Thanks for having me Andy - it was a pleasure. And thanks again for the inspiration on the local lead gen model.

Yes, I've been playing at the Fastlane for the past 15 months within a structure in which I don't (yet) have any ownership and will never fully control. Within a very complicated, labour-intensive business model with lots of moving parts that's difficult to scale. Because it was the deceptively "easy" choice of what I already knew how to do, working with people I've already worked with.

I don't regret it as I've learned a huge amount and made a lot of great contacts. But one day recently I woke up and realised that I was pushing a boulder up the wrong mountain.

I'll do a detailed writeup soon of what I've been doing all this time and the lessons I've learned along the way. In the meantime - forget the grand plans and just build something!

 

My cliffnotes:

Look for the opposite of red flags. Our focus should be on qualifying clients, but of course using disqualifying as a tool for just that.

It's the end client that pays us through our client. So that's the one we need to keep happy. And we also want to estimate whether our client will be happy to keep their clients happy.

Smaller recurring fee makes it easier to sign up clients than a big upfront fee - and it makes it easier for them to see positive ROI sooner, if not even right away - a great incentive for them to stay signed up.

Fixed fee helps both sides plan their cash flow and optimize their processes to become more profitable.

A great type of cold call is when you have something they already want, and call them for exactly the reason they put their phone number out.

Your beautiful website may actually deter some people from calling you. Sometimes ugly is the way to go.

 

Listened to this last night while driving in the car - really enjoyed it - thank you @Andy Black and @Contrarian!

My takeaways:

"Cold-call"
Call business owners with a present for them. Instead of trying to sign them up for directories, you actually give them a little taste of what is to come. Question for you guys: do you give that first lead away for free? Has it happened to you that they didn't come back and ran off with the lead without paying you? How do you follow up?

----


"Just do it already"
Great lesson @Contrarian. Big reminder for us all to stop f@cking around and produce more.

----


"Keeping it real"
Launch a basic version, buy data and improve upon your benchmark. No need to polish everything for months before launching it.

----


"We live our dream"
I am in a similar situation like Andy. I am working from home, without any commute. I save money on food, choose my breaks wisely and fill them up with things that really push me forward in terms of productivity.

No social mingling, no Happy Birthday lunches with the colleagues and no BS.

My friends (the ones that finally got what I am doing) don't get how I can isolate myself so much.

I have a friend who recently quit his job and rented a shared office, because he needs it to be productive. Because he gets depressed at home. No income, but already around $ 500 down the drain before lifting a finger each month.

Guys, we live our dream.

And every day we don't realize it, is lost.

Work hard, but also realize that life is happening NOW.

----


"Make it a game"
People spend nights collecting rewards and earning money in games.

We spend nights collecting the same in reality.

Make it a game.

Make it YOUR game.

----


Thanks for sharing guys!

 

I find other people's takeaways can make me understand things I might not take in otherwise - adding value.

 

Definitely!

As @cautiouscapy mentioned, it is great to read other people's notes. We are all tuned into slightly different things, so we each pick up on things that others might not even hear. Reading different views always helps me a) challenge my own believes and b) look for different angles.

Thanks for clarifying!

Oh yes, sales definitely is a screening process.

It took me a long time to understand, but you don't want just any sale.

You want the right sale.

This also means leaving some "money" on the street.

Which I needed to get comfortable with at first.

I have to listen to this talk again - I might have missed this!

Thanks for the link

100% agreed.

Curious to read your thoughts @cautiouscapy!

 

@Nicoknowsbest actually I haven't listened to this one yet...setting up some "manual" tasks to do while I listen.

 

Listened to this one on my way home from work yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised. Thank you @Andy Black +REP

 

The topics were focused and you guys talked about local lead gen at a higher level. Great value in this one.

 

Glad you enjoyed it @Nicoknowsbest!

I did make a few calls before I built anything, but more to suss out the economics of it than anything else. How much is a new client worth to you? How do you currently generate leads? How much does that cost? Etc. And how does that stack up against my cost to generate the lead?

The most receptive of those, I told him I'd be back in touch when I had a lead for him and that I'd give it to him free of charge as it's also a learning experience for me too.

Two weeks later, I got the first lead through, called her up, clarified what she wanted and the timescale, then told her to expect a call from my contact. Passed it on - and he called me back to inform me that he'd done the work and made £85.

What's interesting to note is that he also told me he gets tons of calls from people offering "internet advertising", "digital marketing", "SEO", "help for your website", and so on, and gets rid of them all. Moral of the story - focus on helping people get the results they want, not on telling them your credentials and expertise, and hoping they'll connect the dots and be impressed (they won't be).

