Founder's Story - Stephen Blackburn & Stephen Johnson: Mastering Marketing with Rich From Anywhere | S2: E45

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

In this episode, Daniel Robbins interviews Stephen Blackburn and Stephen Johnson, founders of Rich From Anywhere. Starting as music artists in South Florida, their journey into entrepreneurship began as a way to fund their music career. After experiencing initial failures in e-commerce, they found success through mentorship and created a systematic approach to online marketing and lead generation. Their company, Rich From Anywhere, now helps thousands of businesses improve their marketing strategies, automations, and overall growth.Stephen and Stephen emphasize the importance of building an irresistible offer and owning your data through email lists, rather than relying solely on social media metrics. They share their journey of scaling an e-commerce business to over $200,000 in seven months and eventually building a successful marketing company. Their Grow Your List Challenge and various training programs aim to empower business owners with the tools and knowledge needed to succeed in the digital marketplace.Key Points Discussed:Transition from music artists to entrepreneurs.Initial failures and the importance of mentorship.Scaling an e-commerce store to over $200,000 in seven months.Importance of building an irresistible offer.Owning your data through email lists over social media metrics.The LOL principle: List Over Likes.Utilizing AI in marketing and business operations.The significance of consistent lead generation.The Grow Your List Challenge and its impact.Future goals and ongoing mission of Rich From Anywhere.Relevant Links:Rich From AnywhereOur Sponsors:* Check out PrizePicks and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: www.prizepicks.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hey everyone, welcome back to Founders Story. Today we have a treat because we not only have one amazing entrepreneur, but we have two and we're going to talk about one of those topics that is one of the most requested topics and that is marketing, lead generation, building lists. All the things that we've talked about are critical to continue and build up your business. If you want to scale, you have to have these things. So we have Steven Blackburn and Steven Johnson from richfromanywhere.com, but they first scaled their e-commerce from zero to 209,000 in seven months. I know they're going to dive into that.

Now they're doing seven figures in their company and they're helping thousands of people, businesses improve on marketing, automations, which are, these are critical. They have an incredible membership program. They're doing challenges. We'll dive into all that, but Steven and Steven, let's kick it off. So what was the journey to entrepreneurship like for you two? Man, so it all started with us. We started as music artists, right? So we were music artists in South Florida doing our thing. We had a little bit of a fan base. We were kind of like, you know, we were popping. I'm not even going to lie to you, right? I'm not going to downplay it. But, you know, at the end of the day, we didn't have any money, right? We

were broke. We were like your typical starving artists working two jobs that we hated. And so we literally just kind of came up with this idea to like start like an online business to just fund our music career. Like that was all that was really all that came down to. We were just like, hey, let's try to make some money online so we can at least fund these photo shoots and these video shoots and all this kind of stuff. Right. So that we're not going in the hole, at least. So we started an e-commerce store and started watching YouTube videos and trying a bunch of Facebook ads and stuff like that. And we ended up spending about five thousand bucks on ads and we made zero sales.

So so we went from broke to broker and it was not a good look. So we were like, all right, let's not do that again. Cause that didn't work. And so we found, thank God that we actually found a mentor who actually kind of already knew how to run ads and already had a proven process. So we just ended up paying him to teach us. So ironically, we ended up spending another $5,000 on this mentor as well. Kind of looking back on it, it's kind of funny. But this guy came in and he just showed us exactly what to do. And we went in that night, we went home, we launched the ads the way that he told us to, and we ended up making a sale within eight hours of the ad launching. Now, just to kind of give you

some backstory, though, we before that we had spent three months trying to run ads ourselves with no sales. And and we really were like, pretty devastated. It was bad. Like it wasn't even funny. Like I'm laughing now, but it really wasn't a joke. So so at that point, we kind of figured out what worked and we just rinsed and repeated, you know, and I think that's a, that's a principle of success, right? Once you find something that works, don't try to reinvent the wheel. Like we literally just rinse and repeat, keep doing the same process over and over again. And that's what kind of took us from zero to 209,000 in our first e-commerce store. This was like back in like 2016, 2017 or something

like that. Yeah. And then, you know, from there, once we realized how effective like marketing actually is, we took the store, packaged it up and actually sold the store. So this is our first time like exiting a company like and it was very gratifying to see that we actually created something that other people want. So then from there, we were like, OK, we have this skill set now. We know how to run ads. We know how to market really well. So let's help other people that have e-commerce brands and other brands. Let's help them to do the same thing.

