Transcription
Charlie's just stepped me through his five-point blueprint to make any business work and retire your bloodline. And if you can't sit down and watch this free video, then I've got some news for you. You're probably not going to make it.
So, where do we start? So, the first and arguably most important thing that we're going to start with is the foundations. The next thing is the actual expertise. The third thing we're going to cover is sales. The fourth thing is appointments. And then the fifth thing, which is also not very sexy, but I'm sure you can probably attest to this being sexy, is operations.
So the first place to start is with the foundations of the business. Now I've personally made nearly $30 million selling expertise online, and I have been able to successfully retire my bloodline, which I'm very fortunate to be able to do.
Now, before we actually talk about the foundations of the business model and specifically what we're going to be getting into, I want to talk about how money actually works because I think the thing that school doesn't teach you—well, the thing that's, yeah, the thing that school, they, they try and hide it from you because if you learn this, then you leave the system, and you know you can't be the slave, basically. So what we need to understand is what actually is money and how does this work and how do we make money because a lot of people talk about wanting to make money and they talk about, you know, "I want to earn an income and I want to make money myself," but they don't understand how it actually works.
So how do we make this? Well, basically what we're doing is we're not really making money. We're actually taking it. So to make money, we have to extract it from a market. But we all know how give and take works. You can't really take something without giving something in return. So the question, the big question about making money, then becomes what do you have to give in exchange.
So if we look at money and we imagine that this M here represents money, there is an inverse flow of something, and what that is is value. So money is made when value is created. Now some of you might have heard this idea before, but the question then becomes, well, what is value? Like how do I add value or create value?
Well, we can go a layer deeper if we use psychology because value is created when pain is alleviated. And what this means is the way that you make money is not by coming up with some crazy idea in the shower or, you know, having some stroke of luck with some genius new toaster that you invent or something like that. The easiest way to do it is to find a painful problem that a lot of people share and alleviate that pain. And it's through the alleviation of the pain that value is created. And it's through the creation of value that money is made. This is business 101. And this is the first thing that I think people need to know.
But the question then becomes, well, how do I alleviate pain? Where, where does pain come from? Well, pain, if we map this all the way back to its core, comes from problems. So people have in their lives problems and, you know, things that they exist in and situations they have. And those problems can be pretty, um, pretty uncomfortable, and we suffer through life with certain problems. Um, and so if you can isolate a problem in a market, you can alleviate that problem. If you can solve it, you alleviate the pain. Therefore, value is created, and therefore we can exchange that for the dollar bills that we so desire and that we want. And so this is where we start, and this is why selling expertise is such an easy, fast way to make money, and it's also the most straightforward, is because most problems are just solved through the application of information because I don't want to talk to you guys about having to develop some widget or, you know, do some crazy manufacturing play in China where you've got to start doing drop shipping or e-commerce or building a software. The easiest thing to do is find problems that can be solved by experts and then move on.
So, if you think through—um, I'm sure you can probably relate to this—if you think through any purchase that you make, 99% of purchases, you purchase pretty much every single thing to solve a problem. So, down to the fact that if you're walking down the street and you get hungry and you buy a sandwich, well, you're alleviating the problem of hunger, which is creating a little bit of pain, a small amount of pain, and you will pay in proportion to the pain and how easy it is for someone to solve that, which is why we'd only pay, you know, £3 for a sandwich, but if you're in London, £10. Um, you know, you pay a small amount for a sandwich, but you'd pay a lot of money to have brain surgery done if you, you know, didn't have some sort of, uh, like health insurance or something because that problem is obviously very painful, but only a few people in the world can solve it.
So, what we're looking to do at the foundational level is find a problem. So, let's actually have a look because how do we find a problem to have leverage to make money? Well, the first thing that we start with, and this is basically business 101, and you've probably heard this word thrown around quite a lot, and that is the idea or the premise of a niche. So, a niche is a group of people that have something that we would call, and I'm going to do this in purple, affinity. So, the word affinity basically means similarity, where they share certain traits or characteristics that group them together. So an example of a niche could be doctors or content creators, and they have affinity through identity, and this is where we basically label a group of people with, you know, a specific thing. So like we are content creators, God help us, you know, or you are an author, and so you, you know, you come into this play, and each person in the world can belong to multiple niches. So Simon, for example, would belong to the dad niche. He belongs to the author niche now. He belongs to the content creator niche. And I'm sure there's all sorts of other things that you've got going on. The investor niche, the investor niche, the legend niche, blah blah blah, obviously. And so handsome niche. I'm not on the not writing on the whiteboard. So what we can do is people, you know, we can categorize into these into these niches.
Now, the cool thing about finding a niche is it focuses you. Because one of the biggest problems I think you can, you probably find and you probably have this with with your content, is people are like, "I don't know what idea to start with." And the biggest reason that most people don't start businesses is because they're like, "I don't know. I don't have an idea. I don't know where to start." If you start with the niche, we can reverse engineer and extract the problem from the niche. And then by solving the problem, the idea is created. So, we don't go looking for ideas, we go looking for problems. And by finding those problems, we have an idea because the solution creates the money.
So the next step basically in this process once we've figured out what our niche is is we need to do what we call market research, uh, which is something you're probably also familiar with but have never really been given a specific framework on how to do it. And so you need to pick a niche. And it really comes down to a few things when it comes to picking a niche. First of all, we've got one, we've got interest, which is basically, are you actually interested in the niche? Because if you're not, if you've got no interest in the people that you're working with or that you're probably going to be working with for the rest of your life, your life's going to be pretty miserable and unhappy. That's why you work specifically with people who have a dream because you're interested in that.
Means you can follow through because you're interested in yourself. Exactly. Exactly. The second thing is growth. And what this means is, is the market growing? And the cool thing about your market is everyone has a dream, and there's more the like the entire world is growing. So your thing is always going to grow. And then the third thing is, um, financials. So there is one constraint and one place that we have to take our head out of the clouds for, and that's the money because, you know, if you want to work with people like students or let's say you you were really interested in helping homeless people, it's a lovely sentiment, but the problem is is they can't afford to pay anything unless, you know, it's backed by the government and stuff. So you want to make sure that the niche is growing. So you wouldn't want to work like Hormosi, Alex Horoszi uses the example of the newspaper niche. It's compressing. It's shrinking. And if you enter, you know, sinking market, you're going to—it's like being on a sinking ship. But the financial thing is really important as well. And the growth, if you look at any billionaire or most billionaires, the ones that are mega rich, like the richest guys in the world, they entered markets that were growing. So we've got Jeff Bezos started basically ecom 10 years before it blew up, right? We've got Elon Musk with electric cars. If you look at guys like Andrew Carnegie, um, John D. Rockefeller back in the 1800s, these guys were getting into steel and oil and banking and JP Morgan and stuff. And they got into those industries just before or just as they were blowing up. And so a rising tide raises all ships. And so it needs to be growing. So if you're interested in the group, if the group is growing, which means that more people are joining it, like the author niche, for example, would be another one, and that niche has some level of financial resource, then it makes it makes a good niche. And so once we found this thing and once we've picked it and you truly could pick anything. I've got a client who works with luxury gardeners, for example. And so there's all sorts of niches.
