Will Swayne is the Managing Director of Marketing-Results.com.au. This role involves helping clients make more out of the Internet by leveraging the sales and lead generation results of their business websites.
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Resource Mentioned:
- Your Big Idea: Successful Entrepreneurs have One Big Idea. Follow JLD’s FREE training & you’ll discover Your Big Idea in less than an hour!
Success Quote
- “I’m constantly surprised by how stupid I was 2 weeks ago.” – Allan Wise
Business Failure
- Will shares with us a failure from above, and a failure at the ground level. Both speak volumes.
Entrepreneurial AHA Moment
- Will’s AHA moment is an incredible insight for anybody who is in sales… and we are ALL in sales.
Current Business
- Will has figured out how to spend his time in the areas that result in the most $$. Find out where those areas are and apply them to your business!
Small Business Resource
- Trello.com: Organize anything, together.
Best Business Book
- Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got by Jay Abraham
Interview Links
Killer Resources!
1) The Common Path to Uncommon Success: JLD’s 1st traditionally published book! Over 3000 interviews with the world’s most successful Entrepreneurs compiled into a 17-step roadmap to financial freedom and fulfillment!
2) Free Podcast Course: Learn from JLD how to create and launch your podcast!
3) Podcasters’ Paradise: The #1 podcasting community in the world!
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Full Transcript
John Dumas: Hire Fire Nation and thank you for joining me for another episode of EntrepreneurOnFire.com, your daily dose of inspiration. If you enjoy this free podcast, please show your support by leaving a rating and review here at iTunes. I will make sure to give you a shout out on an upcoming showing to thank you!
John Lee Dumas: Okay. Let’s get started. I am simply elated to introduce my guest today, Will Swayne. Will, are you prepared to ignite?
Will Swayne: I am, John.
John Lee Dumas: Wonderful! Will’s current role is the Managing Director of marketing-results.com.au. This role involves helping clients make more out of the Internet by leveraging sales and lead generation results of their business websites.
Will, I’ve given Fire Nation a little overview about what you do, but why don’t you just take it from here and tell us who you are and a little more about what you do?
Will Swayne: Sure, John. Well, as you kindly mentioned, one of the things that I do is I’m the founder of Marketing Results, which is an online marketing agency based in Australia, and we really specialize in online lead generation and helping out clients attract their ideal customers [Unintelligible] and not just attracting one or two, but attracting a steady flow of ideal leads and clients to basically power their business. That’s sort of one-half of what I do. The other half is I operate what I call a practice, and I’ll talk about the distinction between a practice and a business later on, but basically that’s my own consulting practice where I consult on web strategy conversion, profit optimization on more of an individual basis kind of outside of the structure of the business.
John Lee Dumas: Awesome! Well, I really do look forward to delving into that. But before we do, let’s transition to the first topic that we have for today, which is your favorite success quote. At EntrepreneurOnFire, we like to get every show off and rolling with our guest’s favorite success quote to kind of get the listeners motivated for the content that you have for us today. So Will, what do you have?
Will Swayne: Okay. Well, I thought about it, and when I think of a success quote, I think of something that’s a bit heavy. So there was a quote that I really like that is “I’m constantly surprised by how stupid I was two weeks ago.” This is a favorite quote of a consultant by the name of Ellen Weiss. But for me, the reason why I call this a success quote I guess is that it’s not so heavy. It’s not one of these kind of never, never give up type quotes, but this says to me that success can be a bit of a game. It’s light-hearted and everything is a test. Everything is in the sense of a market test or a business test. Everything’s a test and you’re constantly improving, and every time, don’t get too attached to the present and your current way of doing things because in two weeks’ time you’ll probably realize how stupid certain things were and you’ll come up with a better way. So for me, this is about constant never ending improvement.