So we started doing that. We started helping random e-commerce Shopify stores and random brands generate income. And we realized like, yo, we're like really good at this. We're getting good results. So then from there, us being music artists, we decided to throw an event in Atlanta, Georgia as independent artists, all through Facebook ads, all through paid advertising. And we literally sold the event out. And then at that point, I was like, yo, there's nothing that we can't do right now. Can't tell us nothing, you know. So then from there, honestly, we really us and get us to where we wanted to be. And we learned even more and we decided to start really changing lives for a living. So what we did was we created this coaching program, started helping a bunch of people inside of e-commerce stores and online boutiques and, helping them go from 900 a month to 50K a month, $40K a month to over $2 million a year.

And it's been a really gratifying journey being able to help people and make money in the process. I couldn't have asked for anything better than that. Yeah, I think we go into business for the impact, right? In the beginning, you might go into business for the money, of course. But then you start realizing business is more about money, it's impact, and then the money comes. What we hear from a lot of business owners is exactly what you said in the beginning. They do ads, they run ads, they spend a lot of money hoping to make money, and they never make any money. So what is like a tip or strategy that you're seeing that maybe is a way that people get started? Or is it something that maybe they're lacking? Or

what are you finding in terms of like, what's stopping people from making any money when they start doing ads? Yeah, for sure, man. We will return to our show shortly. But first, let's talk about today's sponsor, Magnesium Breakthrough by BioOptimizers. Did you know four out of five Americans don't get enough magnesium? Crucial for over 300 biochemical reactions in your body. Here are signs of magnesium deficiency, irritability, anxiety, insomnia, muscle cramps, high blood pressure, and even constipation. I know I suffer from a few of these, but many supplements don't work well because they use low quality magnesium. That's why Magnesium Breakthrough by BioOptimizers is recommended.

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make sure you have your Facebook pixel installed on your website that you're running ads to. And for those of you who don't know what a pixel is, it's very simple. It's just a little piece of code that you put on your website. And what it does is it just tracks the behavior on your website. So when people are checking out your products, they're adding things to cart, they're buying stuff, that pixel is just sitting there collecting all that information. And then it's sending it back over to Facebook. It's sending that information back over to Facebook. So now when you're running your Facebook ads, you can actually see which ads are making you money and which ads are wasting you money. And without that pixel, you don't have any communication

between Facebook and your website. So you really have no idea what you're doing. You're kind of just like running blind. So what we like to say is no pixel, no profits. Right. So remember that if you don't have a pixel on your site, it's very, very difficult for you to scale and make money like strategically with ads. So that's one thing. And then, you know, another thing that we're really big on is not boosting your posts over here. We're like really big on don't boost your post. Facebook makes it very, very, they sell it really good. They're like, hey, spend another $50 and you can reach 500 million people. And you're like, oh, that sounds great. But at the end of the day, all the really powerful targeting features and the

different strategies that we use are not on the boost function. So you're probably going to lose a bunch of money. What you want to do is you want to run your ads from the ads manager, which is in the back end of Facebook. Right. And to go even deeper into your question, bro, when it comes to starting, like for those of y'all that are just starting, the first thing you have to understand is this. You could have the best ads in the world. You could have the best ad strategies in the world. But if you don't have an irresistible offer that people truly want and desire, then it does not matter. And that's one of the things we teach as well is how to craft an irresistible offer, how to make it so mouthwatering that people are literally jumping to your offer. And the way we do that is through something called a lead magnet. Now, a lead magnet is something that you give away for free or something that you give away for cheap. And in exchange, you collect the information, the names, the phone numbers and the emails. Now, a lot of people have it wrong when it comes to growing their business. They're very focused when it comes to social media. They're very focused on the likes and the shares and the comments. And we literally know

creators right now who have millions of followers, but are not making any money at all. And the reason why is because they are married to social media. They're in a committed relationship with social media, but only one person is committed. And that's the creator. Because social media can shut your account down, you could get hacked. There's so many different things that could happen with social media. So it's very important before you start running ads, make sure you learn how to craft an irresistible offer. Yeah. Don't get married to social media. You know, look, divorce is expensive in all areas of life, but right. So like you get divorced, like she's taking half, right. But you get divorced from social media. She's taking everything.

