From Influencer to Millionaire with Lauren Tickner – YouTube

Transcript:

(00:00) those who are innovators who are really trying to expand the industry and change things up like what you’re doing right that’s very much something where you need a large operation you really need a lot of people on the team to be able to build and scale and grow and develop but a lot of people that you and I know for example internet marketers I don’t think they need to have as crazy of an operation as they do have because a lot of it’s just excess complexity when you really look at what’s actually bringing

(00:23) in results and what’s actually generating revenue for your business half of the stuff that you’re doing doesn’t even matter [Music] we have another awesome episode of Beyond a million for you and today’s guest is Lauren tickner Lauren went from a job in Asset Management to Fitness influencer she then started selling Fitness courses online which eventually led her to founding impact school a company that helps coaches and Consultants scale Brad and Lauren cover a ton in this episode everything from

(01:00) social media marketing and how to drive more leads and close deals through direct messages to operational tactics and managing the work-life balance plus I get to hear about Lauren’s personal experiences and the perks that come with living in Dubai here’s Beyond a million episode 92 with Lauren tickner and Brad Weimer Lauren tickner I appreciate you coming out yeah well in Austin what else could I do here well you can do a lot of things here but I’m glad you made it to the studio we were going to do a remote

(01:27) and it’s so much better to do things so much better so much better so I want to open with so every time we have uh people on the show they they fill out a form to help us get you know construct for who they are like details or whatever I want to read some of yours okay so opening line three million in profit per year may be too small for your show but I don’t go by Big Dick Top Line rev LOL Revenue goes up and down but the aim is to stabilize and slowly increase profit yep lavish there’s no expecting

(01:59) you to read that out loud but it’s my favorite I read it actually last night and I was like this is great in one of the one of the reasons I wanted to read it is because aside from it being hilarious is because we have you know 10 million 20 million dollar companies that don’t take 3 million off of the business each year and I think it’s a really relevant point to highlight to entrepreneurs that listen where they’re like oh my God this company’s doing you know 10 million a year and it’s like yeah but you don’t

(02:28) realize that they have a five percent margin or a 10 margin yeah um so I like the idea of measuring take home versus Top Line versus big dick versus big dick exactly exactly hilarious um so I want to dig into that business and what generates that Revenue but before we get there can you give me sort of origin story backdrop yeah so I never plan to be a business owner or an entrepreneur and my goal was always to be so I went and got an asset management job at the age of 18 and I just realized you know what I’m actually totally

(03:00) unemployable because they were getting me to stick by this really really structured schedule and I placed a lot of judgment on myself in the fact that I just I just couldn’t enjoy it and I couldn’t seem to understand how everybody around me enjoyed that job despite the fact that they were making a ton of money it just all I wanted to do was go and work out at the gym because there was a really nice gym opposite from my office and I could see it through those beautiful you know floor to ceiling Windows right and um yeah so

(03:28) at the same time I had a fitness Instagram account and I’d made that account because I’d actually lost 50 pounds so as a kid I was never obese but I was significantly overweight and I really just this one day I decided I need to just lose weight and so I just changed something in my mind and I just unfortunately went down a really unhealthy fat loss Journey well it’s kind of like when people get first into business they sabotage everything else in their life to only focus on their business they destroy a ton of

(03:56) relationships and they just do business all day long that was me but for fitness and so I lost a lot of weight really quickly and I started having panic attacks every day and at the age of 16 and 17 that’s quite rare to be having panic attacks and um I remember driving home from the gym one day because I was trying to do a session but I just couldn’t breathe properly because I was having a panic attack essentially a long drawn out panic attack for multiple days and I just thought to myself you know what I want to be successful I’d already

(04:26) decided that when I was younger because my brother that’s two years younger than me has epilepsy and autism so he’s in a wheelchair and he had literally had his freedom stripped away from him at Birth and so through growing up with that and through seeing that I really had this desire to create freedom for myself and to make the most of my life because I’d seen someone that actually physically and literally could not and so I realized I’m I right now through the actions I’m taking through

(04:55) being overly obsessed with this one thing which for me was Fitness I am self sabotaging my own potential freedom in the pursuit of a goal and at that moment I realized that was not what I wanted to do and so essentially then I changed my life and I decided that I wanted to actually get healthy which is how I created this Instagram account and the reason why that’s relevant is because when I quit my asset management job even though I’d only been doing it for a year I had this Fitness page to fall back on

(05:23) that I’d just been giving giving giving giving to and I’d never got anyone to pay me any money and so then I put together a fitness program and I launched that and that was when I was about 19 years old and so I just somehow I don’t know how but I found Pat Flynn’s smart passive income podcast love it and they were talking about webinars and so I learned okay I can I can create a webinar I can get people to sign up to an email list like what is that and I found this whole world of digital marketing and essentially that’s slowly

(05:56) but surely how I ended up here crazy uh well that’s a phenomenal lesson to get when you’re 16 17 18. crazy yeah yeah I mean most people don’t have any ambition of I think it’s changed over time but certainly the you know in in the US The Narrative has always been work hard planned for retirement that’s the game yeah right and that’s changing over time through mechanisms like this but what uh tell me about the the initial transition out of the job like what was the size of the Instagram

(06:30) page at the time was that actually the plan did you have money before you quit or did you just say it I’m going so I was making 18 000 pounds a year wow and this was supposed this was supposedly okay this is one of the biggest asset management companies in the UK and I really sacrificed potential earning in favor of the title because to be able to say that you work at that company at such a young age I was the youngest person that they had ever hired in 50 years because back then you could hire people who are like 16 but in that

(07:07) period of time things had really really changed so it was a very much an ego play to be able to tell my dad I finally got a job in finance because his dream that he always said to me is he wished that he went and worked in finance and I think that that was until a few years ago something that was a big regret for him because he worked in property in the UK he had a small real estate company like a brokerage not you know one of these giant multi-million real estate portfolios or whatever like a small company making a couple hundred grand a

(07:37) year which is decent but when finally I quit that job and made made it happen through my own business and he was able to learn from me that the reason why I had the balls to go ahead and actually build my own business because he had his own business and I always saw him running his own thing he finally realized thank God that he didn’t go into Finance because otherwise I never would have been able to have done this and he saw how miserable I was when I was working in that job actually funny story so I remember one time I got back from

(08:10) the train station because you have to in in England it’s very normal to commute using the train so I get back and it’s like 8 p.m and I am knackered I’m so tired and I remember I went upstairs and I just sat down on the toilet and like I just for some reason I grabbed my phone right let’s be honest everybody goes on their phone while they’re taking a pee and I just dropped my phone in the toilet by accident and I just remember like crying and crying and crying and crying and I’m never someone that cries

(08:38) and I just remember thinking that the next day at work I wasn’t going to be able to go on my phone and check Instagram because that was the one thing that was keeping me motivated throughout my days because it was it was honestly so miserable at that job and so I honestly had no intentions for anything I literally had no idea what I was going to do I had a I had a place at University that I had deferred so I was supposed to be studying economics and it was at a very good uni in the UK and I remember going

(09:11) on the website and just thinking I really need my own business and if I study economics I’m just going to end up back in another corporate job and I am not doing that as we already decided I’m unemployable and I think a lot of entrepreneurs can resonate with with being that way so I called them up and I I kind of fancied myself as a bit of a salesperson at this stage right because I’d been having some experience making negotiations with the fund managers to try and get them to stop being so aggressive to me and I’ve been studying

(09:41) some negotiations so I called the uni and I was like hey I am supposed to be doing economics however I’ve been working in this asset management job for the last year or so and I want to study Sports Science because this this and this regarding Fitness and they told me no so then I go on the website and I was like okay because I physically couldn’t do it because I didn’t have the right degrees and so this is how how outdated these systems are just because I I sorry I didn’t have the right exams that I’d

