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Finding Your Niche: The Secret to Business Growth (Bootcamp PT. 3)
Chris Do reveals that massive business growth comes from a one-degree shift in your offering, not a 180-degree pivot.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · March 10, 2024
Your Breakthrough Is One Degree Away
Creatives and entrepreneurs often believe a major breakthrough requires a radical, 180-degree pivot. They look at their current business, see its limitations, and conclude the only solution is to burn it all down and start over with something entirely new.
This path requires too much effort, too much energy, and expertise they simply do not have. It presents a false choice between all or nothing.
But what if the success you want is not a revolution? What if it is merely an evolution? During a live business bootcamp, educator Chris Do challenged this all-or-nothing mindset with a powerful counter-narrative. “The success that you want is sometimes one degree different than what you're doing now,” he states.
The answer is not always a new client base or a new service. It is a small adjustment to a single variable: who you deliver for, how you deliver, or how you package the result. Before you run off to reinvent your entire business, you must first look at what you already do and find the one-degree shift that changes everything.
The Myth of the Glamorous Portfolio
For years, Do’s creative agency, Blind, operated at the high end of the production world, making commercials and music videos for global brands. But as the market waned and profitability shrank, he saw the writing on the wall. The business was on a downward trajectory.
The initial, obvious answer was to take their high-end skills and apply them to lower-value work like industrial videos. “That's the wrong answer,” Do cautions, describing it as taking a lucrative skill and doing it for clients who pay less and value it less. It was a race to the bottom.
The real answer came from a one-degree shift in clientele. His business coach posed a simple question: “Don't you just make really compelling images for people? Who else might need this?”
The insight was that businesses in completely different verticals needed the sophisticated design language Blind had mastered. The market with the biggest need and budget was commercial real estate. This insight, as Do explained, “is how we flipped a thousand-dollar job into a multi-million-dollar opportunity.”
They took the same core skillset and applied it to a new audience. It required learning a few new skills and a new industry language, but it was not a 180-degree pivot. This shift allowed them to bypass the traditional advertising agency model, becoming the agency themselves and capturing the value they once gave away.
But the story gets more specific. When Blind finally secured a relationship with a massive, $13 billion real estate development company, Do asked them why they were hired. It was not because of their portfolio of work for sexy, big-name brands like Audi or Xbox.
It was because of a project for a self-storage facility.
The client, who worked with world-class architecture firms like Gensler on billion-dollar buildings, told him directly. “If you can make self-storage facilities look good, you can make our A-class buildings amazing.”
That single, unglamorous case study was more relevant and powerful than all the flashy brand work combined. It was the closest thing to what the client was doing, and it proved Blind could make the mundane magnificent. They beat out every specialized real estate marketing company and commanded the highest price. Your most valuable case study is not always your most famous one; it is your most relevant one.
Find the Client's Problem, Not Your Solution
Most service providers are stuck because they sell a skill. They sell video production, graphic design, or copywriting. They are focused on the deliverable, but the client is focused on the problem.
In the workshop, a videographer named Jason detailed his struggle to sell his services to mid-sized tool and manufacturing companies. These companies, often with revenues of $15-20 million, were starting to see the value in content marketing, imitating larger competitors like Milwaukee and DeWalt. They had a “Made in America,” blue-collar ethos and wanted to grow their brand recognition.
The central question, as Do framed it, is simple: “Why do they need video?”
If you walked into that manufacturer’s office and brainstormed 20 ideas to grow their business, video might be one of them. But it probably would not be number one. “If you're not in that top category, they're not going to spend it on you,” Do explains. “That's the problem.” You are selling a line item under “other,” an expense to be minimized.
To escape this trap, you must stop selling video and start selling a business result. To do this, you have to divorce yourself from your past deliverables and live in the client’s world. What problem are they *really* trying to solve?
Do offered an innovative example by examining the strategy of Peak Design, a company making bags and accessories for creatives. Despite being an established, 10-year-old company, Peak Design launches new products through Kickstarter, a platform typically reserved for startups.
Why? They are not just testing the market; their products are often already manufactured. They are using it as a brilliant, self-funding marketing channel.
- They tap into Kickstarter’s built-in community of early adopters.
- They offer a discount to incentivize pre-orders, guaranteeing a successful launch.
- They generate massive buzz and gather customer data with zero marketing spend.
A videographer who understands this could approach a manufacturer not by offering to “make videos,” but by offering to design and execute a product launch strategy modeled on Peak Design. This connects the service directly to a measurable business outcome: a successful, profitable launch. This transforms the creative from a vendor into a strategic partner.
Navigating the Startup Maze
The principle of solving a specific, high-value problem applies universally, especially in the complex world of startups. Another workshop participant, Kzia, aimed to help female founders of fintech companies articulate their value proposition to secure Series A funding.
Her focus was on helping them achieve product-market fit and craft a compelling story for both customers and investors. It is a niche Do compared to the work of communications expert Sam Horn, a “pitch doctor” who helps entrepreneurs package their ideas.
The first hole poked in this avatar was a critical one: customers and investors are two completely different audiences with different needs. Serving both is like running two different businesses.
A more crucial distinction came from another attendee with deep experience in the startup world. He argued that targeting companies at the *seed* stage was a mistake.
“For series seed companies,” he explained, “paying customers and that's the main traction for the investors. That's why positioning and branding exercise doesn't really make sense that much.” At the seed stage, founders are laser-focused on customer acquisition and operate on their own beliefs about the market. They are not yet mature enough to see the value in paying for a positioning consultant.
The real opportunity, he argued, is at Series A. This is the stage where a company has found some traction and now needs to scale. The founder's capacity is stretched thin, and they finally have the capital and the mandate to hire outside experts for marketing and strategy. This is where a pitch and positioning expert becomes essential, not just a nice-to-have. This is a critical insight for anyone looking to serve the startup ecosystem, a topic further explored in this discussion with investor Simon Squibb.
To sharpen this focus, Do advised Kzia to immerse herself in that world. You cannot write to an audience you do not understand. He recommended specific, actionable steps:
- Join startup accelerators. Organizations like MassChallenge or Austin's Capital Factory offer opportunities to become an expert mentor, providing direct access to founders.
- Talk to Venture Capitalists (VCs). Many large VCs have in-house marketing experts to support their portfolio companies. Getting introduced to a VC can lead to a pipeline of work with their funded startups.
- Work for the best. Find the person doing exactly what you want to do at the highest level and work for them. Do pointed to Nancy Duarte, the “queen of presentation design,” whose firm employs over 100 people. Working for an industry leader like her, even for a short time, provides an unparalleled education in the craft, the clients, and the business itself. Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward.
The Art of the Small Yes: Closing Massive Deals
Once you find the right market, a new challenge emerges: navigating large, bureaucratic organizations to close high-value projects. An attendee named Will shared his frustration with a $2 million project stuck in a year-long approval process within a massive corporation.
When dealing with huge chains of command, it is unrealistic to expect access to the CEO. The key is to get as close as possible to the decision-maker or, more likely, the people who influence them. In this case, Will was dealing with the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), who had the ear of the CEO but was still getting gummed up in procurement.
Do’s solution is not to fight the bureaucracy, but to sidestep it. The strategy is to break the project down. This approach is known as chunking, or scaffolding from the bottom up.
The most powerful tool in this process is the discretionary budget. Every manager in a large corporation has a certain spending limit they can approve without needing higher-level sign-off. The first step is to find out that number. One can ask the marketing contact directly: “I'm curious if you have a discretionary budget that you're allowed to spend without needing additional approval.”
Speaking this language shows you understand their world and builds confidence. Do has learned from clients who told him, “Chris, you put in a budget for $84,000. If you put in for $79,000, I can approve it tomorrow.” This is not a negotiation ploy; it is a structural reality of corporate finance.
Once you know that number, say $80,000, you design the first step of the project to fit it. This could be a discovery phase, a strategic audit, or a small pilot. This initial project accomplishes two critical things:
- It gets the ball rolling. You move from talk to action and start delivering value.
- It triggers the sunk cost bias. Once a client has spent money and time with you, the psychological barrier to switching to a competitor becomes immense. The fear of starting over is a powerful motivator. They would rather continue spending with you, the known entity, than risk losing their initial investment on a new, unproven vendor.
By securing a small, easy “yes,” you pave the way for the much larger “yes” to follow. This is a foundational tactic for anyone navigating complex sales, a subject detailed in this deep dive on closing deals.
Systematize Your Genius: The Predictable Proven Process
Chunking a large project is not just a sales tactic; it is the foundation of a scalable business. The most successful service providers do not sell custom solutions every time. They sell a system.
When entrepreneurs are asked what they want most, the answer is almost always a predictable proven process. Demonstrating that you have one is the fastest way to build trust and reduce the friction of buying. The client is not guessing what comes next. They are buying into a system that has delivered results time and time again.
Do challenged the workshop attendees to define their own process in five steps. Why five? “Why not 17? Too many steps, too complicated,” he explains. “Why three? It's too simple.” Five is the magic number. It feels substantial enough to be thorough but simple enough to be understood. This structure is a core tenet of clear communication, as explored in this guide to effective speaking.
Using video production as an example, Do and the group mapped out a generic five-step framework:
- Step 1: The Plan. This is the blueprint. It includes the script and storyboards, establishing the overall vision and strategy before any execution begins.
- Step 2: Pre-Production. This phase adds detail to the plan. It involves casting, location scouting, and finalizing all the elements needed for the shoot.
- Step 3: Production. This is the shoot itself, the live-action phase where the crew is on set and cameras are rolling.
- Step 4: Post-Production. This includes everything that happens after the shoot: editing, animation, color grading, sound design, and music.
- Step 5: Distribution. This is the final and most critical step: getting the finished product seen by the right audience to achieve the business goal.
By mapping your service into a clear, phased process with defined dependencies, you create a predictable journey for the client. Any delay in one phase clearly impacts the next, tying their approvals directly to the project timeline and budget. This system transforms your service from an art into a science.
The Great Devaluation: Where Value Truly Lives (and Dies)
Defining your process is the first step. Understanding where value lies within that process is the second, and for most creatives, it is a painful realization.