She's taking it all. I just read a recent article that said most creators, it was like over two thirds make less than $40,000 a year. And it was only like a very, very few percent make even $100,000 a year. So I'm glad you bring that up because I've been through that myself where you put all this energy and effort into this account that you think you're building of your own ownership and they take it away. It happened to me on Amazon. It's happened to me with multiple platforms, destroying my businesses overnight and all this hard work I worked for. And it was one of the most depressing parts of my life. So when it comes to the ownership of data and creating your own lists, how do you see that? And how do you see that going forward in the future? Dude, it's literally everything. You see these stories of, for instance, six or seven years ago, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion.

You think about that. Facebook has some of the best developers and coders in the entire world. They could have just easily replicated WhatsApp if they wanted to. But why did they buy the company for $19 billion would it be? It's because all the data that WhatsApp had on its users. That's the only reason why. And these stories have happened over and over and over again. You see these types of things happening. So, you know, owning your data is literally the most important thing I feel like anyone can do in their business, you know, but the thing is, everybody gets tied into these what we call vanity metrics on social media, right? They're looking for likes and shares and comments because it makes you feel so warm and fuzzy inside when people comment. But at the end of the day, look, I don't know about you, but like, I can't pay my mortgage with comments on Instagram, right? Like my son doesn't eat

likes for breakfast, right? I can't do anything with that. Those are vanity metrics. So what we do is we have a philosophy in our business called the LOL principle. And, and no, it's not the laugh out loud, right? It's saying a joke. all right? It's what we call the list. So the last few months, I've been practicing how to learn Spanish because it is really a passion of mine. I've been using Rosetta Stone. Why?

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and prove security in real time. Our audience gets a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com slash founders. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash founders for $1,000 off. Now back to the show. Over likes principle. List over likes, right? Because amateurs create content to grow their likes. Professionals create content to grow their list because a list will pay your bills. You know, having a list. And when I say list, I'm saying names, emails, phone numbers of all your people. Having a list, guys, will literally supercharge everything and anything that you're trying to do.

If you're trying to go live and get more people on a live, great. Send out a text blast and an email blast and get more people on your live, make more money. If you're setting up an event, right, a local event or like in person, like we'll send everybody the address and have more people show up, have a more impactful event. Right. And if you have a promotion, text everybody, get more people into promotion, make more money. It doesn't matter what it is that you're doing. Having a list supercharges everything. And that's what we're trying to get people into the mindset of own your your data, because if you don't, you got to remember, guys, if you're on social media, growing your TikTok and growing your Instagram and your Facebook and all that stuff is great and it is important. But the question you should be asking is, what if Instagram shuts me down tomorrow? What if TikTok does get banned this year or whatever,

right? What if my Facebook gets hacked? And these types of things happen all the time. I'm not talking about things that don't happen. Well, what happens is your audience that you built, it literally just disappears overnight. That's what happens because you're renting that audience from those social media platforms

that really don't care about you. And honestly, a lot of that stuff is built off of algorithms that can get triggered by anything. And you can even incorrectly or unfairly get your account shut down. Happens all the time. So, but if you have a list of emails,

phone numbers, names of all your prospects and all your customers, well, now this is like ownership. It's like protection for your business. And you can just text everybody and let everybody know what happened. And it's like security for your business. And I know security doesn't sound sexy, but you know what really doesn't sound sexy is building a business up to 50,000 a month and then it getting wiped out in 24 hours and you go back to zero. That's really not sexy. So yeah, totally getting wiped out in 24 hours. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants that. I've been through it. Nobody wants it. But and I'm seeing a huge resurgence, at least the last year, I've been seeing a lot of people talking about email newsletters and how emails

