need to hire these guys, work with these guys. It’s great,” and I thought, “That’s it. This is going to open the floodgates. That’s it, I’ve made it. I’m done, I’m there. Brilliant.” I was living the dream. Unfortunately, it was only a dream in that from that stunning introduction and that endorsement by Les, we failed to turn that into an astonishing zero pounds’ worth of business. We just didn’t know how to capitalize on that opportunity, so even though we got an expert, a proven expert, a guru, if you like, in the field saying, “Yeah, work with these boys,” and there were loads of people that were interested and we were keen to do the work and we proved we could get results. Somehow we failed to make that turn into money.
So much so that 12 months later, I was dead broke. Me and business partner fell out because I had abdicated responsibility of the financial success of the business to him because I didn’t know how to do it, so I needed somebody else to do it for me. Lo and behold, I was left with a £108,000 of unsecured debt. I wasn’t even savvy enough to have a limited company. It was all debt that we’d borrowed and put into this partnership. It was a limited partnership. However, the astonishing thing was I thought the problem was a lack of money. Some of you here now probably believe that the reason that your business isn’t working is because you don’t have enough money to get started or to invest in the website that you want or to buy the doohickey that you want or to sign up for Raymond Aaron’s program or whatever it is and you think that that’s the problem, as did I. I was wrong. I was very, very, very, very wrong. That’s not the problem. The problem was I didn’t know how to attract clients to me and make money and how to make the sale and turn those sales into profit.
The reality was, even though I had all this debt, if you had given me a check, if I’d had a rich uncle and, ironically, a little side twist just for randomness, I was dating Eric Clapton’s daughter at the time and if he’d written me a check and said, “Here you go, have the money. Wipe the debt clean,” it wouldn’t have solved the problem. It would have solved the temporary problem called ‘I don’t know how I’m going to pay the credit card bills’ or ‘prevent having my car repossessed’ or things like that. It would have solved those problems temporarily, but the reality is if you had given me a few months, I would have been back in a similar mess because I had a desire to do something, but I wasn’t able to bring in more money than I was spending. I remember at the time, my dad was a career man at HSBC or Midland Bank, as it was then. He worked there for 40 years and he said, “Dan, I can help get you a job.” I figured out after tax the job he could have got me, like an entry level job paying £16,000 or so a year, after tax, etc. and paying the minimum payments off the debts and paying the interest and whatever it would take me something like 37 years to pay off all the debt that I had managed to accrue.
I realized that the problem wasn’t actually the debt. The problem was the fact that I didn’t know how to attract clients and make money, so the first distinction that changed it all for me before I knew how to do all the stuff that you might have heard or seen me speak about before, all the marketing, before I knew how to do any of that, the first distinction that I made was it’s not how good your coaching is. How good your coaching is does not determine your income. It’s how good you are at getting clients. The reason why the 6% are making 53 times as much money, I would argue, is part because they have a system, they have a process. They have an ability to generate clients. It’s not, as we agreed, because they are 53 times better than you at delivering whatever product or service that you do. How many buy into this concept? Show of hands. Okay, good.
Next up was this man who you’ll see tomorrow. Any of you guys seen Andy Harrington speak before? Fortunately for me because I was getting into all this learning stuff, I was just trying to consume everything. The problem was I didn’t have any money, but I was smart enough to recognize there were things I could bring to the table and via Nick, who I had met at the similar age, similar time period, Nick introduced me to Andy. Andy was growing a training company, an NLP training company, as it was back then and Andy offered me a job working for him sales, which frankly scared the shit out of me. The reason why was I was no good at sales. The thought of trying to make a sale made me sweat. That’s why I had the previous business partner in the accelerated learning business because I didn’t know how to do that. I knew how to do the delivery. I was quite happy adding value, but I had a limiting belief that somehow making the sale to somebody wasn’t adding value. That was somehow greedy or taking away.