Do posed a question to the room. If you had $10 to allocate across the five-step production process, where would you put the majority, the $5? After a moment, he took a vote. A few hands went up for Planning. Zero for Pre-Production. A significant number, seven, went up for Production. Zero for Post-Production. The overwhelming majority voted for the final step: Distribution.
The seven votes for Production were telling. “Chances are, everybody who raised their hand for production works in production,” Do observed. “It's because you're in love with your own sauce.”
This is where he introduced the Smile Curve, a concept developed by Stan Shih, the founder of computer giant Acer. The model maps the value-add of different stages in an industry's value chain. It looks like a smile: the highest points of value are at the very beginning (R&D, concept, branding) and the very end (marketing, sales, distribution). The lowest point, the bottom of the curve, is in the middle: manufacturing and assembly.
Production is a commodity. Do used the example of an iPod. Of a product that might cost hundreds of dollars, the Chinese factory that assembles it might make only cents. Apple, the company that owned the idea (the Plan) and the marketing machine (the Distribution), makes almost all the money.
“Everything in the middle dies,” Do declared. This is where AI is rapidly eating creative jobs. Text-to-video models and generative AI in Photoshop are automating production tasks, making the people who only “make the thing” increasingly obsolete.
The value, and the future-proof career, is in the thinking and the selling. The idea and the distribution of that idea. This is the brutal economic reality that most creatives, who fall in love with their craft, refuse to see. They pour all their energy into the least valuable part of the chain.
Quality is a Correlation, Not a Cause
This revelation sparked a debate. An attendee named Karina pushed back, arguing that quality is inextricably linked to results. “If your product isn't actually quality, then no amount of marketing” will save it, she argued, pointing to the Barbie movie as an example of a high-quality production that led to massive success.
Do immediately dismantled the argument. He asked her a simple question: would she bet that the theorem “quality equals results” would hold up to scientific scrutiny, or would it be full of holes?
“I know better than to bet for what I want,” she conceded.
This is the core bias. Creatives *want* quality to be the determining factor because it validates their craft and their effort. But reality is a different story. Do shared a personal anecdote about his son, who insisted that getting a Corgi would guarantee a million YouTube subscribers because every influencer he watched had one.
Do used it to teach his son a lesson. “I want to teach you a new word today, boy. There's something called correlation and causal.” Causal means A definitively causes B. Correlation means A and B sometimes appear together, but one does not necessarily cause the other.
Quality and success are a correlation, not a causal relationship. And you cannot build a business on a correlation.
The evidence is everywhere. Do pointed to TubeScience, a marketing firm famous for creating direct-response video ads that drive billions in sales. Their own team admits the videos are ugly. “They said, 'we're embarrassed to show you,'” Do recounted. TubeScience owns high-end RED cameras, but their best-performing ads are shot on iPhones. They often have to degrade the high-quality footage, adding camera shake and poor exposure to make it look less polished, because on social media, polished often feels fake.
Authenticity, not polish, drives results. Filmmakers like J.J. Abrams use a frantic, shaky-cam style in horror movies to create a sense of realism and unease. It breaks the cinematic illusion, but it makes the experience more visceral.
Your client does not care about your RED camera or your perfect color grade. They care about one thing: results. If an “ugly” iPhone video moves the needle and your beautifully crafted masterpiece does not, the ugly video wins.
The challenge for every creative is to let go of the romantic attachment to craft and embrace a ruthless focus on results. Your value is not in how well you make something. It is in how well your work makes something happen for your client.
TRANSCRIPT
oftentimes we look at solutions that are 180 degrees away from where we're at that require too much effort and energy and expertise that we just don't have and we think well there's no other solution it's either All or Nothing But in fact the success that you want is sometimes one degree different than
what you're doing now so we Chang who we deliver it for how we deliver it how fast we can deliver for we're just changing one of the variables right now so before you go and run off and try to find a new client base just look at what you do and see if
you can make one little tweak [Music] this episode is brought to you by the business boot camp if you're looking to level up your business check out the link below or drop us a comment if you've enjoyed this video so we can keep making more content just like this all right where we
left off I I was like peppered with questions in the hallway and so I just want to make sure as we're trying to sort out the Avatar of the person um that you have Clarity on who it is that you're going to sell to maybe I'm selling to a market that doesn't want
to want what I have or value what I have have you found your market yet all right yes so I'll just I'll use the uh the guys or the yeah the people I was talking about earlier with the like tools and Manufacturing types companies you want to work with them yeah let just
let's stay with them let's just go with that for now today okay um what kind of Revenue are they doing a year um they are at at least in the 10 to 15 million what's that at least in the 10 to 15 20 million I think so yeah cuz you know tool dies
all that kind of logistics they're at least doing 15 to 20 million yeah it's got to be yep okay and you do video right yep here's here's usually the problem like why do they need video yeah not all of them need video and they can't see it so the um the companies that
I've you know when I was been doing my research a lot of them actually are getting into the YouTube and Instagram game um they're they're making content they're doing little how-tos di DIY showing you how to use their stuff the Smart Ones are yeah and so like you know like Milwaukee or Robi
or you know all these bigger name places DeWalt like they have some pretty decent channels actually yeah but those are huge companies yeah those are they're owned by another company called Home Depot which I think is a multi-billion Dollar business right for sure yeah and they're they're doing influencer marketing right yep so
you guys understand how influence marketing Works they pay somebody you talk about it and they're happy to spend that money and in those spaces the quality of video doesn't even matter it's it's actually besides the point they want the eyeballs they want a person who's going to speak about the product in some
kind of semi- genuine way right um okay what else um if I if I kind of shift the uh the targets away from like Milwaukee these bigger huge ones um the company is that maybe you're they don't have the same brand recognition that a Milwaukee tool company has um they're still competing with
those and they are oftentimes very much about made in the USA um stuff that's very um Midwestern or it's like got more conservative values Amica I get it what's that made in America it's a good thing made in America yeah more conservative values it's more about Mom and Pop more about you know
we're servicing blueco collar workers and um local economies all that stuff yeah exactly but why do they need video right and so again I think the the ones that are starting to make video I think it's because they want more people to know about their products yes okay so if we were to
brainstorm and we're like entering into like a strategy space right yeah and we're we're going to look at it from the point of view of the manufacturer of these tools and equipment manufacturers right they want to grow their Market they want more customers and we're going to list like 20 ideas and then
we're going to measure it against impact and effort video will be one of them it may not be the top one and that's usually where your problem is they have a certain dollar amount to spend where would they spend the money and if you're not in that top category they're not going to
spend it on you that's the problem they might call up Tim like yo I heard you do some you know with Furniture can you do this with our tools he's like of course I can let me look at your business so this is the problem we need to connect what we do to
result that they want now I know of a company called um Peak design they make bags and accessories for people who shoot video Peak does something very unusual when they release a product they they run a Kickstarter campaign very unusual and and Peak is not a new company they've been in this game
maybe for 10 years now maybe longer and they run a Kickstarter campaign something that's reserved for new companies and startups why do they do that so I thought about that Dan said Dan right Dan said maybe they're just testing if the market wants it but everything I've seen them do I think is
already manufactured and ready to go they're using it as a marketing channel that they pay nothing for think about it they're tapping into the kickstarter Community right they're giving them a discount to buy early they're guaranteeing a fairly successful launch based on that and so I'm thinking if I was a videographer maybe
I need to study that and bring that strategy to other manufacturers they're one of the few that does that so what you're looking for is connecting a result that the client wants to something that you could possibly do and you keep exploring that so something that's really interesting and that I learned from
my business Mentor here is that oftentimes we look at solutions that are 180 degrees away from where we're at that require too much effort and energy and expertise that we just don't have and we think well there's no other solution it's either All or Nothing But in fact the success that you want
is sometimes one degree different than what you're doing now so we change who we deliver it for how we deliver it how fast we can deliver for it we're just changing one of the variables right now so before you go and run off and try to find a new client base just look
at what you do and see if you can make one little tweak and and one example we already talked about today but a different example I'll share with you is um for a really long time we make commercials and music videos we're in the high-end uh production visual effects uh and design space
we service mostly advertising agencies and and and and bands right and so as we saw the market kind of waning and it's getting tougher and tougher to make money fewer opportunities especially from where we started to like where we were it didn't look good and I can see the writing L on the
wall this plan is going to go down he not heading in that direction it's heading this direction so do we do and and my my my business coach like don't you just make really compelling images for people who else might need this who who else might want this and it's the first answer
is like well we'll do industrial videos and that's the wrong answer which is take what you're doing that's super lucrative and just do it for clients who pay even less who might even value it less so we tried that for a while that was not the answer the answer was there are many
businesses in in different vertical that need the sophisticated design language that you have and so it turned out excuse me in the commercial real estate space that's what they wanted and that's how we flipped $1,000 job into a multi-million dollar opportunity so we just took the same skill set now we had to
learn a few new skills and then that's how we got our foot into doing brand strategy and serving as the agency so we kind of cut out the agency we took their money and so it's not that different and what got us the opportunity was the ability to Leverage a really great portfolio
with with really big name brands and to get that work now here's the thing um I eventually got to um to uh build a relationship with those clients and they told me why they hired us it wasn't because we worked with Audi or Xbox or any of those companies it wasn't that it's
because we worked on a self- storage facility that's low rent but look good it was called Trojan storage and they told us if you can make self storage facilities look good you can make our our a class buildings amazing this company was worth 13 billion the kinds of buildings they build are the
kinds of buildings that Netflix moves into and they hire worldclass Architects usually gendler to design them these are 100 multi hundred million dollar projects maybe billion dollar projects they build so they look at Self Storage like you can make that sexy you can do anything and that's all they needed to see it
was the closest thing to what they were doing and we beat at every real estate market marketing company that went for it and we're the most expensive so that's how you can leverage right so it's not like we got to do something brand new just we got to do it for a different
client a different deliverable something is a little bit different and that's all it needs right so Jason you got to sit there and really think and if you were just divorce yourself from the thing that you've done in the past and just look at a client or a customer who who's trying to
solve a problem let yourself live in that space for a while and eventually you'll figure out the answer so helping them run a kick start campaign because if you have Kickstarter expertise that might be an Innovative way to Market cuz you want to be on that marketing side right because you're not on
the delivery side otherwise you end up being other and if you live in other remember we're trying to reduce our expenses in other don't be in other okay yeah so I wanted to like have you guys poke holes into my avatar yeah cuz it's completely new and I'm trying like to figure out