(10:08) done when I was 18 years old got it you hadn’t gone through the right classes or whatever yeah so they didn’t let me do the degree that I wanted so I think it’s so crazy that at that age you have to make one decision once when you’re 16 for the rest of your life yeah but anyway so so I went on the website and it said UK’s number one Business Degree so I was able to convince them to let me switch to that degree which then I thought would help me with my Fitness business but I get to the university and I’m in a

(10:38) lecture regarding accounting and tax and it was all about UK tax and accounting and at this point I’d already been selling fit online fitness coaching and I go to the front of the class and I ask the guy I’m like okay I just realized I need to pay tax because I didn’t realize by that point and so so I asked my lecturer at Uni please can you help me figure out how to pay my taxes because I have customers in America Australia all around Europe what do I need to do and he closes this big booklet that he had

(11:14) in front of him and he looks at me really close and he says that would be a good question for Google Lauren wow and I just remember at that moment thinking yeah this is an absolute waste of my time so I I quit and then I just did my own thing yeah well that uh he sounds like an and oh and by the way I did some research on him and he had never worked in a company never had his own business he’d been making textbooks his whole entire life yeah yeah I mean this is the nightmare of traditional education and it’s not the

(11:46) case in all institutions right but it certainly is the case in many and it’s I I feel the same way about government where it’s like the narrative is if you can’t hack it in Private Industry then you go into government or you go into education and it’s not universally true but man there’s a reason that those stereotypes exist so so at that point you had the fitness thing going at some point you transitioned into the current business what was the size and scope and why did you why did you transition

(12:19) because it sounds like you were self-sustaining um and maybe not killing it but doing fine with the Fitness business and you were doing Fitness courses yeah exactly so I was helping people learn how to track macros and then do weight training as a woman and I was doing really well considering I was 20 21 22 I was making multiple six figures in profit per year and it just felt everything felt so easy and if I I do often think if I could go back to running that business now honestly I think I would I think I would make that

(12:51) trade just because when you’re someone with a big audience on social media they give you everything for free they don’t even expect you to post about it so I would get these vacations anywhere and they would invite me I didn’t have to pay a penny I would go to I went to Bali once for three weeks everything was paid for except the flights everything but I had credit card points so I got the price for free as well so it was a really good life back then and so I never never once checked you know leads or or conversions or

(13:22) sales or nothing I just looked at my bank account every single week and is it going up and if it was then I was happy if it wasn’t then I wasn’t even that stressed because I didn’t really have much expenses you know I was a young single girl and so this was a really good time for me this is like probably when I think when I’m older this is like the Glory Days and so well I want to talk about that part of it because one of the things that I find sort of uh perpetually fascinating about the world that we live

(13:52) in today as it pertains to content is you can do things like that where it’s you know a couple or a few hundred grand A Year Without Really having a business right you’re not tracking metrics you’re not deliberately doing much of anything anything and it’s just worth yeah um what so what were you selling and how were you getting leads then because I want to talk about the transition to you know the shift to the current business but what were you doing then to generate it’s not like you found Pat Flynn so you

(14:21) found some internet marketing stuff what were you doing to make that business work at the time okay so back then I had just one thing that I was selling which was essentially a coaching membership so people could come in and they would pay between 49 and 79 a month pounds pounds a month I was doing all in pounds because I didn’t think that you know the USD is the the Global Currency that people use um excuse me I don’t even have any idea what the what the conversion rate is on that well back then it was good because

(14:55) I made more money than I would have if it was in dollars because obviously the pound was significantly stronger back then yeah these days it’s it’s a little shy I don’t know exactly what it is now but so I was selling this membership and what I would do is I would just try and I would consistently try and go viral that was all I was trying to do how can I get my Instagram post to go viral yeah because Instagram was the platform back then if I was doing it now it would most likely be Tick Tock if it was in three

(15:19) years who knows what platform it’s gonna be so that’s it I would literally just get people to go into the link in my bio and then sign up for the thing that was it was really simple I did not really try and do much then I learned about all the webinars and everything like that and that was when I started being more intentional about growing an email list but I do think as entrepreneurs especially what a lot of what we see people put so much pressure on themselves constantly all the time to be man just building these crazy gigantic

(15:48) operations that for the most part might not even be necessary I just think that I was very fortunate early on to have a dose of what’s possible without having a gigantic operation because I think if you’re trying to build and and I think you know the guys from Andreessen Horowitz talk about this a lot but those who are innovators who are really trying to expand the industry and change things up like what you’re doing right that’s very much something where you need a large operation you really need a lot of

(16:13) people on the team to be able to build and scale and grow and develop but a lot of people that you and I know for example internet marketers I don’t think they need to have as crazy of an operation as they do have because a lot of it’s just excess complexity and when you really look at what’s actually bringing in results and what’s actually generating revenue for your business half of the stuff that you’re doing doesn’t even matter I mean I know these guys with these giant social media teams

(16:36) and then when they look at like is that actually bringing in any leads or revenue for your business maybe it’s growing that email list by like 20 emails a week it’s just so much work just for absolutely nothing yeah I think that’s a good lesson in general is why are you taking the actions that you’re taking yeah and very often with businesses as they grow they push the envelope to satisfy somebody that’s not really the target market anyway so they’re chasing a shiny object right they’re chasing a big client and they

(17:05) modify their existing structure to cater to somebody that isn’t in their core uh Avatar and spend all this time and energy to add that feature set and it’s like you you could have just spent the energy on the core market and Amplified more there yeah or even more dangerously it’s to appease your peers oh God yeah well in the social in the social space for sure right when you’re looking at um visible tracking of views and clicks and look at me right uh yeah that’s interesting so okay so what was the

(17:39) transition so you were doing the fitness thing why change and what changed yes so good question and uh sorry for not closing the loop so regarding Okay so so basically I would always get invited to these Fitness conferences and I think this is where taking feedback from the market is really important because at these Fitness conferences all of my friends will be invited to do workout classes and I would never get invited to teach the workout class they would always ask me to talk about social media and I was always really envious of them

(18:10) because I wanted to do the class it was really fun but then I would do the talk on the social media and people really liked it and these owners of companies like director consumer physical product food companies or clothing brands they would always come up to me and ask me a ton of questions and I remember one time this one guy came up to me who had a blood testing kit so they take your blood sample they ship it away and then they give you you know what are your hormones how’s your vitamin D Etc all of that

(18:39) stuff and he said to me okay so like how can I hire you for my marketing and I was like well I have my own business I’m not looking to be hired and he was like no how can I hire you for Consulting and I was like is that the same thing as a consultant I have no idea what is Consulting right and so I remember saying okay give me your email address I’m gonna send you a pitch deck so I just thought in my head pitch deck okay maybe that’s the right thing to do so I created this proposal for him and I told

(19:10) him I would do it for a thousand bucks a month a thousand pounds a month and uh he said yes and so I was like crap crap because I couldn’t think how much to charge and I just thought a thousand sounded like a nice amount of extra money to be making So eventually what I ended up doing is I just set up a call with him once a week and I would just guide him on what he should be doing to get leads using social media because they were already doing stuff on social they were already running ads now I knew nothing about ads at that time however

(19:36) um they just primarily wanted to focus on connecting better with their target audience and their their target audience was the same target audience that I had had through my social content so through connecting the dots like that I realized number one I hate working one-on-one with clients at this capacity is not interesting for me and the second thing was maybe there’s something to this helping people with social media game and so a few of my friends were massive influencers one of them had 800 000 on YouTube right so subscribers way more