John Lee Dumas: I really love that quote because that’s so applicable to me. I mean, as I’m growing EntrepreneurOnFire, I’m constantly frustrated by the challenges that I’m coming across. And then you’re right, two or three weeks later, I look back at those frustrations that I was having and now it’s just so fluid and I feel like almost an expert in certain areas that I used to be clueless in. So I really need to start having that mentality that when I get upset, when I get frustrated, that I’m just going to realize, hey, this is all a learning process. It’s part of being an entrepreneur. And two weeks from now, I’ll probably look back and laugh at myself, but at the same time, realize that right now, in the future two weeks I may even be more knowledgeable than I currently am.
Will Swayne: Absolutely.
John Lee Dumas: So take us to the ground level here, Will, and give us an example of where you can actually show us where you’ve applied this quote to your life.
Will Swayne: I knew certain things about direct marketing and about data analysis and about maybe Internet marketing a little bit, but when I started up Marketing Results, I didn’t really have any experience at getting clients. So I sort of had these skills that I was expecting to apply somehow, but we didn’t really have clients ourselves. And this was before we kind of – it was a general direct marketing or a small business marketing consultancy, if you like, in those days and we didn’t quite have the same focus as we do now. Yes, and I worked out that even though I had these skills, I had the marketing consulting skills or some skills, but I didn’t actually have any skills at getting marketing consulting clients. So that was a realization that I realized I needed to solve pretty quick. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be a marketing consultant anymore. I’d be back in a job.
So how did I overcome this? Well, I basically sort of reached the stage where like things were becoming more and more serious because I had a sort of sporadic work, but it was really [like quality] and it was not the sort of stuff I wanted to do and it was low alley rate or low return, and the money started drying up basically so the need became more and more urgent. I remember one day, I was doing some searching online and came across a product called the Coaches and Consultants Marketing Bootcamp, which was produced by a guy called David Frey, an American guy. He actually had a really superb [Unintelligible] himself, but it was a fairly neat kit of stuff about kind of how to get clients for coaches and consultants. It was $300 or something like that, which was not an insignificant amount to spend at the time, unless I was going to get results from it. But I thought it looked good. I did actually purchase that and I started applying the ideas and it was actually a really, really good product. Even today, I think it’s a good product. That helped me to establish more of a position in the market and start to attract more people who potentially had a need for the skills that I could bring to the table, and then that sort of started to kick things along.
So the lesson here for me was basically like you’ve got to get out of your comfort zone. You’ve got to admit that you don’t know all the answers and seek targeted help from real experts and people that have trodden the path that you wish to tread. Otherwise, you’re potentially in trouble. I don’t think enough people seek the right help from the right people soon enough.
John Lee Dumas: That’s just a great lesson to pull from that, and we’ll use that to transition to our next topic, which is failure, which are challenges, which are obstacles that need to be overcome because as an entrepreneur, we all have journeys, and this is about your journey as an entrepreneur. So Will, take us back to a point where you faced an obstacle or you had a challenge that you really had to overcome or to pivot. Take us back to that point and really share with us how you faced this challenge.
Will Swayne: I think as you progress in business, you go from plateau to plateau. One challenge could sort of hold you back for quite a while. I mean you jump to the next plateau. I think a recent challenge that I think is recently instructive is I’ve got a couple of things I do. As I mentioned, I’ve got the Will Swayne practice, which is really one-on-one consulting, it’s mastermind groups, it’s information product sales. And then there’s the business, which is actually managing pay per click accounts of SEO programs or conversion optimization for clients on an ongoing basis. I sort of found myself more and more drawn, more interested in the practice side and the consulting side, but at the same time, the business is growing and adding more people. That sort of thing was really, really consuming my time on the business side and I found that I was putting more and more work into the business with less and less results really, and it wasn’t taking me in the direction that I wanted to go and it was sort of yes, it’s good. It’s a good income. No sort of complaints on the financial front. But it really felt like a really laborious job with a lot of hours and a sort of real high intensity stuff.