like what it is so right now um my avatar is she's a female founder of a fintech company and she's she just got seed funding and she's transitioning to series a um she's about 38 she's been in the financial services um department and that's how she started her fintech what else do you
need to know um what are you going to do for her so the problem she has is that she needs to achieve product Market fit in order to get to series a because that's what investors want to see before they could fund you that's her problem yeah but what are you going to
do so what I'm going to do is like help articulate the value proposition um help her communicate better so customers understand the value the product provides to them and um help her develop like a good story so that when she's pitching to investors it's capturing their attention Okay so I I I'm I'm
not trying to say it is but it's kind of like what Sam Horn helps her female entrepreneurs do right yeah to be able to come up with a clever phrase or how to package it to to nail the pitch yeah so you're like a pitch doctor no no I wouldn't I I don't
like doctor but I you don't have to use those words it's so it's it's it's on both sides communicating to the U investors and communicating with customers MH but you help people articulate their different their their diff their differentiator yeah um you value prop value it's it's words yeah okay okay female entrepreneur
working in financial technology yeah who's looking to raise money yeah yeah and they need to be able to nail their pitch they need to the customers and to the investers basically right okay poke holes guys poke holes yeah the customers and investors are two totally two different beasts yes so those are two
different audiences two different businesses to different models I guess that's the biggest okay H for me that's good I I agree with that one is the value to the customer and one is how am I going to make my money back or what what no there's not a cause it's Financial technology right
it's not like you're solving hunger or something right it's a little bit different okay what else thanks Carol if you want to help companies to focus on the product Market fit usually it's better to have them scale on a series a because when when they're on the series seed um it's very hard
to make them believe that your positioning will help them for serious seed companies usually the paying customers and that's the main traction for for the investors and that's why positioning and branding exercise doesn't really make sense that much I've been in this okay a lot I mean at least right you're in that
space KY did it make sense what he was saying not really okay I think he's saying and I don't know this space either so there's different rounds of funding and to order to get to like the third round they have to have done a lot of things and you were saying uh you
got to get to them relatively early because by the time they reach series C they already have that figured out it's going to be very hard to convince them is that right right or no no okay so what we experiened with the serious seed startups is that their positioning is not that important
for them yet because they have their own perspective Ive and they're trying to find those Market fit within their own beliefs and then they're not yet that mature mature to understand that they need some Consultants so where should she be on the series a series a that's where the company starts to spend
because then said there is fer doesn't have enough capacity and they're trying to hire everyone else and okay that's my guess would be all right if Ki wanted to learn more about people in the startup Community what organizations could she join where could she go to be around more of these people because
I think the minute you're around the people that you want to serve you hear things you feel things and you can write to them immediately right I bet you if all of you had an opportunity to sit down with five or six of your ideal dream clients and you ask a bunch of
questions only on an information gathering hunt that you would then be able to sharpen up your position and your messaging really quickly that's what I'm finding out at least will you're interested being those communities startup accelerators are mass challenge is a great example um you can be an expert and you can coach
these startups with these things and for me it's turned into actually what I'm trying to work on and so Mass challenge is a good one Builders and backers is a good one okay so so I I can't it's hard for me to hear so what's the first one uh it's Mass challenge Mass
challenge like it's like a startup competition and like whoever wins they get a certain amount of funding and mass challenge what's the second one Builders and backers Builders and backers yeah okay is there a third one um what's it uh Capital Factory and Austin they hire on a lot of experts and stuff
like that Capital Factory okay so we can learn a lot more about them yeah K did you want to say something you just hold on for a second will until we find the next person yeah the way I would do it is that I would talk to the VCS and uh if you
have any connection with a VC some of the biggest VCS got their own marketing experts inside the VC structure to help their all portfolios and this is how you can get a new business how will we find out about these people yeah that's usually your clients so once your clients are funded they
always have an access to the groups and communities and they are the one who can introduce you to the VC to so your clients if you have some in in the industry yeah do you guys know who Nancy dwart or DTE is yeah she's like the queen of presentation design of course you
would know and they they have like last time I found out about them 100 people working like I didn't know presentation design was such a big business and then we had uh we have a friend her name is Ashley Smithers and she used to work with Nancy dwart and because she worked with
her for a period of time she learned all the the tricks of the trade develop Report with prospects and knew exactly what to deliver at a certain level so sometimes I think KZ it may be a step backwards for a little bit but another way is to just find the person that is
doing exactly what you want to do at the highest level and and work with them in some capacity so you can just get a feel for the game that could be another way and you're going to learn a lot from that so sometimes you got to go backwards before you go forward okay
because you're in a space I know nothing about K will knows something about we'll know something about but um I don't know enough to help yeah for these startups uh my advice is always to turn yourself into the product that you investors are buying right and so they're looking for certain variables you
know it depends on what it is for fch startup it might be signups things like that and so as far as positioning you might consider centering that you know your pitch deck or whatever or you know even your the Persona that you're trying to to Target based on these variables that these investors
are interested in in order to get them to the next level because it's like if you really consider who the consumer is is it really isn't um it really isn't the customers that they're signing up that's getting them to the next level it's these investors yeah right and so it's just positioning in
that direction okay all right we're good okay we can move on to something else is that all right what else do we need to move on to where's the board here um no it's over here okay what should we what should we talk about here so there's predictable lead gen scaling team maintaining
quality predictable sales finding your Market I think we spent a lot of time working on Jason's in in terms of his suggestion is finding the right Market if you can find the right Market it seems pretty clear like you can communicate the value so if we're stuck not knowing how to communicate the
value I suspect it's because we're not clear about the market and if the market that we found for whatever reason doesn't have money it's not that they don't have money they just don't have money for us and what we do right it's not like I'm going to find poor people it doesn't no
they just don't want to pay for what we have and it's too hard and it requires too much resources to educate the market so that they want to spend money you can do that and what happens is you'll spend all the money and number two comes in right behind you and takes all
the clients and they spent none of it right you're doing all the road building and then they get to ride on the road in the freeway okay uh there's something about long-term relationships business versus personal brand which we will get to so where do we need to focus our energy now will um
so I was able to finally phrase that question and the question was is how do I successfully close on projects that have to move through vague SL huge chains of command with levels that I can't access you know yeah okay so really big organizations have layers of management and it's not always realistic
that you're going to talk to the decision maker obviously when we worked with a$ 13 billion company I saw the CEO founder like once I mean when I say Saul like he went that way I went this way it wasn't like we were in a meeting but I worked with the CMO and
she had the ear of the CEO and she made all the decisions she had all the power anyways so what we're trying to do is get as close as we can to the decision maker or the people who can influence the decision makers because they're a proxy for them now really large corporations
with a lot of layers of middle management it's quite difficult to get to okay so let's understand if we can't control that part and that's just how procurement works at which part are you entering it and let's see if we can't just help you do what you do better so it's usually with
a CMO like you said or like a director of communications and uh they they just can't get it across the line and these corporate decision-making periods they take such a long amount of time how long is that oh my God for the company that I have in mind it took a whole year
that's a really long time too long MH and how's how big is the project uh it's a $2 million project okay well that long said corrected it was like 50 that 50 bucks that's too long right so we're talking about a $2 million operation that's the budget that you're talking about right and
it's taking a year to close that doesn't sound horrific it's not great but it's not horrific and so you can imagine how many people have to get eyes on this to be able to approve a $2 million budget I don't care how much money you have $2 million to a lot of money
to throw away okay so you're dealing with a CMO okay and something is getting gummed up and it's just because of the size of the project so this is where I have a a kind of a more generic answer but I think it might work okay so $2 million here anybody spent $2
million recently you got to talk you did you got to talk to some people right me myself and I like do we want to spend all this money or not right okay so if you could if you could just break the project down into smaller size pieces eventually becomes an easier thing to
prove now there's things that I've learned and you probably already know this will because of the scale in which you're talking about is at a certain level they have this thing called the discretionary budget you guys know about this in corporations it's a discretionary budget means anything below that number they have authority
to sign a check on it might be helpful to find out what that number is and design something that they can approve so you can get the ball going Abby we did that and we put it on and then we used to everything off do you have a mic you're so clear what's
going on somebody throw her the mic will throw her the mic or or I'm really thank you go ahead um so we after boot camp we realized that we needed uh to fix our systems to align with this kind of processing cuz our budgets are very similar and so what we did is
we found out we did a bit of we found out the discretionary spend of every single person that was going to be involved in the pro pro program um and then we used zap to help us integrate a Gant chart which then triggered at every point of the project this is when you
we need your approval if the approval is not obtained then there is a delay to the project and that costs them money so usually that helped us yeah trigger the payments and Trigger things quite quickly yeah okay okay so let's get into it I I mean I think generically or broadly it's either
called one of two things we're going to call it chunking and you kind of you understand chunking take a big piece and just chunk it down into bite-sized pieces it's also called scaffolding if you go the other way from the bottom up and they're basically the same concept the way I look at
scaffolding as a visual it looks like that and chunking looks like maybe like this you know you just take it like what's the smallest piece of the pie that we can eat okay big projects big budgets big decisions too many people involved so if Will knows his client really well he could actually
just call up um marketing Mary and say hey is there a number that you have discretionary approval over because it seems like whenever we work with clients like this it always leads into a very long procurement process and we get gummed up and if this project is important to you it's an urgent
thing that you're looking a solution for I'm curious if you have a discretionary budget that you're allowed to spend without needing additional approval and with in the kind of companies that we'll thinking of the answer is 100% yes whether they tell you or not is another story but the fact that you can
bring up certain language and speak very matter of factly will give them confidence like yeah I can tell you these things and I've only learned about it because people tell me they'll say like Chris you put in the budget for 84,000 if you put in for $79 I can approve it tomorrow otherwise
I have to get approval I'm like is this a game is this negotiation Ploy and then I made some phone calls and it's not okay so it doesn't really matter and there's things that you're going to want to understand here as a concept and then apply as you see fit let's just say
