Kavit: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Interviewer: Kavit is a creator of Automated Business System, where he helps experts leverage their time, knowledge, and skill to create online, thriving, profitable, and scalable businesses. Can you take a minute, fill in some gaps from that intro and give us a little glimpse of your personal life?

Kavit: I’m a musician. I play what is known as a tabla. It’s a North Indian drum. I’ve played that for as long as I remember. I’ve been fortunate to have an interesting music career, played with lots of different artists. My interest has always been in playing Asian-Indian music with Western music. Pop, Jazz, R&B, Hip Hop. It’s been a pretty interesting ride.

Then, that led me into launching Insider Music Business, which really was about helping musicians learn how to get more gigs, sell more music get more exposure. Ultimately became my first experience in the online business world, launching, if you’d like, a collection of products that was basically educational and helping people to improve their music careers. That’s really where I personally learned the art of marketing ultimation and how to design costumer journeys that are exciting enough to get people to buy. That brings me to where I am today.

I live in London – born in London also, although I lived a lot of my life in Lagos, Nigeria before coming back to London. In Lagos, Nigeria, I went to an American school, which is why I have an American accent. Everything is a bit mixed up and I’m trying to figure out where I’m from.

Interviewer: Well, Fire Nation, if you’re recognizing Kavit’s American accent, it’s because he was on Episode 1,015 of EO Fire. Definitely if you have a change, go back, check that out because we talked about his journey, his worst moments, one of his greatest “a-ha!” moments. I don’t remember if I told this, Kavit, on our last episode, but did you know that I was in a Bollywood movie?

Kavit: No, I never knew that.

Interviewer: Well, there you go. I never brought it up. Surprise! But yeah, I traveled the entire continent of India back in 2007 for four months. One of my stops was Mumbai and I got picked up to be a little extra in a movie called Yuvvraaj, which was a lot of fun.

Kavit: Sounds exciting. I’m going to have to look it up. I’m actually flying this evening right now to Mumbai. Maybe they’ll have it on the flight.

Interviewer: That would be awesome. Katrina Kaif and Salman Khan are in it. It’s the first and last time I ever wore make-up, and they put it on me, so that’s my only excuse. That was fun. So, Kavit, we’re going to be focusing today on talking about funnels, we’ll be talking a little bit about empathy, we’ll be talking about building an automated business system because everybody loves the idea of passive income, of monthly recurring revenue, of all these things. We’re going to kind of unpack some of the myths and some of the realities of that world. Before we even dive into that, Kavit, let’s talk really quick about what you consider your area of expertise. Like, what are you an expert in? Break it down for us.

Kavit: Yeah, I think there are a lot of people that do amazing work. They know what they’re doing, they’re great at their craft, but what they’re not so good at is figuring out who they’re supposed to reach and what kind of impact they’re supposed to make. How do they take what it is that they’re really good at, magnify that message, figure it out, clear it up, and then package it in a way that can reach a lot more people, which ultimately will have a bigger impact on the world? My job is to do that.

That’s what really makes me come alive every morning thinking about new people, new ideas, what they’re working on, and just saying to them, “How do you get that out there to the world. How do you define a process that allows more people to–” you grab more attention, you have more attractiveness, and therefore you take more people on a journey that really allows you to reach more people and have more impact with what it is that you’re doing.

Interviewer: This used to be a consistent mistake that entrepreneurs are making over and over again that you’re just seeing, that you’re just like, “Ugh, I just wish that entrepreneurs knew this because it would make their lives so much better. Make their businesses so much more successful. Make their revenue so much easier to come by.” What’s that one thing you keep seeing that’s making a mistake on over and over again?

Kavit: I think it boils down to something really big, which is that entrepreneurship; I don’t really believe is for everybody. I think it’s hard work, it’s not easy. There is a rich life that comes with it, I guess. There is a glamorousness that comes with it, but that’s like the 10 percent that you’ll see of entrepreneurs and 90 percent of it is actually tough work that is getting your head down, getting the stuff done, getting the stuff marketed, getting the stuff built, sharing what it is that you know. It’s not always fast cars, big houses and all that kind of stuff, which is the picture that’s sometimes painted and attractive.