John Lee Dumas: Now were you scaling at any point during this process or was this really a situation where you were trading your time for money?
Will Swayne: There was a little bit of growth going on. Well, actually, to answer your time for money question, now this is completely time for money. This is very much time for money. Except for the fact that I have a team and other people’s time comes in too to leverage that. The practice side is more scalable for a number of reasons.
John Lee Dumas: So what was this failure that you just came across and faced?
Will Swayne: Well, the failure I think was that I was putting more and more time into the business. The team was growing a little bit, the revenue was growing a little bit, but the expenses were growing exponentially faster. So I was doing more and more work for less and less reward and I didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.
John Lee Dumas: Yes. That’s not a sustainable model.
Will Swayne: No. It was actually at the same time taking me away from what I did see was exciting and profitable, which was the consulting and the mastermind groups and the information products. So it was a bit of a sandwich effect, I suppose, and eventually I thought I definitely wasn’t in a space where I would define it as successful because I was going backwards in a lot of areas to where I want to go, which is not only financial success, but time [success], location freedom and all those other things, and just happiness and engagement with the work I’m doing.
John Lee Dumas: So your success is growing a little bit, your revenue is growing a little bit, but your expenses and your cost to run your business is growing a lot. What pivot or change did you make to overcome this?
Will Swayne: For me, it was a couple of things. I mean, one was to let go of the kind of exit number in my head or an equity-building plan for the agency, for the business, because I think I’ve run the business – when I sort of first started, I thought, oh okay, I’ll boot up Marketing Results and run it for a bit and then I’ll sell it and get a big bunch. It’s only an agency. It’s hardly the next Instagram. But I’ll get some equity and maybe move on to the next project and stuff like that. That was really holding me back I think because I was investing a lot of stuff upfront in exchange for a potential future payoff, and that potential future payoff seemed more and more distant because of the dynamics of the agency sort of business. It’s very people intense, etcetera, etcetera.
So one thing I did was to sort of let go of that and say, “Look, it’s not about an exit number. It’s also about income on the way through and total returns from a financial perspective.” But from a lifestyle perspective, it’s also like how happy and engaged they are and I am in the job in the day-to-day and who I’m working with. So I let go of that for one thing, for the practical sense. We actually basically created separate business units in the books so I’d have my practice income in one column and some expenses like travel attributable to the practice, and then I have the business income in the other column. So I basically mentally separated them, and then went back to the team, the business team, and said, “Look, from now on, the revenue is really the business revenue on the management, and that’s the thing I’d like you guys to drive. And the practice or the consulting I’m doing separately can fit in vice versa, but they’re kind of two different separate business units right now.” That’s been really a positive. It sounds like a small shift perhaps, but it’s freed up a bit of mental RAM and a bit of energy to continue to innovate and grow.
John Lee Dumas: No, it seems like it was a definite pivot, Will, and that’s the thing about pivots, is that even if they are small at the beginning, the divergents just increases over time and they can just truly take your company in a completely different direction over the course of months or years. So even small pivots first can really magnify out. So I definitely see where you’re going. Let’s use that to transition to the next topic, which is the other end of the spectrum. You obviously had that failure where you saw your business was kind of tail spinning into a situation where your costs were shortly going to be larger than your revenue was, and you pivoted and you avoided that. You had that little aha moment that you were able to just say, “Let’s go in this direction.” So take us to another time back in your journey where you had this really big light bulb that just came on. The clouds parted, the sun was shining and you said, “Wow! This is an aha moment that I think could really resonate with my clients, with the people that I deal with.” Do you have one of those?