it's adk it it depends on the size of the company bigger company much bigger smaller company maybe they don't know the concept let's say it's adk and Will's like dude 8K that's really far away from 2 million it's true but he can do something for adk so what he has to do is
design that very first step for adk it could be a discovery thing it could be an audit it could be all kinds of things where he could do profitably and happy to do all day long okay there is something called the sunk loss bias you guys have heard the sunk loss bias is
once they start spending money or working with you even just talking to you it's very hard to pull out how do I know this because you've all been sold this way before you notice like uh and and I I teach this St and I still fall for it like every single day of
my life right this is why when somebody's like free sample you're no because the free sample is the beginning of you entering into the sunk loss bias you understand that you get in a little bit of my time a little bit more time and now I just can't get out and then you
buy ticket to the states yeah the freaking YouTube videos they they're killing you right 36 hours later here we are see what happens so what you want to do is you want to just break it down to the smallest piece where they can make some commitment and if you say $80,000 is really
not that small will chunk down the other way until you get to something that's really small and the first thing could just be like content marketing and then there is a downloadable and then they're just making a little investment with you each and every time until they get to that point and there's
they go past the point of no return as soon as they start spending money with you here's the problem and you've been here before if I start again with Bob I've lost the 80k I've lost it and who knows if Bob's going to do anything that I want so they just keep spending
more and more so people are are less likely to to remove a bad fit just because they don't want the fear of starting over is like horrific to them so if you can just chunk down this works with every single person here so kzia might want to sell a $25,000 naming uh word
smithing thing that they're she's going to do but they're like we don't want to spend that kind of money well I know people like you say this to me all the time so I've got this other program give that a shot okay so maybe you'll get there and you guys know what like
Gant charart are AB be throwing around terms like Gant CH what the hell G is like like waterfall right it is so let me explain that to you it it kind of looks like this but it just looks like the opposite direction these are are you can call them Sprints or whatever and
this phase can't begin until this phase is approved they're dependencies right like I can't make you an animated film unless we have a script a budget casting uh a team Etc so each one depends on the next thing happening it's how most projects are designed and if you just remember it's waterfall because
it kind of looks like water falling down a rock face or something like that in in Silicon Valley they do something called scrum or Sprints and they collapse all these things into little Cycles but that's a whole different story so for those of you that are having problems managing your clients you just
show them phase one phase two phase three any delay here equals money okay either I can't deliver on time or it's going to cost you more and what you do is if you're able to show them how every single project that you do works you have now developed a system that's predictable not
not only in terms of like what you deliver but you ease the whole friction behind buying and selling okay when I ask entrepreneurs what is it you want they almost always say we want to have a predictable proven process and if you can show people your predictable proven process selling becomes much much
easier okay it's predictable because we've seen you do this over and over again it's proven and we have the results the receipts if you will and the process which is what we're going to share with you so let's spend a second here as you're all designing your irresistible offer what is your predictable
proven process what is it do you know what it is everybody so when we design commercials I almost with like a very high degree of certainty know exactly how every single commercial is going to be made every single time and then what we do is we write about it and we share it
on the website so no one's guessing like what's the next step it's very very clear how many of you have a predictable proven process right now not a ton okay maybe you guys are close and you just need to write it up a little bit okay so the first thing that we want
to do is we want to just limit the number of steps to five five is the magic number why not 17 too many steps too complicated to understand why three it's too simple I don't think you guys are really thinking it through it's usually five okay whenever you want to teach something it's
five five steps five skills and if you start to look around you'll start to see that the people who do this for a living almost always break things down to five right design thinking five steps user Centric marketing five parts there's something about the magic number five so go ahead and let's spend
a minute everybody okay I'll give you five minutes to do this to figure out your five steps what are the five major steps it'll force you to prioritize you might have 17 but you'll start to prioritize towards the five most important steps in what it is that you do in is delivery the
fif step always or can we go deliveries after five step I don't know okay depends on what you do if you're stuck at four deliver is the fifth step you have a 17 it ain't it okay you just walk us through your five steps God dang it yes I can help you figure
out yours okay let's go we'll do it Mo Dro you need the mic see he's really good at speaking to the mic until it's his turn right go ahead what are the five steps First Step would be uh client meeting on on boarding figuring out for the right fit okay just keep talking
so I don't want to write until I hear it so first step is meeting figure out if they're qualified uh after that we that's your onboarding process a little bit different than your proven process to get them results so the proven okay The Proven process to get once they give you money what
happens we didn't start uh I guess doing the script script okay script and casting scripting is different than casting yes it say script and then casting casting and then would be any storyboarding okay so this is where of conf you're almost there just finish it production yeah and then post production that's pretty
much it but that's where I pivoted my business to making the fifth step to distribution because when we talked about the results post produ is not what they want but helping them actually get their video seen is what they're actually looking for okay you would collapse one of these things right so you
you could in theory take script and storyboards because they go together it's your blueprint and you'll start to see there's some pretty broadly applicable generic Frameworks here okay so your fifth one your new fifth right would be distribution right y so what in in broader terms everybody what what do you consider scripting
and storyboarding what what what could we call that as a broad term yeah yes yes what devel yeah okay okay pre-production I'm going to use the simplest terms that a fifth grader would understand it's called a plan it's pretty good isn't it why you guys laughing I say something funny I got broccoli
my teeth I'm it's just a plan what is the plan very good we want we're going no I know I know I just want WR with you we have to have a plan and this puts the client's mind at ease think about it those of you guys don't talk about this like how
do you get this I I when when do I get to decide we're going to come up with a plan if you're an architect it call the blueprint or floor plan or something you would have a plan what is the plan so you can adjust this language to your industry such that everybody
who works in your industry understands we have a plan okay so the plan is usually broad it's on every single thing Okay so we've uh casting is very specific to what you're doing what would stage two look like we have a plan and then what what do we do now right but what
do we call the next phase like PR pre-production pre-production pre-production works we have a plan you guys like the plan no we're going to make the plan a little bit more clear so if you think about it it's just kind of like layers of an onion and you're just pulling out the pieces
right layer the onion and and often times when I talk to the client I'd literally tell them it's an onion and we're going to peel it off layer at a time first couple layers a little ugly might hurt your eyes a little bit but eventually we get to that right so when we
do animation work we'll tell them we're going to do some style frames really nasty looking storyboards or you like that then we'll do a choppy animatic or sometimes a romatic do you guys know the difference between a romatic and animatic no okay those in production no a romatic is like what it sounds
you steal all the shots like you go and capture that shot from Dune and that Pepsi commercial and you just cut it together it's not even like a cohesive look right you just ripping stuff off until you block it out that's all it is right it's just taking the slab of marble and
just chunking out I'm not sure there's a person but it kind of looks humanoid and we just peeled back the layers until we get to the core and the core will be like we're ready to go right so you can call it pre-production we have a plan it's going to be a 30
second spot it's going to be in Miami we're going to have a couple people in it it's a dialogue comedy driven thing you guys like that plan we like the plan now we want details to the plan go a little bit deeper so you have pre-production right what would be the next thing
what's happens after pre-production production it's like who's buried in gr's Tomb Charlie production okay so now we've got it down to three main things what happens after production dgo post production yeah we do Post okay now for those of you guys don't understand production and post- production like what the hell are they
talking about production is what we call in live action like when you actually show up on the set and you're shooting it's usually you know a day or two days whatever there's a whole crew most of the money that's spent usually spent right there in production not always if you do a lot
of visual effects it'll be mostly in post post is animation editing color grading visual fact whatever it's all that kind of sound music all that stuff is called post after you done with the shoot and this model is really built around Production Studios because they Define it around themselves right it's like before
Christ and after Christ right there so post is after Christ now the last thing that you're going to do is what distribution marketing okay this is where it gets really interesting everybody can we can we agree that's distribution or marketing what do you want to call it then deping publishing final okay all
right but delivery doesn't add a lot of meaning to this there's a place where I'm going to go with this everybody if we had to guess if we had to guess if we had uh $10 and we had to assign a dollar value to each one of these things with a total budget
of $10 what is the most valuable part this is where it's going to hurt this is where it gets real interesting okay I want everybody to lock in one answer in their brain okay everybody actually write in your notebook let's not cheat okay where would you spend the bulk of the money okay
let's say we had $5 of the 10 where would we put the $5 that matters the most to us if this is uh we're if we're buying just write it down okay we'll do this okay and dgo I want you to do this too cool one two three four five okay we we
have $5 we're going to allocate to the most important part of this we're going to take the other $5 and distribute it everywhere else1 we have $10 total five of 10 I'm trying to keep this simple $5 is going to go to one and the other five is going to go to the
remaining four so that means one of them will get two bucks and the others will get $1 each and now we have to make adult decisions everybody okay I want you to think about it argue with yourself like shut up stupid I know what I'm doing figure it out okay hold on don't
get there yet and I'm almost certain I know what the answer is going to be I do I really do I know what it's not going to be that's what I meant and this is when you're going to cry everybody have their answer so 1 2 3 4 5 I just need you
to write a number down where will you spend five out of $10 okay everybody got one okay here's what we're going to do guys you ready we're going to just show by raise of hands here and you're going to see and after you raise your hand look around the room look around the
room okay it's going to hurt the plan who's going to spend all the money on the plan I see four people so we got four votes there for the plan pre-production that's what I thought production you only get to vote once right just want to make sure okay raise your hand raise your
hand three seven seven yeah and seven people so this is zero this is kind of interesting post no it depends on where your biases are it really does okay and then distribution of marketing everybody else 1 2 3 four five six 6 7 8 9 10 12 13 14 okay I knew this
is the part that's going to be like not here and the numbers seem almost evident except for some of you seem to argue for production chances are everybody who raised their hand for production Works in production I'm almost certain okay all seven people raise your hand who voted for production raise your hand
and don't freaking lie will did you vote twice okay okay everybody's in production right there should be seven hands it's perfect do you guys work in production yes okay well okay here's what we're going to do lower your hand if you don't work in production it's going to be six out of seven
of you you the rest of you are liars that's all I'm going to say I thought we're going to be honest with each other no lunch for you guys tomorrow okay I'm telling you right now it's almost all in the distribution or in the planning okay there's a guy's name is Stan Shin