But what I find really interesting about that, however, is that in order for you to be that persistent, dedicated entrepreneur, you need to have commitment, and commitment means in every shape of the work, in the product that you create, are you showing commitment throughout? Is the quality remaining the same? Is the delivery remaining the same? Are you committed to putting out content on social media, for example, or on the podcast or on blogs or whatever it is that you’re doing fair marketed? Are you being consistent and committed to that process throughout?

I think a lot of entrepreneurs seem to get caught up in the idea of trying so many different new things and then never finding one, two, three, four, five things that they’re really good at, double downing into that strength, and then staying committed with it. If only that area was solved, I think it would make a huge amount of difference to the kind of results that people are seeing.

Interviewer: One thing that Gary Vaynerchuk says that I’ve definitely been resonating with lately is hey, the 84th employee on Facebook is going to be more financially successful than every single entrepreneur that’s going to launch their business in the next 10 years, because you know what? Sometimes it’s okay to be number two, to be number 10, to be number 100. You don’t have to number one, solo, uno, that unemployable solopreneur. You can be if it’s in your DNA, if it’s in your blood, but you don’t have to be.

There are other paths to take that can still maybe give you that fix, because I’m sure that 84th employee at Facebook still feels like an entrepreneur and they’re still doing some really cool things, but they’re not at the top of that totem pole. Now, I get it, Kavit, consistency, quality, commitments, that’s all absolute necessities for success with entrepreneurship, but let’s get one unique tip, tool, or tactic that you’ve seen entrepreneurs apply or that you think that we should be applying. Let’s kind of get granular here.

Kavit: Yeah, sure. I think the first thing has to be the obvious thing, which is that most entrepreneurs don’t actually know who they’re targeting their work to. I don’t mean that in a broad sense, because everybody knows in a broad sense who they’re essentially trying to sell to, but there’s something to be said about being specific and super-niche with the different sectors of a targeted audience.

For example. I used to sell a course called Magnetic Marketing for Musicians, which is essentially a course that showed musicians how to market themselves, get more exposure, get more gigs, etc. I would sell that to musicians, but musicians is just so broad that if I sell that program to musicians, for example, I would get some sales here and there, but it really wouldn’t just be a hook into any of these people. It just wouldn’t really resonate with it and stick with it enough, unless I turned it around, which I did to Magnetic Marketing for guitarists and drummers and pianists, and separate the product marketing strand out.

It doesn’t mean I have to have different product, by the way. It just means that when I’m speaking to a specific group of people, I’m speaking to them in a way that they will really understand, because at the end of the day, as rightly as you said – Gary Vaynerchuk, who I was very fortunate that we were sharing the stage in London in May of this year, 2017. He spoke very clearly about that idea of attention and the fact that everything is about grabbing and getting attention. The only way you can do that is you’re speaking the language of that person, which I guess leads on to the idea of empathy, which you mentioned at the beginning.

Interviewer: So, I love all of this, and one thing that I was excited to chat with you about today, Kavit, was the sales funnel and the business success that you’ve been able to achieve with some of your clients, because I really love the story. I really love the case studies that we can really chat about because, Fire Nation, if you can’t relate specifically with one of these case studies or stories or successes that we’ve been talking about because it’s not in your industry, well guess what? That can be applied to your industry.

Sometimes that’s even a better opportunity because if you’re just hearing what the people in your own industry are doing and you’re just trying to replicate that, well, you are kind of in a red ocean. I love when people apply strategies from different niches, different industries, to what they’re doing, getting that nice little blue ocean opportunity, being first market to have that landgrab.