(20:04) engaged than if it was just Instagram or something and um the others had a few a few hundred thousand too and essentially we were all sponsored by this company called gymshark and so gymshark is a big Fitness brand and they were all paying us a salary each month okay so can you imagine like the influencer life is like an easy life okay so you just make a few posts on social for the brand you make yourself look good and then boom that’s it but that’s all they would do it they didn’t have any other income streams and

(20:33) so I was obviously making decent cash from my fitness coaching business and it was just me and a team of a video editor and a community manager so it was only three me and two others and so I said to them okay well because they turned to me they were like Lauren how are you still traveling and everything like hook me up with whoever this company is that’s giving you a trip for free and this time I was actually paying and I told them like yeah I think things have dried up like less free trips these days you know

(20:59) just paid for it for for me and a couple of my friends they were like what how are you paying for like such a good holiday and so I told them oh I’m selling these these fitness challenges they were like what how do I do that and I was thinking in my head how are you guys not doing a Fitness business because you have such a big audience but some people who are naturally with a big audience they don’t think more operationally they don’t think about generating money because everything’s free it’s so easy yeah so I gave them my

(21:26) share funnel because I thought if I give them my funnel then they’re gonna I’m gonna make 30 bucks a month on affiliate commission and uh yeah they launched it and some of these guys make like 20K in their first launch and so I thought cool imagine if I’d had a cut of that I should have like taken a revenue share or something but then I just thought nah you know what like I was comfortable right everything was easy for me so for a few years I did nothing of it and then finally I saw this one guy a friend of

(21:50) mine Iman godzi who is really famous now but back then I knew him since he was like 11. and if he was selling a course on how to build a personal brand and he had like 10 000 followers on Instagram and I thought this guy if he could do it so can I so I Just Whipped together a course and I launched it and that was essentially how I eventually made the transition wild uh yeah you know there’s there’s definitely I think about that the construct of the influencer not realizing that they have that they’re

(22:18) sitting on a pile of gold like not knowing how to monetize is sort of the same as it’s it’s very common to find restaurants on the coast like with amazing views that are mediocre as because they don’t have pressure to create a good menu and a good experience because the view is so good it works anyway and so the people that I’m most impressed with operationally are those that on some level are forced to dial it right and it’s one of the reasons that the adult industry is so interesting from a

(22:55) marketing perspective because it’s so competitive because everybody likes naked people so so the marketing is Cutting Edge all the time because it’s so competitive they have to figure it out um so you figured something out and you made the transition do you do the did you abandon the fitness thing at that point for a long time no and it was a big mistake that I I was trying to be two different people so I was talking to two audiences one was because back then I didn’t help generally with people that want to sell

(23:25) their knowledge online it was really anyone who wanted to build an online fitness coaching business so I was still trying to stay Niche however I still had all these Fitness people I had like Fitness people following me I had like people that wanted to lose weight following me it was all very confusing but the interesting thing was and the reason why I think this is actually potentially a cool move for someone who is let’s say doing you know a direct consumer type of play right now and then moving to business the business

(23:54) side of things is so many of the people that had been through my fitness stuff then two or three years later came to me for how to become an online fitness coach because they’d had such a life-changing experience and that was a pretty cool realization and seeing wow I changed someone’s life so much that they went from Super unhappy with their body to absolutely loving health and fitness to the point where they want to be able to now help other people go through that same transformation and so that then

(24:20) just became innately more rewarding to me because I realized that I could then make an impact through other people rather than me just doing it directly myself but just on that note that you were saying before so I think a really good business and I saw one of my friends do this his name is Sean and he has this company where they essentially take a percentage of influencers brand names as it were and they scale them up and so I think that there are so many influencers out there who actually need that it just comes

(24:48) down to them being able to trust in you because influences are pitched so many times a day on hey let me build your business for you and I’ll make you a ton of money but it just sounds really really unachievable but I think if if there was like a backbone in which it can be done without the influence even feeling like someone is taking a cut of their business that’ll be a really cool business and that’s something that I’ve considered potentially doing in the future because it’s something that I

(25:10) know that I’m really really good at and is definitely very very very profitable but influencers can be hard to work with yeah well that’s the uh I mean Talent creatives are hard to work with right it’s just a lifelong you know uh reality and it goes back to I think all of all of Hollywood you can always point to this right it’s you’ve got business people and creative people and there’s some working together and how you figure that out um but I think the challenge in that business model is that when people get

(25:43) very good they tend to just do it all themselves and you’re with almost all marketing agencies the graduated path of success and a marketing marketing agency is inevitably doing your own products because you realize that if you if you’ve perfected everything up to that point where you get the rest of the margin is doing your own products I.

(26:08) E your own content in this case right and it’s the same thing with influencers as it is with any other business but the starting point for marketing agency is like let me take other people’s money to figure it out and then you learn with other people’s money and that’s great from an agency perspective and generally not great for the business in aggressive spaces right and then as they get better you know they charge more and eventually the really good ones do exactly what you just said which is they share Revenue

(26:35) um but it’s hard to find the good ones that share Revenue learn and experience it from that sense but you know what I think as well um there’s also on the other side of things this massive interest right now on people taking a stake about the companies and just doing a REV share but then I also think I’m seeing a lot of people shoot themselves in the foot because they try and do it too soon before they’ve become good enough to actually do that because they think to start the best way to do it would be a

(27:02) REV share but at the end of the day if you’re not that good yet doing a ref share isn’t going to be good for you because you’re not going to actually make any Revenue so I always think that for me personally I think it was good that I started with my own thing because I was not putting anyone else’s company under any risk and I knew that I was good in Fitness and the worst that I could do is help someone lose weight too quickly as an example or you know in the health and fitness space I think at the

(27:28) end of the day it’s very hard for people to create change anyway and so I think it’s quite a for me at least it was a safe kind of battle tested battle testing ground to be able to sharpen the axis as it were when it came to business because you have to really understand psychology because to get people to buy into something that is against their innate desire which is to do things that are hard it’s really really challenging sure well on the fitness space in particular when you look at uh different markets is

(27:57) just a tremendously competitive market because oh yeah but back then it wasn’t in that space maybe not right but you know we uh our our director of marketing actually who is sitting in the other room maybe not so much staring at us uh did the marketing for taebo Fitness which was like decades ago this guy Billy Blanks did infomercials but that thing has existed forever it’s just you know every time we go through a new platform you started by saying you know it was Instagram and now it’s tick tock

(28:27) and like who knows what it’s going to be well for a very long time it was infomercials and there was this whole engine around infomercials and fitness influencers but it keeps transforming right transitioning yeah I didn’t even know about that isn’t that how Tony Robbins got definitely his Fame definitely yeah I mean in in before infomercials Tony was doing uh Little Live Events where he would uh do these pop-ups in his hometown and around and he would just run news paper ads and get people in a room at a hotel yeah and

(28:59) like give them a motivational seminar for 20 people so interesting so this is one of the things that I speak about often with my team because I feel like there’s constantly this battle between marketing and then the rest of my company and so we always discuss this all the time because marketing is like the one area the business where you always have to consistently stay ahead of the curve and adapt all the time and change things in a reactive manner based upon the customer and the market feedback and so it kind of drives like my operational

(29:29) team crazy because we’ll get this massive like feedback survey response from our customers and then we’ll do a live launch to our audience and then it doesn’t doesn’t go how we wanted it to so then they survey the people and we find out that the reason why it didn’t go this way is because we were trying to Market this thing when they actually wanted to buy this other thing and so then my Ops team has already planned this entire campaign for the rest of the year and then my marketing team comes in