he wrote the value curve and it's a smile curve production dies and he mapped us across mult multiple Industries multiple Industries I think his name is Sten and we've done this before if you look up this smile curve it's going to make you cry for you it's an upside down smile because almost
all of the value is done in the thinking of it and in the marking of it at the end very little in the middle and how do you know this well let's say you want to manufacture a chair where are you going to make the chair let's be honest here you're going to
make it in China China and are the getting rich making chairs no they're not but the company who had the idea for the chair the marketing part of it makes all the money a while ago they tracked down of $100 or so from what it might cost to make an iPod it's like
18 cents 12 cents is made for the entire product some of the parts are made in Japan which is 4 cents and apple the marketer and the and the and the distributor distributor of the product makes most most of the money that's why they're so rich so in the planning the idea or
you can call it branding you know depending on the industry that you're in the thinking of it like um liquid death liquid death 100% example it's almost all the plan maybe a little bit of distribtion everything in the middle dies did the person who put the water in the can make any money
the person who gave them the water probably not this is where it hurts a lot Jason I'm sorry you're reduction I didn't I didn't even write this wrong I prereduction I didn't even spell it right I didn't give it like the correct spelling and nobody even challenged me on it I was like
who cares that's dead anyways right okay watch this too where is AI going to eat your lunch listen K shut up you're going to kill everybody here no don't don't say that don't say that yet let's go for the easy answer first okay where is AI going to replace you first you already
know production you can type it in it writes the whole script okay hold on hold on so AI is going to eat you here so all seven of you are almost dead now think about it AI will like text a video uh uh Photoshop beta you don't even have to put words is
crazy have you guys been using Photoshop beta it is so freaking good oh my God it's got me out of so many jams already right that's where AI is right there and that's why all the artists are crying because they just see themselves as production people right is AI helping you with distribution
little bit how the algorithm knows not you it's helping somebody else else but where is a helping you or taking your distribution away from you how is a a threat in distribution for you um not really but this not really the answer is not really yeah okayo you want to argue yeah I
mean right now if you're in Facebook ads doing Facebook ads for clients yeah I mean you might know there's a lot of new AI stuff happening with Facebook that they're like all these different features that you needed in the past they're just like give us a couple of the people and they're finding
everyone for you the think eventually you could be like find me the business owners and they will put it out there for you okay how long has Facebook ads been around how many years 10 10 minimum how many of you know anything about Facebook ads a little bit two of you are we
worried that they're going to all of a sudden like start getting into like Facebook ads but they're Mak they're bringing that barrier down for anyone to be able to start I think there's a big barrier in the beginning I'll ask you again how many years have editing tools been around forever how many
of you have opened up an editing tool very few just because it's easy for you don't mean it's easy for people okay copywriting has been around forever you going to write the copy yourself AI probably not I'm not sure AI might who knows who knows if it's any good just yet okay so
if if it's in the production category these seven votes are heavily biased I'm just telling you right now it's cuz you're in love with your own sauce is what it is so you want to put more of your efforts in planning and distribution I got the idea now the robots do the rest
and then I'm going to deal with distribution it's in the idea and the marketing distribution of it because this should have gotten the most votes which you did because this is the only one we can tell is actually to get you results Jason's excellent at making what he makes I know it I've
seen his work he's very good but if it don't make me a dollar I don't care that's the a problem so if you do something that's soft and fluffy and you can't measure it and it doesn't move the the Baseline for your clients it just doesn't matter it becomes a pure aesthetic almost
a vanity play and it could have been a flop so the Barbie movie they've they've invested a lot into into marketing and that has translated into like their sales their it's it's breaking barriers yeah and so I'm pretty sure that we're going to start seeing like the Barbie movie in like college courses
as as a marketing thing in terms of what they did you know um you guys remember a movie named John Carter they spent a gazillion dollars on that movie a gazillion dollars in marketing it didn't do Jack it's huge flop I think Buzz Lighty year was also the same thing a gazillion dollars
making it a gazillion dollars marketing it didn't to to the end of time they're going to think the more money you spend on something the better it's going to do but actually it's not and I'm not sure if Barbie's a good movie has anybody seen it is it a good movie yeah they
what's really strong about them is that they also put a lot in taking a risk in the planning and the production so I think that Barbie was that Magic sauce of like they took a big risk they hired a female you know filmmaker female team and it really paid off and it was
the right time so I feel like yeah that leads me into like yes distribution I think is what clients think is the most important in terms of the numbers it is but you know the reason seven of us are like production is because we know that also like if you if your product
isn't actually quality then no amount of marketing exactly like you're saying Chris is going I I love where this is going by the way I love where this is going okay hold on hold on everybody just calm down let's let let her finish speaking everybody just no I mean that's it and I
know in reality like you know we see all the time things that aren't produced to C we think that they should be and they still succeed enough for the people investing in it to be happy but I I may get a viral video out of this we'll see let's see no everybody just
relax everybody everybody when I say relax just keep your hands down until we're done you're going to have the mic for a while okay okay what's your name again I forgot your name already where are you going here you're Karina yeah a Karina the dreamer okay wa go you say quality there's a
relationship between quality and what results and the ability yeah the abil call it results okay quality equals results let's just say now I'm going to ask half the room to prove where this is true and the other half to prove where it's not true the thing about um theorems like this we only
have to find one case where it's not true and the whole thing falls apart now if you're a betting woman would you bet that this is going to stand the test the scientific test or are you going to bet on the fact that we can poke so many holes through it's going to
look like Swiss cheese where would you bet I mean I know no no no answer the question where would you bet camera on her face lock in Zoom yeah we got where will you bet okay I I know better than to bet for what I want I want to bet that quality why
would you bet against something you know is not going to be true you why would you do that it's it's true I can't actually you can't I can't I wish it in the same way that like all of us artists wish that we're not going to be out of a job here's what
I would wish for yeah here's what I wish for well peace and hungry nuclear you know what is that called disarmament I wish the climate change and the Plastics in the oceans would go away you know what I mean I wish for all these things but ain't going to happen but you don't
think there's still like a correlation like you know like yeah maybe not cor correlate I I say this to my children all the time I'm going to share a story with you okay right my boys have always wanted a dog and they want a corgi they love corgis and because they watch yoube
Ubers with corgis and so on a road trip from LA to San Jose my son's like Dad you should get a corgi I'm like why should I get a corgi boy because you get a million subscribers like really he goes every influencer I know has a corgi they have a million subscribers and
so do you think every person who has a corg has a million subscribers [Laughter] yes he tried but then I'm like so do you think if I were to search on YouTube right now now M that every single person who has a Corky in their video has a million subscribers he goes uh
oh he starts backing down I said I want to teach you a new word today boy there's something called correlation and causal he's like what does that mean causal means a equals B correlation is sometimes a equals B but not always and we're not going to bet on sometimes I'm not a gambler
okay that's the problem is okay why why you say that okay I mean just because it's yeah you're you wanted to be this cuz you're a person who quality that's the problem your bias and I value I think I value quality and so well I'm going test you on that yeah you only
care about quality in some things not all things it's true so when someone wants to sell you a quality thing that you don't care about you ain't buying because I I'm I don't want to make any judgments but from from the car you drove to everything that you've touched in your life not
everything you P you pay for the most expensive version of it because we all make different decisions because we all have different values and unless you're filthy rich even filthy rich people don't always spend the most on everything okay so this is just a correlation and we know and if we had to
guess in terms of case studies where we can prove this to be true and case studies where this is absolutely not true it would be so disproportionate and it only took K two seconds to disprove you she's like tube science okay because they get results are there marketing videos any good they're terrible
they even tell me we're embarrassed to show you damn yeah yeah they said we're embarrassed to show you and I'm like I'm embarrassed to show you my profit and loss statement you see the difference here they care about the results yeah and you know what they told me we have red cameras we
have AR cameras you know what camera works the iPhone and you know what they do their production team insists on shooting with the red dragon 8K and you know what they have to do they have to add camera shake and degrade and add poor exposure to it I'm like what is the point
then because somebody's like quality so they have to make these expensive cameras look like lower quality because what happens is and this is a phenomenon in the social media age the more polished it looks the more we feel it's not real interesting one take poor exposure a little camera shake and then we
think it's real this is what film um filmmakers know J.J Abrams when he directs a horror movie you you want to throw up because he's like the camera is like shaking all the time you know and you notice also like um I forget I think it was Ali mcbi when they started doing
this and they might have been one of the early Pioneers to do this when they would whip pan because they wanted you to feel like it was a newsroom real thing like somebody's literally turning their head in cinema they would never do that because it lets you know there's a camera person right
the whole idea behind a movie is you're supposed to not remember you're watching a movie the minute that there's a weird edit or weird color correction or a weird sound Jason knows this it pulls you out of the dreamlike uh trans that you're supposed to be in but in TV say they started
experimenting with this like that makes it look real it feels like I'm in the room it feels like TMZ that's why they do that psychologically they understand how to trigger that in you okay so quality not equal results but did you get a corgi no he gave up he G he gave up
his argument a and he learned a lesson and you're and the lesson he learned is do not argue with Dad I wish he learned that lesson he still to this day tries to argue with me all the time he's batting zero and you know um do you guys know who Jesse itler is
Jesse itler founded a company called ziko water I think he's a billionaire uh he also founded um a jet something a private jet company what is it called and he's married to SP yes and he's also married to another billionaire the lady who created Spanx so they two billionaires who are married to
each other life is so fair right like what are we do with our billions I don't know right Sarah yes so Jesse tells this really heartwarming tear-jerking story about his father he said his father is like a Checkers Champion like the grandm of checkers I didn't even know there are levels to this
game course I didn't didn't know I thought Checkers is such a simple game and he goes he's The Unofficial New Jersey champion of checkers right and he says from the time in which I could figure out Checkers he beat me every single time without Mercy he never let me win and he goes
I beat him one time in my life and he goes on and tells how he beat him okay and it's a it's a terrible story because as he tells the story the time he beat his father was cuz his father had dementia and was in a mental state of De line and that's
the only time he beat him and he said because he never let me win I learned a lot of lessons in my life right so when he had dementia I had no mercy on him I I destroyed him but it's a heartwarming story there's a heartwarming story in here somewhere and I felt
so justified in my treatment of my boy it's like you will never win ever and it made Jesse who he is and he's a super bright guy obviously very successful man okay so that's the result with my son those things are not connected let's be sober when we make decisions Romanticism is for