Fortunately for me, I was so desperate for money and so desperate to learn more stuff in this space – NLP, etc. – I took the job. Not because it would make me a lot of money, but because I would have a base salary and, more importantly, I would get free NLP training as being an employee of Andy’s. Again, it was a lot more than by design. By being in the environment Andy said, “Look, I’m going to train you how to do this stuff,” and the best sales guy in the company at the time was a guy called Tolson. He said, “Learn from Tolson. Model Tolson and you’ll learn how to be better at selling stuff.” I remember Andy is a little bit of a scary guy sometimes and the first call that I made, they went, “Right, we’ve got a real hot prospect for you, a hot lead here. His name’s Chris and he’s already said he wants to sign up for this NLP program. He’s bought all this stuff from us in the past, but he’s just procrastinating about making the decision to do it.” He said, “What you’ve got to do is ring up and get him to sign up,” and then Andy said something, which thankfully served me well. He said, “Don’t you dare get off the phone until you’ve got a yes out of him.”
Fortunately, I took it quite literally and so an hour and forty-five minutes later, I managed to talk Chris into not by confidence, just by sheer persistence talked him into this, but he didn’t have his credit cards to hand, so I made him sign the check whilst he’s on the phone, sign the check, put it in an envelope and was on the phone with him while he walked down to the postbox and posted the check for the training. That was my first sale. I’m excited to know you might make one sale out of 20, 30 or 50 calls at that point. I thought, as Andy told me, it was going to be one and one. “This person’s going to buy,” when he said that, I took it quite literally. Because I moved from one end of the country down to the other, I left behind a lot of the friends and the peer group that I had in the past. Andy said, “Look, you become like the people that you associate yourself with.” There’s a stat that says is you look at your income, your income is the average of the ten people you spend the most time with.
I started spending a lot of time with Andy and it was definitely true for me. Not just because I had a better example, a better peer group, a better experience of being around somebody that just thought about how to make opportunities happen, how to take action, how to turn this around, how to make sales, how to make profit, how to add value rather than my friends back in Sheffield where I was from, which there’s nothing wrong with them, but like me, they were struggling, they were in debt. They would just drink their money at the weekend and then they’d have no money the next week, etc. By moving away from that peer group and associating with some people that were playing at a higher level than I was, it transformed everything, so I set a goal to clear all the debt in one year. By the way, during this process I worked for Andy for a while and then I left Andy because I felt I had the learnings to go out on my own again, but I set the goal to clear this £108,000 of debt in one year and I failed miserably. Bear in mind I’d never made more than £16,000 a year until that point of starting to hang out with Andy. I’d never made more than £16,000 a year at this point. I failed to do it in a year.
It took me 17.5 months to clear that debt completely, but more importantly, I solved the problem. I didn’t solve the problem by just making a lot of money. I solved the problem called not knowing how to attract clients to me, not knowing how to make the sale, not knowing how to show people that what I had was really valuable and it really would benefit you to sign up. I solved that problem and, consequently, I’ve never had any debt personally since that time. This is something for me that was so huge before then. It seemed like I would always be in debt forever and I thought it due to lack of money and it wasn’t. It was due to not being able to make the sale, so my key distinction #2 that kind of transferred me on this journey is peer pressure always wins. Always. You become like the people that you hang out with. It’s been proven time and time again in science. Basically, if you hang out with people that are overweight, you will unnaturally, unconsciously okay with you to pile on the pounds. Exact same thing in business and financially.
One of the speakers later today who I’ve just seen come into the back of the room earlier, Jeremy Harbour. He’s phenomenally skilled at buying and selling businesses, which was a topic that interested me much later on in my story than this, but by hanging around with him, it’s transformed my thinking, my awareness, my skillset and my standards for what financially is and isn’t acceptable. You’re going to love his presentation when you hear it later on, but regardless, just get the key distinction here is, look, who the hell are you hanging out with? I’m not saying that you should or shouldn’t get rid of some friends, but I would argue that you’ve only got so much time and if you choose to spend more time in the proximity of certain people that are getting the results that you want, you cannot help but start to produce similar results. Make sense? Alright, perfect.
