Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Paul McManus, Co-Founder and CEO of More Clients More Fun, Author, Podcast Host

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

Paul G. McManus is a best-selling author and prominent figure in the financial industry, specializing in helping financial advisors to become bestselling authors and create authority-based marketing systems to attract their ideal clients. Over the past 8 years, Paul has played a pivotal role in assisting clients in generating over $50,000,000 in fees and commissions.He is the author of multiple books including The Short Book Formula: A Financial Professional’s Guide To Writing A Book In Six Weeks To Attract Ideal Clients, and his upcoming book: From author to Authority: Master LinkedIn, Gain Visibility, and Attract Premium Clients. Paul has emerged as a leading authority for financial professionals. His works, blending insights on authorship, and authority-based marketing systems, serve as a cornerstone for those aiming to attract high-value clients.Learn more: https://www.theshortbookformula.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-paul-mcmanus-co-founder-and-ceo-of-more-clients-more-fun-author-podcast-host

Welcome to Influential Entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Paul McManus, who's the co-founder and CEO of More Clients, More Fun. He's an author and a podcast host. Paul, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

Hey, so I always like to kind of have that, you know, when I say one word, what do you think? And when I read people's company names, it's like, that just sounds cool. I do want more clients and I do want to have more fun. So I think that's such a neat little vibe there. And I know that we want to dive into what you do and how you do it and why you do it. But give us a little bit of your background first. What's your story and how did you get into the industry? Yeah, absolutely.

So I started more clients, more fun in 2015. And at that time, I had just left my quote unquote corporate job. I got inspired by online marketing. And at that point, there was a gentleman named Michael Porte who wrote the book called Book Yourself Solid that I joined his community and mastermind. So I left my corporate job. I started my own online coaching business. And from the very beginning, I started using LinkedIn as a tool to help.

people at that time as more coaches, use it as a tool for business development. It was in 2016 that my very first financial advisor client found me. You know, there's so much talk about who's your perfect market, you know, who should you choose as your ideal target market. And sometimes they find you, which is pretty cool. So at that time, I had no idea about financial professionals, financial advisors, wealth managers, etc. But his name was Shane Wals. And in 2016, he reached out to me. And long story short, over the course of about two years, I helped him go from making roughly a couple hundred thousand dollars in commission to making over two and a half million dollars in commission.

And so, as you can imagine, his producer group, his life insurance carriers, all these different people like, okay, what's going on here? What, you know, what's your secret sauce? and he was gracious enough to point in my direction. So that started me on the path towards working exclusively with financial professionals. And that was back in 2016. Fast forward a couple of years. And it's in 2018. And I'm speaking at two packed breakout sessions for an elite group of financial advisors.

And just to give you a sense of it, they have to pay. $25,000 a year just to be part of that group. And I was doing the two breakout sessions. I had Shane on my left. And I had another client of mine that was part of the group on the right. His name was Mark. And it was essentially an infomercial. I mean, I knew that no one there knew who I was.

But they knew who Shane was. They knew who Mark was. They knew the results that the organization validated. And I, you know, it was my. real, it was my first real experience of what I call authority marketing. Yeah. And I knew it going into it, right? And so I knew that I would have more people interested in working with me than I really

had capacity to work to work with. So my strategy and my approach going into it was that I essentially did the whole hour breakout session as more or less an infomercial, just, you know, having them talk and tout their results, et cetera. and at the end of it, I distributed an application, which essentially said, okay, you know, to take the next step and apply to potentially work with me, build this out, oh, and by the way, it's going to cost $1,000. And, you know, it's a deposit. So if for some reason we decide not to work together, you'll get a refund. But it's $1,000 to simply have that conversation with me.

And it was it was such a defining moment because you have a lot of seasons, super successful, type A personality, you know, elite financial, you know, insurance producers in there. And there were some grumbling and they were looking to like, wait, so what you're saying is that I have to pay you a thousand dollars to talk to you. And I'm like, look, I'm not trying to be arrogant or anything. It's just the reality is, is that there's more, you know, there's going to be more interesting. in working with me than I have demand for. And this is just a way that I can, you know, prioritize who to spend time with and make sure that, you know, it aligns with everyone's interests.

