Brad Weimert 0:00
What are the elements of building an eight figure publishing company? The

Francis Ablola 0:04
big thing is knowing your audience and knowing that there’s a hot market that wants your product, something different, something unique, something that nobody else is doing for that hot market that’s already hungry for it. You want to find a really good product, or want to beat somebody’s marketing, see who’s running ads again and again and again and again, find the stuff that’s really working and just find ways to do a little bit better it’s at bit better. It’s actually interesting. I went to AI four, which is one of the biggest conferences of AI in North America. The first keynote speaker was this guy. They call him the godfather of AI, and his 30 minute keynote was how AI is taking over the world, how it’s dangerous, how we’re making a big, giant mistake.

Brad Weimert 0:38
Congrats on getting beyond a million what got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder of easy pay direct I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million, eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Francis ablola, yes, I am grateful to be able to pull you off stage and, yep, get you away from your responsibilities to, you know, teach me some stuff about live events and marketing and business in general. Well,

Francis Ablola 1:32
we’ve known each other for a really long time. Too. We have, and I

Francis Ablola 1:35
don’t even know how long,

Francis Ablola 1:35
but it’s been at least 15 years. That is wild. I would say, yeah. I think he worked with my brother for a while too. I

Brad Weimert 1:41
think you’re right. Yeah,

Francis Ablola 1:43
long, long time. Yeah, I

Brad Weimert 1:45
love it. Well, we are at the family mastermind event, and lot of badass people here. Yeah, you being one of them. Oh, thank you. Likewise. Appreciate that

Francis Ablola 1:54
great room, though, ladies, crazy, crazy room.

Brad Weimert 1:56
It really is. You have worked with a bunch of people in the room, but you have scaled multiple eight figure brands, that leads me to believe that you have some idea of how to do it. Part of it is just being

Francis Ablola 2:07
around the right people and learning the right things at the right time. So I’ve spent my entire adult life in the world of publishing, information, publishing, coaching and being able to work for a company that was already doing eight figures when I got there, as I think I was 2223 years old when I started working for Ronald grand that was my first space in this world. Before that, I actually worked for a Fortune 1000 company, for a billion dollar company. I was brought in to manage their online marketing at 22 which is a, you know, another funny story, but when you were 22

Brad Weimert 2:39
when I was 22 oh my gosh, I was completely

Francis Ablola 2:41
unqualified.

Brad Weimert 2:42
Sounds like a terrible

Francis Ablola 2:43
process. It worked. So I I was started as an entrepreneur. At 21 I proposed to my wife, we moved out together, and then I was completely broke, because I was a broke, struggling entrepreneur for about, I don’t know how many years, and I needed a job, but I was studying direct response the entire time. And so I learned about the WoW docs from Gary Halpert. And so there’s two positions that I if I’m gonna go, if I’m gonna go, find a job, I want the biggest one I could possibly find. So two companies, one was Venus swimwear, the other one was this big, one fortune, 1000 MPs. Group was a staffing company, and they had a job position open. They needed a 10 years experience and an MBA. I was a college dropout, and I was 22 years old, so I didn’t start when I was, you know, 12, but I did this, wow, box. I did this, this sales letter, and I got a it was, I sent it FedEx next day, and when they received it, I it was 10 at 10am next day. I got a call that same day, and both, both places. I sent it, and I had my pick of which role, and I got the job. I was a wonder kid. I worked there for about two years, and then went over to Ron’s office, right? I did the same thing. I wrote him a sales letter and got a job over at Ron’s. Wow,

Brad Weimert 3:51
that’s wild. You got to explain the concept for two things. One, first, Gary Howard, anybody that’s referencing him, which is like the predecessor to Dan Kennedy sort of, yeah, we know that they’ve been studying direct response, actually, to break down the wild box a little bit, because I think this principle is interesting in like, every area of life

