Ryan: Hey. What's going on? It's Ryan here and I'm really ...

[Pages:21]Ryan:

Hey. What's going on? It's Ryan here and I'm really, really excited for this morning edition of our monthly Mastermind call. Before we get started, I have a few quick questions. The first question is, I want to make sure, can you hear me and see my screen okay? Rather than commenting in the Go To webinar chat, one of the things that we do, if this is your first time on a NLM Mastermind call, we do all the chat in Facebook, so I just posted a Facebook link. If you would just click on that link in Facebook, you can comment and let me know can you see me, can you hear me? I'll wait till we get about 25, 30 responses to makes sure that we are all good.

Hey Greg, what's going on? Hey Lisa. Hey, hey, hey. Hi Nigel. It's early in the West Coast, everyone is still waking up. Speaking of which, how many people is this your first Mastermind call? If it's your first Mastermind call in the Facebook chat, just type in "first Mastermind call" or "first." I'm just curious to know. If you are a veteran, if this your second Mastermind call, or if you've been part of many, many calls, you can type in "veteran." I'd love to know who we've got on the call. Hey Seth and Lee, and [Dubarak 00:01:39], good to see you. Ross, Jeremy, good to see you as always. Hey Kevin, we're seeing you next week. Hey Greg, [Naivy 00:01:48], great to see you here. Hey Julie. Bill, [Nuraj 00:01:52], Gustavo, I know you've been looking forward to this one my man. Awesome. [inaudible 00:01:57] super early, got my coffee. Who needs coffee when you've got green juice? No, just kidding. Coffee is good. Hey Dallas. Hey Lee. Hey [Nuraj 00:02:06]. Cool, a lot of firsts. Awesome, awesome. Hey Derek, [inaudible 00:02:13], that's funny. Yes. Jodie, veteran. Julie, veteran. Jeremy, vet. Marissa, vet. [inaudible 00:02:20]. Hey Dallas, yeah. Gosh, we've got a great crowd this morning. Hey Brett and Joachim, Dean, Robert, Esther. Esther is of course, vet. Rich, yes sir, definitely. Phil indeed. Awesome, awesome, awesome, the numbers keep going up, up, up.

We have got a really packed house this morning and I'm really excited. This is a topic that I think is going to be really useful for anyone who is building a consulting business, who has some sort of consulting business, who's thinking about building a consulting business, or if you don't do any consulting right now at all, but you're thinking of maybe adding this as an additional income stream. The reason why is, consulting is one of these things that you can to your business no matter what it is that you do. When I first got started consulting, that wasn't my business at all. I had at the time three info product businesses in three different markets, in the Scrabble tile jewellery market, in the orchid care market, and in the memory market. I wasn't intending on doing any sort of consulting, but it sort of came up with an opportunity that came up, and I decided to try it out as a little experiment, and that experiment ended up growing into a seven-figure business. I'm going to walk you through that path that I took, some of the lessons that I learned along the way, and kind of like these key nuances, like these key learnings that I picked up along the way that made all the difference in the world. I want to keep this as short as possible.

Sorry about that. If you can here that beeping, we're having issues with our smoke detectors today. I'm going to try to leave as much time for Q&A on this call, because I think this is one of the calls, this is one of these training calls that ... diving in to whatever topic you want to go into in more detail, is going to be the most useful thing. That's the cool thing if you are here live. Okay, one last thing before we dive in. One of

the things that we always do in these Mastermind calls, is I ask someone to take notes, or if you're going to take notes, to share your notes. We kind of do like a note contact, if you will. My question is, who would like to volunteer to share your notes after the call with everyone in the group? We will give you a nice shout-out and credit, and I'm extremely grateful myself. Who would be open and willing to share your notes? Awesome, thanks [Jen 00:05:13], you are amazing. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Do we have maybe one more person as a backup? Sweet. Phil, I appreciate it, awesome. Awesome, awesome. Dorothy says, "I'll share too if they turn out all right." No judgment, these are just notes. I'm sure your notes are better, it will be better than mine. Cool, so that being said, let's dive in.

Now, this is mostly going to be an audio call. I don't really have a lot of show and tell. I've got maybe a few links that I could show you along the way, but I didn't put the other formal slide, so [just to note 00:05:43]. The reason why I did that, is I want to just get right to the learning. I never intended on creating a course on how to build a sevenfigure consulting business. You just think that I learned along the way. Like I said, nuances, subtleties, key learnings that I picked up that made all the difference. The first thing that I want to talk about a little bit is how I got started. I mentioned at the time, this is in 2009, 2010, I had at this time launched my third information product business. I've launched the Scrabble tile jewellery business, the orchid care business, and I just launched the memory business, Rocket Memory. The businesses were going well.