And then the, you know, it's at the end of that, despite all the grumbling, at the end of the day, I got a stack, you know, you can't see me right now, but, you know, about an inch stack of applications and credit cards of people applying to simply have that conversation with me. And to me, that was a defining moment because that That's really for the first time where I really appreciated the idea of authority marketing. You know, it reminds me of a phrase I'm sure you're familiar with called borrowed credibility.

So you didn't have the credibility in the room with the people in that room, but your contacts and your clients did the two people that were with you. And so you kind of can just sit back and smile as they make an introduction. And then when you start talking, you're not pitching, selling, pushing. you're just kind of talking and educating and you're bringing to the equation that trust that's already established there. So I think that's huge. The other thing that I think that you made there was your target audience, not that you will never ever do a service package with anyone outside of financial services. But the cream rises to the top. When you start finding these little honeyholes of opportunity, then you just focus there.

but maybe some advisor has an attorney that they refer to you. Great. Be happy to work with these. It's not like I'm not going to. So those are a couple a haas that I think a lot of people don't really pick up on in their market. They try to be all things to all people and go the true cold approach. Now, marketers that might hear that would go, yeah, but I've got a funnel and I've got a, I just find in my personal business, I really resonate with what you said because that's how I've grown my business. business very successfully is that strategic alliance referral networking and that borrowed credibility

all while building that authority. So I love it. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, 100% I agree with everything you said. I call it same concept, but authority by association. And just to underscore what you said is that I knew absent having these, you know, Shane and Mark next to me, I was a nobody. You know, I could go up there and say, oh, LinkedIn and I could geek out on all the technology. and probably nobody would show up and people would get bored and go on their very way. But I knew I had magic in both those sessions because the results were so substantial for Shane that the organization validated. You know, and interestingly at that time working with Mark, he's since passed away. But he was literally, you know, he was talking about how many appointments he was getting with these, you know, high net worth attorneys.

And literally while during the session, he was like looking at his phone, he's like, oh, another appointment. Oh, another appointment. And so, you know, I like the analogy that I felt, you know, I'm a dude, right? But I felt like I was the pretty girl at the bar, you know. And when you're the pretty girl at the bar and you're the only pretty girl at the bar and you have a bunch of dudes around you, you know the kind of power that you have. And so it was my first pretty girl at the bar moment. And really since then, I've, you know, all of my marketing. for myself, as well as the packages and the services that I do for clients, it's a hundred

percent geared towards helping build that authority. You know, just before, I think it was yesterday, actually, I was listening to some of your stuff and I heard you say this, so I'll credit you, but I think you said roughly, you know, authority is the priority. And I couldn't agree more because everything that I do in terms of marketing is that it's all, how can you better position yourself? can you better build your authority brand? Because the authority brand, you know, and again, I'll credit you because I just listened to you say this yesterday, is that it's not, it's not,

you know, it's like a Swiss Army knife. It's that it makes everything that much better. You know, if you're already doing webinars, if you're already doing whatever, speaking, if you're already getting referrals, if you're already doing this, that of the other seminars, it's going to make it that much better. Your clients are going to show up to your meetings. They're going to say, yes, faster. They're going to appreciate your time. They're going to be better clients. And so the number one priority that I love building for myself and then helping clients do is to create that authority. And then the foundation for me, and I love to get your take on this, is that writing and publishing a book to me is the foundation in one of the fastest ways to

build that authority brand. Agreed. I agree with your citing me and the, yeah, I mean, you know, how can you not agree with what you heard me say? But here's, you said exactly what I've said over and over again. So many times these people that sell their systems and packages and, oh, I'm the SEO guru, or I'm the text messaging you this or I'm the, they want you to do their thing and stop doing everything else. You know, like, no, no, no, no, don't do that, do my thing. And what I always loves being able to say is whatever marketing you're currently doing, if it's giving you some results, keep on doing it. I don't care what you're doing. But when you are seen as that expert, it'll work that

much better. Now, does it 10x, 100x? No, probably not. But if you think about the Darren Hardy compound effect concept, if you improve just a little bit in this one little touch point, 1%, and then this one 1%, and then this one 1%, all of a sudden that compound effect is massive. So how do you establish yourself as that authority and you can Google around and find all the people that say, oh, you need to do this and this. And you just posed the book. And I will say that back in like 1997, 98, I was working at a bank. And that was right when online banking started. And I remember distinctly, everyone was almost like running for the hills, hair on fire going, there's not going to be any branches left. We're not going to have a bank. We're not going to have jobs. And look, 30 something years later,

people still go in branches. It just changes a little bit. I say that to affirm what you said. People might go, ah, books, who reads books anymore? Oh, I can read it on a Kindle. Oh, I can. Well, people still respect the fact that what are the first six letters in the word authority?