Francis Ablola 4:11
well. So the big thing from, well, Gary Halbert was a huge influence on me. Actually, I learned marketing from going to one of his seminars, and completely, like, berated me in the room. And so I was 20 years old at the time. It was a small room. There’s like 20 or 30 people in the room. It was one of his very last seminars before he passed great marketer, one of the best copywriters to ever live. It was going around doing hot seats with people. And he said, All right, Give me. Give me the idea. Tell me about your business. And I raised my hand. I was like, a cocky 20 year old. I was like, I got his business. And then it was for a it’s actually for John Gordon, who is now the he has like 11 best selling books back then. It was his very first book. And I was promoting his very first book, and it was on energy. And so I said, All right, I got a product. It’s with this new speaker. It’s a new author. And he asked me about it, and I was like, well, it’s about how to get more energy. I. And he asked me, like, all right, how do you do that? I said, I don’t. I actually don’t know. Drink more water. And then he was like, You don’t know anything about your product. You don’t know anything about your clients. And he completely, like, bashed me in front of you. I was like, the youngest person in the room, oh my God. And He bashed me in a good way, not in a good way. It was actually humiliating. But I learned from that moment, like, you have to understand your product better than anybody else. You have to understand your clients, your avatar, and that made me a better copywriter. And so I spent 20 years learning copy, which now you can do it AI in 20 minutes and shortcut that time period, which we do, and we teach our students to do that. But I spent 20 years learning how to be a copywriter. It all comes down to understand audience, understanding a way to be different, a way to to get their attention in a unique way. And so the WoW box comes from Gary Halbert as well. It was a FedEx box. And I remember these two because I had to send two out. There’s two positions I wanted, but I only had, like, 50 bucks in my bank account, and to set out send out those two FedEx boxes with what I had them in them was $44 so literally, my last dollars to send these things out, wow. And so they were next day air, 10am received, and the idea is, you open it up. It’s it wasn’t just a resume, it was a cover letter, but it was well crafted sales letter. I think I stole the idea from Gary halberts. On the opening I attached a Starbuck gift gift card attached, and it was a FedEx box. And the opening line was, hey, you’re receiving this letter, and you can notice that it’s a FedEx FedEx box with a Starbucks gift card attached. Why have I done this? One is, I think it’s of urgence importance to your business and growth. And two, I’d like to discuss some ideas that can help you, maybe over coffee. It’s on me. And then inside was a full on sales letter. I analyzed their websites and gave them, like, a bunch of SEO pointers and PPC pointers inside of there. And I had a bunch of pictures of me, because I will go to seminars. So I had a picture of like Bill Rancic, that was back then, from the first apprentice, a bunch of celebrities and things like that. I threw it in there, and, yeah, got calls from both companies the next day. And so that was the Wow. It was something completely different. And again, this was a fortune, 1000 company. They hired. They had, I think, 20,000 30,000 employees at the time when I worked there, and I was able to get the attention and get the job and, you know, find my place there, and got bored of the corporate world and left and joined the entrepreneurial world. I

Brad Weimert 7:13
think, I mean, I think that that there are a couple big things there. One, it really doesn’t take that much to stand out, but you put energy in, right? But that’s number two, is that if you put energy in on a routine basis, regardless what the result is, you start to build a habit of putting the energy in all the time. And there are tons of people that never take action because they don’t know if the action’s gonna produce an outcome, and so they just don’t bother taking the action

Francis Ablola 7:41
at all. There’s a level of trust and confidence you have to have in yourself from the get go to do these kind of things. And I didn’t grow up like with a confident attitude whatsoever. I learned that’s all learned, that’s all learned through personal development, that’s all learned through books and tapes and and meeting the right people. But you know, being able to go out and do something and spend your last 40 bucks on a job that you don’t know that you’re completely unqualified for right now. And I always tell my kids now it’s okay to do hard things. Yeah, right. Everybody leans toward easy, if somebody asks. And we coach a lot of entrepreneurs. And the biggest question, especially my AI classes, we teach a lot of a classes, what’s the easiest way to generate a lead? What’s the easiest way to generate sales with AI? And so in our coaching, we’re like, All right, so I know you want the easy way, but I want you to be better. So AI is making everything easier across the board for everyone. If you believe and subscribe to that, well, you’re not going to stand out whatsoever. So you need to develop the skills, you need to develop the talents, and you develop the relationships, and AI makes those things better, but you stand out further from that, and that was a huge, huge departure of, hey, I always want to be easy. I want to do I don’t have the confidence to do this. It’s okay to do hard things. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 8:48
I think it’s not only okay. I think it’s super important. Actually, there are some, there’s some studies now that I’m not going to pretend to actually quote, because I don’t know what they are, but I’ve talked to a couple of my smart doctor friends that study this shit. And like biohacker people, there is legitimately a benefit to doing hard things routinely, yeah, but they have to be hard for you, like it actually is better for you as a human, and will keep you alive longer if you are doing harder things. And there seems to be a causal relationship there, there’s

Francis Ablola 9:18
no growth whatsoever without, without getting outside of your comfort zone, right? Your mom always say, how tall can a tree grow? Right? As tall as it can. But humans put the limit on each on ourselves, and that’s that’s a weird thing to do, is that, you know, in nature, things grow because they that’s as as big as they grow. Well for us, you know, we stop us. It’s our environments, the people around us. It’s whatever it may be. And getting away from that allows me changing new peer groups, the whole thing that lifts your mindset out into a different

Brad Weimert 9:47
world. Yeah, it’s been a theme for me today. It’s weird. I woke up and hit the gym and I was talking to Trevor mock about I just mentioned this to King Kong, but we were talking about growth. And like, I truly believe that growth is the point of life, like it is, it is what keeps you moving, is what makes you happy. It’s that progress in life that is satisfying, but you got to flex that muscle all the time. Well, it’s