like movies and poetry and for Valentine's cards not for your business because that doesn't pay the bills you have to be sober when you make the business decision unfortunately so many of us the creative soul and I was like please let it just be that please this one time and then you get
your heartbroken yeah I hear that I'm really curious then how you sell branding cuz I know you I don't are you guys still doing Blind by the way no we don't do blind we haven't done blind since 2018 I've been client free congrat for 5 years Cong where are your C now hi
everybody my name is Chris I've been client free for 5 years that's when you say hi Chris you guys didn't get your queue but okay okay what are you going to say well I'm just curious then cuz you're also teach we're all create like we're in the business of like you know design
and so how do you just do we just take the business we get and leave the rest like leave the people like how do you sell quality design if you don't believe the quality matters I I didn't say that you put a lot of words in my mouth like quality doesn't matter make
one argument at a time make sure you use me my words I went to the extremes you're right we're in great Zone today I love quality okay but I know quality is not always tied to results okay cuz there have been a lot of quality films that don't have good result results there
have been a lot of crappy reality shows that have tremendous results a whole new genre of films and and TV shows have been created because you know quality doesn't doesn't equal that in fact I would argue that the less money you have the more Innovative your Solutions will be I've seen some some
um um promos for for TV that have swept all the awards and they had like $10 to make it cuz they let their creativity shine not their production shine I also have this theory that uh firsttime directors who scor it big their second and third movies suck ass you can go down the
list the wowski Matrix most amazing film part two not so good third and he's just going downhill real fast M Night Shyamalan 6 cents amazing film unbreakable not bad then it just falls down the crap tree really fast because you know why they have power and they have money they were much better
just being Scrappy but it's also a very difficult thing to consistently produce a hit so there's two factors in there because they don't understand their process they clearly do not have a predictable proven process The Beatles did the Rolling Stones did um the weekend does they know how to make hit after hit
so this is just a fantasy I believe okay so let's go back to your challenged me I'd love to answer it if you can challenge me the right way like the question I I just asked yeah if you want to challenge me huh what you want to phone a friend Nero's going to
help you yeah I don't know her bro I don't know we just how how would you sell result over okay this is really good this is now we're getting to the heart of it okay this is a much better question look at Nero he doesn't say two words but he how do you
s results bro let's forget about that okay results are really interesting because it depends on who you ask so the question in your sales process is what results matter to you that's the only question that really matters what results matter to you cuz it doesn't matter what I sell does not matter what
I make Dale Carnegie wrote like he goes I love strawberries and cream but it doesn't matter what I love because fish care about worms look you can try to fish all day with strawberries and cream you're not going to catch any fish because fish like worms and bugs it's got nothing to do
with you so what results matter to you what results are you trying to achieve that you've been unable to in the past what roadblocks or challenges have you run into yeah Ellen you want to say something just thinking of your the farm example you used right like which which example um the farm
Design Studio mhm yeah like with the you know ice cream or whatever they sent out like that's a very difficult result to measure right like I'm just thinking when we're selling to clients like sometimes you might not realize the result until significantly for further down the line wait I I hear one story
I agree with and then I hear a questions not connected to the story the question what does the farm design have to do with results well because they did get a result but themselves yeah I guess if we're the question is how are we selling results to our clients or I guess maybe
it's not the question is what results matter to our clients yes what results are you selling is the only question that's relevant okay what results are you selling now I'll answer the whole Farm thing even though I don't it's a non SE or like I don't know how a equals B there okay
because the result was they got the clients they wanted from their efforts from a marketing thing yeah okay so here's what you need to know just about the farm and I'll put that thing to bed the die line is run by Andrew Gibbs Gibbs who who said Gibbs you know your cpg stuff
huh Andrew is an LA guy do you know Andrew yeah I met him are you friends first I know him okay friends not friends okay you want to be friends with Andrew sure find out what organizations he serves on on the same board it's I think the AIG okay Andrew for a time
I'm not sure if it's still true runs the world's number one packaging resource so if you're a manufacturer looking for great design this is very important you're going to be looking on the die line makes sense so what did we learn from that go where the fish are you have a fish who's
very hungry who is self- selected right because Mom and Pops who don't care about the quality of their packaging do not go to the die line they go down the door to Dan they just don't know and they don't care enough so all the Discerning buyers who want to do excellent consumer packaging
Goods goes go to the diine to find out things that are good um Aaron got super lucky how did he get so lucky he hired a young woman from straight out of school cuz she's probably half his age and she's much smarter than he is when it comes to social media he was
lucky also because he didn't kill the idea even though he didn't understand it we have to understand the amount of luck he's had but you can engineer that luck right so when some young person presents an idea that's so crazy challenging to you say yes or not no because what you have to
gain is going to outstrip what you have to lose cuz he's a monkey he told me he doesn't even understand beh hands and she's the one who insisted we will post this here he goes whatever just let her do it then they're lucky again that the work on beand surfaces to the top
that then catches an editor and had an interesting story in presentation so his design had to be remarkable enough that somebody would see and talk about so they they feature that thing on the DI line as a spec project not even a real project there didn't even go anywhere he got zero results
from that and then the DI line is the thing that catapult him to the next level because here's what he told me it's hilarious he's goes Chris I don't have enough time to talk to all the people and talk to me about work I'm like boohoo so sorry for you right I'm going
to slap you right he said here's how I got the leads there was a call for bids that a bunch of companies went after and they asked them what would you do to solve this problem and three of the five companies that were bidding on it referenced their work so all they did
was reverse image search that thing and they trace it back to the dialine the dialine traces it back to farm design so when your competitors are using your work as a sample of what to do clients get real smart so what's the lesson there the lesson there is you have to put out
the work that's really easy to find that traces all back to you your SEO game should be fantastic if he made it difficult to find himself on the dialine on behance back to his website he would have lost that they would have given up here's the problem where some of you may struggle
with photographers especially whenever you go on a photography site do you know how hard it is to save an image they they use some kind of weird flash technology I think to lock the image they're saying please do not hire me please do not track this back to me because what I do
as a as a director is I screen capture that it loses all the data from that image non- searchable non SEO and later on I can't remember where I got it from why did they do that somewhere along the way an idiot photographer told all his photography friends and her friends to do
this thing and they all seem to do that impossible to drag and save the image they could not anticipate Pinterest and search engines and they just still adhere to this I promise you go search some of the best photographers in the world they have weird slideshows that you can't even find the image
and you're like why would they do that to themselves your number one priori is to make sure everybody can steal your image put all the metadata in it and make sure the web can find you once it's around you see so if he was an idiot and he would have locked his images
and made it super difficult to find they wouldn't have found him yet people do this all day long because they would rather not worry or they they're just so protective of the work they'll put it on Vimeo and lock the hell out of it Vimeo is probably the worst search engine on the
in the universe I have videos on my own channel I cannot find literally I'm not even exaggerating I'm like I thought we uploaded this I can't even find it YouTube you don't even have to spell it correctly and you'll find it get all the cinematographers and all the motion designed firms they post
all the work on B mail and then they're like Chris we can't get any work I'm like I don't know why I just can't figure it out just can't figure it out okay so what results matter so you have to find something that can be measured okay it has to be something you
could measure and quantify Harvard Business Review um May June issue and I have it here somewhere I I I'll pull it out my bag they said that there's been a class divide between what's referred to as Performance Marketing Performance Marketing okay versus brand building okay that most of the attention and the resources
go here right why why is marketing so hot why is everybody trying to do marketing because there's an Roi a direct response holy cow there's a direct response rois very clear okay so if you want short-term Revenue which almost all CEOs are concerned about you do Performance Marketing what are some examples of
Performance Marketing direct response go ad Google ads Facebook ads pay what else there's more email what price ipulation no that's not Performance Marketing it's how do you what sales yeah cold Outreach pretty much everything you do funnels who said funnels funnels 100% you guys understand Performance Marketing put a dollar in you get
$3 out all day long very easy to sell and they said brand building is where the world's most valuable companies spend their energy this is about long-term value there's a big big difference this is revenue this is value this is longterm okay so if you're starving you're not thinking long-term value but the
world's most successful and valuable companies focus on brand building now here's the remarkable thing everybody Elon mus became the world's richest person incredible but if you look at the actual sales of Teslas it's not very much but they have more money because of the belief in their Brand This is a future-based speculation
that they're of the future and everything is of the past you know before Elon bought Twitter there was a rumor circling he could buy Mercedes-Benz Daimler Chrysler they've been in business for decades making some of the best automobiles in the world and according to the rumor thing I read Elon has so much
discretionary income that he doesn't even need to get a board vote remember before we're talking about $100,000 he could spend a couple bli billion dollars and not even seek approval from anybody he could buy Mercedes-Benz they do not make nearly as many cars or sell as many cars as Toyota Mercedes-Benz but he
can buy them it's because of brand building he's done an excellent job forget about his politics and his craziness just focus on what he's done that's that's working okay so Harvard Business Review very left brain thinkers here they write this article in the maun issue about why these two things have to work
together that Performance Marketing cannot come at the cost of long-term value brand building this is an argument for everybody who's in the brand space who's doing things that are a little fuzzy but they also say that brand building typically is drops down to two things awareness or like engagement or something silly we
need to talk about brand building as something much more measurable and bring this group to this group because they have to work together okay we do know this we do know this if you spend all of your money and effort Performance Marketing eventually your brand will be worth nothing because this drives this
away we know that send me 10 emails I'm unfollowing you I'm now irritated I'm not going to buy from you anymore I used to like you now I hate you so we have to think about these two as it work together okay so we got to get out of the fuzzy metrics we
got to get something much more concrete and they have I think seven dimensions in which they can measure the value of brand building have you read the article okay you have it I have the article here it wasn't even why I bought the issue it was the article before the article I wanted
to read unfortunately the article I wanted to read was crap but I got this piece out of it okay so if you want to sell quality which is what you want to do right is it Karina yeah Karina you have have to uh sell status you have to sell status you will pay
an unreasonable amount for me to do something that doesn't really matter because doing so would give you pleasure can you think of anything that you do where that's the case where you pay an unreasonable amount of money that's not logical 100% you fly business a few times I like spend the extra money
on the credit card oh I see through points and all that stuff you can do it yeah okay so Karina will fly business class even though it's silly because if a flight those of you guys that don't fly business class a flight is like 3K uh coach would be how much like 5