I’m going to play you a little video now of my first ten months in business. To give you context of this video, it’s teaching the next key point, which is about the systems and how you can setup the business for success from the word ‘go.’ I think most people in this industry make the mistake of thinking if only they had the product right or if only they had the success or the sales, then they would setup their business the right way and that’s like trying to build a house without having any foundations established. That’s building a house on the sand. It’s stupid and you end up always then trying to get the clients, trying to keep the clients and then you don’t have the time to get the system in place anyway, but then you’re out of money, so you have to get some more clients and it’s a mess. In my first ten months in the CTCS training industry, I made over half a million and I’m going to play you a 20-minute video that shows you exactly how I did that.
Now just to give a bit of context, don’t worry, in the video I get a little bit technical at some points and the reason why that is, which isn’t relevant for that presentation here, is I’m presenting a marketing competition for a specific type of marketing software called Infusionsoft. Any of you guys heard of Infusionsoft? Yeah, okay, it’s at their annual conference and every year they have a Marketer of the Year contest, who’s used that software best to build the systems that grow their business. Again, I’m not selling anything. I’m not talking about Infusionsoft in this presentation, but you’ll hear me reference it and I get a little bit techy. Don’t lose sight of this 20-minute video. It’s to show you how I started from scratch, no products, no list, no money and I produced this result in ten months. Ten months and you can, too. Just watch the systems or how I thought about the structure of creating the business. I think you’ll find it very useful. You want to see the video? Cool.
[Video Plays]
That was my little attempt at Photoshop. Yeah, it was pretty good. I want to start with a little test for marketers, which I learned from a friend of mine called Jason Bale in the UK, so it’s a practical test to see how competent marketers you are. Everybody needs to stand up. This will be really quick, but if you could just stand up for a moment. What you need to do is put your hands out about this far apart. Just hold your hands out like this and then on the count of three, I want you to bring your hands together and clap. We’re going to go one, two, three. Okay, hold them out nice and wide. One, two, three. You guys are good, us Brits are crap at this. We’re all trying to clap in unison. One, two three. One, two, three. Little bit closer together now. On two, this time. One, two. One, two. One, two. Okay, now two inches apart, on one. Ready? One. One. One. One. One. One. One. Thank you, thank you. It’s an important test because it’s called the ‘How to Guarantee You Can Get a Standing Ovation from the Audience before You Even Begin.’
I took the competition literally, so I’m going to show you guys one sequence and I think this next ten minutes or so probably is going to be, could be the most valuable ten minutes of the entire conference for you guys and the reason why I think I can say that is this time last year, I was sat in the audience. I already have one business. I’ve been on Infusion for about 18 months, but I’d already had one business. It was doing okay, it was doing quite well, but the reason I was sat in the audience is because I wanted to start a new business. I’d actually incorporated the company, but everything I’m going to show you now, I created between the end of February and the end of December last year in ten months. We went from zero, a new company to just a little bit under a million dollars in that timeframe. Everything I’m going to show you was borne out of that, so I literally sat in the audience wondering how I can do that stuff and this is it.
The business I was starting was a live coach training company, so we train people in live coaching skills and in neuro-linguistic programming, which is a type of psychotherapy, really. What I wanted to do was have a traditional info business, generate the leads, send them a free report and then get them to buy a home study program. That’s the sequence I’m going to show you today anyway. In February of last year, we were at zero, we’d just started. We literally hadn’t made any sales yet, so we had no monthly revenue, we had no employees. I had a couple of hundred leads from personal contacts and other things like that, but that was it. I had no marketing campaigns or sequences, no buyers and the first month I spent about £25,000 in marketing, which I’ll show you and it was all Google pay-per-click. There was nothing creative about it. It was just dumping a lot of keywords, throw a lot of money at it and see what happens. Cross your fingers. I was working 40-50 hours a week on this and pro rata, I was maybe taking a day off a month or so when you first get the business going. I’m going show you four things today, but I’m going to skim over a lot of it because it’s already been clued by the other two guys. Weren’t they awesome, by the way, Gus and Shawn?