Francis Ablola 10:11
that you just mentioned Trevor. So Trevor’s one of my dear friends we met when we were kids, like, not kids, but 20 year olds in entrepreneurship, we were always the youngest people in the seminar room. And so it’s that growth mindset, but coming up with people who are also that had that mindset. And so Trevor and there’s a few of our friends that we’ve met at a seminar back in 2008 that were all the 2122 23 year olds in the room that were the youngest people there, that all grouped together. Now I’m 41 now, that all kind of grew up at the same time through entrepreneurship, all supported each other throughout the entire way. We’re always there to pick up the phone and have a have a conversation and get us ourselves back on track. That was a massive thing for us. And we’ve kind of, we don’t speak as often as we used to when we were back in our 20s. We all have lives and kids. We didn’t have kids and things like that back then. But that was a massive thing for our growth, just connecting with the right people and staying in group with your own mastermind, or your own tribe, your people that you know they’re always there for you. Because in our everyday lives, oftentimes it’s some people aren’t there for you. Yeah, yeah. That was a huge, huge thing for us.

Brad Weimert 11:15
Yeah. Well, I think today, you’ve got a lot of other options too, right at the time. I mean, we are at a real estate educator of that right now, I grew up with, you know, Tony Robbins CDs. I didn’t, I didn’t have the tapes. I’m not that old. I had the CDs.

Francis Ablola 11:29
I got the CDs too.

Brad Weimert 11:31
But you know, he was my peer group, right? He was the mentor, he was the accountability partner. And so if you don’t have those actual people in your life. There are all these other avenues now, and like today, podcasts are or YouTube or whatever, fucking Insta Tiktok like, you can get it wherever you want. There’s

Francis Ablola 11:49
so many ways to plug in and grow your mind. Yeah, there really are. And so for free, there’s YouTube, like you just mentioned, I used to go to libraries. I used to go to libraries. I used to get books, and I used to get CDs. Kind of ashamed to say this. I used to burn the CDs, right so I can listen to them over and over and over again. After I returned them, I would burn the CDs that are there. But everything you can possibly imagine was there. Now you got YouTube. Now, like you mentioned, Tiktok, headspace, blink list, all these things you can read any book on, on what is the speechify that takes any book and turns it into an audio book for you and just plug in? And I see so many people not taking advantage of that, which is crazy to

Brad Weimert 12:23
me. How much time do you spend deliberately focusing on personal development now, if any, I

Francis Ablola 12:28
still plug in a lot, right? So a lot of my it’s different. It’s different skill set things now, so it might be more specific. It’s not just General, General Tony Robbins motivational type information. I still listen to Jim Rohn a lot, and I still actually work heavily in the self development niche. So one of the jobs that I had very early on, before that fortune 1000 company, I was a web developer in high school, and how I first got plugged in was my boss’s brother ran a motivational seminar company, and we did all their website work. And they had a website called MLM challenge, and Jim rohnchallenge.com and so MLM challenge was a site for mlm people. It was a membership site. This was back in 2000 I didn’t know how to program really, so I made a fake username and password box. I just gave everybody the same username and password across the board. And they sold it for $67 a month, amazing. And they had, you know, a whole bunch, a whole bunch, a really good number of people. But I got plugged and listened to that. And then their father, those guys, Father was good friends of Jim Rohn, so they ran the Jim Rohn challenge. And so my job for about six weeks was doing nothing but listening and editing Jim Rohn tapes to put on the site that turned everything on for me. So I’ve been a lover of personal development ever since, and now, from for me, I have four kids, a big thing that I’m doing with them is teaching them entrepreneurship. We homeschool like we’re the weirdos. We don’t socialize all that kind of stuff, whatever it may be. I take my daughter to seminars. She’s been to a AI seminar. She’s going to a real estate seminar with me in two weeks. She works for me. She’s teaching herself how to edit, edit videos, and she has a YouTube channel. At 14, my other kids, they listen to me do for my team. We I used to do a nine at nine. Now we do motivational trainings for our team. I’m speaking to them. They listen in as part of the school work. So I’m always plugged in, especially as a leader, right? You have to it’s not only yourself, but it’s the people around you at that point, especially when you’re scaling a business, when you’re scaling a business, when you’re growing a business, it’s about who’s around you and making sure their headspace is right too.

Brad Weimert 14:26
Yeah. Well, I don’t have any kids, but I am always thinking about how kids are raised. Probably not always, but often, the homeschooling thing to me is there’s a direct parallel to growing anything, whether it’s a family or a business or whatever, but the energy that you put in and focus on it, homeschooling is the thing that I would want to do, because you have control over all of the influence of your family and your youth, and to farm that out, to delegate that out. Into a school system that we’re all very aware is broken in

Francis Ablola 15:02
a really weird world today. Oh, really weird world. Super

Brad Weimert 15:06
weird. I would like to have the control and influence there. So I think that’s beautiful. Okay, so I have an agenda with you, because there are, there are several elements of business that you’re involved in that are dope, that people should learn more about live events being one of them, yes, and kind of how you have created several eight figure brands. We’re gonna talk about AI because, you know, people seem to care. And it’s, it’s, you know, some ninja shit going on right now, and then some other stuff. Okay, but tell me about real advisors, sure, and tell me, like, the general frame of the business, and yeah. Then we’ll talk about the events themselves. Tell me the business model, yeah.