Kavit: I think that’s absolutely spot-on, because one of the first books I’ve ever read on my business journey was a book by Jay Abraham. It was called Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got. In there, one of the really interesting ideas that he talks about was the idea of find industries that are doing spectacular work, in any specific area, and then take those ideas and inject them into your own industry. Because if they’re working in one industry, but you’re not seeing them in your industry, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to work in your own industry. It could be a new way, a new energy, a new injection, a new insight, a fresh burst of energy that you bring in to your industry that could be the thing that you need to catapult what it is what you’re doing.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about that. What’s some of the success that your clients have had that you think might be kind of cool to share with Fire Nation?

Kavit: Sure. I mean, I’ve worked with all kinds of – I would call them experts, but essentially, they could be conscious consultants, therapists, speakers, people that have a body of knowledge or a style of work they do that helps somebody reach a transformation or result. One of our case studies that I like to share when I present is a lady called Doctor Julie Coffey. She’s a medical doctor. She has been a family doctor for many, many years. She struggles with the idea of, “If only I understood their body or their weight or their health, they could lose a lot of weight and feel a lot better.”

She created a course online packaging her knowledge, sharing with participants essentially the ideas around understanding your body, your diet, and nutrition. This is an idea I’m sharing here because I think it could be applied to any kind of medical practitioner or fitness trainer or personal trainer, and this is kind of relatable, that everyone has their own style and way of fixing and dealing with things. There is a unique aspect to it, although of course, to lose weight you have to look at diet and nutrition and exercise no matter what, as well as the mental state. She created this course that’s 12 weeks long. She called it Uber Slim.

We built together a sales funnel which included a webinar, a report, a checklist that people would download through Facebook, advertising, which is how she would be fill out her lead. She wrote her weekly blog. She writes a weekly newsletter. She sends people to a sales letter where they start to engage with her and find out what it is that the course is about before they go ahead and purchase. The course sells for I think $99 right now. Then they go into the members’ area and they drift there and receive the material.

Essentially, most of that process is completely automated once it’s set up. All she needs to do and all she needs to work on is bringing in traffic, whether it’s advertising, whether it’s appearing on a lot of other people’s podcasts, whether it’s guest blogging, whether it’s PR. Just yesterday, she sent me an email saying she’s not being filmed for a TV show. All of these things bring in traction and bring in leads. Then of course, there’s a whole amount of work that’s to be done with engaging with that audience, which I think is very crucial and a lot of people miss out, because it’s in that engaging that you turn a lot of visitors you have called into customers that are happy and raving fans.

Interviewer: One thing that I love, Fire Nation, is that once you’ve dialed in your funnel, all you need to do is just figure out how to get good quality traffic to the top of that funnel, and then let your funnel do its work. We’ll just nail those steps that come out to whatever that might be at the end, that $99 course in this example, or for me, podcast is paradise. Whatever that might be, hiding people into the top of that funnel, good qualified leads. Maybe it is through that pay traffic, maybe it is through other types of content marketing, like social media, maybe it is through a podcast or TV shows.

All these different opportunities, but the key is, have a dialed-in funnel, and then you figure out the traffic part, because that just comes on to dollars and cents because now you know, “Hey, if I’m spending $5 on a lead,” per lead that converts to $99 course, I can have all day long.” Now, Kavit, let’s talk pretty briefly, but I’m curious about this, what is the role of empathy in business?

Kavit: I think it’s really important to touch on that, because most people will design sales funnels without even thinking very deeply about their audience.

The things is, the person you’re trying to convert, if you can’t really understand as much as you can about them, about their state of being, about their well-being, about what matters to them, about the people that matter to them, about the places they go, the things they read, the ideas they’re interested in, if you don’t really figure out who those people are and what matters to them, how in the world are you going to be able increase your conversions or take people on a shorter sales journey or decrease the amount of time that it takes to convince or share or convert or attract somebody to become a costumer.