are becoming like more important again. And so creating that list is critical. How do you see AI transforming all of this? I was doing some ads this morning and I saw that the platform gave me options of using AI to create headlines and all these things that you're saying offers and stuff. I thought it was very fascinating. But what are you all looking at in terms of AI automations and AI being able to help us create these things? Yeah, man. So it's funny you say that. So the platform you're probably talking about is Facebook because one thing that Facebook is really good at now is integrating AI into everything that they do. If you're a business owner and you are not using AI, within the next two to three years,

you're going to be out of business because all of the smart business owners are utilizing AI within their business. And they're literally running laps around you if you're not tapping into it. And the reason why is because something that would take me a day to craft and come up with, AI can do it in 10 minutes, right? So if you're not tapping into AI, you're literally getting left behind and businesses are running laps around you. Now, when it comes to AI, there's a lot of different ways that you can use it. You can use ChatGPT. That's probably the most famous one that everybody knows, utilizing ChatGPT and getting it to create you an ebook or

create you some ad copy and things to use within your ads. But if you don't know how to properly communicate with AI, then you're not going to be able to get the results that you need. But here's the thing, right? And we call that prompt engineering. That's when someone can create a prompt or a question or a request to AI. And in return, AI gives you these amazing results. But if you're not good at asking AI these questions, you can ask AI to generate you a prompt that will allow AI to give you the right answer. So that's a little hack that you can use there. But Facebook is amazing. We're Facebook ads guys, Facebook and Instagram ads guys. And one thing Facebook has really embraced is utilizing AI.

So when you're running ads, Facebook has this thing called Advantage Plus, and it's literally AI integrated with Facebook because Facebook has 52000 data points on each person that uses the platform. So to break that down, what a data point is, is it's literally all your habits that you do online from buying to the time you message people to any of those things. So Facebook integrates and helps AI to learn its audience so that it can run ads better and target better for you. And the beauty of it is, I don't know how many of y'all have run ads before, but when you get to the ad section of your ad where you're trying to generate the visual that you're going to use, like you said, bro, Facebook allows you to use AI to come up with different headlines, to come up with different captions for your ads, and all of those things. So integrating

AI into your business is something that you can't escape if you do want to be successful. And I encourage you all to embrace AI because AI literally is the future. We use AI in our business literally every single day, and it truly does change the game. It's not going anywhere. Yeah. Thank you for saying that because I feel the same way. If people are not going to use it, I mean, they maybe have two or three years and then that's it, right? Because somebody else is going to come in. Somebody is going to be able to automate, do it for a cheaper price because they have less employees. They have more automation. They can do it faster, better. There's so many things that it's going to enable people.

So thank you. And I think a lot of companies, surprisingly, I ask people like, do you use even just chat GBT? And so many people don't even use it yet. And I'm like, holy smokes. That's like the most basic, the simplest way. But I'm curious about what you have going on with your challenge and what you're doing there. Can you dive into that?

Yeah, man. So we have a lot of different types of trainings. We literally do webinars every single week, and we just get on for an hour, hour and a half, and just blow people's faces off with information. And people make money from just our free stuff, right? But if you want to dive even deeper, we have something called the Grow Your List Challenge, which is a three-day live virtual event that we do once a month, once every couple months or so, depending on how busy we are. But essentially what we do is we teach you for three days how to build your list, how to grow it fast, how to grow it organically, and we teach you about Facebook ads and how to grow your list using Facebook ads as well. We share our screens and we show you strategies and all that stuff. And we have you about we teach you about Facebook ads and how to grow your list using Facebook ads as well. We share our screens and we show you strategies and all that stuff.