Now market research. How do we do this? Well, the main point of the market research is we want to try and find a problem, right? And so what we need to try and do is extract really three big problems because you don't necessarily want to come into this business with an assumption. Now the cool thing is what we can do sometimes is we can have a Venn diagram, and that is a Venn diagram before you ask, one we can have a Venn diagram, and basically you have your expertise and you have the problems in your niche, and so what you're looking to do if you already have an existing expertise is find the place where your expertise meets a problem, and so for example, the example I gave you before, before this, if you knew how to do horse show jumping and that was what you done growing up, then there might be a situation where you you help, you know, people do their first show jump or something like that. And that could be an example of what you'd pick. For a lot of you guys, you might not have a they might not have like an expertise just sitting in them, you know, waiting to manifest into a business. And that's fine. I'm going to assume that they don't and that, you know, there's there's no existing expertise. But if you do and you're lucky enough to already know how to do something, like for example, let's say that you were, um, you're a professional accountant and you want to teach people how to start accounting businesses and you've already done that yourself. That could be an example, but you probably already have a business at that or you're in university and you've learned something during your university program. Instead of four years, you can teach it in 6 months. You know, what's your expertise? One of the other things about this I find really interesting is that when I was younger, I don't think I had any expertise. Okay? So, I started a garden company at 15 years old and I, um, had to hire gardeners to do the work because I wasn't a good gardener. And then later I started a design company and a marketing agency, and I wasn't very good at design. So, I hired the experts to come and do the work, and I just matched up the problem with the experts. And the experts' problem was they didn't like to do marketing or sales. Turns out the expertise I eventually had after a lot of practice was marketing, but that took time to build that expertise up. So I was able to work with people that had expertise before I even had it and connect them to the to the problem with the niche. Now you've got a content business and you're getting experts to do that for you as well.
Totally. Yeah. Sit in this video and enjoy what I'm learning. It's very clever. But it's but that's that's true. That's right. I mean, I I haven't spoken for the last 10 minutes. I don't need to. You're you know you're the expert and kindly coming on here and sharing the knowledge with people. That's a good example actually. Right. But if you ask people to help you, you'll find there'll be a lot of experts out there that maybe don't want to do certain things like marketing. So you can connect them to the problem or niche that they can they can help. So exactly. And so like going back to that student example, let's say that you went to university and you figured out how to get a first in engineering, which is a pretty tough thing to do like computer engineering. And let's say that the the reason you did that is because you developed your own productivity technique for revising a very, very specific thing. That's a prime example of, you know, something that you could teach engineers on how to become more productive or something like that. And so what we're looking to do if you don't already have an expertise, absolutely fine. We're not going to we're not going to, you know, bottleneck you before you even start. Again, I just want to say I think it could be even a benefit if you don't have an expertise. Like when I moved to Hong Kong and someone said, you know, "You could become a taxi driver." Well, if I become a taxi driver, I can't become something else. You know, like if you have an expertise, like my editor teams here, all really amazing. They're they're stuck really being editors because they've got an expertise, you know, like it can naturally trap you. It's not always good to necessarily be the only person with the expertise.
100% 100% 100%. So what we're looking to do is we're looking to extract the three most painful problems through our market research. And so market research is incredibly simple. All we need to do is talk to the niche. And so what you're looking to do is you're either going to find them on social media, on the phone, or via email. And so a niche, there's three ways of really contacting them. We're not going to worry too much about the content thing because we're just getting started. So you want to talk to your niche. Now, there's another way you can do this which works really well and that I found is the easiest way to find problems and understand your market just—it's almost like going like straight into the, you know, straight into the beast of the thing—and that is basically what I call immersion. Now this is a pretty cool technique that you can use. So what you want to do is you'll probably find that everyone in your niche has a couple of preferred social media platforms, and what you want to do is you want to create social media platforms. So it could be LinkedIn, it could be Facebook, it could be Instagram, it could be Twitter, or, you know, controversially, we'll call it X, right? It could be TikTok, you know, any of these platforms for for goodness sake. It could even be Reddit, it could be Discord, anything. You want to find where your niche is hanging out. Then what you want to do is you want to go and create your own accounts on these platforms, you know, whatever it may whatever it may be. It may be Facebook, it may be LinkedIn. And then for 30 days, what they need to do is you need to behave as if you are a member of your niche. And so what you do is you let the algorithms feed you the information. So if you if you let's say that your niche is you want to help professional teachers who teach music, right? And what you would do is you would download TikTok and you would start looking for content that you think professional music teachers would find, and you start commenting, you start liking, you start sharing, you start behaving as if you are. If you do that for a week or two, the algorithm will think that you're a professional music teacher, and it will then start recommending you deeper content, and now you're sort of you're connected to the machine, and this is how you can assess trends. It's how you can assess problems. You can start looking at the language that your niche uses. And this is basically how you sort of join the club of your niche because imagine if there was a, um, a club that happened every Sunday. Um, let's say a hundred people in your local area directly in your niche met up and talked about their problems and their lives. You can have that same effect just online. And so that's basically what we're looking to do.
Now, after 30 days of either talking to the b to the to the niche or immersing yourself in the content, you should have a pretty damn good idea as to what these main problems are going to be. And if you don't, then it's because you haven't done it for long enough. And so really, I would try and talk to 30 people if you can. You can reach out to them on social media. You can reach out to them on email. You can call them up. And there's two ways you can go about this. You can even go the honest route, which is where you say, "I'm looking to start a business in this space. Would you mind helping me and answering a couple of questions, you know, to assist me? I'd really appreciate it." Or you can make up an excuse because in psychology, we have the reason respecting tendency. So, people are more likely to do something if you give a reason. Where you say like, "My grandmother's writing a book on said niche, and I'm doing some research for her. Don't suppose you could spare five minutes?" or you say, "I'm doing a school project on what it's like to run a business in the gym niche or the landscaping niche," or it could be a B2C niche, whatever business to consumer, and then, you know, you say, "I'm writing this book," or "I'm doing some research for this, that, and the other." You can pick if you want to be honest or not. I've done both, and they both work quite well. Once you've spoken to 30 people and you've spent 30 days on these platforms, you should be able to isolate a problem, and there's a couple of bits and pieces on the foundational front, really the the first thing is the problem. It's all about the problem. That's the main thing. It's really the main thing that matters. But a couple of the bits and pieces you need to bear in mind are your pricing because a lot of people are going to have questions around like, "What do I charge? What should I charge?" Honestly, the easiest thing to do here is just look at what your competitors charge because, you know, the easiest framework is if your competitors are charging a certain price and it's working and they're making sales, that's usually the best price to start with. Maybe slightly less, maybe slightly more depending on how good you think you can solve the problem. But if you start here, pricing is very dynamic. It can be changed overnight like that. And that's the first place to start.