(29:53) and changes everything but it’s just a fact that marketing ultimately the the philosophy stayed the same but the platforms change consistently and it’s something that yeah it’s been a real learning curve for the more operational focused Minds on my team to be able to try and understand that because they want to build the structure sure so so I want to talk about that part of it because you move from Fitness to functionally like business opportunity how do you create a business online yeah and you mentioned that you didn’t get

(30:24) rid of the fitness and kind of the logical progression was that the people that had succeeded with the fitness product then thought oh I could create a business out of this and so that jump makes sense but when you shift over to just business content and you’re just focused on helping people build businesses um what content you produce theoretically is different and and how you go about the whole thing but it’s a different space so first and foremost how do you drive leads for that business and can you give us some idea of size

(30:57) scope frame of just how that works for you yeah so well I never thought or potentially that the fitness clients would become the business client right never so for me I was having a conversation with a friend the other day and they said to me Lauren it’s really weird how you never had any intentionality behind anything that you’re doing today I was like I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not so thanks and it was true because it just happened for me really really organically because like I said I in the

(31:25) beginning I never intended to have a business for me it was kind of by accident so now I see people starting their social media platforms and like their personal Brands through trying to scale their business through their personal brand and it’s like the opposite way around of how I did it and I understand both I mean it’s the same thing at the end of the day it’s just that I never had a business in the beginning so um on that note though so essentially what I did in order to Pivot is that I had a few people just ask me well I see

(31:55) what you’re doing but I have like a productivity business does it work with that or I see what you’re doing but like I train construct action people how to scale that construction company and I thought I don’t think it works but if you want to join like I’m running around starting like in a couple of weeks just join for free and like let’s see if it works so I got these couple people and then there was this one girl Francesca who had this productivity business she was making like 6 000 Euros a month and

(32:20) she scaled to 25k a month and I just thought that that was really cool and proof that it didn’t just work in Fitness but I didn’t want to just hope and pray that just because one girl at work for the others because the construction guy didn’t work for and so I thought okay well I must not be good enough and I had all these like doubts in my mind so I just kept doing what I was doing and then finally one day I had so many people asking me about social media I launched a separate business to scale social media and then I created a

(32:45) lead generation agency and then I was just doing all these different things that at one point I realized like I have so many different and this is all over like a two-year period I have so many different customers and so many different things I just need to compile it all into one and that was in 2019 then obviously in 2020 the lockdowns and everything everybody wanted to take their business online and we were only at that point working with those that essentially were selling their knowledge online so primarily people that had been

(33:11) doing in-person training workshops on let’s say tax planning right I had a few clients that were doing that and then I had some that were personal trainers and I had all these various different customers who then Beyond a million is brought to you by Easy Pay Direct if you’re an entrepreneur and you are still using a product like stripe or PayPal to accept payments it is time to find out why the largest names in your industry would never consider doing that check out easypaydirect.com forward slash bam to

(33:40) find out more it’s for us to Double Down dabbling in in 20 and so then we were able to just take what I was doing in Fitness and systematize it it was it’s very much the same it’s very much the same the only difference is the way in which they deliver to their customers obviously if you have Fitness it’s more you know personal workout programs if it’s in anything else it’s whatever you’re teaching yeah sure um so how do we get leads for that we were running live trainings still same thing as what I do

(34:10) now so every single month I do a live webinar and what we do is that’s to our organic audience and so the vehicle in which we get top of the funnel leaves changes all the time right now I’m actually not running ads we’re still doing everything organically but that’s again because like I I personally Love Organic so this is like my own selfish reason why I’m still doing that but we are going to start running out soon to all the marketing people listening um or the paid marketing people but um

(34:37) yes we run a live training on a topic that we’ve been hearing a lot in sales and then basically we just you know Bush all the objections in that and then we get them to apply and then we have them put 100 bucks down to get on a sales School and then someone from my team takes a sales school and then closes them into a membership so it’s a very similar model to what I was doing about five or six years ago in Fitness it’s just that back then we didn’t have them pay for a sales call back then I was

(35:01) just closing through the DMS over the last few years I’ve been primarily closing fully through the DMS but right now what I realized is that I would rather have a business in which there’s a longer retention so I realized like we had more of like a one night stand business versus a marriage business and because we were just selling to new people all the time and we had no retention and uh back in Fitness I had a really great retention whereas that was a more enjoyable business to run so I thought what was I doing back then that

(35:30) would be really applicable now so now I’ve shifted into more of like a monthly recurring Revenue type of model which has been really really beneficial to me personally because before every single month we would start at zero because you’d made the sales in the previous month sure there was payment plans coming in but at the end of the day they’re only lasting a maximum of six months and then we just didn’t have anything to to sell off because after they were done they were done and they didn’t really need us anymore but the

(35:53) level in which this you know the skills of the team is essentially the level of which you know a customer can potentially stay with you for and so we realized it was on us and it was our problem that we weren’t scared enough to take them to the next level so that’s essentially what we’ve been fixing over the last year so it sounds like when you said the skills of the team as what ultimately increased the lifetime value of the customer yeah so uh support related problem or and or that you just didn’t have another product more like

(36:21) strategically it was a it was twofold it was like a mindset block of the team thinking that we shouldn’t sell anything else to them because we are not the right ones to for them to stay on with because we can get them to a certain level but we can’t get them Beyond but then when we actually really looked at it that was fundamentally Incorrect and that was fundamentally not true it’s just that we weren’t putting our heart and soul into creating the product in which they would need to get to the next

(36:47) level so it wasn’t a knowledge and skill Gap really it was a mental Gap in the fact that the team who was leading customer success didn’t believe that we had what we actually did have because we hadn’t created it so we had it it was just in their heads and it was in the client results and the steps that we’d taken one-on-one with clients it just wasn’t packaged up into a formula and so essentially we got everyone who was doing one-on-one client work to literally go through their top 20 clients they’d work with the results

(37:14) that they’ve got for those best clients and go through from starts and exactly what they did so we had these massive Google Docs each like 20 30 pages breaking down like exactly steps and then from there we’ve done this over about an eight month period like we boiled it down into essentially the formula in which anybody would need to take in order to ascend through those like Revenue stages but we typically don’t work with people who in this business are scaling past like 100 200k per month on the business where

(37:43) they sell their knowledge online a lot of our customers have other companies but from their online business we don’t really work with clients beyond that level right now got it so it’s creating the initial products yes but for them that’s a lot of money absolutely business because there are other companies are you know very Capital intensive like some of them have real estate businesses where all their money is tied up in in projects some of them have I mean brick and mortar locations of like chiropractor companies and so

(38:14) their profit margins is like 10 20 30 so they really like this because their margins is like 80 90 sure yeah well look also the the size of the audience is so much bigger than you know so so easy beta act serves small business businesses as well as sort of midmark and larger businesses but our marketing energy goes towards companies that are 1 to 50 million in Revenue and as soon as you get to I mean even at one but when you get to 10 million a year plus the market just compresses it just shrinks there just aren’t as many businesses and so when

(38:50) you look at the size of the audience that you can find somebody that has expertise and help them operationalize the expertise to create Revenue exactly it’s just much bigger yeah um yeah but so my my big question there is well I want to highlight one thing you said which I think is really cool when you’re creating the webinars you’re looking at the objections that you’ve heard through the sales process already to decide what you’re going to talk about and I think that’s awesome and like that’s a an ongoing lesson that can

(39:17) people can take but it still begs this question of how do you think about top of funnel and what content you create period because you grew up creating a bunch of Fitness content and some of that dominoed into the biz op space but now do you deliberately create because it’s still all organic so do you deliberately create business content do you also create more social content like how do you think about your approach to content creation as a top funnel strategy that you know you’re trying to convert later yes so there’s really