I’m going to show you two things, which they didn’t show you that I think you’re going to find really valuable. We’re going to talk about these four areas. We’re going to talk about how we tracked our potential clients. That’s the lead generation. Then we’re going to talk about lead capture, how we took that traffic and turned it into opt-ins on the list and then, third, we’re going to talk about lead qualification, which for me, this is a biggie. If I wasn’t doing Step 3, I wouldn’t have any profit and so that’s huge, how we qualify the leads to eliminate the ones that are a waste of time and only focus on the ones who are going to buy from you anyway. Finally, four, just lead conversion. The first problem I had was I didn’t have a product. It’s kind of tough to sell something when you don’t have a product, so my solution was quite simple. I said, “I’ll go find someone and use theirs.” I didn’t want to invest the time in creating the product and spend months because I wanted to get a return fast. I went and found somebody and agreed to a license deal, basically. It wasn’t even my product.
I paid him an RE, the rights to sell the product. What people try to do is they spend ages trying to create this magical product and then trying to figure out if they can sell it. It was paperclip traffic at a simple squeeze page. The website was the most horrendous thing you’ll see in the world. I’ll show you it in a moment and it was just an opt-in page for a free report. The free report was just the sales letter to sell the kit. That was the whole business, so we added just a ton of keywords in and threw a lot of money at it. Fortunately, I was able to get a good credit line with Google because I’d used them in my other business, so I didn’t even have to put the cash in. I actually had it on credit, so I kind of threw some money at it and crossed my fingers and hoped that it would come good. The challenge was I didn’t know which keywords would covert to sales. I was tracking which keywords were turning into leads, so I knew my cost per lead for the people to opt in, but I didn’t know which keywords were actually giving me the buyers.
Fortunately, thanks to Tyler, who stood up here earlier, he gave me a little bit of code last year at the user’s conference, which allows you to capture the information passed through from Google and store it in the contact record. I could store the keyword that they used to get onto the database against the contact record, so I could see which keywords were actually giving me the buyers. It doesn’t matter if the lead costs you a dollar per lead or ten dollars per lead. Okay, I’m getting a bit technical here, so let’s make this simple. In fact, you tell me. What’s the point? Can somebody give me succinctly what’s the point that I’m trying to get across. Yes, sir? What you say is true, but it’s not my point. Yeah and let’s get even chunkier up above Google. Let’s just say that your business advertises in two newspapers, that’s how you get all your clients. Let’s keep it simple, you’ve got Newspaper A and Newspaper B. Newspaper A costs £1,000 to advertise in it and it gets you 100 leads from that advert. Newspaper B costs £1,000 to advertise in, but it only gets you ten leads. Which is better A or B?
The point is you don’t know because it doesn’t matter how much the leads cost, it matters how many sales you make. If in those 100 leads only one buys £1,000, that means you would have spent £1,000, made £1,000. Therefore, you would have made break even. Of the ten leads of Newspaper B, let’s just say Newspaper B has got more qualified buyers, you get five out of those ten leads to buy. You made £5,000, you spent £1,000. Therefore, you’ve got a gross profit of £4,000. Therefore, Newspaper B is infinitely better than Newspaper A. The mistake that most people in our industry, including in this room, make is they make assumptions about what is right and what works rather than actually looking for the evidence that proves it. I don’t really care if my theory of what website looks prettiest or whether this idea is going to work or not is right. I care about the results. I care about what end result is and what the marketplace thinks. Most people in our industry are like, “I’ve this great idea for a product or a website or the name of my book,” and I’m just going to come up with this idea and that’s it. It’s going to be magical when actually it could be the worst idea known to man. The only way you actually know is to have some way of testing and measuring the process.
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The question is how much is it costing you per sale? I think that code – do you guys have that code – you can find it on the Infusion forum. I think Tyler posted it on the Infusion community, so you can find it in there. Literally, we installed that, it took no time at all. It took maybe 20 minutes to throw it into the squeeze page and we started tracking the cost per sale, not the cost per lead. We went from over 1,000 keywords to just 38. There was only 38 that were actually driving the buyers and that saved us about £12,000 a month in pay-per-click spend, but…can we pause just briefly, Brenden? Look, people go, “Pay-per-click doesn’t work,” or “Facebook advertising doesn’t work,” or “This doesn’t work,” when actually the truth is they have no f’ing clue whether it works or not. In this example, I was spending on over 1,000 different keywords, 1,000 different ads and actually when I ensured it properly, not based on the number of leads it got me, but the number of sales it got me, I actually found of that 1,000 only 38 were working.