Will Swayne: It was 2003, 2004, 2005 and we were a bit of a general small business marketing consultancy, but we did a couple of Google AdWords campaigns and we did some web stuff, and that was really, really successful. It was really successful, and also, we found that the web was something we could control quite well. So we’ve been quite engaged thus. We could build a website, get some traffic running and actually get some leads and results, but if I went in and consulted with them or write them a direct mail piece or something, then there were a number of ways they could muck it up. That maybe they didn’t send the direct mail piece or they couldn’t put it in the envelope or whatever, or they didn’t have a list. So we got into the web for that control reason partly because we could get results and it was in our control and the client could just pay us the money and get the results. But the problem with marketing models – and it’s a bit different now – but at the time, most web agencies were actually project houses. So they were doing website designs and projects. The problem with that environment is twofold. One, you always have to be chasing the next project. So you chase the project and then you’ve got a project, and then you have to switch to delivery. When you switch to delivery, you typically stop market. Then you finish the project. You get paid and you go on with your marketing. So it was very lumpy, it was very stop-start. That was one problem.
The other problem from the client perspective was that if you do a website – again, it might seem common knowledge now, but in those days, there was a little sense of if you built it, they will come. Having an online presence was all about building a website, doing a project, getting it down, and then, oh gee, we can relax now. But what we increasingly found is that that was really only step one of a 10,000 step journey, and being able to manage, proactively optimize, proactively improve was a real source of value. So the aha moment I suppose was to switch to a project model to an ongoing retainer model whereby instead of them paying one amount for a project, they would pay one amount for a project, and then X dollars per month for us to continue to proactively push and manage their online presence. So the aha moment I think that’s applicable to people listening is the idea of continuity income. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, I always believe there has to be a continuity income stream so that clients are paying you X dollars per month in order to continue to avail themselves of your services. It’s not just a transactional per product or per service type of deal.
John Lee Dumas: Absolutely. That recurring model of income is so important and can really just sustain a business and make you project out to the future because then you can actually plan for the future when you know what you’re going to have at least as a base of financials coming in.
Will Swayne: Yes. I think the recurring model these days is sort of very well known, certainly in tech circles and in the Internet circles – email systems and shopping carts and all sorts of things now are X dollars per month. But I think the practice applies equally to offline bricks and mortar style businesses or traditional services businesses. So if you’re a carwash or an accountant or a mechanic or virtually anything, I believe there’s scope for continuity services.
John Lee Dumas: Absolutely. Will, have you had an I’ve made it moment yet?
Will Swayne: I try to focus on projects and goals and the achievement of those, but also, when I do achieve them, there’s always the next thing. So I kind of equate saying I’ve made it with maybe stagnation, but at the same time, there’s potentially a moment where someone says, they get to a space where they sort of go, “Look, I don’t need to prove myself anymore. I don’t need to be fearful. I can act out of strength and not weakness.” That kind of thing. So I think in a professional sense, I think I’ve reached that realization.
John Lee Dumas: Now I always have loved this question because it brings out such a variety of answers with entrepreneurs. Some entrepreneurs come right back and say, “Absolutely. I have an I’ve made it moment every single day when I wake up,” and then other entrepreneurs say, “Absolutely not. The day I have an I’ve made it moment is the day that I die.” I really believe that the good sweet spot is somewhere in the middle because you really need to be setting goals for yourself and really driving hard to achieve those goals, but once you reach that platform, that plateau that you’ve alluded to earlier, you really need to kind of step back, take a deep breath and appreciate the achievement that you’ve had up to that point because EntrepreneurOnFire is about the journey. Will, you’re an entrepreneur and you’re on a journey right now, and that’s all you have and that’s what we have and it’s just not about the destination. So I always stress to Fire Nation, to our listeners, enjoy the journey. You definitely want to have goals and you definitely want to celebrate those goals and their reach, and then it’s time to set that next lofty goal and drive towards it.
Will Swayne: Indeed.
John Lee Dumas: So Will, you’re rocking and rolling in your business right now. You have a lot of cool things going on. If you could just pull one thing out and share with Fire Nation one thing that’s exciting you about your business right now.