Now, I would also add, it's probably better to go higher because you can always come down. Yep. Just on pricing. Now, other than that, out of the theory crafting, there's a few other little bits and pieces that you're going to have to do before we move on to the next step. And that is basically just setup. Okay? And so what you're going to need is you're going to need a payment processor, which is something you can use like I would just say Stripe or Square. I mean, there's all sorts of payment processors you can—automated way of collecting payment. It's basically what I mean. Yeah. Exactly. Just to specify. We're also going to need bank accounts. So like an actual business bank account, and you can go down to any local branch and they
Should be able to set you up for a with a corporate account, basically for free. And then just some other things as well, like your name, like your company name, and any other bits and pieces that you might think of that you need. You can also do some basic social profiles as well for the business.
And if you want to, you can do a website, but I wouldn't get too hung up on the website. I think a lot of people spend way too much time building their website before they've even got clients. Um, because then you have to send people to the website, and then the website has to send people to payment. So actually, it's no step. Um, although you know, I think from an SEO point of view it's always good to have a website, but from an actual business setup point of view, it's it's not as important as you think.
Down below we'll put some links because we have partnerships with uh brands for payment processing. We have a partnership with Tide Banking and others to help you with bank account setup. So all the stuff you need down below, and if you buy them through us, we get income from that which we can give away to fund people's dreams. So yeah, that's kind of the foundations, and that's everything you need to know to really get started, or at least how to think about getting started.
Now the next thing is actually building the expertise because it's all good and well to think like, oh yeah, I'm going to find this problem and you know, I'm going to create this leverage, but we actually need to know how do you become an expert, and really this isn't as hard as you might think. A lot of people, when we think about becoming an expert, it seems like this big gray scary topic where it's it's so unspecific and it's like becoming an expert, like what does that even mean? Right? Well, what we're doing is we're becoming an expert in the problem first of all. M so we're not necessarily looking to become like, let's let's take the marketing example, right? You don't have to become a complete marketing genius or marketing expert. In my example with gyms, all I had to become an expert in was was Facebook ads marketing for local gyms for appointments; so marketing itself or any any specific industry is this huge massive expertise, and becoming an expert in like that it takes like 10 years. Like another example could be personal branding, like, but if you just got really really really good at making, becoming an expert for TikTok for authors, it's a lot easier to do that. The smaller the the smaller the niche and the smaller the problem, at least insofar as a fact in proportion to the big thing, the easier it is to get into it. So, we're looking to become an expert in the problem.
Now, in my experience, most problems have solutions. And in this instance, and this is going to get a bit theoretical, so you're going to have to bear with me. Most problems are solved through the application of information. So I want you to imagine that a problem is like a—this is where my diagrams start coming out—imagine that this here is a padlock. Okay.
Looks like a dodgy handbag.
You described it to me. I know it's—
Yeah. Let's pretend that this is a padlock. Now, inside of a lock, you know, we we have what we call a pin code, right? And that basically could look, you know, like it has a different shape, you know, where it comes like this. And what we're looking to do is imagine that becoming an expert is as simple as trying to find the right key for a lock. And what this is is it's a demand for specific information. So in in biology, there's a thing called the lock and key theory, which basically explains how enzymes catalyze substrates. We're not going to get into biology, don't worry. But this is how your body works. And this is how pretty much everything works where, you know, you have a specific shape demanding a specific type of thing. And this is an enzyme. And then we have substrates. And if that substrate doesn't fit the enzyme, the reaction won't happen. And that's basically how your body works. Now, business is the same thing. So all we're looking to do when we're becoming experts and trying to solve this problem is we're trying to find the key that fits in. And the key that fits into problems is information. So for example, um, with your or with the guy who connected you to Penguin for your book, he has the information available to do that and he knows how to talk to them.
Yeah. Exactly. So that—well, that's that's information. It's like I know what to say. I know who to go to. I know what, you know, where to put you and do certain things. And so it's just an acquisition of information. All becoming an expert really is is finding the information that can be applied to the problem in the same way that opening a door or opening a lock is as simple as, you know, going through your keys, finding the right key, and unlocking it. And different information can be used to solve different problems. And so back to my example of doing marketing for gyms, I had to learn how the Facebook ads platform worked. Then I had to learn what offers worked in the gym space and what people would resonate with. And over time, you realize that becoming an expert isn't that complicated. It's just as simple as finding the right information. And then you slot the key into the lock, you open it, and then back. But if you put certain information into a problem, it won't work. So it it requires specificity. So the question then becomes, how do we acquire that information? And this is really simple and it's really straightforward. We do it in two ways. We do it through questions like that and we do it through copying. So this is why you want to enter a market that's already got competitors or has, you know, where the problem is is has been proven to be solved because if a problem has been solved then it can be solved because what that means is if something's already been done, it's an indication there's a certain there's a certain bit of information laying around somewhere in the ether that if found and applied will work. And so what we need to do is look for that information so we can turn the key and unlock it. And we do this by one of two ways. Either by copying your competitors who have already done it. And without any shame, this is exactly how I got my first couple of clients' results. So when I got my first couple of gym clients, the first thing, the very first thing that I did was I went to my competitors. I found their clients and I found their ads and their funnels and I copied them. Exactly. And in a lot of industries that can be considered copyright and illegal, but if you're working in the internet online game, that's just the way the world works. Same thing is true with a lot of people on YouTube, right? So for example, you've got an expertise in building a personal brand and in creating viral content. And that's because there's specific information that you have available. You know what questions to ask. You know, like that person looks like they could potentially be a good good fit for this for this video. And that people copy you and it works for them.
A compliment.
Oh, I never mind it when people copy.
Exactly. And they're never going to be as good as you. But remember, you're just looking to start and you're just looking to make a little bit of money and and sort of build an income for yourself. You're not trying to become a multi-millionaire. By the way, school also makes you think this word's bad, right? Don't copy your colleague. Don't copy this. Don't copy that. There there is—I just quickly on the ethics side because ethics is always an interesting like conversation real quick. I don't want to preach to anybody how you live your life, but like copying, bad version in my opinion is Mark Zuckerberg promises to build a website for someone else, steals their idea, and takes it for himself. Good copying, see Facebook, think it's [ __ ] build something better. Yeah. You know, I I I I personally think it's worth just—again, I'm not judging anybody—but I I think the copy model uh is really important to do it the right way because then you you have a better life later if you copy ethically.