Francis Ablola 15:44
So real advisors is a publishing company, and we used to publish other companies. Now we’re only doing our own internal brands. It started back in 2017 I reached out to our friend of ours, our mutual friend, Bill Mark cross, yeah. And I had just worked for a few companies, and I was kind of quiet doing some freelance stuff. But

Brad Weimert 16:01
let me pause you for one second, because the publishing company that label immediately makes sense to everybody that sells information, sure, yeah, but the rest of the world is thinking, is it newspapers, like does he have magazines that mean?

Francis Ablola 16:16
So we produce digital content, both in product form, so courses, seminars and coaching programs. Got it and so right now we have two brands. One is our dolmcross automated investor, and another one is AI for business.com we actually had several more live seminar brands as well. Yeah, and I had been working in this space for a while, and I had actually worked for one of the larger real estate education companies, and it actually got shut down by the FTC. Oh, fun. And so the next day after that whole thing went public, I got a call from the CEO, and he called me. I was like, All right, and he said, Okay, Francis, all right, let’s forget about that. What’s the next thing we’re gonna do? I got a new idea, and I just hung up the phone. I was like, I don’t want to do that anymore. And so I had to go introspective and say, All right, I was making a lot of money. I we were selling a lot of products, but were we really serving people? And if I had to look, to look deep into it, I was just the copywriter, is what I said. But I knew that they weren’t really serving people, and I believe it was like a $200 million judgment, and they settled for $20 million right? So that felt a real and I had kids at this time. Those my first I think I had my first two. I have four. And I was like, Am I doing work that kids, that my kids are gonna be proud of? And I couldn’t say that. So I called up this a few years later, thinking about that, called up my friend dolmar said, hey, I want you’re the top investor that I know. You’re doing a bunch of deals. I want to create a education program of people that I know are doing deals that care about their students, that can grow. And that’s what we did. And so we started with, actually, wasn’t Bill marbles with our friend Lee Carney. And then we moved into the commercial investing space and and now we have our current brands, but it’s all based off information, that stuff that we do real and we teach, we teach, we coach, we help entrepreneurs. And that’s a really fulfilling thing that

Brad Weimert 18:04
we do. A number of things I want to hit on there, but the to close loop on publishing, you find people that hopefully have expertise in an area and help them get that information out to the world, monetize it. Yeah, that’s basically what the publishing platform. Yeah,

Francis Ablola 18:16
that’s the publishing model. But now we don’t really go after clients anymore for that. We just we create our own now, do it

Brad Weimert 18:21
yourself. Yep, love that. But that’s what that’s how it started. That’s how it started. Was publishing other people’s information. Who were the experts and you created the info forum. Exactly. The other thing that you said was, you know, you brought up the FTC, and I think most of the world, when the FTC condemns you, you were condemned to the world, if you are inside of the info product space and you have done well or been around long enough when the FTC condemns you, you might just realize that the FTC is a super shady organization and they’re terrible. So maybe it’s possible. Yeah, you might think that it’s but there is very much a problem with that agency and being guilty until proven innocent, and not innocent until proven guilty. In the case that you were talking about, it sounds like maybe there was they were warranted in the Yeah, I would say maybe they were warranted. Yeah. I think it’s an interesting distinction, because, you know, we had a client that got an FTC suit, big name real estate educator, and he got an FTC suit because he was in somebody else’s commercial 10 years ago. Yeah, it wasn’t even his product. He was just in their commercial. So he got cited in this FTC suit, which has crazy ripples in the banking world, the merchant account world, etc. And that’s horrible. Yeah, right. They’re aggressive. They’re super aggressive. Yeah,

Francis Ablola 19:41
I’ve been through it a few times, just as a consultant or advisor to companies or friends that have gone through that it’s an aggressive process. It ruins lives. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 19:50
it really does. Ruins lives. Yeah, really does. So I like to click on that one when it comes up, because, yeah, because it’s like, is, was it a bad FTC thing? Or. Like FTC being the FTC, there’s probably mix of both. Yeah, there’s mix of both. There probably often is right? Okay, that’s great. So you launched the publishing thing, and now you’ve got your own brands in house. And did you learn the skill set to do that through the initial fortune 1000 that you work for?

Francis Ablola 20:19
It was actually not the fortune 1000 I was working for Ronald grand Oh. McGrath. Oh, right, right, right. And so after that, I got bored of the board of the whole world. I live in Jacksonville, and I was a huge student of Dan Kennedy, which he mentioned Gary hallibur, Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy was another, another influence in my life, greatly especially through Ron Legrand. So I met Ron at one of Dan Kennedy’s super summits, and I saw him there. I’d known him. I’d seen his infomercials. I know he was a real estate investor guru and but I saw him there, and I kind of followed him like a puppy dog. I was 22 years old. I was also kind of going around and saying, try to get as much face time with this guy, because it was a, you know, you know, Dan Kennedy’s top, you know, one of top students and most successful, and he lives in Jacksonville, and all this kind of stuff.