Will Swayne: Right now, the thing that’s exciting me most is doing more one-on-one consulting days with successful businesses that have a successful website whom I can really benefit, I can really help. So when I do strategy sessions with clients, at the end of the day, I usually [Unintelligible] and sort of conservatively estimate the value of the strategies and plans that we’d come up with during the time together. The typical client sort of says that they feel the day’s work between $200,000 and a million dollars in additional profit over the next 12 to 24 months. So that to me is very exciting and satisfying because I really feel I’m making a difference. So it really comes down to client selection, I suppose. It’s doing that process with the right people because I know that if it’s with the right people, I can really, really assist, and those people are normally companies that are already successful online, already profitable online, but want to be more so. Equally, I know that if it’s not the right fit, it’s probably not much of a point, but I guess it’s that sense of making a difference.
John Lee Dumas: Will, be as specific as you’re willing to be on this next question. You’ve just shared that you love working with successful companies and making a difference with them. Share with us a time or a situation where you have improved a successful company. Be specific. How have you improved their revenue, their income, their website? What have you done?
Will Swayne: Basically, it was a successful online business, an infomarketing business, sort of mid to high six figure income. We looked at what they were doing or I looked at what they were doing and they were doing a lot of things right, but they just had optimization opportunities. So we looked at a few things. There were lots of ideas, but I’ll just give you two or three. One of them was that they had a lot of opt-ins every day. They had like 75 opt-ins a day. But on the thank you page, they didn’t really have any offer. So we said let’s put an offer there and let’s come up with what that would look like. So eventually, they said yes or they did that, and now they make two sales a day off that page, which is 200 bucks a day. So it’s 70 grand that’s being made there just for that one thing that they weren’t doing before.
Another thing was to look at their processing strategy. Instead of sending people always to buy certain offers, certain products, let’s say $50, we would have a range of options. So the main sales there would be about Product A, but then at the bottom it would say well Product A is $50 or Product B is even better, and that’s sort of A plus something else and that’s $300. Then Product C is really awesome and that’s A plus B plus something else, and that’s $2,000. By putting in place these new products and strategies – they were actually just all in a recent launch – they were able to double revenue over what they would have done if they had just offered one, [perhaps one]. So those are a couple of examples I suppose.
John Lee Dumas: Those are some great examples and that’s the kind of stuff I love talking about and I love picking your brain at because that is such valuable information for any business because when it comes down to it, we’re all salesmen. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. You can be a doctor, a lawyer, an entrepreneur of any kind, we’re all in sales.
Will Swayne: It’s really easy to think, “Oh, but my business is different,” as Dan Kennedy likes to say. I did another [day] with a consultant who was selling sort of projects, if you like, for normally in the $10,000 to $25,000 range, and we came up with a new way of sort of presenting those projects and prices so that there were two options. The first option was $10,000 to $25,000 and then the second option was sort of $20,000 to $45,000. A deluxe option, if you like. So it was a totally different service. So he started doing that and presented six proposals, and three people said, “I think I’ll have the second option, thanks,” and I think two went ahead with the second option. So that basically created $10,000 to $15,000 of additional revenue, most of that profit per project simply by asking the question. If the question wasn’t asked, that wouldn’t have materialized.
John Lee Dumas: Absolutely. I just love that psychology that goes into what makes a person buy and the price anchoring and then the multiple options and the layers. There are some people that are just always going to go for the most expensive thing, and then there are other people that will really always feel comfortable with the middle price object no matter what, if there’s a higher or a lower. But if there’s just that middle price project by itself and there is nothing above or below it, then all of a sudden they’re not comfortable with it because that’s all there is. So it’s so interesting how people think and how you can really craft your offers to kind of hit every different dimension of a person.
Will Swayne: Absolutely. That’s been a breakthrough idea for me and they’re quite [Unintelligible].
John Lee Dumas: Oh, it’s great stuff. I could keep talking about this for a lot longer, but we’re going to have to move into my favorite part of the show, and that’s the Lightning Round. This is where I provide you with a series of questions and you come back with amazing and mind-blowing answers. Does that sound like a plan?
