Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - Joel Marion: How to Sell Your Online Product and Get Rich - 068

Episode Date: October 10, 2018

Joel Marion was forced to pivot his career once a book he published failed. Instead of folding, he learned Internet marketing and has since made more than a $100,000,000 selling his online supplement line, BioTrust. In this episode, Joel joins Bedros Keuilian and teaches you what it takes to develop the $100,000,000 work ethic. Watch or listen now to discover how to market and sell your online product and make a massive profit—just like Joel Marion did. “Only you can write your own destiny.” - Bedros Keuilian Here’s what you’ll discover: 3:29 - How criticism and rejection can help you hone your craft. 15:46 - How to get what you want in business by coming with a giving hand. 24:32 - How to use urgency and purpose to accelerate your entrepreneurial growth. 33:54 - How to recruit an army of affiliates to promote your online product. 44:36 - Why your response to setbacks determines your level of success. “If you want to have the biggest impact, and you want to have a life of meaning and live the life you were born to live, you have to be prepared to go through all those circumstances that get dealt your way and use them to refine your character and become better. ” - Joel Marion

If I truly believe in my products, my services, and my message, it's my job to get that out in front of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. Right? So I need to do everything that I possibly can. And it doesn't sit well with me if I know that I could be doing more. Hey, friends, welcome to another episode of the Empire Podcast. This is the podcast where we help take your idea, your passion, your purpose, or your business, and help you reach your fullest potential. And in this episode of the Empire podcast Inside Look, we have our dear friend and colleague, Mr. Joel Marion, co-founder of Biotrust. What's up, my brother?

All right. How you doing? I'm excited. Thanks for having me. So, Joel, you live in Florida. Yes, sir. In Beller Beach. Yes.

And you've got a very unique life story. And what I want to share with everyone is you're the guy that literally went from zero to a hundred million dollar business in just over a year. and you did it before the age of 30. Correct. Not a lot of people build an empire that way. And it's not off cryptocurrency or anything weird. That wasn't even the plan either. We were thinking if we put all our ducks in a row in this new supplement business,

we come from the info marketing business. Yeah. And me and my partner, Josh Pizoni, if we put all our ducks in a row, then maybe we can do $10 million in the first year. Right. You know, and then next thing you know. You can't exist. Yeah.

All right. So that's the hook for you, right? I mean, here's a guy who before the age of 30 did $100 million in revenue with his business partner with Biotrust, the supplement company. Great supplement company. I love it, use it, and endorse it. And you weren't always an entrepreneur, though. I mean, you were a high school phys ed teacher making a whopping, what, $40,000 a year? I think it was $42,000.

I was rolling in it. And what made you decide to become a teacher and not going to marketing, considering the marketing mind that you have? So it's actually interesting. Health and fitness was my passion. I've discovered Body for Life in Bill Phillips when I was in college and got really into health and fitness. I competed in the Body for Life challenge and won that contest in 2001. And that was kind of my foot in the door of the industry. Also, from my personal transformation, I wanted to inspire and give back and help other people get healthy and fit.

So I became very passionate about learning more about health and nutrition so that I could experiment on myself, find out what's working, and then share it with others. While I was in college, I actually did an internship at Gold's Gym as a personal trainer. And I was horrible at it. I mean, I was the, as far as sales go, I was the lowest performer in that facility as far as sales. I was at time, it was horrible marketer. Technically, you were a good trainer, though, as far as training. Yeah, yeah, I understood the concepts and they would feed me people come in for consults and stuff like that.

But when it came to closing deals, and I always felt like sales had this negative connotation or this negative stigma, like, I don't want to be too pushing. I don't bother people while they're working out. I didn't understand how to sell in that environment. Now, if I went back to the same goals, I'd crush it. I'd crush everybody by like 100X, right? But at the time, I didn't understand marketing at all. I was very passionate about health and fitness.

When I won the Body for Life contest, I started getting into article writing. They had a partner magazine, Muscle Media. Yep. I wrote some articles for that very slowly and gradually got into other magazines wound up being on the Fitness Advisory Board at men's fitness and was writing for men's health men's fitness and a lot of other trade magazines muscle fitness hers woman's day and what year was that now so you won in 2001 but now you're writing all these articles so it it took a little while for me to even like get in as for apart from muscle media which they kind of just published me because I was the champion

and one of the contest champions and winners. It took a while for me to get good at writing. I wasn't necessarily a great writer. I had a passion. I had some knowledge here, but to put it out on paper and making it entertaining and coming up the right hooks to get people interested in reading an article

that I wasn't there yet. So I was submitting to a bunch of online magazines and other print magazines and said, hey, I just published in muscle media. And I have a new idea for an article. to submit to your publication. And I had dozens and dozens of rejections. No one wanted to publish my stuff.