Exactly. You know what I'm saying? So it's like people still respect that. And when you can have the thud factor of popping down on a desk or something, you know, hey, here's a cup in my book. take a look through it and let's, you know, talk about what we can do to work together. So I think that's spectacular. I think you've got a solution to what I'm about to say, which is when people hear that,

all of a sudden their red flags go up and go, I can't even write a good email. I can't write a blog post. I can't write a LinkedIn article. What do you mean write a book? So how do you solve that for people? Because that right there is a big hurdle. 100%. So I'm going to use a client.

example to help underscore a number of the points that we've been talking about as well as to answer the question that you just pose. So one of my current clients, and you may know who he is or you may know him, do you know John Cutton from Cutton wealth management? No, I don't. Okay. So he does a lot of stuff with Anton Anderson, who I know that you know. And he does, so he's part of Ameriprise. And AmeriPrize has 75. advisors. And guess what his ranking is? Number one. So out of 7,500 advisors, he's number one. And he does $10 billion of assets under management. His company makes close to $100 million of revenue per year. So, you know, he's like the, he's at the top of the hill. He's what, you know, probably all

financial advisors aspire to be like when they grew up. So I had the great fortune of meeting him last year, so about a year ago. And, you know, funny enough, how did I meet him? Well, I wrote, and published my book and started doing a guest podcasting to where I ended up meeting him by accident. And since then, he's become a client and a, you know, great advocate for the work that I do. So he's, you know, he's already reached this pinnacle of success. And yet, you know, he has a podcast. He has all these different things. But yet he'd never run a book. And so he's intrigued by by that idea. And really, to your point, it's like, well, you know, I'm a busy guy. You know, how the heck am I going to write and publish?

a book, given my schedule. So, again, using him as example, our approach is that we call it the short book formula. And I think one of the biggest obstacles that people have is that they imagine that if I'm going to write a book, it's going to be this, you know, 300 page tomb. I'm going to have to take a sabbatical, you know, how many of get this done. And it's just overwhelming. And our approach is absolutely not. We target roughly 12,000 to 15,000 words. Typically, when we print the book, it's roughly 100 pages. But here's really the point is that it's not just about getting the book read. It's about the book is your sales letter in disguise. It's your salesperson and printer, two phrases I like to say. And the most important thing is not just to write it and have it sit on the shelf, but it's actually to get your ideal prospects to read it.

And so when you write it at about 12,000 to 15,000 words, your ideal prospect can read it cover to cover in roughly one hour, Sometimes a little bit more depending on their speed, of course, but the idea is that they can read it, they can consume it in roughly one hour. Now, imagine what happens when you introduce that as part of not just your marketing and lead generation and positioning, but you actually introduce that as part of your sales process. So imagine, you know, and I do this myself, you have a 15-minute call with someone who found you online as interest in your services. You know, great. You have a nice call of conversation. You qualify them and say, hey, you know, let's go ahead and schedule.

the next call will be an hour on Zoom, for example. Oh, but by the way, I'm going to send you a copy of my book, and I ask you that you read it prior to our next meeting. Is that something that you're willing to do? And of course, if they say no, well, guess what? We're not scheduling that next meeting. I find that at that point, you know, 90% of the people say yes to it. And by the next meeting, assuming that they've done what they need,

assuming that they've read it, I don't have to present. I don't have to, I don't have to, you know, I mean, you know, again, I purchased it yesterday based on Dr. Chaldeini. You know, this is persuasion. By the time they show up, they're already sold. I just, you know, I just smile, look pretty, you know, ha, ha. And ask, you know, ask questions, logistical questions, you know, why is this important to you? What do you want to do next, et cetera? And, you know, kind of a fun story that I wrote in my book is that occasionally they'll say, yeah, I'll read it.