Will Swayne: Okay.
John Lee Dumas: What was the number one thing that was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?
Will Swayne: Look, I didn’t think it was anything in particular. It was probably a little bit of confidence, a little bit of maturity, a little bit of timing. I was employed for four years after [uni] in one company. That was overseas in Japan actually, and then I came back to Australia and I was just in a place where I wanted to give it a go to go online instead of getting a job, and I possibly didn’t have any sort of amazing kind of broadly – well, immediately applicable specialist skills to the Australian market as I had been working in a very niche field in Japan. So yes, just the confidence really to make it happen and have a little bit of financial backing to at least do the first six months, if you will, without having to worry about where the next meal is going to come from.
John Lee Dumas: Absolutely. The longer the runway that we can have as startup entrepreneurs, the better every time. What’s the best business advice that you ever received?
Will Swayne: Oh, that’s a really hard one. I think Dan Kennedy has a saying that the most dangerous number in business is the number one. I don’t know if you’ve heard that before, but basically what he’s meaning is if you only have one person or one process or one machine or one something, then that one person or lynchpin, that’s going to break. It’s going to leave, it’s going to resign, it’s going to fall sick, it’s going to malfunction, and then you’re going to be stuck. So the I guess corollary to that is to make sure that you’ve got more than one person or one process or one tool or one machine in play all the time and constantly be looking for bottlenecks and risk points and trying to solve them or clear them before they become an issue.
John Lee Dumas: Do you have an Internet resource that you can share with Fire Nation?
Will Swayne: Absolutely. Yes, I think a pretty cool resource that is a bit different is a thing called Trello.com. Trello.com is like an online pinboard, if you like. Some people call it Pinterest for guys. It’s basically a tool where you can kind of put up – yes, it’s a tool that’s really flexible. You should go and have a look at it. It’s free, it’s certainly free. If you need to manage projects and manage workflows and collaborate with other people in a really, really simple, intuitive way, that’s a lot simpler than Basecamp or any sort of more high powered tool. But yes, it’s worth checking out.
John Lee Dumas: Cool! Definitely, we’ll check it out. Have you heard of Asana?
Will Swayne: I have not heard of Asana.
John Lee Dumas: I was just given that as an Internet resource twice in the last two weeks, so I went and checked it out. It sounds very similar to Trello, so I’d like to try Trello to compare the two. I’d like you to try out Asana and let me know what you think about that.
Will Swayne: Okay. Yes, I’ll definitely do that.
John Lee Dumas: What’s the best business book that you’ve ever read?
Will Swayne: Oh, it’s so hard to pick just one because I do love reading, but look, I think it’s pretty hard to go wrong with “Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got” by Jay Abraham for the marketing and business growth perspective. It’s just really, really practical, substantive advice and strategies for growing a business.
John Lee Dumas: Awesome! Well, this is the 63rd interview that I’ve done and the first time anybody’s said Jay Abraham, which is shocking to me because I love that guy, but I’m glad he’s on the list.
Will Swayne: Yes.
John Lee Dumas: So this last question is my favorite, but it’s kind of a tricky one. So take your time, digest it, and then you can just come back at Fire Nation with an answer. Does that sound like a plan?
Will Swayne: Cool!
John Lee Dumas: If you woke up tomorrow morning and you were in a new world. It was identical to earth, but you knew nobody. You still had all of the experience and knowledge that you currently have right now. All of your shelter and food is taken care of, but you only have $500 in your pocket and a computer with Internet access. What would you do in the next seven days?
Will Swayne: That’s an interesting question. I guess given that the money is going to run out, my initial sort of thinking on this was to I guess spend the whole seven days almost in not medication as such, but in thinking and reflection and exploring. So basically exploring the new world, the new society for unmet needs, basically. I believe that there’s an unmet need that people really care enough about and there’s a business idea there. That would be if I had the luxury to do that. If I really needed to put food on the table, then I’d probably go and find someone and help them sell something or help them optimize some sort of commerce that they’re doing on a fee or percentage or profit basis.