And I could have sat there and said, oh, I had this gift and no one understands it. You know, some of the artists out there who think, like, oh, my stuff, the way that it is is great. And then they get all these nose. And they just think, well, oh, the industry doesn't get it. For me, I didn't take that approach. I took the approach that I'm just not good enough.

yet. I'm just not good enough right now. So I went back. I, you know, refined my craft. I took some writing courses. Became a much better writer, submitted it again. A bunch more rejections. A couple published, you know, and then it's kind of snowballed and then I was getting published everywhere. So let me stop you right there for a moment because my job is to extract the nuggets and then, and then, of course, to help explain the nuggets. And so there was a real big shift there. There's two types of people. The person that goes down the road when they get a rejection, they go, you know what, obviously the industry doesn't understand, or they just don't get me,

or I'll never be good enough. Or it's not for me. Or it's not for me. You, on the other hand, got the rejection, and you said, oh, okay, I just need to hone my craft better. And you kept going. What is the mindset shift between the way you thought and the way most people think so that we can learn to do that as well? Well, I think it is exactly what it is, right? is I had, I knew what I wanted to become,

and then there was all these gatekeepers that were gonna either publish me or not publish me. So whether or not I felt like my content was good as is, it wasn't the right fit for them. So if I had to cater and shift my message to be more of, and plus, you know, these guys are editorial directors, and not to say they have it all figured out, because I did one of my most successful ebook programs,

Extreme Fat Loss Diet, I was told by an editor that no one will ever do this program. Why don't you tell our friends what that product did during the launch? Yeah, it did $1.4 million when we launched it. And I was told by an editorial director of a magazine that no one will ever do this. And I was trying to publish it as an article first. And then a couple of years later, a couple years later turned into an e-book. Yeah.

But you know, you have to listen to feedback, right? And when you're getting a bunch of knows, there's a reason why you're getting a bunch of nose. And if you've got to shift the way that you're doing things. me honestly it was just because I didn't have enough experience and I understood that. Now at this point in the game, if I was to submit to a magazine and they didn't like my stuff, well, there's a reason why I self-publish everything because I wouldn't deal with that anymore. But yeah, I mean, you take the feedback that's coming in and then you make the adjustments based on the feedback, right? If I didn't, if I just discounted everything that everyone was telling me or all the rejections, there's a lot of evidence here, right?

You can look at the evidence and then you decide what the next step is. And if it's a dozen knows, you say, why is it? And it doesn't serve me at all to say that, oh, they just don't get it. Right. Because they just don't get it. It doesn't help me get into that magazine later down the line. So you look at it as I've got an outcome. There's all these gatekeepers who are saying no.

They're not saying no to me personally. They're not rejecting me personally. They're saying your work is not good enough to pass. So I'm going to make my work good off. Or not what we're looking for or whatever. So, hey, let me learn what you're looking for. looking for so that I can craft something that is going to be. And get to the outcome.

Yeah. So it's really have the outcome in mind and forget about the rejection and what it does to your emotions, et cetera. As you know, we're all going to be told no a million times before we get the yes. That's how you learn. That's how you learn. And so in 2001, when you're doing Bill Phillips's Body for Life transformation, are you a high school teacher at that point?

No, I was in college. You're in college. Yeah. So I was actually the tail end of my freshman year in college into my sophomore year. Got it. So I started writing for magazines shortly there after one. while I was still in school. Did the gold gym internship with the personal trainer.

Was horrible at it. But I wanted to do this whole thing with writing. And my career path that I wanted to be was an author, right? I was freelance writing for a bunch of magazines that pay you a couple hundred bucks a pop, you know. And it's not like I was getting published 50 articles a month or something to make that worthwhile. It was side cash.

So I had to do something to make money. And that became a high school. Yeah. So I finished out the last two years of college, and it was actually my dad who convinced me to do this, which in some ways I'm glad that I listened to him there, because it did give me something to do right out while I was getting other things off the ground.

But at the same time, he's just, he's one of those guys. It was like, look, you're not gonna be that. Why don't you just be a teacher? Anybody can be that, you know? So, but, so anyway, I decided to double, I double majored health and exercise science and I got the teaching track as well. So, graduate.

I'm a teacher. I'm freelance writing. And then the catalyst for me getting into online marketing was I got a book deal, which bombed. Tell us about that. Now, wait, I do have to backtrack just for a second. So for, again, our friends listening to this episode, there's always going to be people in your life to tell you, no, you can't do it. And sometimes they mean well.

Like, your dad means well. He wants his son to have a stable, successful career. And there's always going to be kids to teach, hey, go be a school teacher. But you knew deep down inside, I meant for more. I've got this gift. I've got to share my experience that I had in 2001. And so you're grateful for the fact that he said, go ahead and be a school teacher, because that did give you some income to live off of.

But you still stayed on your path. So there's a lot of lessons in here that only you can write your destiny. Others can hold a pen for a moment. but we don't really know the truth unless you're the one right yeah one of my big things that I teach other up-and-coming entrepreneurs and people who aspire to be an entrepreneur or just to you know live the life that they were born to live is you are in control yeah you know you it's not somebody else it's not something that happens happens to you it's not some set of circumstances or you know here's here's all the reasons why I am what I am today well it's

because you chose based on your experiences and your reactions to those experiences and here's where you ultimately end up. But you're ultimately the one in the control. Because when you had the setback, you didn't bounce back. Yeah. When you had the set back, you didn't bounce back. Ooh, I love that. It's a TM.