(39:49) three types of content that I create so the first one if we start with like the most bottom of the funnel content so that’s really where it’s like I call it intent trigger content so it’s where I want people to come come towards the company and just say hey I want to be your client I want to give you money right now and so most people just never even do this type of content because they think social media or social media but I see social media as Business Media and so when you actually make content

(40:15) like where you’re getting people to actually say hey I’m interested in getting this right now then they come towards you with in their mind that they want to join and start working with you so for example like you may want to say something let’s say for you guys right like you know are you sick of other payment processes blocking you or or taking away your funds um send me a message saying the word info and let’s talk about how easy pay direct can uh you know save you from your payment processing woes once and

(40:47) for all okay something like that I’m totally running that isn’t it yeah but then basically like if someone messages you can just have an automation on the back end whereby when they send you the word info you can reply back to them like Jack uh great to hear from you shoot me your best email and I’ll have somebody from my team send you over all the information they send their email address another response from the bot says like sweet thanks I’ve just had Anna from my team send that through to

(41:15) you could you check your email for me to make sure you’ve got it check spam as well just in case at the same time the automation emails Jack from Anna saying hey it’s Anna here from Easy Pay Direct um whatever your thing would be so maybe it’ll be to schedule a call maybe it’ll be for them to fill out an application I don’t know what it is for you but whatever it is we personally like them having an application so that then can go through into our CRM with all the information so that we can either

(41:40) qualify them or disqualify them and then give them something for free if we do disqualify them and so that could just be a really really simple piece of content that you post once a week and you if you find something that works just keep posting it again and again and again I have this one instagram story that whenever I post it normally on average I’ll get like four to five thousand views on my Instagram stories this one takes up to Fifteen to twenty thousand every single time this is a middle of the funnel content actually

(42:05) this one it’s not bottom so this middle of the funnel content says I put together a brand new free training on exactly how to get leads on social media it says something like that and then it’s like it’s a blueprint it’s a blueprint designed to increase your reach it’s 100 free comment the word access and I’ll send it through to you something like that I can’t remember exactly what it says but it says something like that and um the reason why I get so much additional organic reach is because so many people start

(42:33) replying right so it’s just a photo of me and then there’s text on the top and then people start replying to it that then pushes it out to more people in your audience so that’s like one story no others I delete everything else and I just have that one story up because if there was a story up before and then half of the people drop before watching the next story then Instagram is seeing like a 50 drop off rate so that’s obviously not good again that’s quite tactical and obviously algorithms

(43:00) change so I wouldn’t you know if you’re listening to this in like 2025 or Beyond then it may not be relevant anymore but what works is essentially the copy where it’s just like saying you know I’ve recently put together a brand new free training on whatever it is and then give some context like it’s a blueprint to whatever the outcome is do you want access 100 free question mark comment and unreply the word whatever it is and I’ll send it to you and the automations are what do the magic because then you’d

(43:26) have to do anything yeah so and that’s stories specifically stories yeah but this also works on posts as well everything that I do I put it on both stories and posts and videos as well because you can just have like a a random video of I don’t know you cycling on your bike and you just put the text on top and then you put some music and then it’s just the same content everything personally that I do is text first and then I’ll repurpose everything into um videos and then I have a separate team that does short form content and

(43:56) the short form content is all designed to be top of the funnel content that I’ll get into in a second and the top of the funnel content is literally designed just to reach more people generally it doesn’t have to be more of the right people the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel is where I’m actually like focusing in on my people top of the funnel is just purely designed to reach like a mass mass market and I don’t necessarily care who I’m reaching because just how organic social media works you

(44:23) just need to continuously reach more people to then be able to eventually convert some of them into potential customers for your business um so I’m with you on that but the people tend to approach that different ways so there’s definitely you know sort of like Trend chasing right let’s talk about AI let’s talk about um you know politics or whatever whatever’s in the news in the moment right um but there is still a question of some people are much more targeted in that than others do you is it truly for you

(44:58) anything uh is top of funnel or do you care if they’re potential clients at all or is that in your mind the top of funnel purely just to get the algorithm moving with you yeah so I’ve had a bit of a battle in my mind about this because my personal personal preference when I’m creating the content myself is and I and I do create all the content for my personal brand I’ve tried hiring ghost writers and stuff in the past and it just doesn’t feel right for me um so for the top of the funnel stuff I

(45:26) always start everything with like a cocktail party brag so let’s say you’re at cocktail party and somebody comes up to you and they’re like oh so tell me something crazy cool about you and you had like a couple margaritas or something and so you’re feeling a little out there and so you’re just like boom tell them a fact about yourself that would literally make their jaw drop and be like wow that’s so impressive so it’s kind of just analogy because obviously you probably just don’t go out to people

(45:49) on the street and say something you know random about yourself but um it would be something so the one that works for me every single time that does really really well is like I became a millionaire by the age of 23 without only fans daddy’s money or multi-level marketing here are the three traits that made me a million and here are the five habits that made me a million now here’s the exact business model that made me a millionaire so I just changed the last sentence and that’s desirable for a lot

(46:15) of people because they want to become a millionaire and it’s also appealing to my people so I like this for top of the funnel because generally it brings in the right people however when it comes to video content it’s slightly different so video content you can’t just like look at the camera and say I became you know it sounds a little it just if some reason works better when it’s typed then when it’s video I don’t know why it just it just does when you are acknowledging the fact as to why people should listen

(46:42) to you in video I think it’s because of how people’s minds work with short form content they are just scrolling so fast they aren’t looking out for why should I listen to you as much so as long as you speak with conviction in your video content they do listen to you which is kind of terrifying at some moments because who knows who all these young kids are actually paying attention to just because they’re speaking with so much certainty sure but in the video content it’s it can literally be

(47:11) anything I mean yeah I had this one video go viral where I was saying and I was speaking with a lot of certainty because I was in Dubai and obviously you know I’m based there that was like Yachts behind me and I was saying like in Dubai it’s normal to make 10 million a year and obviously I’m speaking like in my friend’s circles a lot of people I know are making 10 million a year in their business there and that is like you know when I’m there I feel like super broke all the time and so um obviously people on the internet are

(47:38) thinking like oh this girl is full of or oh wow that’s crazy like that must be so true so the comments then start going crazy and people start replying to each other and it just goes Super viral but for maybe the wrong reasons so I personally don’t like that type of content for that reason because it doesn’t necessarily add any value however if you want to reach more people which an organic is really important because let me tell you like after that one video that got a few million views on Instagram That Grew my Audience by

(48:09) 2000 and out of that 2000 my engagement for the next few weeks was a lot higher than normal so there’s pros and cons to it both it just depends upon what you want and personally I am right now testing both so I don’t have a defined outcome on on what I think is best yet yeah well I think it’s a it’s an interesting game I always like getting people’s opinions on it and for you uh as organic is the mechanism through which you’re converting it is all about the conversion ultimately right so what are

(48:42) you going down the chain for sales you mentioned that you used to go and sell only in DMS yeah and now you pull it to a call why take and you said at the time that you did it because you thought that it created a stickier customer maybe a longer term relationship yeah what’s the difference yeah so different as DMS the thing is is that I at this stage in phase of my business is I’m genuinely really vetting out potential clients that aren’t going to be a good fit because what we used to do is we used to

(49:16) sell between 25 to 100K directly through the DMS and I have a ton of DM conversations like I showed some guys like because they were obviously like oh I don’t believe that you can do this I was actually a mastermind and I closed them on 50K paid in full and I just showed them I was like yeah I do this all the time so it definitely can be done and I think if anyone says that you can’t close High ticket in the DMS you just don’t have the right approach because it’s actually not that difficult and as long as you’re tracking all the