By the way, I had a business that was just kind of breaking even before. if you save £12,000 that were saving, if you save that and it has no negative impact on the sales whatsoever, what happens to that £12,000? It becomes profit, but most people aren’t measuring, so they have no idea. They just go, “Oh, pay-per-click works,” or “Pay-per-click doesn’t work.” They go on assumption just because they are so ignorant that they’re not even willing to measure and hold accountable what’s working best and what isn’t working.
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We just chunked it back in onto the better performing keywords, so problem #3 was we had a really crappy landing page. The solution was split test the page like a crazy, British lunatic. This is the landing page that we had and quite blatantly, if any of you guys know Eben Pagan’s stuff, you’ll see that this is a really bad rip-off of the David DeAngelo’s Double your Dating thing in terms of the layout and the style and the font an all that. I’m British, we have no imagination, so we just threw a copy in and that was it. It was converting about 6.3% to capture a lead from Google AdWords traffic. We did a lot of testing on the copy and here’s what we came up with. This page – do you like this page – it literally doubled the conversion rate. It went from 6.3% to 12.8%. Specifically, we tested the copy, but actually what made the biggest improvement –this may or may not surprise you – the first thing was moving the opt-in box from the bottom to the right increased conversion significantly and I found that on all my other landing pages as well.
These little images on the bottom ‘as seen on Google, Yahoo and MSN,’ which seems pretty stupid to me, but I saw somebody using it, tested it out and it works really well. Is that funny? I actually asked the audience, “Is that funny,” because to me it was just common sense, but they found it hilarious. I saw somebody testing something and thought, “That might work,” as in moving the box from there to there or doing a different color or whatever might work better, so I just tested it out and saw what actually worked better and that created a better result. I’m telling the audience and they laughed and I’m like, “Is that funny? I’m sorry, I thought it was about making more money.” You, the audience, do whatever you want, just test it. Alright, here’s the really fun part. Now we had a little leads and we knew…
Again, the key distinction there, by the way, is not about how your webpage looks. If you think it’s about moving the opt-in box from the bottom to the right-hand side, you’ve missed the point. You’ve entirely missed the point. The point is you’ve got to have a system that you can actually test and measure to see what produces the best result. It’s not just an idea, you think that’s best, but actually you’ve tested it, so you know that this is the optimal process you need to get the optimal result in your business. This is your business, not just hanging out, hanging out and hoping it’s working. Let’s actually make sure we can get the best possible results for our business and all you need is a process and a way of measuring and testing that process.
Ninety-seven percent of the direct mail cost was a complete waste. Here’s what we did. This strategy here is where all our profits are made and I haven’t seen anybody else really showing you guys this. Actually, let’s just pause for a second because I just want to really say this. What you’re about to see right now in the next 60 seconds or so, I’ve been paid by a client £20,000 upfront for and much, much more in commissions and stuff on an ongoing basis from this one thing that I’m going to give you, but because it’s in a video in the middle of a presentation I’m giving you in 60 seconds, a lot of you will go, “Oh yeah, that’s quite a clever idea.” Do not underestimate the value of this idea. Don’t worry about the technology that makes it work. We can cover that later. Just get the concept of what I’m about to say.
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This is the thank-you page after the opt-in for the free report. I wish I could take credit for this idea, but it was actually my web guy who kind of came up with this. Basically, after they get to the thank-you page, it says, “Before we send you your free report, please answer the following questions,” but they only see the first question, which is, “Have you trained as a live coach?” If they’ve already trained as a live coach, they’re not going to buy my live coach course, right? It’s a dropdown menu and this is the cool bit. When they select the answer, for you the techies out there, it submits through the API into the database and you can run actions based upon how they answer the question. Is that worth a vote, worth a vote? When they answer the question, it brings up the next question. In this example, “Have you trained as a live coach?” No. It brings up the next question, “On a scale of one to ten, how interested are you in becoming a live coach in the next six months?” They choose and immediately the answer is passed through the API, into the person’s contact record. In this example, basically how they answer the first question, a different second question would appear and so on and so forth.