And then they show up and like, ah, so busy, I didn't have a chance. Well, guess what you do then? You say, oh, well, you know, and you say this politely and tactfully, but it's like, you know, so, you know, this is not going to be a good use of our time, right? And then, you know, and there was a client of mine who's now an client. His name was Tim. I remember this story. And he showed up at the meeting the second meeting.

He's like, I don't have time to read it. I'm like, oh, well, this isn't going to be a good use of our time. He's like, oh, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can read it. I'm like, great. Well, let's reschedule. And we should we rescheduled for the next week.

He read it. And since then, he's been like the best client ever. He refers me to everybody. He's an awesome client. But it takes having that authority positioning and that confidence by, you know, to say, if you're not willing to follow the steps that I've laid out, one, which includes reading my book, it's like, I'm not going to schedule the next meeting because to me they're demonstrating that they're a tire kicker. But what's interesting is that what happens a lot of times is that the person says, yeah, I'll read the book.

And so I take the time to send them a, um, a few. physical copy of the book. Sometimes they'll send them an audio book or both. And I remember from a couple years back and I actually write about this in my book in my book is that there was a gentleman named Tim who had scheduled a 50 minute call with me. He came in as a referral. He agreed to read the book. He showed up at the meeting a week later. First question I asked was, so would you get from the book? And he's like, oh, well, you know, to be honest, I didn't have a chance to read it. And so immediately, I said, well, you know, and I said this tactfully, but, you know, I don't know that this is going to be the best use of our time. You know, and, you know, or, you know, he immediately started, you know,

stuttering and be like, oh, you know, apologizing. I'm, I'm sorry. You know, I can read it. You know, basically give me another chance. I said, great, you know, if you're willing to read it, I'm happy to, you know, reschedule with you. So we rescheduled for the next week. He read the book, showed up. And since then, this has been like four or five years now, but he's been like the best client ever. He's referred the heck out of me. And so the through line there is that when you have the book as an authority tool and you insert it as part of your process, not only do get better results faster, but you allow yourself to have the confidence to do things like that, which is I'm not chasing you. You've come to me. You know, I'm the person with expertise. And again,

I'm not trying to say this in an arrogant way. But, you know, if you want to work with me, these are the steps that you need to do. And you have to have the authority. and the confidence really to be able to get away and do that. You know, have you ever heard of Marcus Sheridan? No. You may want to research him. He's the, you know how a lot of times people imprint, like the first time I hear this concept, I heard it from this person, so you're always connected to him.

So I'm sure that he did not come up with this concept of content marketing. Because back in the day, content marketing was like all the rage. now it is, in my opinion, not even a thing because good content needs to be party marketing. Just don't call it content marketing. Just call it good marketing. But the point is, he owned a pool company that was selling in ground pools. And he came up with the content marketing approach. He implemented it like teaching and writing articles and all these things, right?

And I don't think that he wrote a book back at that point. He's written many since then. But he ran a research on. his CRM and whenever his team would go out to meet with someone, if they had read a certain number of articles on their website, like, I don't know, 10 or 12 or whatever, they are, you know, 48% likely to buy. If it's, you know, between this and this, the point is he noticed that and then he called this assignment selling and he would do exactly what you just said.

He would, before showing up to the appointment week before, he would say, please read the following articles. Now, in your, in your case, you would send the book and say, please read the book, but he would do exactly what you said, because it really, really sets that tone and it sets the expectation. And in a psychological sense from a, you know, NLP neural linguistic programming or a, or a psychological marketing approach, you're setting yourself up as someone that is saying, here's what I need you to do. And they're following your lead. And when they do, that, then isn't it, isn't it a higher chance that when you say, okay, here's my recommendation for this financial product, then they may probably be predisposed and persuaded to do that as

well? That's 100% it. I'll give you another example of a concept that we talked about earlier, which is, I called authority by association. I shared the story about Shane and Mark. So going back to John Cutton, who we published one book for him and we're working on a series of other books. But he's since become an advocate of mine. And so he's the number one advisor to Ameriprise.

