Barbell Shrugged - What it Takes to Be a Strong Coach" with AJ Roberts - Strong Coach Ep 1

Episode Date: October 26, 2019

In this special episode, we have AJ Roberts, Chief Revenue Officer at Genesis Digital, the company behind Kartra, Ever Webinar and Webinar Jam. We had a deep dive into everything that it takes on how to become a strong coach, having a support system, delegating, being responsible for your business, being an entrepreneur, and Kartra - the all-in-one platform that's going to change your coaching business forever. Enjoy!

Welcome to Strong Coach Podcast Season 3 on The Collective. Now, for the next couple months, we're going to be posting 8 shows. Season 3 is 8 shows of The Strong Coach. We're going to be talking about how to build your 6-figure coaching business by being a better coach, for one, and also covering a lot of the business basics that most coaches don't know about yet. And we're going to be teaching that here on the podcast. And if you go over to strongcoachpodcast.com, you can get access to

all the other shows that we have going on that are not on the collective. And there's a free gift over there for you. So we have a little PDF you can download. There's the three mistakes coaches make when building their coaching business. So we want to make sure that if you do these three things, then what's going to happen is you're going to see a lot better results. Most coaches go download that and are able, even though it's free, end up getting really cool results out of that. And we have a 90 day program coming up. So if you're interested in joining our next 90 day program, where we take you through the process, if you go to strong coach Instagram account, you'll see the results that a lot of the clients are getting and what the process does for them. So make sure you're following us on Instagram at the strong coach, go over to strong coach podcast.com, where you can get access to all

the other shows and get that free offer that we have that's going to give you advice on how to start. You can do these exercises and start improving your coaching business right away. So check all of that out. Now we've got AJ Roberts on for today, which I'm super excited about because, well, he used to run Barbell Business with us and he's gone off and done his own thing. And he's got, as you know, he's got a long history helping those of us in the coaching industry. And he's running a software company that's doing really, really well. And he dropped some bombs here, some really awesome information for coaching and both on the business side. Enjoy the show.

We get to hang out again, and I know that people are going to love this. And the fact that this is going to be on the Shrug Collective network, and I know a lot of people used to listen to us every single week, and I still get messages. I don't know if you do, but I get messages. It's becoming less frequent, but I still get messages, people going, when are you going to post more barbell business shows? Because that changed my life and it allowed me to be successful in business and my coaching business and my gym and all this stuff. So. Yeah, I was just at the Vigor Round Summit and a couple of people came up and said, oh man, I listened to every episode of that. And now I'm doing this, now I'm doing that. And it's funny because when you do it, a lot of times you don't see the impact of it.

So for those who are listening, who used to listen to us, hopefully you enjoy the show. Yeah, today's going to be a lot of fun. We already sat on the porch for an hour talking about everything. Of course, anytime you and I get together, it's hours of conversation. Yeah, so we're talking directly to the coach today and building a coaching business. And one of the things I'd like to point out is this is not just for the person who owns the gym or has their own online business. Every coach out there is an entrepreneur, even if they're working for somebody else. Because if you're going to make it a career, you have your own book of business. So you have to sell, you have to do the fulfillment.

The way the cash is flowing may not be up to you as much, but you still have to be an entrepreneur. And let's dig into that a bit because it's 2019. Entrepreneurship is on the rise. Large corporations are decentralizing. So from a global economic perspective, people are having to be more entrepreneurial period. So what do coaches today need to have that didn't exist before? And also the coaching industry is exploding and a lot of people are wanting to be coaches, but don't necessarily know how to make it a career. What are the pieces that people are missing? I mean, that's a loaded question, but I think my friend Justin just posted a diagram and it was showed like what skillsets you have. And this was for marketers. And so, so if you know all marketing, this is why you're a bad entrepreneur,

because we always talk about specialists versus generalists. And we say, you know, to be a great coach, you want to be a specialist. You want to have a subject and you kind of want to be an inch wide, but a mile deep, kind of like Louie Simmons is with strength training. Put him on the Joe Rogan podcast, and now you're just shaking your head like, what is this guy talking about? Because in the subject of strength, he's a genius. But when we get out of sight of that, it's questionable. So although skillset wise to be a great coach, that's the approach. To be a great business owner, you can't only know one thing unless you build a team around you that does that.

And so what we're seeing with entrepreneurship and the problem with entrepreneurship or the problem with coaching or the problem with anything that's labeled as this is my job is that you see yourself and your identity is in that skill set. And so you go to certifications to learn how to be a better coach. You invest in things that help you become a better coach, but you don't think outside of, okay, in order for me to do my skill at the highest level, I need to understand how to market, how to sell, how to manage my money so that I can reach more people. And ultimately, if my mission is to transform the lives of those that I work with, how do

I do that at the highest level? And a lot of times that doesn't come from your skillset. It comes from the things that allow you to produce and perform your skillset at the highest level. And so that's where you have to start seeing yourself as more than just a coach because that's ultimately, if you want to spread your message and get out in front of the most amount of people possible, the only way to do that is start to understand these other things. Otherwise you end up getting taken advantage of because you don't know what you don't know. And so you put your trust into somebody else and humans in general, let you down. And it's especially when you're unaware, it seems that those that are going to take advantage of you will find you, right?

Like, and so you'll find them too. It's part of your, your script, right? You're like in the movie, you got to write the script. You need someone to take advantage of it. He's like, I get taken advantage of a lot. It's like, yeah, you put yourself in a lot of positions to be taken advantage of. Yeah, because I mean, it hardens you up and then you don't make those mistakes. But you can help yourself out by starting to branch out on that. And so a lot of people, they can look at the bookshelf, for example, especially if you're a personal trainer or coach.

Usually it's anatomy, physiology, how to not hurt your back, Westside manuals, all these different things. There's not a marketing and sales, even a business strategy. And so people come at this and then they start to think, oh, I need this, I need that. Well, they need the whole picture. They need to understand how business works first. And that's really what we're seeing in the shifts we're seeing, I think, in entrepreneurship is freelancers and people like that, when you rely on other people to fill your schedule, whether you work for them or not, you still have a job. And we're seeing this right now with Uber and Lyft and the bill that just got passed in California saying, it's ridiculous that you guys think you're not an employee to these drivers. And they're saying, hey, we just match people up.

We match the driver with the person who wants the thing. We're like Craigslist. They're a marketplace. They're coming to be a marketplace. Yeah, if we take drivers away from you, you don't have a business. And they're saying, no, no, no, we're a tech platform with this. Well, for those drivers, if Uber took them away, how do they get business? Driving is still a skill. It's still a business.

If they could get their own business, fill their own book, they would always have a job. Well, I watch a lot of, I don't know if you've had this happen, but I've jumped in a lot of Ubers and Lyfts where they're handing a business card where they are building their own business. There's little things, there are things that are forming. Because they see the writing on the wall. Well, they're taking responsibility. Responsibility.

And they know that the business changes a lot. And so with autonomous cars coming, people are going, okay, like I may be out of a job. That's a long way away, but there's still going to be people who want a driver and who want people feel comfortable when they get the same driver all the time, right? So if we translate that back into coaching, when you're working with someone, people are going to want to continue to work with you and have frequency with you. And so being able to navigate that and set yourself up for the most success to build referrals, to build the business, to be able to expand. Because at some point, hopefully your business is to the point where

you have to hire other coaches. Well, now you have to have a system and you have to be able to coach those coaches for them to coach the clients in your process and your system. And so that's when you move into leadership. And so the thing with skills that's interesting is that if you learn the wrong skill at the wrong time or the right skill at the wrong time, it's not going to help you. And so you have to look at with entrepreneurship, the game is where am I at? What do I need right now? And I think sometimes that's hard too, because people look at entrepreneurship and it is such a broad thing and they'll start looking at investment strategies, but they don't have any fucking money to invest. What's the point of looking at an investment strategy if you don't know what to do? I got to have a plan for when I make all the money.