yeah it's ridiculous like that it's six times right and I struggle with this myself and my wife and I were like you know what let's fly like pedestrians or like you know the steerage class because we can spend 2500 bucks on a hotel or I need to buy a new Louis Vuitton bag
we start going through these arguments in our mind right and I found a great solution for this and we'll talk about that in a second okay so how many people here struggle with the mental math here like I'm going to pay $2,500 more to arrive at the exact same place at the exact
same time you you struggle with this right some of us are coach baby give me a coach and some of us like never again business class only champagne deer you know what I mean the one time the first time not the first time but one of the Early times in which we flew
business class because I was speaking and they couldn't pay me Jack so they will give you two business class tickets from LA to Hawaii okay my wife had braces back then and they're like champagne and she don't get one she knows I don't drink so she wants two right and then she sitting
there like cheers to the good life babe and she let out the biggest M and just took her picture and I'm just going to use that every time she's mad at me remember that time I got you business class babe I did all the work right okay so most of us fit into
this category the solution is and I only fly business class now I know I get someone else will pay for it so I'm like free of the guilt if I have to spend the money I go buy the shoe or the bag yeah well the reality is too like people who are buying
business they doing it with points so they're not actually paying for $3,000 yeah I don't know how to work the point system I'm either paying or someone's paying I'm not good at a point system one day I will be good I'm working on right so my whole thing was I want to fly
and travel the world and want someone else to pay for business class so now that's just part of the terms they're not that happy about it now here's what I know when you get to the next level you fly first class and have to pay for your spouse one day first class once
you fly that you cannot go back it's just too painful yeah okay okay hard to upgrade impossible to downgrade okay that's the argument there so you will spend money for things that don't matter to anybody but to you so if you want to sell quality stuff you have to figure out what status
do people want to buy because it's actually one of the main motivations about why people buy so how could you do that in your business how have I done that in my how can you I'm trying to do okay in terms of status I've been focusing on results more than status um no
you're not you're focused on I I want to be and I like that yes I I am I'm going to help you you're right okay okay no I'm going to help you forget about results Great forgotten done all right cuz I can help a lot of you here okay if you truly understand
why people buy cuz they buy because of status what can you do to heighten the sense of status such that they'll forget about the results and just pay you for quality go ahead you know the first thing that comes to mind is just relationships like like I live in Venice and it's not
my favorite part of living here but it's very like you know the people you know very connection driven people want to be in kinship with the people that they want to be like associated with okay are you associated with a lot of people uh relative to what you sell not actually no I
could be smarter about that I'm not going to lie we should be a lot smarter yes let's go there okay stay with what Karina is talking about people buy relationships or they buy into relationships so what could k do as a a Denny designer yeah branding designer branding designer yeah okay um so
that she can continue to charge tens of thousands of dollars for what she does what can she do go throw the mic behind you make the client look good through your work how they take the credit for the work that you did how is it Danielle yeah Danielle how be specific well well
no no no no no no she's got the mic everybody just relax go ahead if it we that is true we do enter our clients work for them into Design Awards so they're credited if it does well yeah now I'll tell you something um I haven't won 100 Awards but it feels like
100 awards that strategy is not paid off that well for us it hasn't we've even paid for the W shipped it to our clients that they share like once and then that's kind of the end of it it's a good theory okay stay with what she's talking about the way we want to
do brainstorming is not enter new ideas until we've exhausted the old idea and I think Karina is on to something that's why I'm not letting her off the hook just yet she's like well there's an association right and I said are you associated with the people they want to be associated with and
her answer was not yet so what does she need to do go ahead take the mic back and tell us the answer it's pretty obvious it's a grants Tom kind of question build some relationships what do you mean be specific uh I mean like ideally book work with the kinds of people that
people want to be associated with in their brands right like who like startups do you specific names or like just Brands give me give me one oh I'm I literally I'm like brain freezing I don't that's right well let us all out go ahead okay okay um name one anyone I feel like
no I need help on this I'm calling another friend I I truly am like I don't will help you sorry oh okay sorry okay will go ahead what's one so like Nike maybe if you can land a big fish or Lululemon Lululemon or any one of those Brands right go ahead Target the
decision maker and do it for free to make sure you get the name yeah yeah yeah so we that's the tactic part right yeah so what she needs to do uh is just have a nice logo on your website def find the whales find where they they swim and they try to feed
them so that they are happy to give you the logo okay we understand this okay my friend um who's a fairly successful entrepreneur he just told me if you go to the top of the mountain work with the top company all the other companies fall in line oh yeah it just works like
that you go for the biggest dog like the prison rule punch the biggest dude or girl and then everybody else shuts up take on status but same same um the are we still on the logo part I don't want to change it because I want to make sure it's super clear for everybody
what to do so Abby if it's not you got the mic just wait one second okay so Karina what you need to do is you got to go and find get the big dog and it don't matter what you got to do if you have to buy it buy it do you know
what I mean when I say you have to buy it no you pay for it pay to I'll pay you to build your site for you I will pay you you to redesign something okay got it cuz the name you want to name so I actually on that note like I've done I
started in websites and I've done websites for like afterpay Chase Bank they were micro sites they're not like portfolio pieces fine but and they have helped me like for sure establish credibility when people come to me I got a startup out of that like because I are you trying to tell me you
agree yes but what I'm saying is just say I agree I'm I'm leading are you pulling a c on me right now but what I'm leading to is that I've run into another issue then what is it I don't do we have the can I want to it's okay so the issue a
Dan question I feel a Dan question coming on right now you're going to pull a Dan go ahead okay I don't know what a you'll say and we'll know okay I mean this this takes it into another area so we don't need to go there but what I'm running into now is like
it goes back to the leg gen where I now okay so I got this startup I think I need to then Define that if I'm going to be going into that Niche I need to then be setting my bigger fish because what's happening now is the clients that I yeah I need I
need to figure out how to be landing bigger startups the scope of work is different so I landed some big you know website clients but the scope of work I do now is entirely different and so yeah this is a little bit vague this is what I'm dealing with in my I don't
know I don't know dgo I know how to edit this video you take Karina's voice and you layer it on top of itself and then and then and then yeah I have a clear I don't have a clear question I don't know what the hell you're saying just stay with me here okay
all of you understand that we're social creatures and we're not that smart we're all sheeple we really are if they're like if you worked with Nike you're way better than than what we can do we would just love to work with you and here's the weird thing this is where it gets into
where I thought you going to go with Dan and you didn't cuz I didn't know where you went with that it was going to be I thought she said but I did it for Microsoft not like a micrite but not an identity thing and therefore can I claim this cuz I'm in the
moral gray right now then I say well depends on how you want to handle that yeah right okay right now I just list them as like people I've worked with on the website yeah yeah or likeand you just put their logo yeah just put their logo okay and then somewhere on the side
you have to show it yeah and if and then if they want to dig deeper they can find out so you're not misrepresenting you know some people like I received a package from Nike I've worked for Nike now I'm like no you haven't that's dishonest that's black mhm that's so far out of
the gray okay so what you want to do is build a logo quilt of high-profile people you work with cuz that communicates status right Away Great okay that's just one strategy you got it so if necessary you buy the project do it for free okay do something it doesn't even matter because you
are clear about why you're doing it because I need your logo okay so I could legitimately say I've done work with them you don't have to give them the details like I didn't do it for any money I paid for it it doesn't matter nobody's going to ask you very few people are
that direct okay just don't tell them yourself you know how' you do this do it for free I paid them what can you do to to increase the perception of status that somebody gets the privilege of paying you more for Less work and have joy doing it what is it so we've only
got one thing written on the board it's not that complicated everybody reviews reviews reviews testimonials we know that we just believe other people we Outsource most of our thinking you guys we really do what else case studies case studies yeah but if you if you don't have case studies for famous companies it
might not matter we want to go straight to the status part okay what did you say make sure your potential clients know that it's very hard to work with you be have have you have because you have uh a waiting list a waiting list on on the one idea remember one or two
words remember one or two words what's your word waiting list exclusivity make sure you have a limited limited offer that can expire okay we'll do one word at a time okay yeah exclusivity how do we do that decrease Supply sorry I'm like I need a break I I'm like his mouth did not
move and I'm like decrease Supply I'm like and he hides his mic he put it on the table Scott you dirty bastard all right all right decrease Supply correct how will we know that you're right how do we do that yeah how do how do we communicate that you communicate that online you
make sure it's on the website like David C Baker right or you do you do it wa wa wait wait one idea at a time please what's the question all right and application is pretty good yeah waiting list okay oh after she said hold on this guy I was just about to say
after she says waiting list yeah wait list I've been waiting oh did he okay you didn't because you said too many words slow slow slow down okay just don't want anybody say anything one at a time there's an application okay and then ehor said wait list anybody else Tim throw the mic good
throw um basically excluding the company like if you don't make this much money you can't work with me yeah that's in the it's qualifications you qualify the client yeah right remember you you we already went through this what's the number one question you have capacity to produce more no you're not we can't
do anything okay somebody else uh increasing price yes price will do it price has a pretty heavy psychological Factor on the perception of quality it really does those are pretty good so being being specific to what they need like Clarity in them M I love how Martha said this she started strong and
then basically confidence level to distance to mic there a correlation not a causal relationship sometimes people just forget Clarity on the message that's just too broad what do you mean Clarity the message no when that when they see it they are like that's for me well how would I know that how could
we objectively describe this to another human who could do this very difficult yeah it's like what will said like a nice website but I don't know being clearing your ideal customer but yeah still doesn't matter very no okay search in your mind it's is it kandella where where's where's her name yeah candella
do you have something you want to contribute you always bring in the fire well throw her the mic Scott boom I was not expecting that um I would I just keep thinking of the word scarcity you know but I'm trying to think of how do you apply scarcity to a designer in an
effective way and I don't know what the answer is but I know luxury in status demands scarcity because it requires more time like you just can't take that much right right you already talked about exclusivity weight list equals scarcity right he said it he yeah oh that's how you do it yeah yeah
okay so let's get into tactics and how we do this if you look at every luxury brand they operate under false scarcity okay they limit Supply and they communicate that to you in a thousand different ways so the the simple concept of it is they make it difficult to buy it's really weird
a Rolex example isn't it yes so the simple concept is is it difficult to buy buy if it is we want it more for some reason and there's lots of things that we can do to make it difficult to buy you have to be very confident to play this game you have to