And so he got me invited to attend their conference next month in May where they're going to have their top 1,200 advisors there. Now, if I just went by myself, you know, little me who doesn't know anyone that. there, you know, I probably wouldn't show up. I wouldn't go to it. I wouldn't invest the money. I wouldn't do these things because I would expect, you know, maybe a okay result, but nothing exciting. But knowing the, you know, knowing the effect of authority by association, I'm holding my hand here. You can't see it. But I have a copy of his book, you know, his smiling face on the book cover. And I'm taking like 200 copies of this book. And I'm going to have a little booth there. And I'm going to be putting this into the hands of, you know, 200 or so top advisors who I know they all look up every single one of them knows who they recognize him.

They all recognize him. And I can be a nobody, but through authority by association, I fully anticipate getting, you know, a stack of, you know, people interested in in working with me. Yeah, that's massive. And then just to build off a couple things that we've been talking about is that, you know, we talked about before in terms of the book itself isn't necessarily the, it's not advertising, right? I mean, it's not like, you know, spending money on Facebook. It's inserted into everything. So can you imagine, you know, John has, he has $10 billion of AUM, Asson Center Management. He has an organization of, you know, probably 100 plus advisors. Can you imagine what's going to happen to his already extremely successful business when he insert?

asserts his book into that process. Yeah, massive. And success leaves clues. So it's not you just coming up with some hairbrained idea. It is you going, let me show you what I've been doing. Let me show you the results that are coming in. You can have the same. And let's talk.

100%. So getting back to the question, which is, okay, you know, a lot of people maybe listening to this or busy people, it sounds good. I get it. I want to do it. but, you know, I don't have the time. And so the process that we've designed through what I, my book and what I call the short book formula, and I'll share before we end the conversation where they can get

a free copy of my book. But it's essentially designed. It's a done with you service. And so, you know, first and foremost, we do not recommend going along, you know, just straight out. I mean, you know, most people are not writers first and foremost. And then even if they are, they're not necessarily a good market. And so to have the stack of skills that you.

you need to be successful is just very rare. And so our process is designed to help someone go in six weeks, up to 12 weeks, to go from blank sheet of paper to published book and including Amazon bestseller in six to 12 weeks. Time commitment, right? So what we expect of our clients that come to work with us is that they have knowledge, they have expertise, they have experience. You know, and imposter syndrome is a real thing, right?

So, you know, I don't want to, you know, imply that you have to be the best of the best in the world. It just means that, you know, you've been doing what, you know, you've been doing your crap for, you know, at least a few years. You have some success stories, some clienting stories. You have a point of view. And we essentially, through an interview process that is one hour a week on Zoom over about six weeks, we essentially structure the goals of the book in the beginning. And through those six one hour calls, we ask you questions. We get you to talk it out. We give you little assignments that you come so that you can talk about the content for a chapter.

But at the end of the day, you don't have to be a writer, which very few people are. But you need to know enough about your subject matter that you can talk it out. We then transcribe it. We then have a team of writers that turn that into a polished book. And then we go through all the steps of getting that published, whether it's through Amazon or a different source. So that within 12 weeks, you can have a book in your hand that you can now, distribute to your clients, to your prospects. And the amazing thing about a book is that, you know, I would say that the shelf life of it is easily three to five years. You know, it can be

much longer, but it's not something where it's like, you know, again, you know, Facebook ads where it's like, as long as you're paying Facebook, you know, you get a result, right? As soon as you stop paying it, your result goes away. The book is going to impact your marketing, your authority, your influence for years to come. You know, typically one new client as a result of the book is going to more than pay for it. Imagine what a hundred new clients is going to do for it. Yeah. The ROI is through the roof. So I think that is spectacular. Well, I tell you, Paul, it's been neat talking with you. It's almost like I'm talking to my clone. So we speak the same language and that's awesome. If someone's interested in learning more about your package and your

program, how can they learn more and then also reach out and connect with you? Yep. Best way to do is to go to my website, which is www. the short bookformula.com. Again, www. the shortbook formula.com. There, you can get a complimentary copy of my book, including a complimentary copy of my audiobook. You can listen to it within about one hour.

And my calendar and scheduling information is there as well, if you'd like to schedule time on my calendar. Excellent. Well, Paul, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Yeah. You as well. it. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the

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