Brad Weimert 21:02
And he’s also a giant. He’s like, Yeah,

Francis Ablola 21:04
he’s a large.

Francis Ablola 21:05
I try to be part

Francis Ablola 21:06
of his posse at that event. He probably had no he actually probably, I know he had no clue who I was, or even remember that, because we worked together for years after that, and went back to Jacksonville. I actually bought his products. There. He did a breakout session. I bought his products, and then just kind of showed my face around, and then when the they put a job out out, I wrote a sales letter to Ron, and that’s, that’s what got me the job. And next day, I got a phone call. It was a decent sales letter. He actually it’s in his training materials for one of his marketing courses. Awesome. So years after, it still works. And yeah, I worked for Ron in his office for six months, and then we’ve done stuff on and off for I guess, 15 years later. I adjusted an event for him two months ago. So yeah,

Brad Weimert 21:51
now you’re publishing things, namely your own stuff. At the moment. What are the elements of building an eight figure publishing company or an eight figure offer

Francis Ablola 22:01
an eight figure. So the big thing is knowing your audience and knowing that there’s a hot market that wants your product. And so it’s really difficult to want to create demand into a product if it doesn’t exist. So you want to make sure that there’s a market for the product, and you want to make sure that you have a unique something different, something unique, something that nobody else is doing for that hot market that’s already hungry for it, and that’s the biggest thing Gary Halbert will always say, if you want to find a really good product or want to beat somebody’s marketing, you look through all the I’ll do all the research, through all the magazines, those magazines back then, she was running ads again and again and again and again, find the stuff that’s really working and just find ways to do a little bit better. And so for us, when we launched a few of our brands that really skyrocketed super fast, we knew that there was a market there. We knew that there were similar products. We knew we can market better. And so after Iran, I actually worked for a lot of different publishing companies, and that’s how I learned how to write copy. I learned I learned from genius copywriters. I learned from tons of mentors, and it’s got really good at the marketing stuff when it comes down to its understanding their audience, understanding your message, how that’s unique, and then have a killer offer that doesn’t compare to anything else. So we were one of the first ones in our space to do really high ticket offers over the phone, like straight from application to high ticket, and from that moving into having a back end. So we had a really high ticket back end as well. And so knowing your customer, knowing your audience, knowing your product, knowing what customer journey that serves them the most is massive. And you put all those things together, and you have a really good formula that you repeat over and over and over again. So our newest brand, AI for business, is something that is, is. It’s skyrocketing right now. We’re investing a lot in the name and the brand, and we’re doing confidently because we have this formula we know works, and we’ve seen lots of great feedback, lots of great customers coming through that, through that in just a couple months

Brad Weimert 23:54
time, how much time do you spend planning out the funnel and the strategy and exactly what the hook is, the value proposition, etc, versus executing on the actual build.

Francis Ablola 24:10
So that’s an interesting, interesting question. So how much time do I actually spend so the build itself, the build, we have a team, right? So I don’t, I don’t know what time, the time they put in to the build. I just expect the results to be done, but the planning is different. So I don’t sit there. It’s always in my head. And I learned this from being a copywriter again. This is something I picked up from from learning from Gary Halbert and his his tapes and courses. He would just sit on an idea. And so I just sit on ideas, and I might go in as a freelance copper. I would do this all the time. Somebody would hire me for a project, and I’d say, hey, it’s three months to get done. I’d wait until, you know, the week before it’s due after three months, and finish the project. But I’m thinking of the project the entire time. I’m cramming my rooster. So actually, I have a present I did. I’m doing a presentation here when. Day. It was due on Thursday. I turned it back on Saturday. I didn’t start until Saturday afternoon, right? I need that pressure, that pressure, but so. But in my head, I’m thinking about, what are the hooks? What are the audiences I’m seeing other things out there. The best thing that I do is, actually, if I’m working on a project to get stuff, I just go to sleep, like I’m done with this. Go sleep. I let my subconscious brain fill in all the pieces. So I’m always planning new offers constantly, and I’m always offering new hooks, always different dimensions of ways, way to approach things. So there’s not really a planning session. Sometimes there is to communicate that to the team and lay it out on the whiteboard. And that’s my one of my favorite things to do is to train and teach our team to grow. But yeah, the planning is always happening. The build out. You know, we have a really good team. So we have, we have, we have good team members that know how to do what they do, and they build things out really relatively fast, once we get the idea to them. If

Brad Weimert 25:51
you’re a 25 year old entrepreneur that wants to sell information about something, how much time should they spend planning versus executing on the bill

Francis Ablola 25:59
25 you’re going piggybacking off what I just said, planning is probably the most important piece of everything. The build outs really easy. You can send it out and you can farm it, farm it out to anybody who has experience building Clickfunnels or GHL funnels, and it’s the copy, it’s the hook. I’d say that’s 75% or 80% of the project itself, right? If you’re, if you’re things like click funnels, things like go high level, and those funnel builders make it so easy, right? I started building funnels in front page and HTML, yeah. And so the amount of time I had to spend and learn all that kind of stuff and do stuff in Microsoft Paint, like to think about my first funnels were done in Microsoft Paint.