Well, you are right because when I tell people to do this, they say, "But isn't copying bad?" And it's because they've been so conditioned by the school system to think that copying is bad. But really, once you once you remove yourself from the school playground, copying is the most efficient way to learn and to find what works. And there's no shame in, you know, obviously if you're at school and you have a quick peak of the person next to you. Well, that sounds very questionable. As long as you're not as long as you're not the teacher, that's fine. But, you know, but if if you're copying someone's test and you're looking at their results and you copy that down, then yeah, there's an argument to be made where you're not actually learning, but it still gets the job done totally. You know, I mean, even Alex Hormosi and his team told me they copied our thumbnail, the video that did really well and copied the format, you know, and and actually it's a compliment. Plus, that means that more knowledge goes out in the world for free as far as I'm concerned. But like, I actually think that's how you learn what's going to be successful on YouTube.
Well, in your category, in your niche, go Google on YouTube. Go search on YouTube who's doing it well, and if it's done a lot of views then copy the format. Exactly. So that's option number two. Now option number one is is questions, and you should do both of these, and questions is basically where what you do is you find someone that has solved the problem. So you find someone in your niche who's already done it. And you should you should know this relatively well because there's going to be people on social media that you can see that have solved it. There's going to be um people that you've spoken to doing some like market research interviews and stuff that have solved it. You should be aware of at least a couple of people that have solved it because if you if you're not then you weren't able to rate the solvability factor to be somewhat high because otherwise you know you're kind of screwed. Primary example of this is one of my clients started a marketing agency for interior designers and he wanted to help um high-ticket luxury interior designers. High ticket means charging a high price. He wanted to help them get appointments. Great market but no one had ever done it before. So he didn't have anything to copy and he didn't have anyone to ask and so he had to guess and make it up, and it's probably something that can be solved but it might take him like 3, 4 years. So he ended up switching to a different niche that he could he had some base base leverage basically. And so you find someone who's done it and all you do is you beg for their attention for an hour and you ask them how they did it, and that's literally it. You hop in you hop onto the question and you say why does this work? How does this work? Why? How? Why? How? Why? How? You ask as much as you can for as long as you can for as long as they'll give you, and then you're gonna—by asking a question they're parting information with you, and that if if that if they've done it that information is basically the key to the lock to to solve—the audience member for a second, I think I know the answer, but I ask you—if I asked a question on my competitor, why would they give me—a potential competitor—well, you're not you're not looking for competitors, you're looking for people in your niche who have solved it. So often what will happen is, you know, let's let's say that this person here is a competitor. Okay. And then they have a client. You can find the client and you can say how did this person solve that problem for you? Like your competitors won't be too kind in helping you, you know, with the information. But a lot of people in the market, they will have solved it on their own. And if you go and you show enough humility and enough gratitude and you really just say, "Please help me out. All I want to know is what information did you apply?" They'll tell you and they'll let you know. So that's really it. And remember building an expertise isn't as is not that tricky. All it is is about finding the right information and finding the information that can solve the problem. Solution is the application of information. And what we need to do is we need to know where to go to find that information which is basically people who have solved it or people who have already solved it for other people. And go there and then ask what information solves this problem, and then you can take it and you can basically become an expert.
So the next thing that we're going to talk about is sales. And I think because you can get this far and you can theory craft everything and you can create an offer, you can create a guarantee, you can find the problem, find the information, but all of it really falls down to the fact that you need to sell it. And this can be pretty uncomfortable for a lot of people. So we're going to spend a lot of time talking about this here, the wonderful world of sales. [ __ ] love. It's the answer to freedom. If you're an introvert or an extrovert, you can learn sales. This is not the time to click away cuz sales is for everybody. And if you know it, you can be free. Exactly. Cool. So, when it comes to sales, we're selling information. And basically, what we're doing is we're going to be conducting these things called sales calls because there is basically a nice simple three-step process to making money with expertise. Okay? And I'm we're going to explain the the the sales thing and the appointment thing here, but I'm just going to give you the broad overview of how the the sales process would work, right? So, the first thing that we do, and we'll talk about this in stage four, if they're not bored by then, they might be, um, is the appointment. And this is where we book an appointment to talk to people about our service. The second thing is a sales call where we're hopping on Zoom through Zoom video and explaining the service to them to persuade them to buy. And then we have the delivery. Okay? And this is a nice simple three-step process. And here is where we make our money. So we we either like you said charge 50% now, 50% later, or we take the money. And so we're booking the appointment, and I'm going to talk about how to do this. So don't worry about this. You book the appointment where you're on the calendar. So you know, you have Google calendar or whatever. And you set aside an hour or 45 minutes to talk to this person in your niche that has this problem about how your information can solve the problem. And then we have this sales call. And this is usually going to be about an hour long. Now, you've probably done sales calls before that are like 10 hours. You've—if you're—I've done presentations. I've done a different version of this which—get an appointment, present to 10 people.
Yeah. 2-hour presentation and then—
Exactly. You guys don't have to worry about presenting to 10 people because with this kind of business, it's usually just one-on-one. Maybe one to two if there's a business partner or a spouse involved or something like that. But typically, this is just a 1-hour sales.
Can this be done by email by the way? Cuz I again I have got done an email that someone said yes to, sent them a contract, done the work. It can be done but that but if you've got like—we we get this sometimes with the business but not at the beginning I don't think because if you've got case studies and people like personal brand and they know you really well and they're pre-sold then absolutely, but if you're starting out from scratch you could probably do it for like $10, but then I don't know if anyone would really spend money on someone that they've never met or spoken to or heard from before via email. Do you know what I mean? Unless you give the ultimate guarantee—I'm going to I'm going to send you a video about how to horse jump.
Good. And if it's not valuable, then you won't be paying. But if you, you know—
Yes. No. Yeah. You could, you could for sure. And I just think this might be for some people jumping on a call, they might be intimidated as well, right? But this is the thing is it is intimidating, but it's necessary, right? Because what we don't want to do, like unfortunately, we can't hide behind keyboards in business. That's kind of just—you can get a co-founder to help you do this if this isn't your bit. You can. So if if you hate sales, you can always try and hire salespeople, this, that, and the other. But becoming successful is all about outside the comfort zone. And you've got to be able to, you know, to hack sales calls. At least I did—buy some of someone who sent a Loom recently. They sent me a Loom video. I got to know their personality and this is what we do. Do you want it? Yes or no. There are hacks around this. But I think probably top line, you got to just have the balls to jump. Yeah, you got to have a bit of confidence about it. But hopefully after I explain how to do a sales call, you'll see that it's not this intimidating scary thing because it's a process like anything else. It's really simple because you know a sales call is basically a conversation and because everyone watching this you you are capable of conversation, you know you—I I hope so—you know you've probably spoken to people before, right? I'd hope, and therefore sales is basically as simple as asking questions and then pitching and then handling objections and you used to do this even as a kid because as a kid you would ask mom why does that work or dad why is that thing the way it is, so you know how to ask questions. Don't forget to ask questions. A lot of people forget that at the opening. They start selling.