You tell me, what’s the point that I’m getting across here? I’m qualifying them and I’m treating different people differently. As in if they’re a hot lead, I’ll speak to them one way and give them more attention and more love and more trying to get them to sign up. If they tell me, “I’m not actually that interested, I’m just checking it out,” I give them less time and I waste less time, energy and money trying to get them to sign up. See what happened? By the way, that took my guy like a day to write that. It wasn’t complicated. You could get that done on Elance, easy stuff. It was just awesome, so that was just pure profit, straight to the bottom line. Finally, based upon the answers, we recommended a specific product at the bottom of the page. We recommended a product based on what they said they wanted. We give them a tailored offer based upon how they answered and this increased our conversion rate. Of course, for the coaches, the advanced one and if they’re not yet a coach, get this basic one and that got an increase of 112%. I doubled my sales just by asking them what they were interested in and recommending an appropriate product.
It was taking too long, which is also really bad for cash flow because this thing’s cranking like crazy, so we’re going to make a lot of money, but it’s taking too long to get the cash back in. We can’t grow the thing as fast as we want to because we’re running out of cash. We’re a new business, we’ve got no funds. We’re short on the sales cycle. This is my follow-up sequence. I won’t bore you with the details, it’s the usual direct mails, emails, sales calls, etc. and originally it took 77 days. On average, it was taking us 63 days to get a lead to become a buyer, so over two months. I said if I just trimmed each one of these steps and sent it out a little bit sooner, the length of this campaign by 10% and it immediately shortened the sale cycle by more than 10%, but more importantly than that, it actually increased the conversion rate of the campaign. I’m not really sure why that is. I guess it’s because you’re hitting them harder, faster and sooner. It worked for me, so that was pretty easy stuff.
Problem #6 was increasing the effectiveness of individual direct mail pieces. The solution was tailor-made follow-up sequences. This is also known as the reason why you should vote for me. Do you remember on the questions, where they selected an answer? One of the questions we asked them was, “What’s your primary motivation for wanting to become a live coach?” Then we outlined all the major benefits of our program. Is it to make more money? Is it to work from home? Is it to quit your job? Is it to learn new skills? Then based upon those answers, we put those in custom fields and then – this is brilliant, get ready to write this down – we merged those answers into the direct mail pieces. That pretty smart? Yeah, that wasn’t my idea either. It was actually, but this headline up here was for the people that had said that they had wanted to learn some new skills. It says, “Reveal how you can quickly and easily learn a life-changing set of new skills and become a certified live coach in just two months.” This other example for people that said their prime motivation was to make more money says, “Reveal how you can start an exciting career helping other people as a live coach and make £50,000 a year doing it.” We did it in emails as well.
In other words, all I was doing was asking them what their motivation was, asking them what was their motive to become a live coach and then I was emphasizing that as the reason why they should buy it. Same product, same report, same sales act. It was just change some of the headline of what their primary driver is, so it captured their attention more. That is it. Look at the results it got. Here’s what happened. Here are the conversion rate for the direct mail pieces. You can’t really see this, but basically the highest converting direct mail piece is 0.95%. It was the best performing piece, it was only converting less than a percent. Combined, we were doing okay, but the best performing piece was less than a percentage. We rolled out that strategy that I just showed you. Here’s one month later, May 2008. The worst piece only increased by 294%. The best piece increased by over 1,600%.
I say this every time, but every time I watch that, I’ve got goosebumps running along the back of my neck. Look, what I just shared there, which I didn’t put across particularly well, which is why I had Brenden pause the video, that one idea increased sales by between 294% and 1,694%. That’s roughly between a three and a seventeen-fold increase in sales. If you were making £20,000 a year and you got that increase, you’ll be making £340,000 a year from that one idea. All it was having a system to screen out what people’s motive was for buying and then making sure that I emphasize how the same product that I was selling would help them meet those specific needs. That was it. How many think that’s a pretty useful concept? Great. The question is how do you apply it to your business, which will be covered later? Alright, I’m out of time, but since Darcy went like an hour over, can I get another two minutes? This is my last thing. This is my last strategy. When I said if you can’t increase your sales by 30% by doing this strategy, quite frankly, you need to go back to AWeber and one shopping cart because this is really, really good.