Brad Weimert 26:39
Dude Sam Bell taught me how to host a WordPress site. And, like, 2006 or seven,

Francis Ablola 26:45
yes, exactly. That’s

Brad Weimert 26:46
all the options we have. Yeah, man. So yeah, it’s cPanel and shit. That’s crazy. And, like, that’s all

Francis Ablola 26:53
the stuff that works still, like, you know, and click funnels made it super easy, and all these tools have made it super easy, but the skill is what’s needed. And I’d say that’s like 80% of the work.

Brad Weimert 27:02
Yeah, I love that. Okay, so what are the elements from what? Let’s talk about the model itself. Because live events are a big focus, or have been a big focus for you. And you talked a little bit about this, the education model in general tends to be some sort of low dollar amount offer on the front end, sometimes recurring, sometimes not, that sells into a higher ticket thing that has a high dollar amount back end, and often there’s a live event component in there. How do you fill live events?

Francis Ablola 27:33
So right now, we’re doing virtual events to lead into live events. So with our newest brand, we have a three day virtual event, and that’s free, which is something that we haven’t done in the past. So we have a free event, and it’s actually funny, we get paid either 50 cents to $1.50 per person who subscribes, because we have a self liquidating offer. We have an offer that pays for itself once in the door. And so somebody signs it for free, they get the VIP option, which is now $47 and there’s a series of orders right after that, even before they attend the event. Attend the event. And so we’re making from the front about 40% of our money back of our ad spend. So register

Brad Weimert 28:08
for events, and in between the registration, which is free, and the actual event happening, you saw some

Francis Ablola 28:14
stuff immediately from that that day, awesome. And then during the events, we are actually pushing our VIP heavily as well. So we’re up positive anywhere from 105 to 125% on our dollar. And we do these events every other week right now, so we’re turning our dollars back really, really fast. And so that allows us to have a lot of wiggle room. Those are virtual events, and that’s before we sell any type of back end. So on the front, just from low ticket purchases, we’re making our money back, which is kind of like the Holy Grail for marketers, to spend $1 get $1 back right right away, because you have the leads, you have the lifetime value of the potential customers. Yeah. And so after that, to fill what we’re doing in our live events now is we have a 997 product that is packaged with a live event. So come to our office, check us out, experience us now, we’re taking cold traffic who’s never heard of us a week before and turning it to $1,000 buyer, which will eventually be a $10,000 buy or more. And to do that, we have to build a lot of trusts. We have to build a lot of credibility. We have to show them what we actually know, what we’re doing, actually show them and give them results for themselves, and so, yeah, walking through that process of taking somebody, especially in the market today, because there’s so much more competition in the market, yeah, I just mentioned Click Funnels. You can start a funnel in five minutes, right? So now you have a new competitor every single second. So you are creating that marketing across the board and leading them in this trust journey, this this relationship, and that becomes scalable. So once you get that down, once you get creative down, once you get your idea, your plan, down, then it just becomes numbers. You just add more numbers, more dollars to the front, and you get the same predictable. That’s how that’s how you scale. That’s how you scale to

Brad Weimert 29:55
it. So that’s a beautiful sentiment, and most people never get to paint by and. Numbers, right? Most businesses, statistically, the vast majority fail, and the vast majority never really stabilize a structure, and the vast majority never scale as a result. You mentioned cold traffic, and this is it sounds like for you, the foundation of how you scale these offers or these independent businesses, Facebook, tick tock, YouTube, LinkedIn, like, what platforms work like? Our Facebook ads dead.