It's another one. Power through. When you have the set back, you didn't bounce back. I love that. You guys will understand what the power through is in just a few minutes. All right, so once again, you face adversity. You write a book. Yeah, and that wasn't easy either because...

What was the book about? So it was called the Cheats to Luz Diet. It was about how you use your favorite foods to accelerate fat loss. That was the topic. that I've written a number of articles about, and I was really very passionate about the hormonal response to dieting and how you can use a temporary caloric surplus to reinitiate fat burning when you hit a plateau.

So that was a book concept. I thought it was an extremely attractive book concept. Now the next step, again, here we're going back to the gatekeepers, right? I had to get an agent. I didn't know any agents. I knew some people in the publishing industry from magazines. I had a couple people refer me to people, but not like directly. I don't know why it is with the entrepreneurial world.

They want to help you out and just connect you with other people. And you and I are both extreme connectors. We're just always, you can learn from this guy. This guy would be great to, you know, having your network. I got like, it was really weird because I'd go to editors that I had dozens of articles published for and say, hey, do you know any book agents? And they're like, yeah, and they like give me a name, but they'd never really introed me to them. I had to go do my homework and try and find out who they were.

And so anyway, I got rejected by six or seven agents for my book project. And I thought this was a home run concept that was, you know, I'm like, why would you not want to publish this? And again, I think it really came down to the fact that I didn't have a big enough platform to sell a lot of books. And they didn't want to take me on because I was small time at the time. I did catch a break and get a pretty significant agent. And then I called another break and we sold a book in two days after I got that agent.

And it was $100,000 advance for a 24-year-old teacher. That's substantial. Yeah, it was very significant. And I thought this is it, right? I thought this is my path to living the life that I thought I wanted to live, which was be a New York Times bestselling author, turn out bestseller after bestseller, have, you know, a great publisher and be the next, you know, Jillian Michaels or Jorge Cruz or something like that, you know. So got the advance.

I took the next year off from teaching to be available to promote the book and they kind of just burned through the money that was there. And it was coming to the end. The book didn't do that great simply because I didn't have the platform to sell the books. I thought the publisher was going to do way more than they did. Or I gave the publishing industry way too much credit. Like, hey, you publish a book, you get in the bookstore, it's going to start flying off the shelves, right? And they're going to get me on all these TV outlets and all that. We did a couple local news channels and stuff.

Not enough to move the needle. I wasn't on Oprah. I wasn't on Oz. Again, probably because I was just starting off. I was the first time author. And the platform and the credibility wasn't fully there yet to land those placements. Again, it comes back to me instead of, oh, well, the book flop because the publisher didn't do their job. Or the book flop because we didn't get on Oz. If we got on Oz, it would have changed the game.

Right. You know? No, the book flop because I didn't have the platform necessary to move the volume of books to, propel me to the next area of my career. So here I am. Book doesn't do that well. I'm running out of money. And I'm like, I don't have to go back to teaching.

And that's not what I wanted to do. It was a huge, huge letdown for me because I thought, like, this is my dream. I got this big book deal. I'm like, here we are. We're on the ascension now. And now I'm like coming back around. And that voice is saying, like, maybe this isn't quite for you, bro. You know, like maybe this isn't, maybe not cut out for this.

You know, you got told no all these times. You had your chance with this book and you blew it. And so now you're, what, 25 years old at this? 25. Go back to teaching. But at the same time, I was like, this is not going to be the end of my story here. Like, I had a lot of people tell me no. I had so many rejections over the years.

I had so many setbacks. And I found a way to figure it out to make the next move. And at that point, that's when I said, I need to learn how to market and build my platform. I became obsessed with online marketing. that year. It was just 2008 school year going into 2009. I started learning from guys like Ryan Lee and Yonick Silver about copywriting. Frank Kern was somebody that I learned Jeff Walker with Product Launch Formula. And I started putting all my ducks in a row for self-publishing my first e-book. I was networking, providing value to a lot of people in the industry, all the big players

that I wanted to get to know. Now, let's talk about that for a moment. I'm going to stop you and then we're going to pick up there again. Networking and getting to know a lot of people. Why? What does that have to do with marketing? I knew that I didn't have a big email list. If I was going to put this book out there, I would need other people to help promote it, right?

And that was a big part of what was missing, plus my own developing platform. But I needed to acquire some customers and get some people on my email lists through selling products in order to start my business. And I couldn't do that. And I'm not just going to create that out of nothing from myself. So I knew I was going to need.