This hasn't been a revelation for me, since I've worked in sales of one kind or another for 12 years now. What's been my revelation is how easy it can be when you stop trying to push boulders up mountains. Why continue running on the treadmill selling highly complex services to highly complex companies who can't even agree on anything amongst themselves, against hundreds of other companies that sell similar services?

Why not take a fraction of the same skill and leverage it into a scaleable platform to solve common sense problems at scale? That's what I learned from this.

Exactly!

Yup!

I've been working from home for two years now, and for the first few months it was a struggle. I'm an extrovert. But I've learned to be content with my own company. Such is the price of freedom.

As I mentioned on the call, I recently resigned my position in the recruiting business I co-founded (path did not converge with dream). I've taken a commission-only sales position serving the same industry with one of the contacts I made in the process. Step down, you would think?

I'm sure it will look like that on my Linkedin profile, or by the standards of "society", but I sure don't see it that way. Self-employed with a contract for services only, so I haven't sold my soul or my freedom. Work from wherever I want, on my schedule, and scale back or quit whenever it suits me. Supports, but doesn't interfere with, my own business. And I'm looking forward to the work without seeing it as the end goal in itself.

I couldn't even imagine ever being chained to an office, or signing a contract of employment again. Both deals with the devil. Perhaps your friend would find the same, if he could "embrace the suck" and power through those first few months at home?

 

Hey Andy,

Biggest takeaway for me was how important it is to stick to one thing.

I've been bouncing around all over the place trying different things (after reading the majority of the gold posts on here) and trying to see what I want to pursue. I've been struggling finding one thing but I liked that you focused on just taking any action to get the wheel turning.

Thanks as always!

 

OK, listened to it. My own spin on the takeaways I got from this recording:

• Can’t make pretty web pages yourself? (My personal quickest potential win, looking up at the cliff-face of returning to coding-type stuff after many years away from it.)

@Contrarian says that his web development skills are such that he gave up trying to use Wordpress and just put up a landing page using SquareSpace.
He was able to produce a perfectly adequate landing page (certainly in the market he’s working on; for high-ticket stuff then web design and development skills might need to be improved).​

• An excellent reminder for the techies trying to make a living from their skills - Build once, sell many times - in this case, leads for the same vertical market, different geographic locations. Later you can easily add a different vertical and repeat, etc ad infinitum.

I’d call this “Cookie Cutter” growth. Compare to selling Adwords services to all comers, and never specialising in something enough for it to become as easy as breathing to you. @Andy Black could clearly knock out an adwords campaign for “[any tradesperson example] in [any single location]” before his next breath, because he’s been specialising in that for 7 years.​

• It’s not as much work for you to keep your Adwords ads current, compared to e.g. Facebook ads. Adwords ads don’t really change year in, year out. 10 years ago, people were searching for “emergency plumber Dublin” and they still will be in 10 years time. Facebook requires you to keep your ads “fresh”.

• Do you love playing computer games? Free up some time, stop playing computer games and see the parallels with running Adwords campaigns – same excitement, real-world rewards and levels

• Download and read the first five chapters of MJ’s new book:

Unscripted Download


@Andy Black – you point out a few times that you don’t like using “But...”.

What about trying “Yes, and...” in most of the same places? (A basic tenet in Improv Comedy, it leaves the conversation / exchange more open to possibility).

Also I’m sure you’ve figured out that a Green Flag is the opposite of a Red Flag ;-)

 

We've all been there. Doing something sub-optimal is better than doing nothing. It's easier to adjust when you already have something in motion.

The company I'll be doing sales for started as a hobby blog. It's now a seven figure B2B content marketing & native advertising company. Now they're also moving into live events. The founder had absolutely no idea, or vision towards, what it would become when he started it. He just wanted to write useful stuff. I think it's a pretty awesome demonstration of the value of just producing.

Sure. Wordpress would be optimal, no doubt about it. I've used beautiful, all-singing, all-dancing WP-powered landing pages for the recruiting business in which case they were necessary. But we hired a developer to build the site and set all that up. No sense in doing that here, yet. Can always learn how to or pay someone to build a replacement Wordpress site if it makes sense down the line.

I have to thank @Andy Black again for highlighting the power and simplicity of this business model. Doing it through the centralised site model also unleashes the power of ownership. I forgot to mention it on the call, but I tell you what else was motivating - browsing the listings on Empire Flippers! Sites typically sell for 20-30x monthly profits. So, with monthly profits of "just" $20,000, you can sell the site for perhaps $600,000.

That's life-changing money.

Not enough to be a millionaire.