And we're like we have a Facebook group where we're like in there with you all week answering questions and supporting you throughout the whole process. And we've done about 19 of these challenges so far. And we've seen some incredible transformations. And I mean, like from all types of businesses to like e-commerce businesses, coaches, consultants, real estate agents. I mean, like 14 different industries that we've personally worked with. And they're all seeing success with this challenge. And so if that's something that you're into, like, I think if you're a business owner, it's, it's kind of like one of those things where it's a no brainer. It's lead generation is like the lifeblood of your business, right? I've heard, I've heard you say it in some of your episodes. So you understand how important it is. It's just everything, man. If you don't have leads,

you don't have a business, period. So why wouldn't we be focused all of our energy and attention on the biggest needle moving activity in our business, which is generating leads and filling up our pipeline? It's very important. So that's what we do with the challenge. Yeah. I think a lot of times people just get, they get so caught up into the minutia of the business. And it reminds me of the E-Myth. I don't know if you read that book where it's like, they go into it wanting to be a baker because they want to bake, but then they have to realize they have to do finance and customer service. There's so many things they have to do, I think, that catches people away from lead generation, which like you said, it's the number one thing. You could be so successful, but if your leads fall out,

eventually it's going to drop. So it is one of those things that I preach all the time. Be really good at lead generation and you can figure the rest out, but you need clients. 1000% dude. And then on top of that too, when you don't have leads and your pipeline isn't full, well, what happens is you start to get into desperation mode and you start to really start to need sales. So anyone who out here is who's like into sales and trying to close people and stuff like that, the worst thing you could ever do to try to make sales is to actually need to make sales, right? That's one of the, what's one of the tricks to making like more money is actually not even worrying about making money, right? So when you don't have a pipeline full of leads that

are wanting to work with you, it kind of creates this energy about you and now you need the sale and people can smell that they can pick up on that, right? But when you have a ton of leads in your pipeline and you really don't need the sale, people can fit, they can figure that out too. And they're like, dang, this guy doesn't even really need me now. I want to work with him more, you know? So there's a lot of aspects why that's so important. You know, what's funny about that, bro, is that's kind of like dating, right? Like when you, when you're trying to, when you're trying to court a woman, when you're trying to date a girl and you're trying to spit all this game and do all of those things, what happens is if you're desperate, right, and you don't have any other options, a woman can sense that, right? And that desperate energy is very unattractive. But if you got a bunch of options and they know that you got options, your energy is different.

You're more nonchalant and you're just like, yo, we could do this. We can't. What are you trying to do? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, and people can sense that. So I liken that to the dating game. And when you do have that energy and that confidence about you, people will buy from you all day.

And by the way, they call it commission breath. When you're trying to really get the sale and you're so hungry for the sale, people can sense that and they don't want nothing to do with it. That's true. And then you can charge more, right? If you have a lot of people coming to you, you know your service might even be too low cost. You can up your prices. But if you get desperate, that's the thing where people start to just give it away at the lowest cost just because they're like, I need to pay my bills. I need to do these things just for our business to survive.

And I think we know so many business owners, they don't even pay themselves. They pay their employees, they pay for everything. And then what's left for them is nothing. And you're like working 100 hours a week for no money. And it doesn't make sense. So I'm with you guys. If they can generate more leads, they can build more lists, build long-term funnels, all these things. It's super appreciative. If they want to find out more information again, can you throw that site out? Yeah, absolutely, man. If you guys want to join our challenge, we have one coming up soon. It's actually you can go to richfromanywhere.com forward slash G-Y-L-C. All right. So if you're looking to to get access to our challenge, which is called the Grow Your List Challenge, you can go to richfromanywhere.com forward slash challenge and that'll give you access to our challenge.

And we definitely want to be working with each and every one of y'all because like he said, we've seen some amazing transformations. Well, thank you all. This is the first time that I've had two Stevens on. This is also the first time where all three of us are wearing a hat because I normally never wear hats, but you guys, I love the impact business plus impact equals legacy. And thank you for all that you're doing for business owners and entrepreneurs and people that want to get in the game. I appreciate that.

So I hope they check out the next challenge. And thank you both for joining me today on Founders Story. We appreciate you, man. Thank you so much. Thank you for tuning in to Founders Story. Keep exploring, keep dreaming, and join us next time for more inspiring entrepreneurial journeys.