need help from other people. But I went out, you know, I went on, ClickBank was the big marketplace for eBooks. So I went on, I looked at all the top 10, 15 vendors on ClickBank, and I started reaching out to all of them. And these, like Mike Gehry, who's here speaking at Empire, these are all guys who came from some sort of desk job before and found the opportunity in internet marketing and fitness publishing. So I think they had a soft spot in their heart for somebody like me who was a teacher, which happily told them, you know, and I'm trying to move into this space. But I always offered value. I even offered to answer customer service tickets just to shout out some of these guys. I had connections with some magazines, which they thought

was cool, and I offered to maybe interview them. Again, I was on the training advisory board for men's fitness. So I tried to connect any dots for them that I possibly could and use my existing network in the publishing world just to create a friendship. Sure. So the idea was you came to them with a giving hand. You didn't just say, hey, guys, I want to be like one of you. Will you mail out for my product? That's just sucking value out. Right. So you said, hey, I've got this network and I've published articles. And maybe I can interview you and get you exposed in those magazines. Or maybe I can answer your customer support tickets. It's your goodwill bank account, right? Yes, sir. And you are making deposits into that in each one of your relationships. And for me, I'm never going to, new relationship. I got to put, something in that account. I can't make a withdrawal. There's nothing in there. Nothing in it. I can't make a withdrawal. There's a new relationship. So I would always try to make deposits. And I never even, I said, look, this is when I'm ultimately, you know, I would like to get into this industry. But it was never about, hey, so you know, I'm launching a product on this date,

and here's my ultimate motive to get you to mail out in six months from now or whatever. It was just genuinely, how can I help you? And I will embrace the opportunity to learn for me at the same time. So I made, I got to know everybody. Within six months, I literally got to know everybody. I was Vince Del Monte's 30th birthday party with Isabel De Los Rios and Mike Gehry, Kreme Samori, and a number of other people

in our industry who I looked up to a lot at the time, who were much more established than I was. And at the same time, I was refining my craft. And I, I had a lot. hired your our mutual friend, Craig Ballanty, as a coach, copy coach, and helped me out with my sales funnel. So this is one of the cool stories, cool parts of this story. So I took Cheat to Lose and I rebranded it as Cheat Your Way Thin. I knew the concept was great, right? I just didn't have the marketing platform to boost it. And then I didn't catch the breaks with the media.

But I knew it was still gold, right? Who doesn't want to eat their favorite? Who doesn't want to eat pizza and lose weight, right? So let's just share this. with the audience real quick. There was an article you tried to publish that got rejected. You turned that into an e-book, right? And then you end up having a $1.4 million launch with it. And then there's a physical book that you publish. It ends up flopping because you don't have the platform. And, of course, the publisher didn't have the horsepower to get it to succeed. And you take that and then you repurpose it. Yeah. So you don't always have to scrap things, guys and gals. You can actually take something, rebrand it, repurpose it, rewrap it, and how did cheat your way thin?

do. So again, I had all my ducks in a row. I was learning from the greats. I was refining my craft. I was networking my butt off so that I had this army of people who were willing to do me a solid when it came out. And I wanted to make sure it did very well for them. So I had my copy in the funnel was all buttoned up. I ran it through coaches and mentors, got feedback from all these people. Did you test the funnel before having all these, this army mail out for you? No. And I would not recommend taking that. Okay, good. Share that here. So, So, yeah, nowadays, this happens a lot, right? People will put a lot of effort into something, plan a big launch date.

All their eggs are in this one basket. And then they get all these people lined up to mail. They have all these big launch prices. Hey, I'm giving away a car. You know, I got $50,000 in cash or whatever. And then the funnel bombs. And no sales occur. But then you have all these obligations to all these people with stuff that you told them you were going to do.

Fortunately, for me, I didn't know any better at the time. and I happened to put a pretty good funnel together. It was also a lot easier to convert on some of this stuff back then than it is now. But, you know, we turned that book, which was you can buy on Amazon for $16 at the same exact time that my launch went live into a $47 e-course with a series of manuals and audio and video. And then we had an upsell where they can upgrade to a VIP package that had like an email consultation with me and stuff for $97. We did $461,000 that in three days, in three days, right? I had this $100,000 advance on the book, which they pay you out like over the course

of a year and a half while you're still writing it. And then I kind of went through that while I was the year that I took off. And here I just got this windfall of, I actually profited over $100,000 in my account. This is another funny story. So the launch goes live. Yeah. And this is pretty hilarious. The launch goes live.

I was up so late the night before, like probably like 4 o'clock in the morning. Everyone was mailing it at midnight, but I didn't even look at the ClickBank account because I was just like, I'll just check it in the morning, you know? So I logged into my ClickBank account. This is the first. I had sold zero e-books before. I had sold nothing online. Actually, I had a coaching program that was that I started with.

But this was the first book product and the first product on ClickBank. And I didn't even really understand the platform. So I think I wake up maybe four or five hours later after getting some sleep and I just check in to see how this all my eggs in this basket. How's it? How's the basket? And how's the basket? And how was the basket? So I log into my account and I see the $25,000 there.

Right. And I didn't understand. I'm like, let me call ClickBank because I don't know if I still have to pay affiliates out of this or if this is like my portion of it. Right. So I call ClickBank and I'm like, hey, you know, this is my first time selling on ClickBank and we're launching a new product. And I logged in. I see there's $25,000 on the home screen here. I'm like, do I still have the pay affiliates from that?

She's like, oh, no, that's all yours. How did that feel? So I'm like, I felt like, man, like all this hard work that I put in with leading up this eight month stretch. And I was grinding away, bro. I was teaching full time this whole year. Yeah. I was teaching full time. This is my schedule.