Francis Ablola 30:29
No, not all. In fact, our main offer right now is scaled on Facebook ads, and we’re looking to spend much more just trying to find we’re just trying to spend as much money as we possibly can, because now we know the offers. We know our allotted numbers of we only want to spend this much per lead, things like that, but everything else is now scalable. So we want to spend as much on Facebook, then we move it to a different channel. So that offer that I’m talking about right now, right for Business Summit, is only on Facebook, but once I get that, I want to get to Tiktok. I want to get to YouTube, Google ads. About two, three years ago, right at the beginning of covid. We we started. We got banned from Facebook entirely. Well, yeah, we were spending five to $10,000 a day on ads. We had a sales floor of 16 people or so. And all that went away because Facebook said no, thank you. And so now we had to find other channels. So all the channels work, not all the channels work. All the channels work, depending on your offer, but I would say Facebook ads, YouTube ads work phenomenally well for these types of offers. Tiktok ads work really great for these types of offers as well. There’s email and affiliate traffic, there’s solo email traffic. So many things you can do or just building funnels that match that, that that audience. And so newsletters are great way of building up a giant list. Newsletters are easy way to fill up from different types of traffic sources. LinkedIn, for example, for our air for business offer, we have a LinkedIn newsletter that’s growing and that’s growing organically. We did a lot on Instagram shout outs. For a long while, we actually grew our dolemar, cross real estate brand through Instagram shoutouts, which was crazy. It’s something that, right after Facebook shut us down, we’re like, all right, how do we get more traffic? And my partner, my business partner, Brian Hanson, was like, Hey, let’s do this, this Instagram shout out thing. We actually had tested a few things already, and we became one of the largest buyers of Instagram shout outs, which is, you know, finding a person who’s in your niche and saying, Hey, can you talk about our brand on your page, one of the largest buyers in our niche, within like, months, because we had, we had to figure out how to feed the machine that we already had. So the big thing with shout outs is there’s a lot of crap out there, right? So you have to wade through, you have to look at real engagement. You have to and test. So one of the things that we did really effectively was test lots of different pages. And we don’t test big. We don’t say hey, we’re gonna give you $5,000 to run this ad. We might start smaller, or we might might do one shout out instead of like 10 or 20. But you have to find the pages that have the kind of traffic they’re looking for. If it’s US based then US based traffic, you have to look at the engagement. Are they a big brand? Is it? Is it over 500 or a million followers? And if they are, what percentage of those, and you get their software tools out there to see, is this a real follower? Is it a follower in India or Bangladesh that’s not going to buy something in the United States? And so you have to do a lot of due diligence in the process. But once you start doing that, you can start tracking. You build a list of pages to do shout outs on, and you can kind of cycle through and constantly build up your list of pages that you want to start marketing

Brad Weimert 33:23
on your personal Instagram is something like 350,000 people, a bunch of sort of unique, interesting, heartstring motivational content. Does that content convert? Is the intention of that content to convert? Is that being funneled somewhere else, or is this just the personal brand of Francis the blower,

Francis Ablola 33:41
well, so it’s one to get a lot of real followers and engagement. So we use meme content. You know, viral videos are heavy, and so the page right now is growing at about 600 to 1000 people a day, depending on the videos that are on there. And those are real people, real followers in our target market, because they’re engaged in content. It’s also part to get my face, because every piece of that content has my face attached to it, and so my face and my name, so part of it that brand, to warm up that page, building that page. My page is sort of like a testing page. And so it’s, it’s, we try a whole bunch of different things on it. We see what works, what doesn’t. You know, it’s all real followers, which is really cool. We actually have several other pages. I think we have a network of about three to 5 million followers on all of our pages combined right now. And so we test a lot of different things. We found that helps with engagement, and then again, you get that that recognition. And then in the link of my bio is is a call to action to our offer. And so part of that is we get real followers, and we get a percentage of those people to click, and especially if we do an actual ad on there, or such a shout out on our own page, to click the link in the bio and move to the move to whatever the offer is. And so do that a lot in stories. We do that on our pages when you might not see the ads on there, because we actually take them down when the offer is over, and because we don’t want a whole bunch of ads on the page. And so we want somebody looking at they see. Valuable, and then we’ll put an add up. We’ll get, get the result, take it down, and we do that across across the board. A lot of our pages.

Brad Weimert 35:06
I like that idea. We have to hit on your current product. AI is taking over the world, and, you know, it might kill us all. We’ll find out. I just reference all of it as the robots these days.

Francis Ablola 35:18
It’s actually because I went to AI four, which is one of the biggest conferences of AI in North America. The first keynote speaker was this guy. They call him the godfather of AI, and his 30 minute keynote was how AI is taking over the world, how it’s dangerous, how we’re making a big, giant mistake. It’s gonna be, it’s gonna be the end first keynote, first day, amazing three day event, and then by read my white paper on it, and then buy and you guys have fun for the rest AI conference. So, yeah, I could take over the world one day, according to this guy. Well,

Brad Weimert 35:46
it’s possible. Yeah, in the meantime, we’re gonna have a lot of fun with it and make a bunch of money. Exactly, yeah, I

Francis Ablola 35:51
think absolutely. I

Brad Weimert 35:52
think so, when you are producing content, what’s the biggest mistake you can make with AI? I think

Francis Ablola 35:59
it’s really the fact that you’re just using AI as is, you have to train it, especially if you’re using something like chatgpt or Claude, the two really big sort of platforms for generative AI chatbots is that you’re, hey, I want an email. So write me an email about, you know, this podcast, and it gives out whatever it does, right? That’s terrible content. That’s going to be plagiarized. It’s gonna be all out there. It’s just generic. And so if you can train its voice, you can say, hey, here’s a transcript of this podcast I want you to focus on. I want you to be a direct response copywriter. Focus on the voice, personality, tonality of the two speakers, and I want you to write it for my voice. Brad, from this transcripts special note of my reading level and my my tonality, and write this email to promote this podcast in this voice. Well, you can get a much different results than just asking it. Hey, I have a podcast with this guy, Francis. Both of us have really cool Mohawks. Write the email. Okay, so you want to train it, and that’s what a lot of people don’t do, and then they get the result back, and it sucks, and they’re like, AI, doesn’t work. And so you got to train it. You got to get feeded information to know exactly what that output you want to be, and be very specific with that as well. Ai prompting is huge. We actually teach a class on that, and if you’re not prompting it properly, then it’s not going to be the output that you need the