Come on now. And we mentioned this before, but it's this, you get stuck in learning and not in action. And that's the other, the critical skill for an entrepreneur is to be able to figure out, okay, is this applicable to me right now? And that's why I always say it's very, you have to be very careful on the inputs and who you're listening to. Because if you're listening to someone that doesn't have the same business as you, is in a different market than you, is way ahead of you, yeah, you can hear inspiring, motivating things, but how applicable is that information? And that's where the coaching

business is very interesting because the best coaches tend to be the closest to the person they're helping. They have the closest experience. Maybe they've gone through it themselves or they work with people closely because they understand the situation the best. Yeah. When we were running Barbell Business and we had the mastermind, we opened it up to anyone in the fitness industry. And one of the things I realized as time went on is the people I kept in contact with, the people I kept on circling and enjoyed hanging out with the most and were the easiest to serve were the coaches because I know the coaching business. That's where I come from. And it was, it's been a real pleasure and you're right. We've gone broad before going down more

narrow and doing the thing that we know best makes it a lot easier. I want to talk about learning versus action as people do get a lot of, I imagine there's a lot easier. I want to talk about learning versus action as people do get a lot of, I imagine there's a lot of people that listen to the podcast and they go, oh man, it's entertaining. It's entertaining to learn, right? So are you being, we talked about this at the summit, which is, look, if you go home and you take no action, you just paid for entertainment and that's okay. But know that that's what you just got. We're going to do really magical things. You're going to have a great time. There's going to be a lot of community, but if you go home and take no action, you just paid pretty good money for vacation

slash entertainment. You and I have been in a lot of education and personal development going. We met at a conference and we've talked about people who sit and learn and basically get off on it they get that dopamine hit and what keeps the coach from moving out of learning and into action and taking responsibility for all aspects of the business what's keeping them from that i think it's we live in society now where information is so easy that we never actually think we know enough. So it's this lack of confidence in self and confidence is only built by failing forward because you get closer and closer to the outcome you want.

But if you're stuck and you're motionless, then you just feel helpless. And so we could go into actual physiology and psychology that goes on. But really what it is, is that in the grand scheme of things, doing something is better than doing nothing. And what coaches tend to do is, okay, I need more information. Well, now they get too much information and too much conflicting information. And because they don't know which is the right path to take, they just won't take either path versus taking one path and saying, this didn't work and I'm going to go do this.

And I'm not sure where the fear of failure comes from for most people, but I believe that that's one of the biggest fears that entrepreneurs have. And a lot of it is because we're seen as risk takers. We're seen as the fringe. We're seen on the edge, like people that, why do you get a regular job? Safety, like unaware that a regular job is the most unsafe you could be. You could get fired at any minute. You have no control.

But they look at us as that. And because we are the outsider in our local community, there is a fear there that, okay, these people think I have my shit together. They think I'm successful. And if I fail, what are they then going to think? And so it's one of those things of you have to almost suspend disbelief and say, well, what if this works, right? And what if I just take these first steps and what is that first step? And I truly think that the difference between those who set goals and achieve them and those who set goals and don't is going granular and to say, what's those next steps we need to take? And if we look at like when I did the bodybuilding show and lost over a hundred pounds for that, it would have been easy to say, hey, Mike, I won't lose a hundred pounds, right? And then not lost that weight. I could

have lost some weight eating better, whatever. But I said, hey, I want to lose a hundred pounds. I want to step on a bodybuilding stage. Now the deadline helps, but more than anything, I went and hired Shelby Sands. I went and hired John Meadows. I went and hired Derek Farnsworth for posing. And I went and put my team together that then created a plan. And then it was follow this plan. And I think that's what most people fail to do. They say, I want to build a successful business. They get a little bit of information, right? Okay. I need to do this, but then they never get the actual daily plan, right? I knew every day exactly what to eat, when to eat it, what to do. And I think what happens is in business, someone will say, Hey,

post five times on Instagram a day, but then they're left saying, well, what to do. And I think what happens is in business, someone will say, hey, post five times on Instagram a day. But then they're left saying, well, what do I post? What do I say? How do I do this? And so because they never get down to that granular level, you think of it as sets and reps in the gym. Everybody wants to know how many of the right sets, how many is the right amount of reps? What's the best exercise? What's this? And a lot of that comes from trial and error over time, learning your own body and strengths and weaknesses. But that's really what I think is missing with entrepreneurship is they do their skill. That's great. But then they know they need to do marketing, but they don't actually know what they need

to do. They never look into it. They never get down to the point, okay, like I actually have to launch an ad and then I have to look at the numbers and look at my click-through rates, look at my conversion rates to my landing page, collect the email address, how many email addresses I get a day. And I think a lot of people avoid that. People avoid reality because reality hurts. When people go, I think a lot of coaches have a grandiose view of themselves. And that is,

I'm a fucking great coach. I've got this certification, this certification, people should be coming to me. And it's almost angry that they don't have more clients. And like, these clients don't know what the fuck they're doing. And you're laughing because it's true. And a lot of it comes down to avoiding reality because reality hurts. And I think that for me, that's been a practice of the older I get, the more experienced I become, the more I enjoy success when I can be with what is true, what's really going on. And what you're talking about is looking at the numbers. Yeah.

How many clients do you actually have? How many gym owners have I asked where I go? How many members did you get last month? How many did you lose all this? And they're kind of go, and they throw out a number. I go, where'd you get that number? Oh, no, no doubt. They don't actually go, look, it's just some, they're like, oh, and why do people leave? And I'm like, oh, most people are just like leaving town. I'm like, no, they're not. Yeah. No survey data. And that's the thing. Here's what's interesting. I see this all the time too. I had a client and when I was running masterminds, who was in the mastermind and we

asked him like, how much money did you make in the last 90 days? And he took a pen and paper and started writing down like every client he had and how much they paid him. I was like, you don't have a spreadsheet of this? Yeah. That's all in my head. No. That doesn't work. But the reason I think that is is because everybody –

In your head is a fantasy. Right. It's fantasy. It's easy to manipulate, and you can have positive emotion. People are too emotionally attached to data, right? And I just shared this from stage. If you're driving in your car and the empty sign comes on, there's no panic. You go, okay, I got like 40 miles left.

I got to find a gas station. There's no panic. Like you don't freak out. It's I'll get more gas, right? But if your bank account hits zero, you're in a world of hurt. There's no difference in the situation. You just got to go get more money. But like we immediately freak out, right?

Because whatever reason, we have an emotional attachment to money. That's the same in the situation. You just got to go get more money. But we immediately freak out, right? Because whatever reason, we have an emotional attachment to money. That's the same in the business. I imagine people are hearing you talk right now. It's like, oh, you just got to get more money. Easy for you to say. That's true. But if they're listening to this, they have a skill that someone else would pay them for, right? So I always look at it like this. There's only really three problems in business, right? You either aren't getting enough people to see in front of, in order to purchase from you. You aren't getting enough people to say yes. So you either have a traffic problem or you have a conversion problem, sales problem, marketing, sales, or you're not getting results, right? On the backside, which is an experience problem, right? You just look at your business. I would imagine if you're

a coach- By the way, the marketing and sales get really easy when you're getting great results. Exactly. And I would imagine if you're listening to this and you're a coach, you have clients. And the question to ask yourself is, what is the result so you get those clients? And if they can't be quantified, right, if it's a feeling, what's really hard to sell feelings, right? And that's the personal development industry. You'll not see a lot of very high-end products unless it's attached to a celebrity, right? So Tony Robbins can charge a million dollars a year for his coaching and he, you know, four people at that level and the mastermind because he's Tony Robbins. Well, you go down the line and you look at the personal development industry, there's not a lot of people who are charging a million dollars like Tony, right?

And that's because of the transformation. A lot of it's feeling it's not quantifiable, right? His best clients are those that come through his business mastery program who get the personal development, who then say, oh my gosh, my business was transformed because I sorted my own shit out. Very similar to a lot of, from the feedback from Strong Coach, I hear that's a lot of coaches, they were able to get their shit sorted, which then allowed them to build the business. Yeah, we do personal development before we touch business because here's the bottom line is for a long time, I taught business only. And what the result was, was people would achieve a result, but still were unhappy. It's like you built a business around someone else's model, built a business around, yeah, the method works, the system works, the money comes in, whatever. And people are still kicking rocks and being sad. And it's like, well, fuck man,

I'd rather you make a little less money, but love your business. Exactly. And the thing is, is that it's hard. If you said to people, come work out with me, you won't lose any weight. You won't get any stronger, but I guarantee in 60 days days you'll feel better about yourself that's a hard sell that's actually funny because i've had uh coaches that they've had the experience of feeling better and see how valuable that is and then they want to start using that in their marketing i go don't do that because people want they need a fucking number to attach to what they need that we give them it's not what they want right and the thing is is you

always have to meet the market at the point the conversation that they have in their head and so if they look in the mirror every day and say i don't like the way i look i'm fat i'm ugly right you're telling them you're a beautiful soul like you're perfect the way you are they might appreciate that but their subconscious mind is going, fuck you. Fuck you. Just like someone might've thought when I said about making money easy, someone might, fuck you, it's easy, right? You telling that person, you're beautiful. They're looking at you with your six pack abs. You think they believe you subconsciously, right? And so there's a disconnect there. But again, it's that message to market match. If you don't have that right message, and this is

what frustrates coaches a lot, is that they see other coaches who are doing these quick fix programs being successful. Like in the fitness space, you see the eight-week challenges, right? Run a challenge. And then we don't want those people because it's a broken mindset. The thing is, is that you have to think about where that person is, what journey they're on. Someone who's trying different diets, telling them, hey, diets don't work, is a lot harder sell than saying, hey, start this diet that's the last diet you'll ever need, transform their mindset in the initial phase, and then continue on. And I think that that's something that like, when you do that, now you get the results, right? And when you get the results, and you get these transformation, true transformation, people are actually changing,

which is a question to ask yourself, if you're listening you're a coach look at your clients and how many of them have actually gotten the results that they desire right if you're batting 80 plus you're doing pretty good this whole rule of five percent of the people you work with will ever do what you say well that's a great average but you should never try to stick to that average you should always be trying to break it and so once you start getting the results well now your marketing on the front end becomes easy because remember, we're the mentor in the journey. We're not the hero, right? Like we begin as the hero because people are attracted to us, but we're the mentor. We're going to take them across the threshold. We're going to help them through the challenges and we're going to help them emerge on the other side. We're not the hero.