(49:42) people that you’re speaking to it’s very easy to remember who to follow up with because you’re going to have a list of let’s say 50 to 100 people maybe even less that are really high intent customers that want to pay you money and if you’re selling something for a high price then it’s actually worth your time following up with them whereas what we’re doing now is we’re going for a less High upfront payment and we’re only charging 1200 every four weeks for this one primary everything that I’m focusing

(50:07) on at the moment obviously we’re still selling higher priced stuff but it’s just not our Pure Focus because as as the founder of the company like my goal is to get this one thing working so I’m just obsessing on like figuring this out and in order to do that I know that if we are having an actual interview with somebody then we can vet them and we can see are they actually going to be you know are they bsing are they somebody who just kind of wants to come in for like one month and then leave are they

(50:34) going to actually show up once we do let them in because we’re going for more of like a group Community Based model so whereas before every client would have just one-on-one interaction with us and there was no community at all now we have just the community and there’s no one-on-one except an onboarding and so it’s just a different vibe and we need to make sure that they are actually going to be more of a self-sufficient type of person so that’s why we’re selling on an interview versus selling

(50:59) through the DMS now I do think that we will systematize it to sell it through the DMS but we’re going to do it through the impact school accounts rather than my own past personal accounts because we want to be able to build it where it’s not built all around me right well then you know that introduces a whole other uh question so in prep for this I looked at one of uh one of the I think maybe it’s even at the core impact School site and you have the vsl the video that sells the initial thing one of the

(51:27) things that you say in the vsl is this isn’t for you if you’re afraid to get in front of a camera and be the face of the brand yeah and now you’re like I don’t want to be the face of the brand anymore is that accurate yeah so it’s not really that I don’t want to be it’s just that like I I think that I’ve made really nice like cash flow from my business over the last few years I want to go down like a new adventure whereby my goal would be to build a business which doesn’t rely on me so that I can

(51:56) do that again in multiple different other vehicles in the future rather than just always like my interest change and then my business changes sure right because it’s not necessarily like sustainable and also I started when I was young whereas the customers that we work with it’s kind of interesting like we have a very specific clientele and they tend to be there’s there’s really two set groups of people one of them I like refer to them as more like agency Bros so they’re more like marketers

(52:23) people that are really really good at digital but they aren’t necessarily as good at getting their own business in check as they are making money for other companies so that’s one group and then the second group are like really really experienced people who are a little older and they’ve had a ton of of background in their own companies like I have this one client she’s taken two of her own businesses more to more than 100 million in annual revenue each they were like physical location ski chalet kind

(52:50) of resorts and so she’s really smart and obviously business savvy but she wants to build an online thing so those are the two groups and so the type of client that we’re working with they they do want to build their own the personal brand they do want to be like the guru the expert the person at the front of the business business yeah for me personally um I’m fine doing it and I enjoy doing it it’s just that I would like to know with certainty that my business can also function without always me needing to

(53:17) make content because I’ve done it for a long time and I think I’ve really really mastered it so maybe again it’s just this one thing where I’m getting like itchy feet and I want to get a new exciting challenge um maybe that’s also a mental block for me yeah well I think it’s uh I appreciate the transparency I mean that’s the game right it is yeah certainly and you can there’s no question about it the capacity to build something massive on just personal brand is there and it comes with the

(53:43) limitations that you just set which is it’s dependent on your face yeah and you know in the era of AI I suppose maybe we can overcome that with some videos that aren’t really you but that’s kind of scary though it is scary it’s terrifying I like cool my dad and my mom because my phone was stolen when I was in Colombia just now and um it was literally stolen straight out of my hand my phone screen was unlocked and so I I phoned them up and I was like don’t worry I’m fine like I’m I’m here I’m

(54:10) good just to let you know like I just lost my phone yeah then my mom’s like you got your phone stolen didn’t you I’m like yeah and uh I was like but if somebody ever texts you asking you for money or telling you that like I’m in a big danger or something we need to have a way so that like you know that this is actually me so we came up with a solution but it’s actually quite terrifying really if you think about it because it even happened where um nor from my team because my credit card was stolen as well when my phone

(54:38) was stolen so we had to get a new company cards and everything and all this stuff and so I said to her can you please send me like the PIN for this card and then shoot we had this rule as well I was like you need to remember like any time that something like this happens you need to check with me to make sure that it’s actually me so yeah we also we used the new system then which was good it was cool to see her do that yeah it’s terrifying um so I want to talk about that for a minute I want to shift and talk about

(55:03) sort of the lifestyle side of uh the perks of doing what you’ve done so going back to the initial opening comment around 3 million Net versus looking at top line revenue yeah so I have a Litany of clients and friends that are entrenched in the business and are there all the time and grinding all the time and some of them love it some of them are like why am I so involved in the business and aiming to get out of it how do you approach kind of day-to-day life because you’re all over the place right your heavy travel are you actually

(55:45) nomadic do you actually have a place or I live in Dubai yeah so I don’t actually have a place right now my lease expired like I would never buy in Dubai is like the most crazy real estate market ever it’s so turbulent there um but no so right now I don’t have like a place however um I am a resident of Dubai and that’s like where I’m I’m really based out of yeah got it but you bounce around all the time yeah yeah so how do you keep um do you keep normal hours what’s the how do you approach sort of working on

(56:16) the road as a primary mechanism because for me I know uh we have an office we have staff here um I’m driving and I know that when I’m gone things keep running but it in and we’ve got a great team to do that but it really disrupts my habits my life Etc right do you have things in place that allow you to work remotely do you feel like you compromise the quality of your work when you’re remote or is it totally entrenched and you’re just living that way and it works yeah I feel a lot of people get set in their own

(56:46) ways because I have never actually had an office for my business I’ve always been fully online even back in the day when it was just like me and a couple others on my team one of them was in Chile and then the other was in like North UK so we never even saw each other in person except if I would go and shoot content with her like once or twice a month so for me I actually can’t imagine having an office and a team physically in person with me because it’s just not something that I’ve ever done and back

(57:18) when I first started my business I was really really intentional in that I want this business to allow me to live the life that I want to live and I don’t want my business to drive how I’m living so of course there are things that I have to do that I really don’t want to do like when the bookkeeper sends me like a spreadsheet and I need to go through it because like I have to because I’m the business owner which I still think I don’t need to do it I’m I’m having some words with someone on my team about that but those

(57:46) are the type of thing that I personally hate and so every two weeks I do this thing which I call a revenue review and a lot of people have spoke about this in in books and stuff before us like a Time audit I just go one step deeper in that like I look at everything that I’m doing hour by hour and I’ll mark is this making me money is this giving me energy or is this taking away my energy and so next to every single thing that I’m doing in every hour increment if it doesn’t give me energy and if it doesn’t

(58:14) make me money and ideally just the energy stuff like those are really the things that I want to be doing because if something’s taking away my energy and it’s making me money I think that’s a really dangerous place to be because you can stay in this cycle of doing things that you hate just because it makes you money and I think that gives you a really really negative mindset just towards life in general because life isn’t just about making all the money in the world and so I’ve seen a ton of

(58:38) friends and I’m sure you know a lot of people too that make you know tens and tens and tens of millions a year that are absolutely miserable and I just never wanted that to be me and so I really optimized to be able to be in like the I put a plus sign next to the things that give me the energy like how can I stay in as much plus sign as possible and how can I delegate the other stuff because if something makes me money but it takes my energy well it’s a money-making task so why don’t I just pay someone to do it for me because

(59:05) it’s still going to make me money if I pay someone else to do it so I’ve more just started to think about things from that sense and so traveling doesn’t affect me at all because I have these routines that I ingrained in my life yeah honestly a decade ago which is in the morning I’ll get some type of movement so whether that’s going to the gym or taking a walk every single day no matter what I do 15 000 steps a day and then whenever I go out to eat at a restaurant I just say no butter no oil