At the time, I was studying under a mentor of mine. The mentor was Dr Glenn Livingston. Dr Glenn and I, I paid him as a coach, he had a lot of money, to coach underneath him. Over time, after about the second year in working with him, I had the opportunity to spend some time with him in person. Dr Glenn lived in New Hampshire, which is where my parents lived or where I'm from. He happens to live about 15 minutes away from where I grew up. On a trip back to New Hampshire, Glenn and I made a point to get together in person, and I think it was the second or third time that we had met, and we decided to do a hike together. Glenn loves hiking the White Mountains, I did a lot of hiking growing up as a kid in New Hampshire, and he said, "Let's do this big, long hike and we'll hang out." On the hike, we got to talking, and Glenn basically said, "Hey listen, I think that you know my methodology just as well as I do. Right now, I'm not really interested in taking on more private coaching clients, but I have demand. There are people who want to work with me. Maybe that's something that we could explore," and I said, "Yeah, let's definitely do it. Let's talk about it."

Glenn had this sales letter that looked a little something like the one I'm going to put up on the screen here. He had this sales letter and he was taking coaching clients. You could see here at the bottom, he has different options for his different price points or whatever. At the bottom of this, there was another option that we added that was for coaching with Ryan, so Glenn was not full, but Ryan was available. What we ended up doing is, I wrote a three-part guest post blog series on his blog, so a three-part guest post, three articles for his blog, and we just mailed them to his list. We did that to, I guess, establish my background, who I am, who I was, what I had done, and one of those blog posts is ... Let's load it up here. It's this one here, Success Story: Why I Never Play the Lottery. If you haven't seen this before, this is a good one to read, and I can

Page 2 of 21

post the links to this one. It's a three-part, and you see maybe you can grab the other parts. Cool. You don't have to read it now, but you can check it out later.

I shared this blog post and then after that, and Glenn had updated his blog since, in 2014. We lost all the comments, but we had a bunch of great comments on this. Then he just sent a single email to his list and said, "Hey, people are interested in coaching with me, I'm not available, but here is my understudy, Ryan. He's taking clients. If you'd like to coach with him, here is the link." Very simple. The price range that I started out with, which is absolutely crazy, was $297. $297 a month for private coaching. That $297, what that gave people access to, was a private message board, so people had the opportunity to send me a private message once a week, a long message not like an instant message, a long message once a week, and I would respond within 48 hours. That was basically the deal. We started at $297 for that. I think we had a $497 option which included a monthly call as well, so a weekly message or post, and a monthly call. That's what I did. We [inaudible 00:10:26] to that, and that's kind of how I got started.

From those humble beginnings, over the next ... Gosh, this is 2016, so it was 2010, so the next five, six years, I eventually scaled my rate from $297 a month to today, $10,000 a month for a weekly 30-minute call, and I'm currently not accepting any clients just because my schedule is what it is. That amounts to over $3,000 an hour for my time. The question is, how do you do that? How do you scale from that? Again, the first key thing is, I started with no list. The lists that I had at the time were in the Scrabble tile jewellery market, in the orchid care market, and in the memory market, so I didn't have any list of business owners or entrepreneurs or an IM, internet marketing list, or anything like that. The first step, the first key step, was publishing that guest post, so finding, in this case, it wasn't something I was intentionally going after, but finding an opportunity to publish a guest post to someone who had an existing audience. Glenn's audience at the time, I believe, was a list of about 20,000 people, so it wasn't some 2 million person list, it was 20,000 people. It wasn't astronomically large, it was by some standards a very large list, but it wasn't 2 million people or anything crazy like that, so published a guest post to that audience.

The next thing is, because the post was getting great feedback from Glenn's audience, I just shared the post on Facebook, so shared the articles on Facebook just to my friends. I had some friends who were entrepreneurs in the internet marketing world, and shared to them, and through that, built my first little list of about a hundred people. My list at the time, literally, the links that I shared, was the link to the article, and then in the comments I had a little link that said, "Hey, if you want to get more insight into how I've grown my business and my 'daily tip', sign up here." The link was literally just a link to an AWeber form. There wasn't even a website. There wasn't even any website at all. It was literally like, when you publish one of those forms on AWeber, like whatever, and it's like you've got enough room to write a headline for the form, and name and email, that was it. I got my first hundred or so people to subscribe to my "daily tip" through that. I say "daily tip" in quote because I never actually wrote a daily tip. I would write whenever I felt like it, just sporadically. I did that.