Not enough to buy a Lambo (if you value your financial freedom, at least).

But enough to "retire" in a cheap country until you get bored of it, do all those things you always wanted to do, and then provide the capital and a very long runway to focus 100% on building something bigger and better without having to worry about making ends meet or getting a job ever again.

I just booked a one-way ticket to Malta. Perfect climate, effective 5% tax rate and no capital gains tax. So begins the three year plan.

 

How to be different in 5 easy steps.

Once you run your own business, you will get quickly understand a couple of things.

I used to take it as a bad sign or rudeness when "bosses" were extremely short on the phone.

Now that I am an operator myself, I don't even read sales emails I get if the first 5 words of the subject line don't convince me.

I used to work for a high end digital agency.

We used to f@ck around for weeks with details that might get us awards. Well, actually get the clients awards.

I disagreed at a certain point and thought I could use resources much better myself.

So I quit my job and started a business.

You just have to be better than the guy who is hiring you, and the money comes in.

Keep it simple, act fast, always move and improve while on the "run".

I had a similar experience on the weekend.

My Facebook feed is filled with Rolex's, big Audis, mortgage announcements and engagement rings with stones as big as my index finger's nail.

If you compare the numbers, I come out at the short end.

For now.

I know I am investing in something bigger than I can imagine at the moment.

It will all come back and more.

Once you decided to let go, half the battle is won.

Not everything is sunshine.

What are you willing to suffer for?

Stick to one thing, and one thing only.

Everything else dilutes your result.

This is the one thing I'd tell someone starting out, apart from "go do something".

It is life changing if it buys you freedom from being stuck in cubicle nation.

It is life changing if it buys you energy and motivation to use your own brain, to see beyond.

It is life changing if you can go grocery shopping on a Monday at 11 am and still be able to pay your bills at the end of the month.

Think about it as your "F@ck you fund":


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI


Happy Monday everybody

 

Ah yes. Trinkets over results. Been there...

That's a great sentence of condensed wisdom right there!

One thing only. Yep, would definitely have helped big time to keep that in mind in my last business.

Happy Monday indeed!

 

Really loved this talk - had to listen to it twice yesterday! Probably going to give it another run today.

The idea of making AdWords and Lead Gen into a game was so appealing to me.

My inner nerd perked up a bit, now I'm double-intrigued on how to run the best campaign possible.

 

What will you do to turn your double-intrigue into double-action?

 

@Andy Black - This was a great interview. Thanks for messaging me when I followed you. You put me on to this interview, and I think it will be a great complement to what I'm doing now (getting leads for local businesses). You make Adwords seem easy, and although I know it's not "easy", it now seems like an attainable skill.

 

Hey mate - not sure how far along you are in your business yet, but from one forum member (and one lead gen guy to another - hello!)

Seriously, buy Andy's course.

But Dillon, that's $400!

Well luckily the course is 10% off!

Take $60 and sign up for the Insiders part of the forum (MAN talk about content! You should see some of the talks we have in here about Lead Gen alone!)

Andy gives discounts to Insiders, making his course only $299. Congrats, you just surrounded yourself with some brilliant entrepreneurs, got a kickstart to AdWords, and saved 40 bucks in the process.

(If you're still worried about price - think of it like this. The barrier to entry in Lead Gen is knowledge. Any guy lounging around in his undies can create an account and have an ad running in just a few minutes, Andy shows you how to make ads that get results. The day after I finish his course, I'm hopping on the phone and sending leads to people all around Texas.)

If you're like me and you need a little time to scrape the cash together, go ahead and read through his post history (yes, the whole thing.) You'll eat up everything you find.

Cheers man.

Adure.

 

Thanks @Andy Black and @Contrarian for the talk.

Here are my takeaways:

• Keep it simple. Don't over-complicate things for yourself. Understand that other people might don't understand a thing in areas you're familiar with, but they do know what's important to them and it's simple for them. Also, try to find simpler solutions for people's problems. They're almost always better.
• Magnitude or mass. Helping fewer people at magnitude may be better that helping a lot of people a little. Although, it may not be that hard, not necessary inventing a cure for cancer. MJ wrote about it in his books, but just now I seems to get it.
• Focus on needs, not building stuff. Kinda hard to keep that focus for a tech INTJ-T guys like me.
• Make your process fell like a game. This game parallel helped me a bit in the past with poker and affiliate marketing. It's kinda hard to risk money when you think of them like money. But if you think of them like a score on the screen and just make +EV decisions without fear that score gets better. The same can be applied to the whole process.
• Pretty much a do 1, 2, 3 local lead gen blueprint out there. Not getting into to much details, but looks like the major steps are covered.