Empathy, I think is really important. I think it matters more in business now than it’s ever mattered before. The only way to build a huge following on social media – it’s easy to get up to several million followers on social media, I think, because you can pay for that, but it’s not easy for them to consistently read your messages, watch your videos, connect with you on Instagram. It’s not easy enough for them to regularly do that. The only way to get them to regularly do that is if you understand who they are and therefore share about yourself and about the things that you’re doing for them, as opposed to always being, “What’s in it for me?

Interviewer: Empathy, Fire Nation, it’s real, and if you think value bombs have been dropped so far, just wait until after we get back from thanking our sponsors. So, Kavit, we’re back, and I’m kind of curious about this, because for me, I’ve been pushing funnels for a long time. I’ve seen it in my business. I actually love the entire phrase “Your business is your funnel.” I know that my revenues started going through the roof as soon as I started having funnels that converted. But I’m curious, from someone like yourself who’s dedicated his life and his business to this, how do you define that word, funnel?

Kavit: Yeah, a very, very cool question. I think that the funnel really is about – of course there’s the whole idea of mechanics that surrounds it, like what should be. A lot of people will labor over it. “Should I have this link magnet? Should I have that? Should I be selling a product like this?” We have answers for all of those kind of things, but I think those are all mechanics. I think the funnel really fundamentally comes down to your customer, your person that you’re trying to sell to, is in a specific place right now. It could be a painful place, it could be a happy place, whatever it is, you got to define where they’re at right now.

And then, the end of part of the funnel is an experience where they are achieving the things they want to achieve, feeling the way that they want to achieve, being the person they want to be, whatever it is that you’re selling to them, you’re taking them from an unlearned state of something to a learned state of something else. The funnel is basically, “How do I humanely take that person by understanding who they are, knowing who they are, feeling who they are, and just getting them to trust me that I can take them on the journey on the other end?”

That really is the whole point of a funnel: to get somebody to really, deeply connect with you so that you can be a partner in the journey. The mechanics and the other bits that we talked about are all the stuff that can help you achieve that.

Interviewer: So, you said a key word there, journey, which I’m going to move into in a second, but first off, Fire Nation, Kavit just shared, “A funnel is where they are right now. That’s where they start. They’re unlearned, and you’re taking them to that learned state. That’s where they’re going to be moving through, that process, that funnel.”

Now, for me, Kavit, a phrase that I love when it comes to funnels, and I would love your feedback on this, because I’m always evolving my phrase and I’m trying to learn more, is, “A funnel, in a sense, is the journey that you take your lead on–” your costumer, your client, your prospect, on. “It’s the journey that you’re taking a person on from the moment that they engage your company, until that moment where they’re accomplishing or achieving what you wanted them to do at that endpoint.” How can we kind of improve upon that? What are your thoughts on that phrase?

Kavit: There are a couple of things to consider. The first one is that it’s got to be as easy as possible for you to allow someone to enter the journey, whatever the journey is, but somebody has to – sometimes we make it so difficult for people to just want to engage with us. Part of that is, you could take that all the way back to just encountering you on social media and making sure it’s easy enough for them to follow you as a friend, to follow you on Twitter, to follow you on Instagram, to subscribe to your YouTube, and engage with them on a constant basis. It could be, “How do we make that as simple as possible?”

People make videos these days and forget to say at the end of the videos to subscribe to the YouTube channel. Nobody’s going to do something if you don’t tell them to do it. I think it’s really important that we start to simplify what we want them to do and make it really easy to begin that journey. Sometimes people give away video series, webinars, and more complicated pieces of items as the often, as the initial engagement root via an email list. I think it should be as simple as a checklist. A one or two-page checklist that is attractive, show me on what I am missing, that shows me what the end goal is, etc., that’s easy enough for me to opt-in and consume, not just opt-in, but opt-in and consume.

I think as long as we’re fixing that, we’re going to see a huge influx of people into the journey, and then it’s really a case of what I think that work really means, which is about engaging and nurturing and taking people on a journey or on a pathway or on a walkway, as it were, that leads them where they want to go to. That means regularly, consistently keeping in touch with them and sharing stuff that impacts them, as opposed to just sharing emails with the purpose of you getting the sales and the money that you want.