They're the hero of the story. And that's what is so important. When you have other heroes that have gone through that journey with you, well, it's easy now to sell yourself as the coach because you've done it for you. You've done it for others. And it's believable. And they can see that. Plus, you can share that journey the other person has gone on. You can share the trials and tribulations. You can basically walk them through, hey, this is what's going to happen.

And then when that person walks on that journey, you know, and they, oh, he said this was going to happen. Well, now it's a lot easier to handle. When I went to Westside, I spoke to Dave Tate before I ever moved there, and he explained the way Westside works. And if anyone is unfamiliar, they can watch the documentary Westside versus the world. It's on Netflix and other places like that. But you're walking into the gates of hell. And Mike's been there, so he knows what it's like. But you have characters. It's wild. You have characters there, right?

You have the golden boy, right? Can't do no wrong. Then you've got the guy that Louis is picking on all the time. Then you've got the up-and-coming lifter. Then you've got the leader. And so everybody falls into these different roles. Dave explained all this to me. So I go to Westside, and when things start happening

and Louis starts acting weird towards me and things in the gym and people leave, I was so aware of it all that I was able to survive Westside and get the outcome that I wanted, which was that world record. But if Dave hadn't shared that with me, I wouldn't have seen it. And then when it happened, it would have been, what the fuck is this? And I would have bounced. And I think that that's so important. So once you start getting those results, now you can turn your marketing into that. And people are going to be like, man, it's like he's talking to me. He knows exactly what I've gone through. Because what's happening is they have the call to adventure, the call to change, and then they have the refusal of the change. And they go back and forth and they just yo-yo

back and forth. And you're the difference. And once they've stepped through with you, now you get to go through this path together. So marketing and sales becomes easy with the results. And I honestly think when people look at data, if we want to take emotion out of it, look at how many people bring in, how many people stay, right? What's the result that you promised them and what's the result they got? And if you don't know, like you can quantify anything. So like if you do sell, like if you coach someone on anxiety, you can quantify that. Like how many times a day did you feel anxious?

How many times a day do you feel anxious now? Now you have a quantifiable result. And so you can quantify that. Like how many times a day did you feel anxious? How many times a day do you feel anxious now? Now you have a quantifiable result. And so you can, once you have- I've been part of studies where they're measuring anxiety and depression and on a scale of one to 10 today, which level of anxiety you're experiencing. And if you're a human being,

it's somewhere between one and 10. And even myself, who I feel very balanced, I guess you could say, I feel very well-adjusted as a psychologist would call it. Yeah. I mean, still there's days where I go, yeah, my anxiety is around two or three and I've gone in multiple sessions for different things. And yeah, that's measurable and maybe a subjective thing, but at least there's a metric. And the thing is you hear, know your numbers, know your numbers, and you can get into the weeds with that, right? Because you can get – there's so many numbers you could pull.

But you've got to look at – you want to look at what I heard they're called smart numbers. That's what you want to be paying attention to. And those are the big tickers, right? Like two or three. Right, which really is going to be for most coaches, how many leads do they get? How many conversations do they have? How many sales do they have? How many people paid – like conversation paid paid, how much money did we collect?

And then how many people did the program, whatever that delivery is. And what's retention too? And that's retention. A lot of people, they're like, I get really great results. I'm like, what's your retention like? I'm like, I mean, if your results were better. I mean, if your retention, people are wanting to measure results. And I actually

see retention as a, as an indicator. It may not be a direct correlation, but it's a correlation. And it's important because it's a number that can be improved, right? You hear a lot of people talk about funnels in business and building a marketing funnel or a sales funnel. And we like to call them, like I call them campaigns because a campaign is the full picture, right? A funnel, it might just be your three pages of your website, but a campaign is the big picture. And I always tell people that- A lot of people get stuck in tactics. Exactly. They're like, oh, I'm going to do this. As you were talking about the beginner,

I think about myself in business in the beginning, I was getting people results, but then I was relying on all these marketing tactics and there was a disconnect inside the business. So I was doing all these really, I was marketing really hard and then we were getting results, but we did not do a good job of connecting the results to the marketing. And that's something that we do really well now. And all of a sudden marketing got, it feels 10 times easier than it was even three, four years ago. Yeah. And I think that if we zoom out, we're talking about marketing and sales and like retention and stuff like that. Really what you got to think about is the customer journey, right? That's all it is. If you're going to take someone, and for those that aren't familiar with

the hero's journey, that's what I was referencing earlier. I would look up the hero's journey. There'll be a diagram. You'll understand it. There's YouTube videos out there. Yeah. But basically if you think of your customer journey as the minute someone hears about you as the start point to the minute they give you money as the crossing the threshold point to all the way coming back, getting the results coming around, you have to understand that the marketing and the sales is only a quarter of the entire journey, right? And that's why most people, they don't think about, okay, when someone comes in, what's that first initial experience they have with me?

What's the communication process? How do we get them to essentially get the results they want? Because we know they're going to fail at least once or twice and they're going to screw up. What's the length of time it takes to actually get that change? And what are the tools that we can provide as much as possible to do that? And that becomes really what you're focusing on as an entrepreneur is, is how do we give that customer the best journey? The stuff outside of that that allows that to happen, that's the business owner hat, right? That's when you're figuring that side out. But most people, they're not looking at any of that, right? They look at, it's all compartmentalized. And that's, I mean, we live in a society now where we break everything up so much.

Obviously, you and I are very, we talk about this with the human body, right? Like in terms of like, oh, my wrist hurts. Okay, well, where's that coming from? Because it's not, the pain is really not coming from the wrist. The wrist is not the problem. The wrist is the surface level problem. But let's go deeper. Let's go deeper.

And you start getting into cellular. You go down and that's really the same thing in business, right? What people think their problem is, is really not their problem. And it's a process of elimination. And I think that that's really what people need to start looking at. So, you know, when you go, okay, what do I have right now? Do you have a coaching like system that you use, right? Or are you just doing what most gym owners do and then just writing the workout on the board the day of, right? Meaning you get on the phone and you're like, what do you need today? Right? Like that's not guiding anyone. That's not taking anyone on a journey. It's also not transferable, right? Now you may have a series

of questions that you ask them. You may have, there is a process that you use. You just unaware of it, right? Because if you're getting results, you have to have a process that has to be a system there. And this is like system thinking that most people don't really, everything in our life is a system. Every day that you live a certain, like you do certain things in a systematic way. And once you start to see this and you, it's just awareness, right? Now you can start to tweak the system. And so when you look at your business, you say, okay, how do I operate as a business owner? What's my current system? And if I wanted to change it, what's the system that would need to happen? And then what's the gap here and how do we make that happen?

Just like any change, right? You look at your eating habits. What do I currently eat like? How should I be eating? Okay, how do we make that transition and change? It's not going to happen overnight. You know, there has to be some allowances to go back and forth. But most people don't look.

They look at where they are. They look at where they want to be. They never actually figure out that bridge. And they'll invest in people like yourself or I who can help them with that. But if they don't truly ever understand it, they don't really buy in. If they don't buy in, it never really happens. Yeah. I also, when I think about the systems, I think a lot of people are being introduced to systems. They're aware of their systems and they can adopt. And like you were saying, they are operating within a system. They may not be aware of it. And what's in the way? I want to go from point A to point B and I'm operating inside of a system. They may not be aware of it. And what's in the way? I want to go from point A to

point B and I'm operating inside of a system. There's some processes I could adopt, replace what I've been doing with something that's better. But in the end, the biggest problem that I see is people getting in their own way. It's like the systems work, right? And the same thing happens with training. An athlete comes in and it's like they're not getting some type of result. And you go, wow, it's weird. Nine out of 10 people are coming through, we're getting results, but this one person's not. And you start digging deeper and deeper and deeper. And you realize they decided to change 10% of the system to fit some type of personal preference or whatever, which is fine. But realize that it's not going

to get the same result. You change one piece of it. There's that. And so the question I get to ask myself and with a strong coach right now, we're prepping for Q4. So every quarter we put together a plan and go, okay, this is the goal for the next 90 days. It's just like training. What do we want to achieve in the next 90 days? And who's responsible for what? What needs to be executed? There's a plan in place. And I noticed that anytime there is a failure inside of that, there was either somebody on the team didn't follow through with what they said they were going to do, or I didn't follow through on how I was going to show up and operate the team.