Up at 5.30 in the morning, teaching my first class by seven. Then every break that I had, kids were testing, I'm working on the business. Lunch, I'm working on the business. Come home, take a 30-minute power nap. And then from like 4 p.m. until 2.30 in the morning, I'm just grinding away, working on business, listening to marketing courses, practicing my writing, reaching out networking, setting up calls with these other movers and shakers that I wanted to network with. I did this the entire school year on I was living on three hours sleeping night every night

weekends all business yeah all business you know so I made like just crazy sacrifices that most people are not willing to make to accelerate getting to where I wanted to be you got you got five years of work done in one year yeah yeah yeah and you know we talked about power through right power through baby this is this is the way since that point I mean this is wired in who I am but yeah since that point I that's everything that I've done. You know, I don't slow play anything because I'm already, I already feel like I'm already behind. So if I'm going to slow play anything in life, I'm just getting further behind. So many people I want to impact, so many things I still want to do. And I need to be on my game

to get there as fast as possible, right? So let's talk about that for a moment. We've known each other for probably about a decade now. And truly, you've never slow played through anything. And recently you put up a post on Instagram explaining why, why speed is your friend, why you power through everything. Explain that to our audience. For me, the end goal with anything that I'm doing is the impact that it's going to have on other people, on my family, on the end user, the customer,

on the people that's reading or subscribing, right? And if I truly believe in my products, my services, and my message, it's my job to get that out in front of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. So I need to do everything that I possibly can. And it doesn't sit well with me if I know that I could be doing more or that I'm coasting or I'm taking time, you know, doing other things that aren't moving the needle in the direction that I want to go.

Now, of course, I have a family, I have two kids, you know, and that's extremely important as well. But I've learned that, again, if my goal is to impact as many people as possible, I got on Instagram and I could have slow-plated and just organically grew it and just maybe pushed some people from my emails from my email list once a month over there. Yeah. But I've put like real time and effort into every post that I put on there and I believe the message has a ton of value and can help people.

If I truly believe that, which I do, why would I want to just have a thousand followers? You know, because you know it's only going to reach 100 of them anyway through the Instagram algorithm. So, you know, I wanted to grow as quickly as possible. So I made a goal when I got on Instagram to build it to a million followers in six months. I did it in 4.5. My man. And now on to the next one.

We're getting ready to launch a podcast, and my goal is to have that ranked in the top 10 in the business category within the first month. So I'm always thinking about how can I impact more people? What's the next goal to impact and help more people? And it's my job, again, to accelerate it with all the resources that I have. In the beginning, I didn't have a lot of resources

besides my ability to put the time in it and put the work in. Now I have a lot of resources. lot of financial resources that can help accelerate things. And money accelerates. Yeah. Yeah, it's gasoline. Yeah, it's gasoline. Exactly.

So you went from the digital world. You went from actually being a high school teacher to the digital world. Recruiting affiliates, coming with the giving hand, building the Goodwill Bank account, spending that one year being a school teacher, building relationships, going off three hours of sleep, dedicating every weekend to the growth of your business, to the education that you need to become a great marketer. And you launched several digital courses and, you know, had seven figures. launches then the transition happened where you create a hundred million

dollar supplement company called biotrust it you can't find it in any store it's direct to consumer how does this happen so I met my partner in the business Josh Bezoni through working on with him on a product launch he had an e-book called seven-day belly glass diet that he was interested he came from the supplement space was getting into e-publishing and he actually worked with at EAA with Bill Phillips, which was his first job out of college. And he was there for a number of years until EAS sold. And then he went on to do some of his own things.

And then he was getting into publishing. He had this desire to impact others through books and health and nutrition information, getting out information products. So he heard that I was like the top guy in the industry for when it comes to launches. So I was introduced to him through a mutual friend, Rob Polos. And we kind of worked out a deal

where I would consult on the launch. We launched that. We had a lot of fun launching that product, did $1.2 million in less than a week. His job is course. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, I was a marketing consultant on it. I helped push all the affiliates for the launch and all that, help them refine the funnel. They gave them, you know, the pre-launch formula that I used to really make these things, you know, go big when they go live. Yeah. And we worked very well on that. We became, we were, you know, friends in, it was about a year and a half for, you know, and a half we continue to do work, promote each other's products and stuff like that when we came out with new stuff. And then he approached me and said, hey man, I want to get back into

supplements. He said, I see a lot of opportunity here. And we were promoting another company on the back end of all of our ebooks for supplements. So I knew the opportunity was there and I knew we could sell supplements to our customers. So it seemed like, oh, I can bring this in house and I can profit directly and can build equity value in a company. This sounds like something I'm definitely interested in. So we decided to do it. It's just him and I. You know, this was from inception, no company name, nothing. You know, we brainstormed all this stuff together. Packaging. Took about eight months to launch the company. We both put a million dollars in collectively, the two of us. So a million total to buy inventory and to pay initial salaries and stuff like that.