We had no backend. We were doing all this from one product, so I thought it’d be time to add some upsell. Basically, we had an offer for a Christmas sale because it was a bad month. On the thank-you page, we took it from saying, “Thank you for your order,” to saying, “Check out this special offer below,” and then they get a bit of copy and then at the bottom of the page, they’re given a special one-time offer, which they can take by just clicking this button. I paid for some code to be written and developed it with my guy as well where they just press the button and the order is placed automatically through the API. Then this one promotion, I sent out two emails and it generated an extra £10,000, nearly £11,000 in sales, but more exciting, now a few months later, this upsell strategy is accounting for 32-38% of our monthly sales and if you remind me when I just wrap up in a second, I paid a fortune for this code, but I’ve now found out where you can get it somewhere for less than a thousand dollars. Would you guys like to know where you can get that code? Remind me at the end when I finish and I’ll tell you that quickly.
I was too lazy to create this slide, so I’ll draw it real fast. Originally, we just used to have a thank-you page, so then we changed it so we had the thank-you page and we offered them one upsell. That’s what I’ve just showed you, but now what we’ve done is we went and added to that. If they went and bought the initial thing, if they went for the upsell #1, if they didn’t take it, we offered them a downsell. I’ll tell you, guys, as many people take the downsell as they do take the upsell. We offer them a product for, say, £97 or whatever it was and then we offered them the downsell, which is the digital version for half the price. If you don’t do this, you are flushing money down the drain. I wish I could show you more, but unfortunately, I don’t really have time for that now. Here’s my last slide.
My results, so I went from 10 days a year to 32 days a year vacation. I went from 40-50 hours a week to 10-15. I went from $25,000 in Month 1 to spending an average of about $12,000 a month on the pay-per-click and I went from zero buys to 1,570. I went from zero campaigns to 35 marketing campaigns. I went from 330 leads to 65,881. It sounds a lot more impressive than it is. Only about half of those were emails. The rest were like direct mail and stuff, but it was still pretty impressive. I went from zero employees to one, so I guess I failed there and I went from zero to $844,832.98 and my best month previously was zero obviously and I did $223,046.62 in July 2008. Thank you. Let me tell you the real reason to use Infusion. This is just to say thank you to these guys. That’s all my marketing stuff. I just want to say this. This is my wife. I got married in September of last year. She’s hot.
We came back from our honeymoon to find out that we’re expecting a baby in June, but the really exciting thing about that is this. Unfortunately, we got some bad news about six weeks ago. We found out that our little baby daughter, she’s got a problem and she’s going to require emergency surgery when she’s born. The reason why I tell you this is Infusion, don’t get me wrong, I want to win the car. Remember the car? My point is that because of Infusion, I’m now able to as soon as she’s born, I’m going to take three months off and just hang out and spend some time with her. It’s not the software. That software is great, but it’s not the software that does it. It’s these guys at the back of the room. They will bend over backwards for you is you just ask them, so I just want to say thank you all so much. You guys rock. I really appreciate every single one of you.
To cover up the two questions that always get asked, Question #1 is did I win the car? The answer is, yes, I did. Thank you very much and the second question is is my daughter okay and the answer is, yes, she started school last month. I need to stop playing this presentation because every time I do, I seem to have more children. We’ve just announced last week that we’re expecting our third child now or stop using Infusionsoft. You get too much free time. Alright, so here’s the point. Don’t get wrapped up in the technicality of that presentation. Here’s that entire presentation in one sentence, very straightforward. It’s having your business work hard for you, not you working hard for your business.
Most people in here think that they have to work really hard to get traction when that’s not actually true. What you need is to build a system, to build a process that works. That business all’s I did was work to manage that system, worked on that business, as Raymond was saying. I didn’t actually much work in that business because the leads were generated automatically. The stuff was sent out in the post automatically. The letters were sent, the emails were sent and the phone calls were made. We had one part-time virtual assistant back then. Caroline was her name, one part-time virtual assistant and this was brand new. I didn’t know the stuff that I know now. I was new, that was a new business back in 2008. A new business and in August of 2008, you saw me on the presentation there saying dollars because I was doing it to an American audience. I did $233,000. The business started in February. The difference is I didn’t work harder to make that much more money. I created a stable foundation by having the systems because the product is borderline irrelevance.