(59:33) put the sauce on the side and then I’ll just get something that’s lean and then I try to avoid eating something that’s like really processed foods and so that’s how I’m able to stay healthy and like I have good energy and I just eat as much protein as I possibly can and so physically that’s how I stay in check and then mentally when it comes to working um yeah I mean I have these daily huddles with my team every day that I hate you know this is like the worst thing for me just because I just hate

(1:00:02) stuff on my calendar but it’s something that I need to do because I’m running a business right like you can’t just do things that you want to be doing all the time so I think it’s just a balance between having the empty space on my calendar doing the things I need to do as a business owner and kind of just like you know sucking it up and doing those things because I get so many other benefits uh from being the business owner and um yeah it’s a it’s a really tough question for me to answer because

(1:00:25) I I just think that like a lot of people overthink it and you get into this mindset of I can’t possibly travel because it’s going to ruin everything for me and I was thinking that about this time last year because I’d been in Dubai straight for like eight months and I just didn’t want to leave because I was in such a good flow and uh so then finally when I did leave nothing bad happened and it was quite nice to have a flight for like 12 hours where no one was bugging me because the Wi-Fi was

(1:00:49) really really bad and I could just you know get an entire entire Google doc done with a ton of ideas and strategies so it is it’s good as long as you know to order to order to book a place with good Wi-Fi uh a quiet place with good AC um and ideally somewhere that’s that’s safe yeah what uh what are a couple of those things that are profitable for you but you hate doing and you do them anyway for example right now I’m the only one in the so I have my calendar open for sales calls if somebody is going to book into

(1:01:25) a call in those time zones and I try and minimize the amount of time so I have a couple hours open every day and so if somebody books in on that I’m like because I just don’t need to be the one doing it and I feel like every time I’m taking it I’m taking away an opportunity for my team because when we have a sales cool book someone’s already paid to get on the call with us so you just get on the call and you just close them and you run their card and so I know for me I’ve done that I’ve taken I must have taken 3

(1:01:49) 000 plus sales calls at this point and so it’s just like another one of those things I’ve done so many times that it just it doesn’t feel enjoyable for me uh whereas for my team it’s cool because you know they get the high of closing a deal and it’s fun for them so it’s kind of that’s one of those things what else um that would be the main one for me honestly yeah what are the things that you do that you enjoy and you do anyway but they don’t really produce revenue and you find yourself doing them all the

(1:02:16) time yeah like posting on social media like yesterday I made a post like so as a Britain Dubai as a Britain the USA sorry as a Brit in the USA what do I do on Labor Day and I just get so many people making such triggered comments and I just love replying to those because it’s so fun they just get so American people get so emotional about everything yeah it’s so funny and so sometimes I’ll like make posts I’ll make comments like uh yeah but you guys have such crappy Barbecues in America and I reply like

(1:02:50) that and then everyone’s really actually upset with me yeah it’s quite funny yeah I don’t know what you’re talking about it’s good yeah no but the I I come into Bag like yeah well in the UK our barbecues are way better and then tons of UK people start applying tons of USA people start replying so you get some angry texts and saying things like that oh yeah but no that stuff yeah I mean by the end of the day right like I I think about this a lot because the stuff that doesn’t make you money that doesn’t even

(1:03:17) really drive the business forward but if it gives you energy as the founder I think that that’s really powerful because you show up for as a better leader for your team so I know that the days where I have taken a walk before I take my team cool or I’ve gone to the gym before that I know that when I’m on that call with them I’m able to be more present with them and simultaneously like yesterday we went on this like boat on the lake for like half day and then I came back and the rest of the afternoon

(1:03:44) I was just working on like this Google doc thing that I’m making for my clients and I just had so much more clarity as I was writing and I think if it was three years ago when I was really in like hustle mode in like the transition period of my life I never would have gone out and done something just because I felt like doing it I would have only worked all the time and then I began to resent everything that I was doing because I was like oh I need to make that thing for my clients now whereas now I think okay I can’t wait to go and

(1:04:13) sit down and do that because I genuinely enjoy it again because I was able to create more time for myself and so I think the more the more time I’m spending speaking to other people who are really really high Achievers and also who are they have this like charismatic personality I find that they actually spend a lot of time a lot doing free time things whereby it’s not just working behind their laptop constantly so that’s been pretty interesting I think that there’s a there is a narrative and I think that

(1:04:45) there’s some truth to this that you can expect people to be interested in you if you don’t do interesting things in your life true and specifically when you are a content creator and that is the top of funnel for generating leads if you don’t live an interesting life what are you going to produce content about sure now there’s Nuance to that statement but that makes sense to me also like I don’t know you gotta enjoy life yeah yeah well I mean I think it’s interesting because at the end of the day and I see a lot of

(1:05:19) people really afraid as well to spend money even though they’ve made a lot but they just don’t want to spend it yeah and so there’s just no like my dad wants my dad actually said this to me in um 2020 because I was in Mexico when the lockdowns first happened and I went to the supermarket and there were these Mexican cops with these giant like tanks outside of the supermarket and so I’m like what the hell is going on so I go in and I made this video and I sent it to my dad he was like you need to get

(1:05:52) back to England I was like so I looked at the flights and like pretty much all the flights have been canceled except there was this one flight there was twelve thousand dollars and I’ve never spent 12K on a flight before know and um and so he was like yeah but Lauren like you realize the reason why you make a lot of money is so that you can pay for different opportunities and solutions when you really really need them so I thought you know what he’s so right so obviously I I went back to the UK but um

(1:06:18) yeah like there’s no point in having a ton of money if you’re never going to do anything with it and I just think that um it’s a weird mindset and I I personally am pretty like entrenched in the internet marketing space and it seems like a lot of people are really willing to spend a lot of money on on you know their business but not on themselves and so I wonder where does that come from and why is that a common theme in so many people’s lives yeah I know for me it’s a really deep question because uh it has a lot to do

(1:06:48) with how I grew up and I grew up in a sort of upper middle class um home where quite literally I heard money doesn’t grow on trees all the time and my mentality around it in business and in life has had to change over the course of time and it did not change quickly for me part of that is that I I don’t want to be the person that’s pissing away money frivolously and so I want to you know make smart decisions with money and you the more you have the more hopefully you start to realize that it is a tool and it creates leverage and it

(1:07:27) is really truly either money or time and you’re spending one of them and so if you’re trying to save money you’re usually investing your own time to get things done and the path to expansion whether that’s personally or in business often involves spending money yeah well it’s really hard as well because some people are on such a crunch with their profit margins whereby it’s like okay do I invest in hiring this other team member or do I have an extra seven eight grand a month that I can pay

(1:07:59) myself and I think I think that’s a real problem though for a lot of people I’m seeing this a lot especially right now people are really really really struggling with their margins and so I understand that but then at the same time you have to consider like if you were to have an extra 20 30 hours a week what more you could do with that to actually create more potential profits in your business so there’s a massive balance that’s that’s needed in order to figure this out because just the other

(1:08:26) week we were trying to think like okay our head of operations needs to have a assistant so what should we do at this point because really we only need the amount of time that it takes my head of operations is like 10 20 hours a week but it’s energy draining stuff for her so if we’re going to hire someone else this probably is a 40 hour a week type of job for them because they’re not going to be as efficient as her so for us then it was a really really easy decision to hire that person but obviously you know that comes

(1:08:55) with a lot of management and potential inefficiencies that come from another person on the team doing the thing but at the end of the day it was a move that we needed to make but that we could make because we have the margins to do that and because I would rather someone on my team who’s an a player have her team freed up and so I’ve had to have been a you know it’s kind of like getting your head around like delaying the sense of achievement as it were or how do I put this it’s like I don’t necessarily now just care about