Yeah. Listen to the customer first.
Yeah. So, you know how to ask questions because you're a human being and that's what we do cuz we're curious. You know how to pitch because I guarantee you there's some point in your life, multiple times, probably hundreds of times where you've wanted to do something and you've had to convince somebody else to do it. Whether it's your friend on where you go on holiday or your mom on if you can get McDonald's on the way home—treat story—or you know, all sorts of examples. And then the other thing is objection handling. And objection handling, which is what we'll talk about, is when someone says no or I'm not sure and you try to convince them. And that's the persistence. So, you know, when like you're a kid and or you're in school and you want something and your parent or your teacher says no. And so you ask again and again and you try and reframe it. And the problem is is that through our upbringing in modern society is we're conditioned to like not be persistent because you know what happens with your parents and your school teachers is they get sick of you and say stop asking, stop asking and you know then you get grounded or whatever. But in sales we want to try and redevelop that childhood sort of thing that you have. So don't worry, you already know how to sell. You just need to know how to do it in a linear fashion. So sales call is very simple. So like Simon said, um—Simon says—I find that quite funny.
Yeah, of course you do.
Like Simon's like—Simon says—we start with questions. So the first thing that you're doing when you hop on the sales call, and this is really step zero, it's just a little bit of an introduction. And this this this thing here really should only be like, in my opinion, 30 to 60 seconds long because we're not trying to—a lot of people think you want to talk about the weather and the latest football match and stuff, but not really. They're there to solve a problem and they trust that you'll have some level of expertise to do it. So we don't want to spend too much time on anything else. By the way, this can be storytelling. This is
Can be a story. Like what I do when I'm on a sales call, okay? I'm like, "I started a business at 15 years old. I really struggled to do it and now I built a platform that helps people do it for free. Would you like to sponsor it?" That's what I want to talk about today. Yep. That's it. Perfect. Perfect. So then we need to ask some questions.
So you might then be thinking, well, the question might be, what questions do I even ask and how do I get into this? Well, there's really three stages to the questioning. Okay, so this is 1.1. So stage 1.1 is understanding their current situation, and we touched on this briefly earlier. Step 1.2 is understanding their desired situation. And then step 1.3 is the why. And this is all you have to know to get someone over the line.
So current situation is basically asking them questions about where they're at right now. And you're centralizing this and focusing this on the problem. You're not asking for their blood type and their star sign or anything weird like that. What you're doing is you're focusing on the problem that they're there to solve. So, how long has this problem existed? Why does this problem exist? How does this problem affect your life? Like, why do you think you have to deal with it? What have you done to try and solve it? You know, asking questions around the problem as much as we can to build a big picture.
The beautiful thing in sales, and you you'll know this when you ask people questions about their current situation, at least specifically when you're there to solve a problem, is it gets them talking about the problem. And people don't like talking about their problems, which is why they bury them. But when you get people to start articulating information about the problems, it dredges up all of this emotion associated with it, which is basically the pain. And remember, pain is the catalyst for decision because we don't really do anything as humans unless there's some sort of pain involved, at least from a buying perspective. So we want to create pain, but not in a Machiavellian mean way where we're trying to like make them suffer, but we're asking them questions that by the nature of them answering dredge up some pain or emotion attached to them.
So, for example, it's like if we're helping engineers in university, not show jumpers, engineers in university get better grades. You could say, "What's your current grade?" "Oh, I'm I'm I'm only getting like a 22 or, you know, a B." It's like, "Okay, well, why is that a problem for you?" "Oh, because my parents want me to get an A." "Okay, well, why why why are you worried about that?" "Oh, because like if I don't do it, then I'm going to disappoint them." Well, why would why would that disappoint them? And you and you're it's almost kind of like therapy to a degree where you're just trying to find the problem, the pain; you dredge it up.
Second thing is a desired situation. So once we've got the the pain and the problem, we want to create the the pleasure in the future. And this is called future pacing in sales. And this is where we create this sort of mirror where over here, you know, when we're talking about the current situation, we've got all of this mess and this chaos. And by talking about this mess and chaos, you know, we're creating basically pain. It's double M. Shouldn't be a double M, but we're creating pain over here. What we want to do is then talk about the flip side, which is over here, which is the good stuff. So if we solve this problem, what would happen? Why would that be good for you? How would solving this problem have an impact on your life? Why do you want this outcome? What would you do with this outcome? And what we do when we talk about this is we talk about we're creating desire. And if we take pain and we take desire, then this creates action.
Because by the time that you get to the close and by the time that you get to the pitch, the prospect will be in this emotional situation where they've talked about their current problem, so they're in pain. They've talked about what they want, so they have desire. And so, they're primed to make a decision on the call. I've done, I think, 2,500 sales calls and I'm able to do what we call in the industry is a first call close, which is where you can take someone who's a complete stranger who's never heard of you before into a paying client who pays you thousands of dollars or pounds on the first call in like 60 seconds and 60 minutes. 60 seconds would be quite impressive. 60 minutes.
What we do after step 1.2 and 1.1 is we ask why. So we need to say we need to basically you kind of integrate this with the other stages, but why do you want to get here? Why does this suck? Why is your favorite question in sales? Because basically it justifies their pain and it justifies their desire, and if you taking an action is one thing, but knowing why you should take it is way more powerful. That makes sense. If you can build why into like okay if they tried to do it with someone else, why didn't it work? You can understand the flaw in the previous supplier's process and you can make sure you don't make the same mistake. So why why didn't they have the outcome they wanted, and then you can and build that into your your offering. 100% 100%.
So the next thing that we do after we've put them in this sort of emotional situation, which you know once again coming back to what you were talking earlier about ethics, it might seem unethical to do this, but the truth is that it's unethical not to because if you can solve a problem for someone and they're in pain, it's your moral duty to get them to buy if you actually believe you can solve the problem. And so I'm a big believer in if you know you can help someone, you should. It's kind of like if you've got a friend or a family member and they're in a really bad way and you know that you're going to have to ask them questions about their problem and it's going to make them cry. It's going to make them suffer, but it's like going to a doctor; like it's going to they're going to it's going to get worse before it gets better, and you have the best interest at heart.