The call to action in the emails that I sent out, was to sign up for my coaching wait list. I

Page 3 of 21

would send an email, no website at all, and in the email itself, I'd have a little link, "Hey, if you'd be interested in potentially working together, sign up to my wait list for the opportunity to work together when spots open up." That will be a critical development that we'll talk about a little bit later. Once again, no website. It was literally just a link to another form, so I didn't even have a website in the business space at the time. Okay great. That's about 2010.

Around the same time, maybe it was about a year later, I don't know the exact date, maybe someone knows the date, I attended a conference. It was my first real marketing conference, I think, that I had attended. It was probably 2011. Again, I don't remember the exact date, someone might remember it. It was a conference that Perry Marshall was putting on. Perry did a customer appreciation seminar or conference in Austin, which is my hometown or where I live. I think the conference was either free or very low cost. It was a customer appreciation conference, so it was thrown for not to generate revenue, but to generate goodwill with Perry's audience. There I was and [attended 00:15:11] the conference. While I was there, I had a lot of conversations with a lot of different entrepreneurs, and just talked about what I was doing and casually let them know that I do this consulting, that I consult and help people with their businesses, and I'm not accepting any new clients right now, but periodically opened spots, blah, blah, blah. Long story short, from that conference, I ended up getting three paying clients, and I thought, "Hmm, there is something to this. It isn't that difficult to get clients when you do things the way I was doing it," and I'll dissect it in a moment. Cool.

The key learning, the key thing that I learned, and this is one of the single most important things that I realized and learnings that I want to pass along to you is, there are a lot of people who teach, for a consulting model, to do strategy sessions, aka sales calls, frame it as a strategy session but really what you're doing is trying to pitch someone. Instead what I did was very antithetical. It was very counter to what everyone was teaching at the time, and what people still teach today. That is, no matter what I was doing, no matter how busy or not busy I was, I never accept a client, ever. Even if someone was ready to hand me money right then and there, never available. There was always, always a wait list. That was the call to action. Sign up to my wait list. If you'd like to work together, I'm currently not accepting any clients, but I open up spots periodically, and if you'd like to potentially work together, sign up to my wait list, and by adding your name to that list, what I do is periodically I open up spots and I make an announcement by email. I'll let you know when the spots are going to open up, and then I'll send a second email with the link to sign up. Spots go quickly, they're first come first serve, and oftentimes will fill up within a matter of hours.

That was it. That was my sales process. What I discovered is, and it makes a lot of sense, that people want to do business with someone who's busy, who's booked. Fewer people want to do business with someone who is trying to sell them right then and there. It's all about positioning. It's all about selling from a position of strength. Now, key things with this wait list strategy. Number one, whenever I would open it up and close it, I would always stick to my word. I would always close it no matter what, whether I filled one spot, three spots, five spots, or zero spots. This is key. When I would close the wait list, I would make an announcement and say, "The wait list is now ..." or, "Spots are no longer

Page 4 of 21

available, but if you missed this opportunity this time and would like to be re-added to the wait list, add your name again here below." That was the process. Lather, rinse, repeat.

What I would do in between there is, periodically I would send out content-based emails to my tiny little list. At this time, at this point, it was less than a thousand people, fewer than a thousand people. It was just people that I had met at conferences, people that I had posted stuff to on Facebook that signed up to what I was sharing, people who knew about what I was doing just from friends of friends or whatever. I would periodically post a few contest-based emails, and everything was just in an email. I didn't even have a blog at the time. I just stuck it all in an email. No website. No website, and it would consistently fill. That wait list strategy was the first key learning that I discovered in the business. Cool.

By the way, we'll get to Q&A at the end, so I'll get through what I wanted to share, and we'll get to Q&A at the end. If you have a question, the way to post it in the Facebook chat is, you'd hashtag question at the very beginning in all caps, of your comment, and then post what your question is. If you see somebody else who has a question that either you'd love to see the answer to that, or that's the question that you were going to ask, "like" the comment. The way that I answer questions, in the interest of time, is I start with the questions that have the most "likes." That is my way of understand what question is going to be most valuable to the most number of people. Okay? Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Yes, at these conferences, I was a nobody. I was absolutely a nobody. There's some funny pictures of me, me like a little fanboy with my arm around Perry Marshall like, "Hey, please." I was totally a nobody. No one knew who I was for sure, for sure. Cool, all right. Let's get back to ... Minimize this. Let's go back to our title slide here. The wait-list, that was the first thing. Okay. Okay great.