be 100% committed that you want to sell quality and not results okay after I finish this we're going to burn this plan and go back to results this is just for Kina okay you got it okay difficult to buy now we know if we have One widget to sell very difficult to buy
only one person can have it if we have a thousand widgets still relatively small but that means a thousand people can have it so we have to just control the balance between supply and demand when Supply outstrips demand you are entering into a difficult to buy stage okay so the supply the supply
is less than the demand that's all you have to do that's a simple simple big concept supply has to be less in demand so there's clearly two things you can do you can decrease Supply and commit to it and you have to work on increasing demand that's called marketing right let's attack the
equation on both sides this works for products and it works for services as well coaching everything just same concept and then if you need to do a deeper dive on this I need you to read the book over subscribed and then I want you to listen to the interview podcast I did with
Daniel Priestley over subscrib I explained this to a bunch of marketers their head almost exploded they like wow or to business people very straightforward concept to understand okay and ehor is using literally the language from the podcast interview with me right now signal to Market and the whole bit he's paid very careful
attention to this okay which one do you want to work on first you want to work on Supply or demand uh demand demand okay what can you do to increase demand for what it is that you do tell me some ideas who's got the mic yeah no they're going to pass it to
you yeah um yeah definitely strengthening marketing website be super specific one thing at a time first thing that I got to do is definitely update my website would that increase demand uh no everybody in the room is shaking their head right now everybody's shaking no yeah just not they not agreeing with that
okay because for people to find your website you're already in demand yeah okay okay okay now if we think about it just use the models you already know if there's a restaurant that has a lot of demand but you don't know the restaurant exists it don't matter so it's not that what can
you do first work with a big company what work with a big company okay well then we're going back to the other side right what we want to do is what are tactics that we can use today to increase the demand or awareness for what it is what we do marketing more specifically
what build how content content like on what uh like's to Broad uh let's do videos on Instagram okay so you're going to build a social following on IG yeah and it only matters if the people you want to talk to are actually on IG this is very important okay so you're GNA say
IG okay so what you want to do is you want to grow a following right because we're all sheeple the more the larger the following you have on IG just for some reason people think you're better it's it's true can't argue it right it's very hard to argue that and the proof is
when you search for a video on YouTube and one has more views you're like that must be a better video Yeah and almost it's it's always right and on Amazon I almost always just buy the one that has the most positive reviews I don't even read the product description anymore because it turns
out to be 99.5% of the time 9 99.5% of times it's it just works okay so we can get the reviews if you want which we talked about in the last page we can have the local quilt we need to just increase demand and awareness and there's something that's good old fashion press
PR just get it okay you can get the awards if you want okay and now speaking like public speaking yes 100% now we're getting into the things you can actually do and control public speaking and what's old school public speaking you just write a book yeah there's a chat gbt write a book
in one sentence it's probably not any good but it's better than zero what else can you do podcast yeah you can you can do oldfashioned media like podcast 100% you can run workshops MH okay now all of these things uh kind of generally fit into this thing where if you can create value
you can educate and entertain you'll start to build demand because more and more people will get to know you you can also run old school ad campaigns if you wanted to I heard this strategy um at a marketing conference what they did was they wanted the founders of Pinterest to read a guide
on how to create high performing things on Pinterest that's all they wanted to do so they found their emails and they ran a campaign and they were like we don't care how long it runs we just want them to see it and to feature this as a thing for other Pinterest users so
they targeted two email addresses it was a campaign for two people and they just ran it in perpetuity it didn't cost as much cuz only targeting two people until they click on it they're spending pennies see how focused they are on the user and what they want to achieve so you can run
ads there's nothing wrong with running ads but the spify playlist huh spify playlist like if you're a brand designer create the playlist for brand design like why we design the brand okay that's that's a new one I haven't heard before you can create a Spotify list yeah you can create this is like
crazy stupid simple and it just works and I'm annoyed by it you just create a top 10 and you include yourself as one probably not number one like number seven okay it's really weird I hate these bastards because they're not good they find nine companies that are really good and they sandwich themselves
in there somewhere yeah so then they get domain Authority CU When you search like top rting firms they're in there as the number one search result and then this list people like lists they're called listicles make listicles MH people like that kind of stuff that's REM me of panels too I have like
what I have a friend who runs panels with experts in her field and that totally brings in business well so this gets into Mira cotan thing The Three Bs that she talks about The Three Bs you know the three Bs no no okay it's build borrow or B okay if you can be
the expert then be the expert which you're not so build it you're going to acquire skills you're going to go to Workshop you're going to read you're going to consume and you're going to grow but the one that's pretty easy is you borrow the expertise because of Association you interview people you host
panels right and if you have a lot of money you can also buy it's the fourth B but she didn't talk about that fourth B you just buy the expertise we just hired the world's most foremost thought leader in X Marty newm sold his company Neutron and no he didn't sell that I'm
sorry he sold the the ability to license his thought leadership to a branding firm they just wanted to be able to share his articles and his writings from his book cuz that's how they generated leads so when you go to search for Marty num thing it's a good chance you're going to land
on one of their pages and he just licensed his IP pretty smart of them and for him you're not doing anything with it and they get to use his expertise and they just borrow it or they bought it not that hard right you can also believe it or not pay to speak on
panels or at conferences I don't do it but you can do it I know people who do because they're going to put themselves in front of buyers of their services and then you activate the stage effect you're on the stage giving a high quality presentation and they're like well you're up there with
that person that person that person we didn't know who you were until today and so you can spend your money that way this list can be very long and I'm sure ehore and others in this room can come up with some pretty amazing lists so then all you need to do now right
is you put an A and A B and A C and A D next to this and then you just start working on a the highest priority that's it yeah one those which for me personally no because I'm doing a lot of them already for you think about what you would do which
one would you do pick one I think think either events or social I think social first are you sure well yeah I mean I have reviews I guess yeah I would say social just pick one I mean social is I think like you were saying important nobody's debating you just pick one all
right okay Chris I would rather do press what social social press yes which one do you want to do just pick one okay I start with social that's my final answer social number one answer okay Karina pick social what platform Instagram uh yeah probably Instagram no LinkedIn LinkedIn okay guys I don't this
is why I'm here I need y'all okay no no don't listen to them focus on me listen um you have commitment issues yes absolutely okay you do okay um are you married no okay not yet it's okay it's all right I was going to connect no but he stay okay social okay Instagram
yes okay how many followers you got on Instagram oh I I I have commitment issues with Instagram too just give me the answer to the question it's like a thousand how many like a thousand 11,000 no 1,000 1,000 yeah okay don't Snicker anybody how many followers do you think you need to get
on Instagram before people start looking you at as an authority in this space I'd say like 10,000 not 10,000 I'll tell you right now 100,000 if you're really trying to do it at 100,000 yeah but if you're you know if you're in a niche no okay no Chris trying to get me to1
I'm telling you right now okay I mean come on you guys want to argue with me you got to be in 100,000 please you got to be uhuh that's a million that's a million by the way yeah okay hold on Mo hold on hold on so you got 100x this there's a threshold
of credibility you got to get past yeah I'm almost certain it's not 10,000 it might not be 100 but it's got to be more intent here's what we're going to do because we're all super smart we're going to be strategic in picking the one that has the highest potential of success with the
least amount of effort from us that most logically as far as we can see is going to work so the reason why I know and I could be wrong she picked this one cuz she's out of all these let's work on that one and she's got one so so therefore I'm going to
assume the other ones are not there logically deductive reasoning Scott I think I was actually also looking at like Karina oh Martha sorry no no worries yeah I think I also just think of Instagram as like a foundation that's necessary for the rest of them here's what we're going to do we need
to think about the person we're selling to yeah yeah not where we want to be you're right this are two totally different things I know it's nice when I'm right right yeah okay only focus on where they're going to be okay that's the most important thing once you figure out where they're going
to be be there and there's a good chance they're on Instagram I'm not saying they're not they could be on Pinterest they could be on behance they can be on lots of different things right okay now you know that thing I told you about like make yourself easy to find we had these
entrepreneurs who manage not high net worth people ultra high net worth people the people who have homes within their homes kind of thing they founded us and they're they're they're Mexican entrepreneurs from Mexico City they had to go down some crazy rabbit holes later and they found us because they saw an image
that they liked we make it easy to find us that's the thing so when you have something good title it well put it everywhere you can put it and then sit back and wait it's a long game okay all right so if you want to establish demand to be seen as the the
brand not just a bran to work with you have to pick one and work on that okay who wanted to pick another one okay ehor it's just between the two of you now it's like a game of tennis I would say teaching whatever teaching you do do the teaching teaching teaching is not
even on here man workshops then okay you want to run workshops yeah okay perfect okay is there anything getting in your way in my way yeah I think what is getting in your way name one thing that's getting your way running I know I don't know how to prioritize okay fair okay he
can do workshops so everybody here whether it's on on this list or not write down in your notebook what's the one thing you're going to do so that you can establish Authority in your space and create demand for what it is that you do this is something you have control over for some
of you it would be to write posts on LinkedIn I would recommend that write a post on LinkedIn put an image up and just keep doing this with some Cadence that you can manage that doesn't feel like it's killing you okay and keep doing it and when I mean keep doing it don't
write 35 articles and then publish 35 in a row because you're not learning from every post write the post look at the results write the post look at the results and make one small tweak and before you know it you should start to see your post increase in whatever Dimension you care about
either the quality of Engagement the number of people who share or the the the the amount of views it gets whatever matters to you just work on that post tweak post tweak and the key to posting and building a social following is to not overinvestment decrease Supply is we have to learn how
many customers we can actually service well in a given period of time let's say a month okay everybody already knows this number how many customers can you service well in one month what is that number everybody everybody's going to have a different number and it depends on what you do some say 0.
five some people can say three whatever it is okay how many customers can you work with in a given month and you'll know that number or you can take it within a year maybe the year is easier I can work with 10 clients a year I can work with 100 clients a year
it doesn't matter okay everybody cool everybody clear if you want more content like this check out our business boot camp course designed to help you scale your business handle objections and charge more
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“The success that you want is sometimes one degree different than what you're doing now.”
— Chris Do
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