And so I even, as the business owner, I take it on as my responsibility is no longer should a week go by that I realized that something didn't work. If a longer than a week goes by where something's not working on the way to 90 days is 12 weeks. So I should not go longer than six or seven days before realizing that something's wrong. So less than 10% of the time. And then I get to make adjustments from there. But if I'm pointing the finger at myself, I want to say, well, the system's not good enough or it's something outside of my control. But in reality, I likely had some way to address it

way earlier on, but didn't make it happen. Yeah. I mean, I think what's important, especially with like 90 day goals, like most people set them, but what they do is they set the goal and then they add to it. And you were talking about- During the 90 days? Yeah, you were talking about the weightlifter you working with and then they added extra workouts in. It's like, Oh yeah. For the month they stuck

to the plan, but then they started feeling so good. It's like, Oh my, like we're repairing her shoulder, right? We're repairing the shoulder. A month goes in, she's feeling amazing. And all of a sudden her shoulder starts hurting. Eight weeks later, I go, everything we're doing should be making your shoulder feel amazing. What's happening? She's like, well, I was doing jerks yesterday. And I go, jerks are not in your program. And then I realized, yeah, same thing. So I think with that, that's the first mistake I see people do is adding to it. Second thing is they create a goal that they know they're not going to be able to do by themselves, right? And I think the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make is they think they're responsible, right? And I found that the best entrepreneurs I know,

the ones who are the most successful are the ones who realize that they're the bottleneck, right? And so in a way, I don't know if lazy is the right word, but you have to say, okay, I know my habits and I know my daily schedule currently, right? And I don't have the capacity to add in, like, let's say you're going to want to add in Facebook ads. We just use Facebook ads. I think this goes back to being with reality. Right.

It's like, oh, I've already maxed out on time. Let's add something. Right. And so, like, if you know you need advertising, right, and you're going to say, Facebook ads is what I want to do, right? The question is, who's going to do that, right? And the probable answer is, it's not you, right? So then your task is finding someone to do that, hiring that person and getting into motion as fast as possible. But I think the same thing, like you said, you have to know whether that person is the right person as soon as possible, So if you're working with someone and you turn advertising on and two weeks go by and you don't have a single lead, well, chances are that person doesn't know what they're doing and you're going to have to go find someone else. And so again, it's just a process of elimination. Eventually, you're going to find the right person. But people, they're looking for home runs too quick. I want to run ads. I'm going to pay someone to run ads.

Oh, it didn't work. Ads don't work. No. What you learned was that person and those ads that he ran didn't work, right? And there could be so many reasons for that. And so what you have to be willing to do is say, okay, I know advertising is important and I know it's going to come back to me, but there's going to be a learning process here and you have to be committed to that process. And it's like anything. When I was trying to, my first goal in squatting was to

get to that thousand pound squat. I missed a thousand pounds so many times. But each time you learn something and you go back to the drawing board, you train a little bit differently. And then eventually, I think it was five or six meets and I finally hit, I missed it. I opened with a thousand. I said, screw this. I'm just going to open with the weight I want. I opened, I missed it. And then I got it on the said, screw this. I'm just going to open with the way that I want. I opened, I missed it. And then I got it on the second attempt. But it wasn't the first time I tried a thousand pounds. And that's in business.

People say, okay, I need marketing or I need to learn sales. And they'll get a script and they'll try the script and they'll get a no. And they'll be like, this fucking doesn't work. Maybe it works, but you've got to give it a fair shot. And you can set that number for you, right? But that's the reality. You have to get these skills and learn. And it's not going to happen fast right technique wise if you're a lifter you don't learn technique the first time you try it now every now and again there's a unicorn that

ruins this entire philosophy here because they do right but chances the ufc fighter yeah it's vegan yeah now uh it's good for everybody the person who starts their instagram six months later they got a hundred000 people. There's unicorns out there, but most people aren't. The cool thing with the world is that you all have the same opportunity. The difference is we all have different starting points. And so someone's starting in poverty in a trailer park. Now they've got a lot longer path to climb to the top, but the path is still there.

Then if you're starting an aristocrat family with money, you're closer to the top, but the path is still there, right? Then if you're starting an aristocrat family with money, you're closer to the end goal, but it doesn't mean the opportunity is any less. And I think that most people don't think of it like that. The game is unfair, but everybody can be the winner if they're willing to play the game and see it through. And I think that most people just don't know they're playing the game. They're in it, they're working, they never think outside. And so that's the first step really for most people is to change their identity, right? Like I'm not a coach. Like I'm a business owner.

And like I'm an entrepreneur. Like I have to understand entrepreneurship beyond this. Were you there when I did that at the summit? I think I did it the day after you spoke. You spoke on day two. Yeah, I wasn't there. Yeah. The last day I had everyone write down, I'm an entrepreneur.

And I had one of the guys, he came back to me later and he wrote down, he didn't say entrepreneur, but he said, I'm a businessman. And he took on that identity. He said that was the biggest shift he experienced the entire time was taking that on because he had come from a family. There was a family business and the way that his dad and whatever had run the business, he didn't like it. And so he associated being a businessman with burnout and with pain. I had the same experience. My dad owned his own business and I wanted to avoid it. And so he said that when he took that on, he realized that he didn't have to

be that kind of business owner. He could be his own kind of businessman. And he said that once he had that, he got really excited about growing his coaching business. That's a steal from Jay-Z, but I like Jay-Z's quote on, I'm a business man. Right? Because your life is your work, right? I think I've said this before, probably on a Bible Business Podcast, but Gandhi was asked like do you have a message and he said my life is my message right and that's really what we're talking about here like entrepreneurship businessman like with investor whatever it is like these are just things that allow you to share your message to change lives and i think that that's what most people they've resistant to it for whatever belief

system they have like it'd be hard like a lot of people listening to this probably don't have that negative association like the guy at Strong Summit. I think most people do. Definitely they do. Most of them don't consider themselves a marketer, but if they had to say, I'm a salesperson, they would curl up because of what they associate with salespeople, sleazy car salesmen. They always think of that versus the salesperson is someone who you talk to someone and you make them realize that in order to reach their goals, they have to step across that threshold to work with you. I mean, that's what you're doing. You're essentially, you're empowering someone to make a commitment to themselves to move

forward. But it's the language and the language patterns. I know you guys do a lot with and lifted around that. That's what people don't realize is that a lot of the times they hold themselves back because of false beliefs about things. And if they just understood that there's the craft that you perform and then there's the selling of the craft, right? And the organization around that craft. And in order to be able to build the business they want to help the people they want to help, they have to think more than just, I'm a coach. Because it's too limiting. It's going to hold them back and it keeps them from really moving where they want to go to.

I think it's not just limiting your business, but it limits you in life. We see this with athletes. I'm an athlete and they have no other identity, right? They don't even allow themselves to own another identity. And so when the athlete part is over, they go, who am I? And for me, it's, I like holding multiple identities. So if one identity is suffering, so one of mine is I'm a world-class CEO, right? And so it's a mantra slash identity. And not every day do I feel like that's true, but I'm also a lot of other things.

I'm an athlete. You are a lot of other things. It's like on Saturday afternoon, I may not feel like a world-class CEO, but I'm a world-class something else. So I think it's important just from a satisfaction perspective. And then also I've been without a company before i've dropped a sport before you've left things where it was it's like oh fuck who am i now

but if you're holding multiple identities then it's a lot easier to shift into something well the concept of resurrection right it's a biblical process and probably lose half the audience here but like in order to emerge to move forward it's the rising of the phoenix. There has to be a death, right? It's literally like the death of old self to emerge into new self. And that's the thing with identities is they serve you when they serve you. But then it's like a hat. When you don't need it anymore, you can take it off.