Brad Weimert 37:15
best prompt. Let’s say you’ve got the best prompt that you’ve devised. How often are you then copying and pasting the output and actually using that verbatim

Francis Ablola 37:23
well. So it depends on what your tasks are like. We do have a series of prompts that we do, especially if it’s for writing copy and simple tasks, but I’ve gotten to the point where I’m pretty good at understanding how to put prompts together, and I just type in my voice transcription on my keyboard on my Mac, and just talk to the machine. And so it takes me 10 seconds to do that. It actually is faster for me to do that than copy and paste the prompt, especially if it’s something unique. And so I know the the format that you need a prompt in. And the first thing is, you got to give it context of who it is. You got to give it specific examples of what you want. You want to give it. You want to be very, very specific on the format that you want the output to be in. And you go through these things, and you’re gonna give a really good prompt, and it’s prompt, and it’s really just easy to talk to the

Brad Weimert 38:04
computer now, but the output that you get, are you using that verbatim, or are you tweaking

Francis Ablola 38:08
verbatim? So depending on what it is, right? If it’s copy, then I’ll look over it, right? Sometimes it’s verbatim, depending on how you know, depending on the usage of it. And sometimes I just get another idea as I read. So as a copywriter, I might read the copy and I’m like, Oh, this might sound good here, yeah, and I’ll throw in my human two cents. But we also have our team members do that all the time, and they just take it straight from Ai on the process that I teach them, and they’ve used it. They make sales online from Ai written copy, right? We have a copywriter on staff. We have copywriters that we use my marketing team aren’t all copywriters, but I’ve taught them a very simple process of using transcripts and training AI and how to prompt in a proper way where they’re actually getting emails that make sales. All

Brad Weimert 38:51
right. Now, what’s the product that you made? So we

Francis Ablola 38:53
have a three day event called AI for Business Summit, and it’s it’s free, it’s a free event, and I just talked about the whole process, but our goal is to teach entrepreneurs who just they feel uneasy about AI, whether they’re they’re feelful of it, or they don’t know where to start, or they just says there’s so much overwhelming information that’s probably the biggest thing is that the information is just so overwhelming, and we break it down to show them very specific tools. We walk them through the process of how to use AI. We welcome to the process of prompts, but more importantly, how to use direct response and sales strategies that are true and foundational with AI to make it easier, get more effective, but also build that moat around you where everyone’s just not using AI. They have the level up. They have the knowledge in their own brains to use AI in a way that nobody else is doing that’s a free event, and that’s we do it really frequently, actually, and it’s one of our biggest our whole goal with this brand, actually, is to become the premier source of AI information for entrepreneurs, micro entrepreneurs, small business owners, coaches and consultants

Brad Weimert 39:57
love it. How old is that? At the. Point that’s,

Francis Ablola 40:00
it’s, we started in February, okay, yeah, getting going. Yeah, it’s getting going, but it’s actually scaling extremely fast. The topic is just through the roof. And yeah, we have, I mean, I think we’ve had over just last month, I think we had seven or 8000 people register for it. We had 5000 people attend. That’s growing, yeah? Why

Brad Weimert 40:21
the virtual event versus an automated webinar?

Francis Ablola 40:25
I think so. For our brand, specifically, what we’re doing, we could do an automated webinar, it would convert I want to I want to feel the audience first, like I want to know what’s going on in the audience. I want to converse. And we’re doing this really cool thing where it’s almost creating a flywheel of positive attention. So there’s people who come to our events again and again and again. Everyone who registers are for our event are invited back to a Facebook group as well, and they just share positive experience from what we do. And so I feel if we did an automated webinar right now, we would lose a little bit of that. I’m not against automated webinars. We’ve made tons of money from automated webinars. I love automated webinars, but right now, I want to understand my audience deeper than anybody else does, and so for me to speak to 1000 people every other week or so, talking about AI and getting their ideas and getting feedback, there’s no better way of just understanding the market than that. So not saying it won’t be automated in the future, or we might do some other different process. But right now, I want that human to human touch. Even though it’s a virtual event, I want that human want that

Brad Weimert 41:23
human to human touch. Dig it. Well, I know that you have to go sell people shit on a webinar, so I want to respect your time. Where do you want to point people? AI

Francis Ablola 41:31
for business.com. Check us out. Are we at our events out there? And yeah, I appreciate the time. Man, I’ll

Brad Weimert 41:37
blow up. I love saying your last day, oh, man, for sure, appreciate all

Francis Ablola 41:41
me appreciate it. Ah,

Brad Weimert 41:47
I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I enjoyed doing it. I need your help. There are three places you can find beyond a million. The podcast itself beyond a million.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.com, forward slash at beyond a million.