The second thing is the pitch. So in the questioning stage, what we're looking to do is qualify them, find out a bit about their problem to see if we can actually help. If you think you can help, then we need to pitch them. And the way that we pitch your your expertise or your information is incredibly succinct and incredibly simple. You want to basically give a two-minute high-level overview. And I know this works because I've done it for, like I said, more than 2,500 sales calls and I've made nearly $30 million doing this stuff. So, what you want to do is craft a a couple of paragraphs of text that explain what you do and the outcome of you doing it at a really vague high level. Because what a lot of people do, and maybe you've seen this before, is they pitch, but then they they they end up giving this huge like information overload. They spend 10 15 minutes talking about everything to do with their product, and that just bamboozles the prospect's mind. The prospect is just like, "It's too much information." Then they have to think about it because they've got to digest this information. So what we do is we give a really high-level pitch. So my pitch for example for gyms before was basically, "Okay, well, step one we're going to do this, step two this, step three this, step four is you're going to get this amount of appointments." Works really well. Then we shut up. Mhm.
So we we give the pitch and then we just we go silent. We say nothing. And what then starts to happen, the beautiful thing of keeping it vague and high level, which is where we start answers. Because by keeping your pitch vague, what's going to happen is your prospects are going to have questions because they need to know how this thing works and how it works for them. The thing is is imagine there's like you could talk about your thing for a day, like a whole day because it's a lot of information. But they don't need all that information. They just need to know how it works for them and their situation. So, by keeping this vague, we start to get questions from the prospect. And they won't have that many questions. It could be one question. It could be 10 questions, but what's important is they're asking questions about how the thing works specifically for them. Mhm. And so, they're going to have specific concerns and specific questions on little bits and pieces and other things they won't be concerned about at all. So, when I used to sell to gyms using Facebook ads, some people would ask about how the Facebook pixel would work and how all this technical stuff works. Other people would be like, "What offer do you use?" People have different concerns and they don't need all the information to buy. They just need the information they think they need. Okay? And so you answer their questions and then we have the close and then we have the objections.
So once they have enough information, i.e. they run out of questions, they will then ask the price question. So once they think they know like everything they need to know about how it would work for them, they then say, "Okay, well what's this going to cost me?" And once they give you the price question, now you know that they've got everything that they need because that's kind of how people finalize the information. So then we move on to the close. And the close is straightforward. This is just where you tell them the price. There's no fancy way to do this. There's no crazy weird wacky techniques that you need to use. You just say it is this amount of money and then you shut up. And then there's going to be a very awkward silence for like sometimes a couple of minutes whilst the prospect thinks and processes the information. But it's really important you stay silent after the close or after you've delivered the price. And what's going to happen at that point is they're either going to say yes or they're going to say maybe. People never say no. They always say maybe. Right? It's always "I want to think about it. Let me go and talk to my wife." And this is where the objection handling thing comes in. Now the objection handling thing, this could be an entire video within itself. So we're not going to I know that we need to get into this now. If you want to learn how to handle objections, just go on YouTube and search up live objection handling or live sales calls. There are hundreds of them, countless of them you can listen to. But this is, you know, at the beginning, you're probably not going to be able to handle these that well, but after a couple hundred sales calls, you'll be able to do it really well. But if you do the questioning thing properly, the pitching thing properly, and you answer properly, then what's going to happen is a lot of people are just going to say yes, and then you just made the sale. And that's how sales works. It's not this horrible manipulating complicated task. Questions, pitch, answers, close, and then the objection thing is is a little bit for for later when you've got some more experience and some more expertise.
I know that you've probably done a different process to this. How does this resemble compared to what you would usually do? No, I I I think it's it's pretty good. Uh on the objection side I I sometimes patience you know if you if you get objections that you let's say you can't even answer them let's say you don't know how to like rebut their points then regroup and this isn't a dead lead this is someone you can come back to later I think sometimes people will say we don't have any budget right now you know you can say well okay when will you have budget you know it it doesn't have to close then not every call has to be a close I think that's the only thing I you know add is like objections I don't have budget right now okay when will you have budget and they say August. Okay, I'll come back to you in August, right? So, be patient, I think, is probably the number one thing I could teach on the objection real quick. Um, I think on the closing side, like, yeah, I mean, most people I actually like it when people say no. I love it, man. Lo's a no cuz it's honest. Yeah, exactly. Maybe make me think, do I put this back on my cool list in a week or like, you know, I think yes, of course, is brilliant. Goes without saying. Um, but yeah, I think this is really, really good.
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So, the next thing that we're going to talk about, and this is El's touch on sales, um, is appointments and how to book these appointments and how to get them in. And this is my favorite part because this is what I built my entire business and life around. Basically, to get a client, you have to persuade them to do to depart with two things. The first thing is their time and the second thing is their money. So, you have to get someone's time to get their money and so you need to figure out how to get the time. Now, the thing with the appointments is this is the trickiest part I would say because everything up until now it's we're not actually facing any rejection. We're not really having to like grind out anything or do any work. Because the thing with appointments, and I want you guys to take this one thing away, is volume. The key to booking appointments and getting sales calls and getting prospects that you can sell to, is volume. And what this means is doing as much outreach as humanly possible. Cold calls, cold emails, cold messages. This is, you know, that story of like there's a bear under the in the woods or something. We can't go around it. We can't go over it. We can't go under it. What? What is that thing? You know what I'm talking about? Uh I think I know. Kids book. Yeah. Kids book. It's a song, isn't it? It's like a song about how there's like a bear and you can't go around the bear. You can't go. You can't dig under it. You can't go over it. You have to go through it, right? Go through the bear. Through the bear. Is that exactly right? I don't. But we've been recording for long enough for them to volume is very important though. Basically, you've got to you've got to go through this. There's no way around this. There is no way around this.
So, when it comes to booking appointments, there's really three different places that we can go. And what we're going to be doing at the beginning is something called outbound. Now, there are three ways for you to book appointments. Okay? We've got outbound, we've got inbound, and we've got ads. Now, the other way that we can use is referrals, but referrals are kind of off the table since you don't have any clients yet. So, we're not going to worry about referrals. Inbound is what kind of what we're doing now. This is where you create content. It's where you build a personal brand. It's where you're posting and making videos and stuff. But inbound is kind of also out of the question because A, it's going to take months, if not years, to start working, which isn't profitable for you. But B, there's not really much point in you making content unless you know what you're talking about. And you only know what you're talking about once you've got clients. And then again, we have ads. But ads are also off the table because ads are very bloody expensive. And you know, I'm assuming you want to start this from the beginning without putting any money in because this business doesn't require any expenditure. So outbound there are three places we can go. We've got email, we have got DM and we have got call.