And these are essentially the masks that we put on in society. Because if you strip everything away, we're just humans that need to reproduce. That's the whole point of everything. Everything else has been created, right? And when you see it like that, and you realize that we live in a creator's world, right? Meaning that everything around us, everything a creator has produced, it's not needed. It's not necessary. It changes your thought process in the sense of, what are you actually doing? And why am I doing this? What significance do I get out of it? For me, when I left the powerlifting and then emerged into CrossFit, then emerged into bodybuilding and then said, okay, I need to figure out how just to like not be so extreme

and almost died in order to try to like achieve something that means nothing. Then you get into like, you know, I do yoga now and I ride BMX and I go for a hike and I go hiking. I do all these things that honestly, when I was powerlifting, if I was doing yoga, I wouldn't have told a soul in the world. I would have been so embarrassed. And now I see how screwed up my body is and how much I need to like, because longevity, one of the factors there is flexibility, right? I'm going, man, if I can't touch my toes, I'm probably going to die young, right? It changed, it shifts. But when I was identified

as a powerlifter and the life that I lived, like yoga and those people were like so far away from who I was that I couldn't even imagine doing that. And so if I hadn't shed that identity, if I was still powerlifting, even not competitively, and I still had that identity, essentially I'm keeping myself back from longevity, right? And so you have to shed it in order to be able to then step into the new identity that allows you to move forward. It's definitely easier said than done. And letting go of old identities and thinking on new identities is a practice.

It's a skill set. You can get better at it. You've gotten better at it. I've gotten better at it. The transitioning from one identity to a next has become easier and easier over time. And I know that the first few times there was that transformation, that metamorphosis, there was a lot of suffering involved because of the attachment to that identity. And most people I imagine that are listening to this, they've only lived into

one or two. There hasn't been so much experience that there's been a lot of identity shifts where they are in practice of it yet. And so there's a super high attachment and inability to even consider things outside of that. What do you recommend as ways of, to that person who goes, I think I know what you're talking about, but like, I am an athlete and I am a coach. What do you mean? I could be more, or I could shift my identity. Yeah. I mean, as a coach, this is what we're asking our clients to do constantly, right? We're always asking our clients to shift their identity. And that's the thing that I think the first thing for everybody to always understand is when you make a decision, right?

And for example, when your client makes the decision to invest in you and have you as their coach, like you both understand that the first thing that's going to happen is you're going to war with the dragon. The battle is they're investing in you to take them through the battle, the resistance and all the things that come up. Because it seems like the minute we decide to make a change, we're pulled backwards. And that's, in my opinion, the simplest thing, you have to have a coach. If you're in the business of selling coaching, you should be in the business of believing that you need that coach. And you need to be in an environment that's going to point these things out to you. Because you don't see, like they say, the hardest thing to see is yourself, right?

When you look in the mirror, do you truly see yourself? And oftentimes, other people will see the greatness in you, but they'll also be able to point out the not so great things better than you can be because we're naive to that. We learn to live with ourselves, right? And so you have to be in an environment that's going to point that out and be willing to do that work and to know that it's going to be painful. And I think that that takes courage, but the best way to do is to leap. And they always said that phrase of entrepreneurship, right? An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off the side of a building and builds a parachute on the way down. So if you know like inside you're like, I have to change.

Like I know I have to change. Until you actually hire the person that's going to help you, you're not committing to that change. The minute you hire that person, what you're really saying to sending signal to the universe and to your subconscious, super conscious is, I'm actually committed now, right? And the minute you're committed,

I'm actually committed to doing the work, right? And that's the difference. And that's what, so if you're an athlete and you go, you know what, this is not fulfilling me. I know it's not fulfilling me, but competing and everything is part of who I am. Find the athlete who used to be an athlete, who's now something else, like the person who's walked that path, who can then walk you through like, this is how you're going to feel this thing you do.

I mean, when I watched the documentary for the first time, I was in tears and I turned to my wife and was like, we got to move back to Columbus, Ohio. I got to stop powerlifting again. Because immediately I shifted and the memories and everything filled me, overtook everything. And so immediately I was back in that old identity. I'm going to be 330 pounds again. I'm going to go break the world record. Louis needs me. The gym needs me, right?

Which is all ego, right? And then I said, I'm going to go meditate. And so I went and did about an hour's meditation. I come, I said, I'm good. I'm good, right? But I had to catch myself. And that's the thing. It's like, I'm lucky to have a super aware wife

that can just point anything out. So she's a mentor to me every day. And my two-year-old is also seems to be the biggest teacher I've ever had. But it's having the people who can point that out. When you say you want to do something, most of the time, that's your true voice. Then everything you do that stops you doing that, that's why you got to figure out how

not to do that shit anymore, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think a lot of people are afraid to hire, like go into coaching because they don't know how it works. Like you're saying, you know, for me running a coaching company and then if I didn't have a coach, I would immediately be out of integrity and if things started falling apart i would go well of course it's because i'm not investing in the thing that i'm asking other people to invest in and one of my choices in

hiring the coach i did was one of it was the price point is like i should be paying more for my coaching than what i'm asking people to pay me for my coaching. And so it's one of those things where when I'm in the process with my coach, it might feel slow. And there are some realizations that happen and a lot of insights. But I've been working with the same coach for nine months now. Hired him back in January. And every, I'd say once a month, I go, okay, do I really need this coach?

Is this something that's really benefiting me? And then I do a quick recap. I write down all the stuff that's happened since January and I go, holy shit. And I can attribute the fact that things happen to that relationship. I can attribute the ease in which things I move through things to that. And I can also attribute doing a lot of things. The things I wouldn't do were so like this morning, I had to send an email I really didn't want to send. And I knew that my coach was going to send me a text today asking me if I sent that email. And I was like, all right, holding me to the vision I've set for myself. And then I believe good coaches will also help co-create a vision that's greater than what you could imagine for yourself. So it's like, oh, I see myself like this. And they go, I actually see you 20% better or more or having gone further than what you're imagining for yourself.

And so that's been incredibly valuable. I want to shift gears a little bit. I want to go into your specialty. You've got many specialties, but I wanted to talk about what are the initial steps to building a successful marketing campaign? You started talking about marketing campaigns and the different aspects of it. And the most common questions we get from people are, what exactly is a strong coach? These are the questions that come in over Instagram. I look at things, people. What exactly is it? So I'm like, shit, man, I got to improve my marketing.

If they don't know already, then... So there's that one piece. Another one is, I don't have enough... Money comes first is, oh, I need to make more money. Like money is a focus. Another one is time. It's like, those go hand in hand. It's like, oh, if I had more time, I could make more money because they're exchanging time for money. And then the other one is marketing is what is it that you want to do better or what's holding you back? We'll ask people commonly, what's holding you back in your coaching business? And time, money are the big ones. And then marketing is another one of the big ones

because most people in their mind, the solution to their problem is more clients. So what do you tell that coach who's in this mindset of, I need better marketing? What's their first steps? Yeah, so I mean, it's really simple. We mentioned earlier campaigns, we've mentioned systems. So really what you have to have is you have to have a process that's predictable, right? And so typically most people have a website, but

a website is just a brochure, right? Like doesn't do nothing for most people because there's no reason for someone to then continue on with you, right? So I'm a big direct response marketer. So for me, the simplest form of direct response is every single point has a purpose and it leads them to the next conversation. For example, if you have an email list- Can you tell us the difference between direct response and other types of marketing? Yeah. So like branding, for example, and you can just, most of the commercials on TV are just branding. They don't necessarily create a desire to immediately go to purchase that product. Whereas for example, if like a Starbucks did a commercial and they put a coupon code up and it

was only valid for the next one hour, well, now you're getting into direct response because you have to take an action. It's not just a commercial about Starbucks. Now it's a commercial, but it also has an action that you have to go take, right? So direct response is really leading the prospect to take that next action. Well, I want to point this out. This is a really common mistake I see for most businesses, not just coaching, but most businesses are, they want to do branding. They're like, oh, I need more awareness. I'm like, no. Because branding is awareness that this thing exists. And what I've seen just in, I've been an entrepreneur for 12 years now. And I think I'm learning more rapidly now than I was ever before, which is crazy and

awesome. But what I've seen is until a company gets to about, what, $10 million in revenue, dumping a lot of, investing a lot of time and energy and money into branding is, I wouldn't say it's pointless, but it should be a backseat to direct response marketing. Direct response marketing should be responsible for the first $10 million. And more than anything, to be honest, like it's not measurable. And so it's different. I know.

The branding is not measurable. Branding is not measurable. So you don't actually know if it's working, right? Right. It's a crapshoot. And you're competing against the big businesses, right? So you're playing a game where you're going to lose because you don't have the money they're going to have. Like if you came out with a new drink and you wanted to go against Coca-Cola, like who's going to win?