Second key learning that I had was raising your rates. How do you raise your rates? You start getting a few clients and very quickly you realize, "Damn, I'm way undercharging for my time. How do I raise my rates without totally cannibalizing or sacrificing my client revenue?" You don't want to raise your rates and find out all your clients say, "You know what? Too expensive. I'm going to move on. I can't work with you." Scary right? It's scary to raise your rates. Here's what I discovered. Here is the nuance that I discovered that is the critical piece. When I was thinking about raising my rates, whenever that thought would cross my mind, what I would do when I started raising my rate ... This is when I first put together a simple little website, a one-page website that explained what my coaching was and what I did. Super basic, super ugly, nothing fancy. By having a little website, what that allowed me to do was publish my rates publicly. Now, that's another one of these counterintuitive or unconventional pieces of advice. There's so many people out there that say, "Don't publish your rate. Don't publish your rate, keep it quiet. Just share when you get on the phone. That's what you do in a session. That's how you get people on the phone for your sales call, like, 'How much is it going to cost.'" I didn't subscribe to that at all.

Instead what I did is, I would publish my rates, what it actually cost to work with me, on my little website. What that allowed me to do is go back to my existing clients and

Page 5 of 21

explain to them, "Hey, since we've started working together, my rates have gone up substantially. In fact, if you were to work with me now and we were to start working together, it would be instead of," in the early days, "instead of 297 a month, it would be 997 a month. That puts me in a difficult situation because I want to continue working together. I certainly want to continue supporting you in your business, but given that my rates are what they are, I'm in a tough situation where I can't offer my absolute best work to you because it creates this conflict where I can't justify spending the time that you and your business deserves knowing that I have a wait list of people who are waiting to pay my current market rate. At the same time, I want to reward you for being a long-term client, someone who started working with me before things took off, so here's what's going to happen."

I'm walking you though the conversation either on the phone or the conversation in an email that I would have, and that would work extremely well. "My market rate right now is 997. Right now you're paying a massively discounted rate of 297 by," pick a date, "September 1st ..." Where are we right now? We are in February. We'll say by June 1st or maybe May 1st. "On May 1st," relative to today being mid February, "On May 1st, I'll be moving all my clients from this outmoded, outdated fee schedule, to the new fee schedule. That being said, I don't want you to have to pay the going market rate, so instead of jumping from 297 to 997, we're only going to go from 297 to 797, which is still going to offer you a better than public deal in working together."

"At that rate, I can in good faith consistently offer you my absolute best thinking, my absolute best attention, without feeling resentful that we're at a rate that's so far below what I'm charging everyone else, and at the same time, offer you a discount as a way of saying thank you, and rewarding you for being a long-term valued client. I wanted to give you a three-month heads up that this is coming, so that way if for some reason, it turns out that this is not something that fits in your budget, or it's not something that you want to move forward with, you'll have time to make the adjustment, and you'll have time to wrap up anything that we're working on. At the same time, if it is something that you want to move forward with, that it gives you an opportunity to plan your budget starting on May 1st."

Does that make sense? I know when I do this, I would receive almost no pushback, virtually no pushback at all. What does that do? That allows you to, if you look at the numbers right there, from 297 ... By the way, those are real numbers. Those are numbers from years ago, but no matter where you are at your rates, add a zero, thousands, whatever, those numbers that I gave were actually real. Starting at 297, raised the rate of my initial clients from 297 to 797, when I was charging 997 for new clients that I began working with. Okay? The other thing, so that's the raising the rates conversation and path. What you're able to do there, I was able to more than double my business, double my income with no additional clients, with no additional clients and no additional time. I spent exactly the same amount of time, actually less time, because I didn't have to spend any time marketing, I was just delivering a service, and more than doubled my income. Okay? Okay.

The next big thing that I learned was the importance of protecting your time, and

Page 6 of 21

protecting your time by structuring how you deliver your service as a consultant in a way that doesn't allow the client to control how much time beyond what they're paying you, you are going to spend. What do I mean by that exactly? When I first started out, I had adopted this coaching private message board model, so you had an opportunity to send me one private message per week, and for some clients, they'd also get on the phone once a month. The reason why I adopted this is, that was a model I learned from my mentor, from Dr Glenn. The reason why Dr Glenn valued that structure is because he likes to decide when he is going to reply to someone's questions as a coach or consultant, meaning he doesn't like to have stuff in his calendar. He likes to be able to just, "Okay, someone sends me something. I've got 48 hours, whenever I want, to reply back to that person, whether it's in the middle of the night, whether it's early in the morning. It's whenever I want." That works well for him.