Now what you want to do is you want to pick one, and the one that you pick is based on a very simple idea and it's contact availability. So in your niche there is going to be an easy way to contact people. And what we're looking for is is we're looking to try and find their emails, their social media accounts, or their phone numbers. And so with contact availability, if you're in a niche where emails are easy to find, but social accounts and phone numbers are hard to find, then we pick email. And the same thing goes for calling for DMing. So when I used to work with gyms, I did calls because I could find their phone numbers easily, but most gym owners didn't really use social media, at least not so not like, you know, publicly. And their emails, you could find them, but they were kind of tough to find. So what I would do is I would make phone calls. And so what you need to do and appointment booking is really straightforward. It's it's not a complicated thing is you pick email, DM, or calls. And then what you do is you just call the entire niche. And you DM the entire niche. You email the entire niche. It sucks. You're going to have to do hundreds and hundreds a day. But if you're wondering what to say to them, all you say is your offer. So you know how we talked about this earlier where you have your outcome, your time frame, and your risk reversal. All you're doing for appointment booking is reaching out to these people and saying, "Hello, my name is Charlie and this is my offer. Would you like to talk to me?" And what you're looking to do is you're looking to do that a couple hundred times a day or a hundred times a day. And then you just book them into a call. And it's not rocket science and it's not this crazy weird over complicated thing. I mean, there's a lot of complexity to it if you want to get systemized and really advanced with it and start building teams around this, but all you're doing is presenting your offer to as many people as humanly possible. And that's it. What do you have in terms of the appointment booking thing? Did have you done this outbound before or?
Yeah. No. Well, I I I basically from the agency world, I would send an email, but my preferred method in business business to business is email. So, I'd send an email to the head of CNN and I'd say, "We've noticed that you've got no SEO on your Asia platform and we can help you fix that. Um, would you like to talk about it?" And then I get I I I my preferred route back then was go to their office and actually build a direct connection. Of course these days we've got Zoom and other ways to do that but get get that initial meeting around a particular pain point they have and yeah exactly exactly this and then again like the volume thing is such an undersold point I think people don't realize even if you've got like I had 10 clients in the first two months we didn't stop selling because you might lose one client one client stops their budget one client runs out of money whatever the story is you got to keep that volume but I think yeah um I I made a list of 50 companies I wanted to work with when I first started and I used to reach out to them every single month as well. Frequency is another thing, but they love you. Well, but the thing what I used to do, and I think this is, you know, I'm sure it's basically relationship building. So I would email them saying, "Do you want this?" And they'd say, "Not right now, but thank you." And then a week later or two weeks later, or three weeks later, I'd say, "I just saw something in your industry that's really interesting. This is what Tesla's doing." So I try to get BMW as a client. This is what Tesla's doing. Have you seen this? So I start like not selling them something but showing them something I was learning about their industry that they should also know. So I would I would make sure that I was consistently reaching out to them. So volume. Yes. And
Then frequency. Yeah. You written it down for me. Yeah. I glamorous assistant did it for you. So very glamorous.
But volume is basically how many people you reach out to, and frequency is how many times you reach out to the people that you’ve reached out to. And so if you’re wondering, volume should be at least 100 a day minimum. If you’re not, and this is going to suck—for just complete honesty, and I know I suck—the bear. You got to go through it, right? Go through the bear. It’s going to get a bit weird with that. But you have to do at least a hundred a day because if you’re not doing a hundred a day, and it depends on the size of your niche, but if you’re not doing as many as you can, you’re not going to get any appointments because, you know, it might be one out of every hundred people will want to book an appointment with you. And so, you know, if you just want to get one call a day or a couple of clients a month, which could be £10,000 a month, 100 a day.
Frequency is how many times you reach out to them. And honestly, and this is going to sound controversial and you’re going to sound like this sounds ridiculous, but anywhere between like five to eight times because people aren’t going to trust you on the first attempt. The second and third are going to fall on deaf ears. But as soon as you as soon as you start reaching out to them like four, five, six, seven, eight times, they’re like, “Fine, I’ll give this guy the time of day.” Even if it’s just to get rid of him, you know, and that’s how you get the appointments, and that’s how you bring value when you do this, though. Yeah. If you just pester people with the same offer, you’re going to piss them off; they’re going to block you. Yeah, it don’t. So, you’ve got to keep reinventing the the way you’re presenting the offer.
So, the fifth thing we’re going to talk about is operations. And before you click off, because operations doesn’t sound particularly shiny and sexy and all this stuff like Simon is, you need it. Okay? Because if you don’t have operations, what’s going to happen is you’re going to basically make a lot of mess. Operations is basically just as simple as building what we call in the industry as process. And a process—or not American—a process. Is that process or process? Good. Maybe doesn’t really make a difference. A process or a process is basically just a linear chain of actions that have to be completed for something to be done. And so, for example, with us making this YouTube video, we need the the process of making the YouTube video is getting the team over to the house. It’s setting up the cameras. It’s actually recording the video, then it’s cutting the video, then it’s editing the video, then it’s uploading it. And so what we find in business and really anywhere in life is there are a chain of actions that need to be completed in linear or to use a less fancy term, step-by-step order for things to be done. And this is all operations is; it’s building processes. Okay?
And so what we’re looking to do is create processes for a few different things. The first thing is your financial operations. And don’t worry, we’re not going to talk about, you know, shorting housing bonds or anything like that. Financial operations are incredibly simple. Okay? All you really need is two spreadsheets. Well, actually, you can just use one spreadsheet. You can put two in one. Basically, you just need one spreadsheet. And what you’re looking to do every single day or week or month—I used to do it in the month, and I would dread the end of the month because I had to do this—is you look to track your expenses and you look to track your income. And that’s all it is. Because you’re not you don’t necessarily need an accountant yet once you start making money. I think if if you’re in the UK maybe £45,000 a month, elsewhere I can’t comment cuz I don’t know the tax code, but once you start signing a few clients, making a few thousand, you need to find an accountant, and the first thing, the very first thing that that accountant is going to say to you is, “Okay, send me over your books or send me over your line items or send me”—it’s a fancy term for expenses and income—and I don’t know if you had this when you started your first business or when you had—you probably a little bit more advanced than I was; I didn’t have any of this—so I had to spend like a month going through my bank accounts, my invoices, and finding everything. And you need to make sure that you’re keeping your invoices the whole step of the way because there is something that exists called tax. And you know, that’s something that’s got to be dealt with, otherwise you’re going to get fined. And so the easiest way to keep the tax man happy—you’ve got to keep him happy, trust me—is basically expenses, income, and invoices. So when you have your accountant, you can send them the spreadsheet, and they’ll think that you’re some sort of godsend from heaven because everything’s there. And most of their clients do not have this together. So, you need to do this monthly. It sucks, and there’s software to help you. Again, true. So, you can use you can use software like Zero or QuickBooks. Um, actually, to be fair, yeah, you may you don’t have to use a spreadsheet, but if you don’t want to buy these softwares, and they are actually very cheap. Like QuickBooks is what, like three quid a month or something. It’s very, but it’s worth it’s worth getting into the habit of filling these out cuz the only other thing on this is cash flow. Watch out for cash flow because you’re going to have your expenses and see income and you think you’re okay. Um, actually, how much is in the bank? Yeah, that’s the one measure I always look at. Like that’s the one little trick. Don’t ever not don’t look at income and think it’s okay. Have you collected the money? Is the money in the account? Is that person going to pay you? Because most people go bankrupt because they didn’t get paid by someone.