Interviewer: Take us home, Kavit. Let’s talk about how to build an automated business system.

Kavit: The process first starts with understanding what your area of expertise is, absolutely. Then, the process moves on into looking specifically at what sets you apart. What is it that sets you apart as a fitness trainer, for example, to all the fitness trainers? What is it that sets you apart as a business coach with all the other business coaches? This is a really difficult one for most people to get to grips with. They feel like – most people end up saying in a call with us the exact same things that the other business coaches said. “I’ve had this many years of experience. I have worked with these many types of clients. I’ve had this much experience in my business careers.”

But apart from those results, or those tangibles, there are tons of intangibles that make you unique. That is why people will buy you. People buy you, of course. They don’t buy the service, they don’t buy the coaching, they don’t buy the events or the workshops. They buy specifically who you are, and they may trust you enough to do that. That’s really important to nail down, before you then jump into identifying where they are right now, your prospective clients, in terms of their mindset, in terms of their beliefs, in terms of their values, in terms of the things that matter to them.

Where are they when they experience the result? What would they be feeling at that point? What would they be believing, thinking, doing, experiencing at that point. If you can map that journey out, then you’re on your way of mapping out what the product is that you’re going to sell, what the program is that you’re going to sell, and then it’s a case of working backwards and identifying what is the best sales that does four things.

1.) Lead generation. What do we do to get people to come to us? 2.) Lead capture. What is it that we need to be offering to open the doors, open the gateways, to allow the leads to begin to engage with us. 3.) Lead nurturing. How are best going to engage with them on a consistent basis? Not just their email, but what else are we going to do? What else are we going to create? What else are we going to share? How are we going to share a value that overcomes objections that they may have to the sale? 4.) What are the elements that we’re going to do for lead conversion to allow that person to move from being a subscriber or reader or viewer or watcher or whatever it is to a costumer?

I think these are the four critical areas that the sales final will then get designed once you through that initial process.

Interviewer: Lead generation, lead capture, lead nurturer, lead conversion. Fire Nation, go through these four steps and make sure that your funnel is tightly sealed with all of them. Now, Kavit, let’s end on Fire Brother by giving us a parting piece of guidance, the best way that we can connect with you, and then we’ll say goodbye.

Kavit: I think that the most inspiring people that I’ve ever met out the people that have found an idea that has really resonated with them, and then run with it. What I would say is – and I try to emulate this as much in my life, because when I go and find inspiring people that do things for me in other ways that people haven’t, then I look for things about how they work and how they think. The only thing I would say at this point is if there’s something that has resonated with you, whatever it is, don’t take time pondering it. Don’t take time overthinking it. Just run with it. Take the leap, make the mistakes, and use the learnings that you get to move things forward in your life.

My website is www.insiderinternetsuccess.com. We offer a free, 30-minute strategy section to talk with people specifically about their businesses and to see whether we can help them map out sales funnels. Of course, there’s no obligation to purchase anything. It’s an invite to see what we do, and if there’s some interest, of course we’re happy to have a chat about that. Insiderinternetsuccess.com. Of course, you can find me on the social media bandwagon on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, on YouTube, where I produce a documentary every week about the way that I work.

Interviewer: Fire Nation, you’re the average of the five people you spend most time with, you’re hanging out with KH and JLD today. So, keep up the heat and head over to eofire.com. Just type Kavit, that’s K-A-V-I-T in the search bar. Not just this episode, but episode 1,015 will pop right up. You can listen to both. They’re both very enjoyable, value-packed bomb-type episodes. These are the best shows in the biz. All the timestamps, all the links are all going to be right there for you, but of course, go to insiderinternetsuccess.com. That’s a direct way to get to all of Kavit’s genius. Now, Kavit, I want to thank you for sharing your journey to Fire Nation today. For that, brother, we salute you and we’ll catch you on the flipside.