John Lee Dumas: Find the pain.
Will Swayne: Yes.
John Lee Dumas: Love it.
Will Swayne: Not the pain. I mean, a lot of the times people sort of get into a business quickly. Then like six months down the track, they’re like, “Oh, it’s not really a good business.” I’d rather spend two months thinking about what business I’m going to get into. I mean get into it with more [Unintelligible] and more knowledge that it’s going to work.
John Lee Dumas: No, and that’s why I love this question, Will, because so many entrepreneurs that I talk to, obviously, they love what they’re doing on a lot of levels. That’s why they’re doing it. But at the same time, they are definitely delved into what they’re doing and not really open to other opportunities that they’re seeing on a day-to-day basis. So it’s a way to kind of share those things that other entrepreneurs have to kind of let pass by because they’re focused on what they’re currently doing and not able to tackle everything at once. It just can really help Fire Nation who find themselves with basically a clean slate.
Will Swayne: I really believe in focus. So you want to focus and not focusing can often be negative. Starting up lots of projects but not really developing on focusing on any one thing. However, when you do focus on – like when you have a baby. Like for me, it’s sort of the agency. It can be hard to change and innovate because you’re going, “Look, the revenue is coming in in this way right now, and if we move over to this new thing, then maybe it might not work, and then I’ve got all these payrolls and I’ve got all these costs and it’ll be terrible.” But sometimes, creating another vehicle – so another business, another website, an offshoot or something like that – gives you a little sandpit to try new things and innovate in a way that it’s easier to do than in an established entity. And then I found out a useful technique to try new things and get past those psychological blocks, I suppose, and if it really works, you can always incorporate it back into the main thing.
John Lee Dumas: And then it goes along with what Dan Kennedy was saying, which is you’re creating a multi-headed beast instead of just having one beast that you’re forced to rely on.
So Will, you’ve given us some great actionable advice this entire interview, and we’re all better for it. Give Fire Nation one parting piece of guidance, then give yourself a plug, and then we’ll say goodbye.
Will Swayne: In any industry, from a marketing perspective, you want to manipulate the supply and demand ratios in your favor. I did a case study the other day of an Italian hairdresser who charges $20,000 for a haircut. Now is the $20,000 haircut really hundreds of times better than a standard haircut on a high street or a mall? Probably not, but he’s managed to manipulate supply and demand in his favor. So I think one part of that is deal flow. It’s lead flow, it’s deal flow and it’s opportunity flow, and if you can create a strong opportunity flow into your business that’s like systematic and automated and predictable, then it gives you so much more freedom to price how you want, to choose your customers, to not work with people who you don’t want to work with or they don’t have the same values or whatever. That’s probably I guess a broad piece of advice.
In terms of a plug for Marketing Results, yes, particularly if you’re already advertising online and you’re probably spending at least $10,000 a month on online advertising like Google AdWords and things like this and/or you have a business that’s heavily web-based and has probably a couple hundred thousand profit a year or more, then I really think it would be valuable to get in touch and have a chat about your situation and whether or not I can potentially add value to your situation. If you’re a little bit smaller and you’re still growing, that’s absolutely fine too. If you go on to marketing-results.com.au, you’ll find our free e-course, which is “7 Steps to Doubling Your Website Leads.” It’s good practical stuff. Real case studies and examples. Not the usual fluff or regurgitated information that you get on most kinds of email lists. A lot of people have said that’s added some value to them, and if that could assist you as well, then please feel free.
John Lee Dumas: Awesome, Will. Well, we will link all these up in the show notes at EntrepreneurOnFire.com/63. So we will have the link to that website right there. Thank you again for your time. Fire Nation, we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.