Like they're going to win on the branding side, right? But if you take a different approach and you get in front of the right people, so people who would be interested in your drink are not people who are probably going to drink Coca-Cola. So you go and you go through different things. You figure out how do we market to those people? How do we get them to want the drink? And that's the difference is it's a very thought through process that's measurable. So for most coaches, really the thing, if they want more clients, they're going to have more conversations. And those conversations don't have to be on the phone. I know coaches who close

through Facebook chat. It's not like you have to, or you have a salesperson. But there has to be a sales mechanism. Sales letters work as well. So copywriting with sales letters. So you have to have that. The easiest thing, obviously, it's going to run an ad. And I always think the easiest way to get a client is to buy a client, right? And you just buy them less than what they're going to give you. It's simple math. If I can pay Facebook $100 to give me a client and their initial payment is a thousand, I'd do that all day long. So we have to have an advertisement. And depending on what platform you're on, you know what you like, right? And that's the thing. You'll hear different people say, you got to do this, you got to do that. My thought process is that you know what you like and what

you've purchased from, right? So don't do something like if you've seen someone's ad and you've purchased a product from them, that's probably a good example of what might work, right? So it's not that hard to go look at, you can use different websites to look at who's running ads and stuff like that. See what works, see what you like and find your style, find what you like. But you got to have an ad that then drives them somewhere, right? Because what's the ad? What's the next step? How do you feel about ads versus organic traffic? So again, here's the thing. If nobody knows who you are, nobody's going to find you, right? So the thing with organic traffic is it's slow and it's hot, right? And so-

What I mean by organic traffic is just posting Instagram and Facebook. But again, it depends on your following, right? If you don't have a following, how are they going to find you? Now you could try to manipulate hashtags and do stuff like that. But again, now you're trading a lot of time, right? So if you don't have money, you have one or the other, you have time or you have money, right? Like, so if you're completely broke, right, you, all you have is time, but you're going to want to try to shortcut that process by finding someone who already has the audience that you can provide value to, right? So if you were going to go the organic route, for example, and there's another coach that has

10,000 followers, but they coach, like, let's say it's a mindset coach and you're a physical fitness coach. Well, you two could partner up and you could do something on their Instagram page that then drives traffic over to you, vice versa, because it's a value add to their clientele. But whatever you do, let's say you do organic, so you're doing paid advertisement or you're doing organic Instagram posts, whatever, or with an influencer, where do they go from there? What's the next step? And a lot of the times, you could right there and then just say, hey, if you're interested in this, let's jump on a call, but you're not qualifying your prospects, right? Meaning they might not be ready yet to take that path through you because they don't fully understand what it is. And so from there, you might drive them to an email list, you might

drive them to a webinar or live training, or you might just drive them to another video that goes deeper in the subject. I personally always like to try to capture the prospect so now we can have more direct communication with each other. So building an email list, driving from social media, advertising platform to your own email list. Now you can email us is the best because you get to control it, get to control that. I've lost, I've lost an Instagram account before 10,000 followers.

I think it was after you left the barbell business account. Oh, one of our guys tried to log in from South America and somehow got flagged. And just Instagram has almost, I think it has zero customer service. So there was no solution. We have contacts at Facebook and Instagram and people we can ping. But we tried. Completely lost.

I had to rebuild it. So yeah, email list, that would not happen. And you should back up your email list once a month yeah one thing i want to say because we're getting into the weeds and some people start to go blurry eyed and ears start to tune out like you got to think of like other people's platforms right other people's platforms is the front end right so whether it's advertising a podcast is a front end right it's on another platform you're listening to this through itunes or through youtube wherever you're listening to this right it or through YouTube, wherever you're listening to this, right? It's someone else's platform

and you want to get them onto your platform, right? Which you could registering for something, right? So if it's registering for a webinar, you're still getting their email address, right? So you're capturing their information. So I know people who just do text, they capture phone numbers and they're doing text blasts. I know people who are doing many chat lists, right? But it's moving the audience from a place that you don't control to a place you control. Personally, my reason I say email is because you can back your email list up. If you have a Facebook group, there's no real way, like I don't think you can even scrape groups anymore to get people's information. So if Facebook took the group away, now you've lost

your platform, right? So even though you can use these platforms to create communities, they could be taken away at any moment. We don't know, right? So I always like to say to people, get them into your platform because now you can have that conversation with them. And then from there, what's the next sales mechanism? And a lot of times it's going to be some kind of training or something that makes them aware of the problem, the journey they need to take, and essentially does what we talked about earlier. Where are they now? Where do they want to be? And that you're the bridge, right? You're the person with the steps that's going to take and essentially does what we talked about earlier. Where are they now? Where do they want to be? And that you're the bridge, right? You're the person with the steps that's going to take them from where they are to where they want to be. Once they understand that, schedule a call with you. Now you have a phone conversation with them. And each point of this, you can track numbers and say,

because before you get on the phone, you probably want an application, right? That application then pre-qualifies them, but gives you what you need to get on the phone. Then you have the conversation with them, they enroll, and then they go into the program. And then hopefully your program, depending on how you do it, has some metrics along the way in terms of if it's phone calls with you, did they show up every week, right? Did they do the work that you prescribed? If it's a course that you're selling, did they log in and watch the videos and do the homework, right? And every course software has, you can see progress reports. Some are better than others, but. Right, so at Kartra, you can do all of this

and from A to Z, right? Which allows you to get that entire customer journey down. But once you have that, now you say, okay, well, I don't have any phone calls. Okay, well, how many leads? I didn't get any leads. Okay, how many people did you send to your opt-in page? I didn't send anyone.

Okay, we need to work on the front end traffic, right? But let's say we have an ad going down or we have the following on Instagram and nobody's going through to that offer, to that, whatever it is that we're offering them to opt in for training or report or whatever it is. Now we know the subject might not be the right audience message to the audience isn't connecting. So we need to change what the offer is that we're putting in front of them. Okay. Now we're getting people to register, but nobody's signing up for a phone call. Okay. Like what's happening here? How do we get that? Or what do we need to change? And so now once you have the system built, right, the campaign build or the funnel that most people would refer to it,

once you have it, now you actually can build the business because you just look at each step and you improve each step. And so most people think about doubling your business and they go, I've got to get double the amount of clients. Well, first of all, you don't. You could just double your prices, but most people would never do that. But you don't need to double your amount of clients because what you might find is you already have enough people coming through the thing, but you're not converting. So now we've got to work on your sales skills. You don't need any more people on the front end. You're saying a lot of people think they need to double their following or double their list. Yeah, double the traffic. They're always looking at the wrong metric.

But they don't need to. What are some good metrics or conversion percentages along the way? So how many people are getting to my homepage or my landing page? They're getting to the website. How many of them are opting into an email list? What's good conversion on that? It varies, right? That's the thing. We used to say the rule of 30. So 30%, 30%, 30%, 30% along the way. 20%, if you're shooting 20% and you're getting those numbers, those work too. Basically, the thing that you have to remember is it doesn't matter once you get the machine rolling, right? What matters is you get where you're at and do those numbers work, right? So I mentioned earlier about buying your client. So let's say you sell a

thousand dollar program and you buy a thousand dollars worth of traffic, right? You only need one sale to break even, right? But you can't, you're not going to feed your family on break even. But if you spent a thousand, you got zero sales. Then the question is how much do I have to spend to make a sale, right? And the reason for that is, is that if it costs you $2,000 and you make $1,000 sale, what you actually learn is how much traffic did that $2,000 send you, right? That's the amount of traffic you need. So now you got to figure out how do I get that traffic cheaper, right? And there's different ways to change the costs, but you have to understand across the board, it's how much traffic am I getting? How many opt-ins am I getting? How many conversations

am I having? How many conversions am I getting? Those are the big numbers. Once you have those numbers, now you can start to tweak it. So even if your numbers aren't good, like most people, if they're good at sales, they can probably close four out of five, right? If they're good at sales. But if you're terrible at sales and you only close one out of five or one out of 10, well, now you just don't need to get better at sales. You don't need to change anything else. But you can see that now you know where your focus needs to be. And most people don't ever know where their focus should be, right? They think they can turn on a tap and then it's going to equal money. And if they do that and it doesn't work, they shut it down and go, it didn't work. Well, what didn't

work? And what you find a lot of times with coaches is their sales process really is bad. And so not only they're not converting a lot of people they speak to, but they don't get to that point because they don't have a follow-up system because let's say someone's on your email list and they watch your training and they don't sign up for a phone call well how many trainings do they need to watch before they sign up if you only have one that's only one opportunity but if you create 10 different trainings it might take them to the 10th time to then sign up for a phone call we track all that and that's free that's free you hadn't had to pay for that traffic because they were on your list, right? Yeah.