We had a small team of like eight people. You know, about 5,000 units of each product or something like that and then we're off to the races. We did like a mini launch our first month of our protein powder and sold a million bucks of protein powder with like no pre-launch nothing like all the other stuff that I was doing putting so much weeks of effort lead up a million dollars of protein powder. So we're like wow this this could probably be better than any books you know. Yeah. Yeah. So then we do our first VSL launch. I wrote the copy for it. It's the first VSL I ever wrote too. And for those of you who don't know what a VSL is a video sales letter. It's the talking head or the PowerPoint,

whether it sells you a product or service. Right. Yeah. So people land on a page and they watch. Basically, it's a way of almost forcing the user to read the copy because they go on this, land on this long form sales letter where's everybody. Scroll, scroll, scroll, what's the price? Okay.

It's a way to get people more engaged to hear your sales message. And then you only present the opportunity to buy later in the video. So I had never, all my stuff, before was all written sales pages. I had never written a VSL before. Then I had to go back to school, right? I had to, all the top performing BSLs in the industry, I had somebody transcribe them, I studied them,

I looked at what works, I kind of modeled some things. I pieced it together the way that I thought, I kind of created my own formula based on what everyone else was doing, pulled bits and pieces out of what was working for others, created my formula, obviously wrote all my own copy, but this was the very first VsL that I had ever written. We launched, we did $3 million in less than a week.

Holy smoke. With Leptabird. So, but, you know, that didn't come easy to me either. It was foreign to me to write a VSL script, very different than a long-form sales letter. Yeah. But I had copywriting skills. It's just like, hey, I need to learn how to do this. So I went to, again, I went to school.

I got John Benson's video sales letter, of course, and then studied everything that was working, and boom, wrote the first one, $3 million launch. Then we said, okay, a million bucks on protein, three million on leptoburn. What's next? So you only first came out, for those of you who want to start a supplement business, not saying this is the only way to do it, but what you guys did with Biotrust, there was only one skew at first?

Four. Four. Four products. We had our protein powder. Protein powder. We had leptoburn, which was the first VSL that we created. We had a blood sugar supplement, a carbohydrate management called IC5. And then we had a digestive enzyme because we wanted to.

of our affiliates said, who one of the largest affiliates, Isabel from Beyond Diet, had told us that she wanted a digestive enzyme and the other company that she was promoting didn't offer one. So we're like, all right, well, we want to fill that gap for you. Easy enough. So we had those four skews. Got it. We launched the protein powder just like, we sold out of it, like immediately. We got five thousands of each flavor and we sold out of it within a week. So it was on back order. And we had to refill that. So we're like, all right, Well, we have this leptoburn stuff. Let's see what we can do there.

We ordered a bunch more before that went. Sure. So we wouldn't run out of product. And we were constantly chasing, you know, we're battling water. The sales that came in, we could have never anticipated. So we're trying to stay ahead of this inventory curve. We end up ordering just a crap ton of everything because we figured we find a way to sell it at some point anyway. And we didn't want to run out of product because I rather, well, who wants to have an opportunity to sell it?

a million dollars of product in a week and you don't have product to fulfill. Right. So we just ordered a ton of inventory. We did the Leptibirn VSL launch. And then every time we launched another one of these VSL funnels, like the monthly revenue would increase by a couple million dollars. So then it just became rinse and repeat, speed of implementation, get more of these funnels done in bill.

We launched a probiotics shortly thereafter. That did very well. We launched a VSL for our protein products as well a couple months after that. And next thing you know, our first. full year in business, now we're at $100 million run rate. We're doing over $10 million a month. So it was, and that was goal for the, for the company to be doing in a year initially. So we had that on the paper, on the launch plan, goal, do $10 million this year. So you and Josh decided, hey, we're going to shoot for $10 million. Like, we're shooting for the moon,

and the moon for you guys was $10 million. And you guys 10x of that. That's amazing. And so you used the army of affiliates that you had for your digital products to serve as your So that's interesting and this is, you know, Josh and I both call, we've kind of went through our story of originating the company and how we grew so quickly and why this happened the way that it did. Yeah. And we call it the 10-year overnight success story, right? Because everyone's like, holy crap, biotrust just blew up, came out of nowhere and blew up.

It's like, no, we didn't come out of nowhere, you know. We had the army of affiliates behind us. I had all these relationships. I had at that point five to six years of marketing expertise on how to sell online. And now it was just selling a different type of product that happened to work a lot better than just e-books because there are consumables. People would buy three or four containers at one time. Now we're selling up to eight, as I told you guys yesterday, we're selling up to 18 units.

And when someone goes through a funnel, they can buy up to 18 units. And we have people buying 18 units of a product at once. You can't do that with e-books. No one's buying 18 e-books, right? So, you know, but we call it the 10-year overnight success story because we had every, had to line everything up. And we put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into getting to the point that we were when we launched. And then everything just took off because of all that legwork that we had done already. Yeah.

And so really, the legwork that you did was coming to those affiliates, building a relationship, filling up that Goodwill Bank account. I just want to make this very clear to our listeners, filling up that Goodwill Bank account, and then setting up launches that proved successful, where now they can look at you and go, you know what? Every time Joel recruits me as an affiliate, he puts money in my pocket. And you were giving very generous affiliate commissions. Why don't you share with our friends what kind of affiliate commissions you were giving?