For me, what I found, just because of my style, my approach, that I'm very thorough. If someone would send me a one-page question, or one page with a bunch of questions, I would spend literally hours replying to that one-page message. What I also started finding is that people were just using it because it was there, and almost flippantly throwing out questions to me just for the sake of throwing out questions. Someone would say, "I don't really have any questions for you this week, so maybe you could answer these seven questions for me." Now, I felt like I had an obligation to provide this service. What I was finding is that people were just filling time. "I don't really need your help this week, but I'm paying for this, and I don't want to waste it, so let me just waste this one-pager with a whole bunch of random stuff that I could ask you, even though it's not really going to have any impact in my business." Now, how did I know that it wouldn't have any impact in their business? Because I would continue working with them for months and months later, and they wouldn't use anything that I've spent all this time that I invested in researching for them and putting together for them. I realized that that model, for me at least, was broken. It didn't work.

Instead I adopted a model that was based purely on my time. What I would do initially is move from a weekly coaching board to a weekly phone call. Now, the phone call meant that the maximum amount of time that I would spend on a client was limited to that particular slot of time. What I would allow people to do is, if they wanted to, at their option, they could send me a maximum one-page document 48 hours before our consulting call, and if it was 48 hours before, I guaranteed that I would read through it. If it was less than 48 hours before, I would not be able to guarantee that I'd be able to read that one-pager prior to our call, and we'd review it together on the call. Now, the one-pager was their opportunity to throw out anything that they wanted me to review, whether it's a piece of copy, whether it's an email, whether it's a specific business situation, whether it's reviewing numbers. Was I a complete Nazi about keeping it to exactly one page? No, I was a human being about it, but the point is, don't send me a 25-page VSL that's not in the scope of our agreement that's going to take me hours and hours and hours to review, so a roughly one-page document, and that would be our agenda for our hour-long call together.

What I ended up finding is that very few people ended up sending their one-pager 48 hours before. Most people would scramble the day of or the day before to put together

Page 7 of 21

their one-pager, and that, because we had very clear terms, that meant that I would spend exactly zero hours before our time on the phone, and we would have a very productive and focused one-hour call together. Instead of this spilling over into my schedule hours and hours and hours, it was limited to one hour. I knew exactly what my hourly rate had become based on that new structure. Now over time, what I realized is that an hour was actually more time than we needed, so the second way that I was able to raise my rates and basically doubled my business once again, this time I doubled my business several times over by raising my rates, but I didn't want to raise my rates any further with clients. This is when it had reached about ... I think I was charging between $1,000 and $2,000 an hour for my time on a monthly retainer basis. 1,000 or 2,000 [hours 00:33:28] for my time. I wanted to raise my value to get more leverage than I already had, so what I decided to do was with new clients, I decided to test out 30minute calls. Instead of 60-minute calls, 30-minute calls.

My hypothesis, based on all the clients that I've worked with, is that when ... Was it Murphy's law or Parkinson's law? Whatever the ... "Work will expand to the amount of time allotted to it." If you have a 60-minute call, you'll fill the 60 minutes. If you have a 30-minute call, you'll get what you need to get done in those 30 minutes. That was my hypothesis, and that hypothesis ended up turning out to be true. What I found is that when you have 30 minutes to get something done, you're going to get it done. What it does, is it actually helps your client when you put these types of constraints, because when there's this time constraint of only 30 minutes, it really helps your client zone in or focus in on the single most important issue that they need help with. Instead of being lazy with their thinking and coming up with a laundry list of stuff to potentially talk about, it really forces them to identify what's most important in my business, what I most need Ryan's help with. What's going to give me the most leverage in my business? It actually puts your client's best interest at heart, and at the same time, it's a win-win for you because you're spending less time working with each individual client.

Once again, I went back to my existent clients, this is several years later. Went back to my existing clients and said, "What I've been doing with my new clients, instead of 60minute calls, it's 30-minute calls," and basically describe to them what I've just described to you. "What I found is that that 30-minute format provides a lot more focus. We're able to get just as much done in half the time. You're able to free up hours every single month in your schedule, and it allows us to zone in on what's absolutely most important, so here's what I'd like to propose that we do. What I'd like to propose is that we try for, as an experiment, we try as an experiment moving to this 30-minute call format that all my other clients are moving to. Just to try it for two months. If it turns out after two months that it just absolutely doesn't work, then let's visit and we can explore what alternatives that we might have. If you're like all my other clients, I expect that this is going to work even better than we imagined. Of course, I'm here to support you."

I always tell clients, "Of course I'm here to support you. If there's a heart attack emergency that happens in your business that can't wait between today and our next call, I'm here for you." That's for emergencies, and otherwise we use the regular time that we have scheduled for working on your business. I did that. Once again, absolutely

Page 8 of 21

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download