We know that. I mean, one of the things we track is how long does someone need to be on the email list. We're sending out basically free information, free advice to people for months on end. And then we go, oh, the average person converts at email number 27. And it's like, oh, okay. So are we seeing conversions of email number 50, three months in or something like that? And really looking at that and seeing if we can get people to act even sooner or just knowing that and going, yeah, when we get a lead that comes in through Instagram, when we get a lead that comes through a Facebook ad, when we get a lead coming in from

the podcast, we know that once they get in, it takes them about three or four months before they pull the trigger. So I know that the leads I'm generating now are going to benefit us in three or four months. That's when they'll get to sign up. That's when we get to start working with them. And just knowing that is helpful because we might be getting a lot of leads right now. And a lot of people might be coming into the email list and it's like, oh, the sales are slow. It's like, well, we know they're going to pick up. Right. And that's what most people don't think about is you're really in the business of building a relationship at each phase of these campaigns, right? Even after they've given you money,

you're still in the business of building a relationship. And it's funny because we live in a world now where people swipe left or right, and then they're in bed by the end of the night. And so the old marketing analogy is you don't ask the girl to marry you on the first date. And again, we live in a world that's a little different now. So there's TV shows on like they've never met and they get married. So I don't think those ever work out though. But my point is that if you really think about it, if you want to build a relationship, like I understand the desperation because not having money is not fun. And we've both been there, especially when you've had money, when you've never had money,

it's like, you don't know the other side when you've had money and then you lose it. And everybody around you like, doesn't know it's difficult, right? Like it's tough to swallow your pride. Right. And so a lot of people, what I find is that mindset-wise, they're in a very desperate place, right? But desperation is very repelling, right? And so the reason they get upset is because they need results fast. They need to generate money fast.

And the thing is that they shouldn't, in my opinion, they shouldn't operate their business with that mindset. If you need money fast, luckily, we also live in a world that you could drive an Uber, that you could sell your things on Facebook, that you could go do something on the side. And so go hustle your ass off in things that will pay you immediately. But then with the business, build the business the way that it needs to be, which is building the relationships with those clients because there's nothing worse than getting,

in desperation, getting a client who then is needy because you were needy to get them and now they're needy to you. And you mentioned earlier about kind of the old reap what you sow mentality you mentioned earlier, whereas you have to believe in coaching, invest in coaching in order to do that. I found hands down of all the people I've worked, people who are late on paying their bills get paid late by their clients. And so these actions

come through. And so if you're desperate and needy, you'll end up with desperate and needy clients. And so you have to think about that and you have to have patience. And like I say, that's where I truly feel like there's so many other ways to generate the money to fund the business that you don't need to freak out about this has to work. And I understand it's a difficult mindset to come from, but you also have to think of like, there's ways to go for most small businesses. You can get a small business loan. You can put yourself in a position where you're not in that mindset. You can borrow money from friends or family. And that does take swallowing your pride to say, I need help. But you can't build a business out of desperation. You can't

take quick money because you need it from people you know that you can't help. These are all the things that get you in that sticky situation. Because once we have this kind of the river flowing, now we can just look at where do we need to improve? What needs to change? What needs to happen? I had a friend- Less emotionally attached to the metrics. Yeah. I had a friend, it took eight months for them to convert someone from an email to a client. But when you know that, and then you know the value of the client, you know the lifetime value, which I hope those listening who are coaches understand that they're in the best business you could possibly be in. You're in a reoccurring revenue business, meaning people join and pay you month over month. And the

stick rate, the amount of people that stay with you, retention, as Mike mentioned earlier, we're in one of the highest retention industries too, right? So it's really a great industry to be in. And the cool thing is, is nearly everybody needs coaches. Robots really, as much as they've tried, they're not going to replace coaches. People want human interaction human interaction they want conversation they want someone to work with them they don't want to just type in their phone this is my problem and the phone spit back the solution some people do but not well a coach can bring context exactly that a machine is just we're nowhere near it i mean no and i mean the chess... It would take true super AI for that. Oh, yeah.

The sport of chess was a great example of that. They built a machine that beat a human, and then a human plus machine beat machine. So it still shows the value of the human side of it. So with that said, really when it comes, again, go back to the original topic you mentioned, difference between a coach and an entrepreneur. A coach is someone who is going to be operating

in this desperation short-term mentality. A coach is someone who is going to be operating in this desperation short-term mentality. An entrepreneur is thinking long-term. And if you know the lifetime value of your client, let's say the average client gives you $800. How much of that are you willing to invest on the front end to get them in? It's not going to cost you $800 to put someone on your email list. But to get that $800, it might take you six months of building a relationship. And these are just things you have to look at and say. And I get that $800, it might take you six months of building a relationship. And these are just things you have to look at and say, and I get it because sometimes I don't have eight months before I can do this. Okay. Let's look at how else you could make money versus trying to basically

do something you don't want to do in this business that you want to be your business. And I think it's gym owners do it too when they take clients in, right? They don't want to work with middle-aged women who want to lose weight, but that's who's showing up at their door. So they do it and they build a business. And I've had clients, they got 100, 150 clients. Not one of them is a person they want to work with. They just want to escape the business.

And so if you do that and you've been there, you get to a point of burnout and you just want to burn it down. Totally. Yeah. I built businesses. I'd say the majority of my entrepreneurial career and my coaching career was there was a level of desperation involved in the decision-making processes around the business. And it varied. One month it was good. The next month it was fuck.

And we'd go back and forth. And where I've been the last couple of years has been able to, and for two reasons, I really shifted my relationship to money overall that even if there was not a lot of money coming in, emotionally, didn't bother me. That's some Jedi shit. Most people are going, what the fuck are you talking about?

And maybe one day, come do training camp for the soul, you'll get there. But the move that I've also experienced in the last couple of years is having enough experience. A lot of people cannot do this, but there might be an area in their life in which things are easy. There are certain jobs that I can do that I can do in my sleep, but pay pretty good. They're not exciting. It's not whatever. And so I actually, a couple of years ago, I took some time off from working and I basically took on, I worked one afternoon a week for months and months on end.

And I was able to make enough money to where I realized that I can make enough money to live comfortably with minimal effort. Now, it didn't really satisfy me because I wanted to make a really big impact and working one afternoon a week wasn't going to do that. But I got to build a strong coach from that place of there's enough. There's more than enough and we can do whatever we want. And because of that, it's been the smoothest business to build out that I've done so far. Everything's been smooth. If not as much money came in one month, it's not

a big deal. I'm not personally stressed about it and I can stay zoomed out and make really good long-term decisions. It's really, really good. So you have Kartra. Kartra is a system where we can do a lot of what we're talking about as far as the marketing and the metrics and all that kind of stuff. We, in the last couple of months, started migrating all of our systems over to Kartra. You invited me to do this months and months ago. And then, of course, I was busy doing other things. Then your team took over and it's actually getting done. Yeah, well, exactly.

What really happened was... Went to the burn. But yeah, I'll tell people exactly how it is. Yeah, what really happened is I go, I do want people exactly how it is. Yeah. What really happened is like, I go, I do want to move over to car trip and I'm, my attention on the businesses on this right now is really prepping for the summit.

I was like, it was one of those things where it was just, I don't know exactly what everyone's doing on the team, but full steam ahead, let's fill the summit. And after the summit, the dust is going to settle. And then we're going to migrate over to Kartra and all this stuff.

And that actually wasn't as top of mind. I knew it was going to happen, but when you spoke at the summit, the dust is going to settle, and then we're going to migrate over to Kartra and all this stuff. And that actually wasn't as top of mind. I knew it was going to happen. But when you spoke at the summit, and then Valerie, who's in charge of my marketing, she got talking, she's like, we're moving over right away. I'm like, okay, whatever you want. But yeah, since working, we're in the middle of the migration before you got here, actually talked to my tech guy who's running all that. And yeah, I went to Burning Man. And this is what's beautiful about running. So I've been running the Strong Coach for less than a year and a half.

And I already have it to a place where there's a team where things are getting done without me. And without even my direction. And so I'm saying that because you can do it too. The point of the Strong Coach is to give you everything that I've got. So the people who are in our mastermind, you know, we have our 90 day program, which is kind of like a bootcamp for coaches. Like, look, this is all the stuff that I wish people told me when I was getting started. That would have been helpful.