So at the time, it was standard with 75% commission, meaning if it was a $100 cart value, affiliate would get $75 and you'd take home $25. The industry has evolved over the last, you know, that's 10 years ago now. And we do 100% commission now because we understand the value of getting a free customer from somebody. Can you explain that and also the back end to our listeners? Yeah. So the name of the game and growing and scaling the business is acquiring as many customers and leads as possible.

If you can do that at a break-even, meaning I'm paying $50 to get a customer and their average order on the first order is $50 for a digital product. There's no hard cost. Now on break-even. We actually go way negative. We're probably spending $75 to get a $50 customer nowadays because we understand our numbers on the back end, and that's how you scale. You pay more to get customers.

But that concept is lost on so many people. And if you talk to somebody outside of the industry or like my parents couldn't understand how you're giving away $75 out of every $100 to somebody else that you sell, how do you even do business? It's hard to wrap your brain around that, right? Yeah. Yeah. So the name of the game is getting as many customers and as many leads as possible.

So then you can then go sell them more stuff on the back end. And you have email marketing, you have recurring revenue programs, which you're so great at. And there's a lot of ways to take a customer and have them spend more money with you over time. But if you can get a customer at break even, that's a free customer. Like I envy that at this point in the game, a free customer. I'm used to going, you know, again, paying $75 to get a $50, order and then I need to make up that $25 over the next three or four months before that customer becomes profitable. So when it comes to scaling, that's the name of the game is pay as much as you possibly can, be as generous as you possibly can, to the ad networks, which is an auction,

right? And to affiliates. And you mentioned something about my relationship with the people I do business with and affiliates. I would say that I probably have the most loyal relationships in my industry out of anybody. How did I make that happen? Number one, I never gave them junk to promote. I always created quality products that would serve their customers. Number two, I had the best marketing in the industry and I worked tirelessly to make it that way. That doesn't mean that everything that I ever launched was a grand slam. It means that it was good and then we worked our butt off with split testing to make it great. Yeah. So every time I come to somebody and say, hey, promote this, they would know that.

it's a money maker for them. Beyond that, we were doing 75% commission back in the initial launch days and then I have all these launch prizes on top of it, the first person is do the most sales it's $10,000 for every sale that you refer during the launch period we're gonna pay you an extra $2 per sale so people did a thousand sales that extra two grand plus 10 grand bonus next thing you know it really worked out to be more like in the 90 to 95% commission range after all the bonuses. Then I would develop the relationships even further and I would do these affiliate trips where people who came in top 10 on the, during the launch, on the leaderboard, we would

have kind of a launch celebration vacation of a networking party. So I was really the first guy in this industry to start bringing the major players together. Everyone kind of knew who each other was. But it was fractioned. I remember. It was very very important. very fractioned and and I think that's one of my God-given gifts is to connect people. Yeah. And when I got in and experienced some success, I just wanted to like share it with as many people as possible. And I wanted to give back to the people who helped me. So we'd have these private masterminds.

We were invited top affiliates. You know, a couple years ago, we went to Dominican. We ran in three villas. It was an epic vacation. A lot of people came up to me after the trip and said, you know, this is one of the best of my life. And it's not just because we're in a beautiful place, it's because of the company that you're there with, you know, and the networking that's available. Yeah, and probably building deeper relationships and who knows how many business deals evolved from there. Yeah, so when we launched

biotrust, that's the legwork that I put in with all these people. I took care of them personally and financially. I was a good dude. I helped them any way that I possibly could. I deepen the relationships by getting people together in person and providing additional value. It's not just the commission, right? The commission is one part of it, and it's kind of a small part of it. It's everything else that you're doing that brings, it's the difference between average and extraordinary. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. You know, it's funny you say the 10-year overnight success thing, because most people who look at a business or a product or service from the outside just see the overnight success piece. They don't see the iceberg below the surface that's the relationship building that's been grinding for a year while working. that's repetition of launch after launch that has been successful where you've built your reputation on that so that they could come and mail out for biotrust. And here's another thing real quick about that. So you said launch, just maybe think of this.

You said launch after launch that was successful. I had one launch in there that didn't do that well. And I had all my eggs in the best because we didn't get a chance to do a lot of pre-testing on it. And at the time, that wasn't the standard. Now it is. But it didn't do that well. And you know what I did?

I paid everyone double commission. I took a huge loss on the launch because they put their faith in me. I didn't perform on the marketing side. It didn't convert the way that it needed to. And then I went and I paid everybody double commission on that. And they're like, whether it converts or not, this guy is gold.

Like, I'm good. He's going to take care of me, you know? So I don't want to obviously come out with funnel after funnel that doesn't convert and have to do that. But in certain instances, you go above and beyond to take care of the people that make the wheel go around for you. That's a massive lesson here. And going back to the 10-year overnight success, people look at Fit Body Boot Camp franchise,

and they go, man, how did you franchise in 2012 have over 700 locations now? And we're hitting the Inc. 500, $500,000, and the Entrepreneur 500 list. It's not the overnight success, but it was a decade before starting Fit Body Boot Camp. I was coaching and consulting 42,000 personal trainers who had purchased a product for me, come to a live event, come to a workshop. And so I'd deepen the relationship so that when I launched Fit Body Boot Camp as a franchise, many of them decided to turn their own personal brands into Fit Body Boot Camp locations because of the loyalty and the reputation.