If you want to give your clients value, make sure the products good, but people grossly overstate that important. What’s important is how you’re going to get the clients in the first place and what’s the material that gets them to sign up and say yes? If you create them, your business will work hard for you. If not, you’re always going to be working your ass off. You’re not going to have any time and you’re going to be scrabbling around looking for a little bits of clients. You’ll get a client, you’ll work with that client, but simultaneously you’re not getting a new client, so when you’re finished working with that client, you’ve used all the money and then you’re desperately feast and famine rather than building something where clients are drip fed to you every single day, every single week, every single month. Make sense? Alright, one last takeaway and then it will be time to take a break. We’ve got five minutes.
Believe it or not, even back then I was doing a coach training company. I was doing live coaching NLP and the thing that’s really taken me from that level to a level several notches above that now is really figuring out the whole niche thing. How many of you in here are really clear on your niche? It drives me crazy when people ask me, “What should my niche be?” I don’t have the answer for everybody in this room. However, I do have a way that you can solve the problem and an answer that’s certainly for the majority of the room. Give people what they want. I know a lot of people think it’s about the X, Y, Z doohickey thing that they do or the particular methodology that they do. They don’t, people are after an end outcome. For me, during this time I figured out it was much, much easier. The mother of all niches was business because when it comes to business, the best niche known to man as in the easiest niche, everybody in here does something to earn money whether it be a job or a business. You do something to earn money, to bring revenue in so you can have a particular lifestyle.
Some people at different times are more focused on health or their relationship and those things are important, no doubt. There are a variety of niches, but the one common denominator is that everyone is looking to make or pretty much everybody’s looking to make an income, looking to make a living. Let me ask you this, you tell me what are the two things every single business owner has in common? What are the two things they want? Time and money, thank you. They all want to have more time because they feel like they’re working too hard and they all want to have more money. How I’ve evolved in the last few years and you probably know that I speak less onstage like this now than I ever did for Andy. Much more for business, I use this strategy of your next speaker is going to talk about to buy companies and then use my business coaching skills to fix them, so I get all the upside. If you’ve got a business that’s truly a business that’s not dependent upon you, it will bring you profit, bring you money without you having to do the work in the business.
Even working with business owners, I have typically 15-20 business coaching clients at a time and they pay me a monthly retainer. The lowest client I’ve got is on a monthly retainer of £1,650 a month and the highest one is on £16,000 a month flat retainer alone, monthly. Then you can get bonuses on top of that. For me, I kind of said, “Look, I figured out a way to give business owners what they want, which is ultimately I can show them a way to give them a lot more time by systematising their business and it can make their business much more profitable by doing so. I’m not going into great depth with that now. That will be part of my presentation tomorrow, but all I will say to you is this. Go where the money is. Assuming you’re strapping around trying to make your niche desperately work, then it’s a fundamentally flawed business model and it’s probably never going to work whereas the reality is if you figure out how to tie what you do up to an outcome that they want, a big picture outcome, then you could be onto the money whether that be health in some way, shape or form, great relations, but for me the easy one that a lot of you can immediately tap into is how can I help people have more time and more money? For me, that comes in the form of business coaching.
There are the four key distinctions. It is about peer, it’s about learning how to sell. It’s about peer group. It’s about systematising your business and it’s about going where the money is. Think about it, if you’ve got a crappy peer group, you’re not going to succeed. If you don’t know how to market and sell yourself, you’re not going to succeed. If you can’t systemize your business, you’re not going to succeed and if you don’t go where the money is in the first place, you’re not going to succeed. You need all four of those things to be in place to have any chance of being a six-percenter, to have any chance of breaking free from the monotony of making £17,000-32,000 a year in this industry, which is the average, which actually scares the crap out of me because that means half are below that. Hopefully, there were some valuable bits and pieces for you here, but I’ve rambled on too long. I’ll be back tomorrow to get into some more specifics. Was that interesting, sparked any ideas? Good.
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