Yeah. And also the coaching to help work through whatever blocks people are having along the way but the mastermind is where i go look this is exactly what i'm doing inside the coaching business right now it's a coaching business teaching people how to run a coaching business so a lot of what we're doing right now is using cartra to we're going to max it out i don't know if we can do that because the platform is actually the most robust platform i've ever seen and so what we're going to do is we're using it and then we're building out advice to the people in the mastermind and it'll happen on this show. We'll be putting more stuff out. But the system is really, really, really impressive. And you can do all the stuff

that AJ was talking about, plus way more. it does way able to schedule all of our discovery calls with people through it and track all the metrics. I'm not going to go through the list because I don't know all of it. It's too many things. And it's fairly user friendly. Yeah, it's a true all in one platform. And really, it came about because, you know, this when we were running Bob Bell business, you end up with a dozen different platforms that you're paying for every month I was like I gotta have my I was told I can drop my calendar

software I can drop my I'm using type form I can drop that I can drop my course my membership site I'm probably saving 500 bucks a month switching over well that's what we find most people save a bunch of money but a lot of it came from that was the first thing and then like my wife with her nutrition business,

at one point she had like $6,000 in tech. Jeez. And you're going, this is ridiculous. And it's because you end up having all these different platforms because when you start your business, you think you need a domain name.

So you go buy the domain name. Well, now you need hosting. That's the first ruse you get when you buy a domain name and then you actually got to pay hosting to have a website. And then you have to pay the website platform. You can get free WordPress, but if you want a theme or something now you're

paying for the themes and so the costs just add up and so we always used to joke on me and the other guys about like wouldn't it be nice if there's just one place you logged in and and had everything all in one place and then we ended up building that platform and really everything from landing page to email list to video hosting, like you said, calendar, membership site, help desk, affiliate platform. I mean, it's everything. And people can check it out. They just go to Kartra.com backslash strong coach. They can go there.

They can see the different pricing, click on the features, check everything out. But what it allows you to do is essentially we're moving away, and I'm sure people are aware of this, we move to a mobile culture, but we're moving away from websites, right? We're moving into experiences. And this allows you to create an online experience that will take someone from the minute they meet you all the way through to transaction to experience with the membership side and delivery through that. And you can track it all the way. And because it's all integrated in one place, it now allows you to have much easier time in running the business. Whereas when you've got stuff all over the place, it's difficult to make sure everything's synced up correctly and smoothly. One of the things I like about this is even for a gym owner or something like that,

they're using this system. There's going to be tools that you may not be using, like membership site right now. A lot of gym owners, they'll go, well, I want to do a hybrid. The hybrid's this new thing. Everyone's doing hybrid. I'm rolling my eyes because I can spot a fad. 2018 was eight-week boot camps, and 2019 is hybrid. 2020 would be all online. Yeah, well, we'll see. If you are running a gym and you want to go hybrid,

if you're using the Kartra system, you can activate a membership site. And this is something I tell people all the time. If you want to go online, most coaches are already coaching people in person in some regard. Move your in-person people into a membership site. Use something like Kartra and something that's powerful like this because you can move your existing membership, your existing clientele into it, and you can start giving them curriculum. You can start interacting with them there so that when you do go online and you're working with a client that you've never met face-to-face, it's already built out really well. You use your in-person people as that. And so there's all these capabilities that... There's a lot of things that when I adopt a system like this where I don't even, the power of the system

informs me on something I should do in my business. Not always the best thing, but sometimes I go, oh, this is available. I didn't even know that was possible. Oh, we're going to implement that on marketing now. All of a sudden our conversions go up because there's this piece of tech I didn't even know existed. Like the affiliate program, like for strong coach, like people go through it, they love it. They want to refer people. Well, now there's an affiliate program to actually refer, right? So this is actually set up. It's not you having to send out a gift card or something like that. Yeah. Cause the system I was on, the system I was on wasn't very good, but the cartridge system is way better. And then just on that point, and we talked about customer journey

earlier. And I think if the gym owners or even coaches that are like, but I deliver my service one-to-one or like I'm on the phone with them. I always try to think of it like this. You have a limited amount of time with your clients, but the reality is, is they're right or wrong. They've hired you and think you're going to change their life, right? So whatever time we spend with them, there's a whole bunch of time we don't spend with them that we really need to start to think about how do we start to essentially manipulate that time to get the results that they want, right? So for example, if I'm a gym owner, I know that sleep and food and all these other things

are very, very important. But when am I going to teach them sleep? Am I going to run an in-person workshop that I have to do once and then nobody else saw it? Or yes, you could do an in-person workshop, but you can record it. You can put it in a membership thing and everyone now who signs up moving forward also gets access to that training, right? So now you start to bond with them outside of you and them. And especially for coaches who are going to build a team and step back, if you have a

membership site, which is essentially a content platform to deliver stuff to them, you can build a relationship with a client, never meeting that client. That's what then bonds them to your company, to the thing, to them. You can build a relationship with a client, never meeting that client. That's what then bonds them to your company, to the thing, to you. And you can build with, and it's weird when you meet someone that's watched videos, like I meet people who buy their business, like, oh man, the videos you made was so good. And I'm going, what videos? I totally forgot. But to them, they build a relationship with you. And so that's something that with the platform, it's front end and back end. And that's really, I think we mentioned earlier, sales, marketing, or customer experience. And I said experience, not results, right? Because think about it. You go to a

restaurant, you eat a nice meal, but if the waiter is a little bit of an asshole, it doesn't matter how good the food is, you might not come back, right? So the results used to be enough. They're not enough anymore, right? It has to be a full experience. And you have to think outside of what they actually pay for. How can you deliver that experience? And delivering them additional training and different educational material and things like that makes a difference. And so being able to do that and not having to pay additional costs for it, right? Because we have one cost, one low price is kind of the buzz.

But ultimately, it's like, oh, it's not going to cost me another $100 a month to do something like that. I get all of this. It's here. And that's what I really think that people, it will start to expand. Like you said, oh, I could be doing this even if you run an offline business. And we have the calendar system and everything set up for people who do that, booking system and class system and stuff like that. Yeah. All right.

So Kartra, spelled with a K, K-A-R-T-R-A.com slash strong coach. And is there a trial? Yeah. So a 14 day trial there. I don't know if we set up a special for you. It might be longer. If it's longer, congrats. I know for the summit, there was something special, but I have to check after and we'll fix it. But yeah, there's always a trial and check it out. And if you like it, stick with it. If not, go from there. And the cool thing is that we have some done for you stuff in there too. So if you've never built a campaign or something like that,

we have done for you campaigns. So if you don't know how to build a squeeze page to collect an email address, there's done for you. We have templates for all of our pages. There's probably a thousand templates in there. So depending on what you're trying to run or do, we have pretty much a host of templates for those of our pages, there's probably a thousand templates in there. So depending on what you're trying to run or do, we have pretty much a host of templates for those types of pages.

So if you wanted a landing page for a report, there's maybe five or six of those. And if you wanted a video landing page, there's a dozen of those. So we have a lot of templated stuff. So we try to make it as done for you as we can without it being done for you, right? Yeah. And I'm also curious. So if you get in there and you're looking for something, if you see something that works really well and you think it's really cool,

shoot me a DM on Instagram. Or if you have a question about it, because this is one of the things we're trying to do, one of the things we are doing at The Strong Coach, which is looking inside the Kartra system and seeing how we can help create things that are going to be perfect for the coach, let me know.

You can send me personal DMs on Instagram. That's the best way to contact me. A little slow on email, but hit me up there. And then that way I can communicate with AJ. I can communicate with my team. And I'm sure you can reach straight out to Kartra too, and that can be helpful. But I'm personally curious because I want to use the system

to help out the strong coaches. Yeah. And then you want to use the system to help out the strong coaches. Yeah. So, and then you want to leave with besides that, we're going to send people to Kartra.com slash strong coach. Yeah. And if you, if you want to follow me, just AJ Roberts on it. Actually, I'm not on Instagram still on Facebook and, uh, or just AJ Roberts.com. He's back and forth on the Instagram. Well, I had to, because you had to because you asked me to do some stuff.

So I went back on Instagram. I appreciate that. You activated your account to help us out. Spread the good word. Yeah. Spread the good word. It may be back by the time they listen to this. It's AJ Roberts on Instagram too.

But I'm trying to do the digital minimalism. Now I have a two-year-old. I find it's a distraction for me. And there's nothing worse than looking over at your two-year-old and she's looking at you scrolling. And she's like, what are you doing? She doesn't say it, but she just has that look. So it has a lot to it. But I'm around on socials.

All right, man. Thanks for joining us today. Appreciate it. Well, I hope you like the show. If you like that show, you're going to really enjoy what we're doing over at strongcoachpodcast.com. A lot of those shows are of interviewing our graduates from our program, the people in our mastermind, and then every other show, our host is interviewing me. So she brings a lot of questions to me and it's more of a mentor mentee type of situation. And you get to hear my thoughts on coaching and the coaching business.

So make sure to go to strong coach podcast.com to check that out and hit us up over on Instagram at the strong coach and check it all out. Check it all out. We'll be seeing you next week.