(1:09:27) like making more profit I want the people on my team to actually be happy I want them to be doing the work that’s in their zone of Genius too because like I had so many like genuine like I like legit like Trauma from the past of like people leaving suddenly I’m just like now I just want people on my team to be able to do the work that they’re good at that they enjoy to do where they can Thrive um within reason obviously like I still need them to be focusing on the right things but um that’s been something that I think I had

(1:09:55) to figure out in becoming a better leader yeah because before I was just never I was only thinking about myself yeah yep I think it’s a never-ending game yeah yep for well for sure I mean as you as you progress in both revenue and head count in businesses and you get exposed to different types of businesses who you need to be in those roles changes right and so your relationship with spending money on your team or on your staff or with uh what the you want your ethos to be changes right uh and somebody told me a very long time ago

(1:10:31) when I was I grew up in pretty aggressive sales and I was sitting with um this guy who was uh or he was a real estate investor he was a realtor and a real estate investor and he told me when he got into real estate one of the things that he was very deliberate about was thinking about how he viewed wins and how often the winds came he had come from a transactional selling environment where he would close you know three to five people a day and so he got this dopamine hit from the closes oh my gosh so much dopamine yeah yeah and then he moved to

(1:11:06) real estate where you’re closing things many many days yeah yeah and he had to think about how do I create those same wins in short order and for him it was making calls and associating a positive conversation as a win but ultimately what it comes down to is it’s up to you sure ultimately it comes down to you as a leader or you as a salesperson to decide hey what am I going to categorize as winning if it’s not actually closing the sale well yeah because as you hire into your team the reward is no longer

(1:11:42) about your own personal achievement right and it’s about the achievements through other people and so being able to understand that was really hard for me because I was also from sales like I was always doing all the sales myself for my first business and I was able to close multiple people a day as well just through the DMS just texting people back and forth because it was a much lower price point thing yeah and so then when you begin to hire like sales reps or various different people on the team and then they are the one

(1:12:12) that makes the sale and then really the reward comes after a client has stayed with you for a longer period of time because that’s when it becomes super profitable right it’s such a longer term game but I think it also adds I think it adds more interest to building a Better Business generally because I think a lot of people can be really good at sales and marketing quite easily and I’ve seen this problem massively in the online marketing space where people can sell and promote and get so much attention

(1:12:38) but then they can’t fulfill yeah and that has become a really bad reputation for a lot of Internet marketers over the last few years especially because how many times have you heard oh yeah like I’ve been burned by a coach or oh I did an online course but it was really really bad and so then that generally puts a negative spin on the industry in its entirety it’s probably challenging for you with Payment Processing right everyone’s got their payment processes shut down right now yep so people are

(1:13:04) feeling jaded towards the industry it’s just common at the moment where a lot of people have just kind of screwed things up by marketing the world and then not necessarily delivering on it which causes problems in general sure well look that’s at the core of um you know it’s one of several value propositions for easy peer act but people come to us specifically because they’ve had accounts closed or had a hard time with their payment processor and we work with a huge chunk of coaches Consultants you know like pick a guru

(1:13:33) person and we’re probably doing their payments but at the core of that problem is exactly what you said which is a mismatch between the expectations that are being set and the product that’s being delivered yeah and that’s at the core and there’s tons of nuances statement but that’s at the core yeah and what is what is definitely true as you pointed out is that marketers have gotten good at getting people to click the buy button but it doesn’t mean that they’re good at fulfilling the product

(1:14:02) or service and so there’s definitely uh I mean that’s that’s very close to my heart we talk about this a lot well how do you because you that’s important for you as a company right because obviously if they are really good at marketing but they’re not good at fulfillment there’s more chance of chargebacks so how do you protect against that some of that is uh some of that is filtering so you know at the core of Easy Pay Direct we do underwriting and the game is how quickly can we do the

(1:14:26) underwriting to get to know the business who they are what they do how they operate so that we can assess the likelihood of that happening later the likelihood of there being a problem later um so some of it is looking at the historical data and then the other is the willingness of the company to accept help right so if you have a chargeback problem why is it happening and sometimes it’s sometimes it’s that the business owner is just really rigid and they just have a product and they don’t want to

(1:14:53) refund things and sometimes that’s the case uh another way to say that would be that there are super aggressive marketer and they’re not willing to change anything because they see that you know the Bell going off from every new sale but we tend to find very often that a lot of those people uh are super willing to accept help because they know in payments if your chargebacks get out of control you lose the ability to accept payments and it can happen forever and then you do yeah then you can’t accept

(1:15:23) for like five years so a lot of them will take our help and it’s a question of how do you we’ve got a whole bunch of mechanisms to do this but at the front line it’s how do you make refunds easier so that people don’t dispute the charge got it okay that’s cool yeah because what I’ve noticed with like USA clients versus Europe UK et cetera the challenge back is way lower outside of the USA oh yeah I think the charge rights I’ve ever had has only been from USA customers interesting yeah so but also we also

(1:15:52) like when we were working with primarily Europe like we would just have them wire money because they don’t have they don’t even use credit cards in a lot of European countries they only have debit cards and so you might as well just have them wire it just because why not like sure it’s also cheaper for them like especially because in yeah I mean I don’t know it was it was interesting when you were doing big upfront payments but just on that note I have a selfish question what like is a typical

(1:16:17) chargeback rate that’s like normal or acceptable so V so first of all it varies from um country to country or region or region visa and MasterCard have seven seven different regions so North America South America Europe Asia et cetera and that’s really low in Asia there well so they’re all just a little different okay but really yeah but at the core it’s the the number that people need to be focused on is one percent it it you know it’s funny because you say it’s pretty high and then other

(1:16:50) people are like oh that’s like nothing and it really is all perception um but one percent is the number where our industry the credit card processing industry looks at it and if you see it over that the first thing you do is think well what industry are they in so it might be like adult stuff you got it so some Industries are just inherently going to have a higher dispute rate like we have a uh same thing with refunds so if you buy an info product and it’s just information the refund rates on that can typically

(1:17:23) be 10 15 20 that’s not uncommon if you own a coffee shop and you have a 20 refund rate we need to shut that down something is wrong with your coffee right yeah so it really depends on the industry that you’re in but that one percent is a good guiding Rule and uh and then from there I think you know you really need to know based on the industry that you’re in and have guidance if chargebacks become a problem but there are tons of tech mechanisms to control them and help with them uh and at the core it’s trying to deliver the

(1:17:53) product and Market it the same way interesting yeah yeah I mean that sounds like a pretty good way to run a business that’s the basics right it’s the base the basics well look Lauren I love that you came out I love getting you in person here instead of uh video because it’s just so much more fun so much more fun right uh where do you want to point people if people want to find out more about you where do they go yeah so the best place is just probably my social media Lauren tigna l-a-u-r-e-n-t-i-c-k-n-a

(1:18:19) just in case someone couldn’t understand my funny accent and uh yeah I mean I’m all over all different socials and then we have a podcast as well called impact school podcast which uh is on Hiatus right now but it’ll be back soon also interviewed like ground Cardone and stuff which was love it which was fun um so those are the best places yeah awesome well thank you so much thank you for having me this is fun of course love it I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I enjoyed doing it I need your help there are three places you can

(1:18:47) find Beyond a million the podcast itself beyondthemillion.com which has some cool free resources including a free course and we finally launched the Beyond a million YouTube channel I would love it if you would go there and subscribe and if you don’t want to you still would probably enjoy seeing the visual content check it out youtube.

(1:19:08) com forward slash at Beyond a million [Music]