And then I had the duty and obligation to ensure their success, because otherwise my reputation is shot. And so oftentimes, whether it's Biotrust or a Fit Body Boot Camp or any company that you see, there's a backstory to it. And the backstory is usually taking care of the people, building the reputation and building loyalty. And so with our audience here, with entrepreneurs who are trying to take their businesses or ideas

and turn them into massive empires, now you've taken your empire and you guys have adopted, like we've adopted Toys for Tots, Compassion International, and Shriners. I know you guys have a charity that you've given so much money to and made such an impact. What is that charity? So we're one of the largest contributors

to make a wish. We are the largest donor in the state of Texas. that's where the company is founded in Texas and where my partner lives. We've, I think, granted, like, 161 wishes. And you know these are big deal wishes, right? Oh, yeah. With Make a Wish, they really... Most terminally ill children, right?

Yes, it's children suffering with life-threatening diseases. Not all of them are terminal, but they are potentially to go that route, you know. So we've impacted so many kids through that. We also feed a hungry child with every single order that's placed. We have now over 3 million orders, so we've had 3 million kids. We've built wells through water.org, partnership with them. We've supported hurricane refugees and provided relief efforts for numerous hurricanes that have happened while we've been in business. We just look for any opportunity that we can to make a difference.

And I did a post on Instagram about this, you know, capitalism, changes lives. If I'm not generating income or revenue, I can't, how much can I really do as one person, right? It's the dollars that just is the gasoline to make it much, much bigger impact. We can feed three million kids. Could I ever do that by myself, especially if I didn't have financial resources? No, there's no way to do it. So it's money and meaning. It's income and impact, and that's what all great businesses are built upon. So as we wrap this episode up, Joe, what is the message that you would leave to entrepreneurs

who want to build empires like you have and want to have the impact that you have? What is the one thing that you would impart with them? Well, it's actually something that we talked about before we started officially filming here and that's understanding and realizing that you are in control of your destiny. Anything that you want to...

It sounds cheesy, right? If you think that you can achieve it, you can, right? And that's the reality. But you can only if you put in the work, when you have the setbacks, you do bounce back instead of falling apart like most people do. So many people in life will look at their circumstances that are dealt to them, the hand that's dealt to them, and they'll make excuses as to why they didn't do what they ultimately wanted to do.

If you want to have the biggest impact, then you want to have, you know, a life of meaning and live the life that you were born to live, you have to be prepared to go through all those circumstances that get dealt your way and use them to refine your character and become better. And that's something that I haven't always done every single time, but I've done it more often than not, and it's what propelled me each and every step of the way. When I was a writer and I got all those rejections, if I didn't keep going, I wouldn't have got the book deal. If I didn't get the book deal, it wouldn't have flopped. If the book didn't flop, I wouldn't have learned that I needed to, this whole game of online marketing and I need to build my platform

and be in control of my own destiny. All these things that people are dealt at some point in time, maybe they get through the first one, and then they get to maybe the point in, you know, the point. In my story, that's the book, and they say, okay, that's enough is enough. Ed Milet talks about what's your price? What's the price that you're going to sell out at? And you have to make up your mind from the very beginning that there is no price.

Your end goal is your end goal, and you have an entire lifetime to achieve it. And it may take a little bit longer than you think. It may be a little bit harder than you think, probably a lot harder. But you're in control. You're dealt the cards, but there's nobody else in the game, really. You've got the winning hand. It's how you deal with it and how you play it. Love that. Love that.

Hey, listen, you've been more than generous. You've been a dear friend for almost a decade now. You've come to the Empire Mastermind here to teach and share your wisdom with our mastermind members. And of course, everyone here on the Empire platform is here to support you. And of course, we're all behind your mission. So thank you so much for what you do, brother. I appreciate you. It's a pleasure, man.

Thanks for having me. And, of course, those of you watching and listening on this episode, Thank you so much for paying attention. Thank you so much for changing the lives, making the impact. And the biggest way that you can actually show gratitude to us is by going out and living your purpose and reaching your fullest potential and everything you do. Thank you so much. Take care.

Thanks, guys. Thank you so much for joining us for another amazing episode of the Empire podcast. Now, the greatest compliment that you can give to us is liking, loving, and sharing this episode with all of your friends. So please go to iTunes and give us a five-star rating. and then share it online and social media with everyone that you know, and make sure to tag us because we love hearing from Empire listeners. And if you own a business that's doing half a million dollars or more in annual revenues, and you know it's got massive potential,

and you like myself and Craig Ballantyne to help you scale it by 5x, 10x, and 20x in the shortest amount of time possible, then you might be a great candidate for the Empire Mastermind Program that we have. To learn more about the Empire Mastermind Program, go to bedroskoulin.com forward slash empire.