This is really, really important thing to think about because when you sell your service and information, we sell at two different levels, right? Well, we’ve got revenue and then we’ve got cash. And so, let’s say that you’re selling something and you might not you might think this is a lot of money to sell something for, but you can get here eventually. Let’s say you’re selling something for £10,000 or €10,000 or euros or whatever. It might be the case that someone buys this product, but you split it over a five-month time horizon, right? And so one sale on a on a five-pay here is only going to be 2,000 upfront, and the rest of it is is to collect. And what a lot of entrepreneurs get in trouble and where they fall prey to this is they assume that this money is theirs. So, it’s like, I’ve made the sale. I’ve sent the contract. They’ve signed the contract. At this level of business, not with your big, you know, million-dollar deals, but at this level of business, when you’re dealing with, you know, four-figure, five-figure investments, it costs more to sue someone than you would recuperate from the suing. So, no, there contracts, they’re not really worth the paper they’re written on at this level of business. You should still have a contract, and you can do some basic legal templates to make you feel safe and comfortable. But never ever ever assume that what’s in revenue is going to collect because that’s how you get caught. And a lot of people do this where they sell, you know, let’s say that you sell, you know, 10 of these and therefore you make 20,000 upfront and you think, “Oh, I’ve got 80,000 coming in.” And then they go and finance a car or they go on this expensive holiday. But then what happens is a few of their clients, they don’t pay. So this goes down by half. And people can be very fickle with payments, especially can’t obligate your guarantees. Exactly. So if you start collecting this money in your head and start spending this money, you can’t follow through in what you promised. Exactly. So yeah, cuz what are you going to do? You’re going to sue them. It’s like, oh, you owe me £8,000. And they’ll be like, well, I’m not paying it. And it’s like, well, I’m going to sue you. And then you go and look for a lawyer to do that, and the lawyer’s like, oh, it’s going to cost £6,000 to sue them, and I can’t even guarantee it will work. So it You know, someone just went bankrupt, by the way, because of VAT. They spent the money on VAT. God damn it, man. VAT. So they got all that. They collected all the money, and then they didn’t actually allocate—even they looked at cash and bank, they thought the cash and bank—they forgot to delete what was owed from the—in England we have something called VAT, valuated tax—if you’re watching from the UK, VAT—you don’t have to worry about VAT until £82,500 a year in income, so we’re not going to worry too much about that, but yes, that that is sucks, and all of this financial jargon which you’re not going to be familiar with and might seem intimidating, all of this is easily cleared up by hiring an accountant for a couple of hundred a month, just being disciplined yourself, just you Measure the amount of money you’re spending. Measure the amount of money coming in and measure the amount in the bank. That’s all you need to do. Don’t don’t get freaked out about accounts. It’s simple. And as your business scales, get an accountant. Simple. And then they’ll they’ll solve it all for you. But you need to be prepared for the accountant, which is why you need to start using the software or a spreadsheet or something similar of keeping all the receipts. Exactly. Otherwise, the an accountant is only as good as the information you have available to them. Right. And otherwise, you’re going to get into trouble.
The second thing is a client support process. So, this isn’t something that, you know, this is this is quite niche and deep and specific, and it’s not too high level, but you still need one of these because what’s going to happen is if you follow the steps that we’ve laid out in this video, you’re going to get clients. You’re going to book appointments, you’re going to close deals, and you’re going to start applying the information to the problem to, you know, create the solution and make money. You’re going to make money. And in the process, you’re going to sign this wonderful thing that we know as a client, which is basically a customer, but for some reason in the business world, we say client because it sounds cooler, I think. Um, and your clients are going to need support. So, in conjunction with you delivering the service or coaching them or whatever the information, how you’re passing that with them doesn’t really matter. They’re going to need your help. And so, what this basically looks like is they just need to basically make sure or they need to know that you’re available to them. And so, what I like to do is I like to use WhatsApp Business at the beginning. Now, as you scale, there’s a tool that you can use called Help Scout, which is an email support tool. But don’t worry about that until you’ve got like 50 clients. At the beginning, it’s just WhatsApp Business. What you don’t want to do is have your support channel happen somewhere where clients aren’t active and using because you want your clients to ask you questions. You want your clients to come to you. And so, what you need to figure out is which platform are they most likely to use freely and frequently so they can ask you for help and support. And so usually for most businesses that’s going to be WhatsApp Business. Don’t use your personal WhatsApp number. Otherwise, you’re not going to sleep at night because you’re going to, you know, be texting your mom as you go to bed like I do because I’m a little sloppy like that. Now, that sounds really strange, doesn’t it? Sweet. It is sweet. Yeah. Depending on what they’re thinking. But sweet, right? But if you’re texting if you’re texting your family and you’re trying to relax on a Friday evening and then suddenly a client comes to you with a problem, now now your weekend’s kind of like you can’t you have to separate you know work and and and play if that makes sense. So you have those two separate things. Now that’s really the support thing beyond that. That’s really it. You just need to make sure that you’re available, but you need to tell your clients where they can come for support. And if you just give them your email, they’re not going to email you because people don’t like using email. You’re going to get it’s going to get lost. WhatsApp’s the best way to do it.
Now, the next thing is project management. So, as you start growing the business and as you start signing more clients, you’re going to have to manage projects. And a project is basically when you’re building something, right? So, it could be hiring a certain team member or it could be building a new product or it could be anything. And as we complete these projects to grow the business, like that’s how we make money. And you need to have something to manage these projects. So, what I would suggest that you use is something called Notion, which you can actually get for free. And this is a really simple tool that basically allows you to put all of your tasks and organize your to-do list. And if you’re building something, you can break it down into steps, and then it just building projects and completing projects is as simple as following steps laid out in Notion. They they even sponsor us, by the way. So thanks thanks for that plug. So if you buy it from down below, it is free. You use the code down below. We get credit for it. So please go ahead. Oh, I didn’t know that. Yeah, it’s a great tool. I only ever endorse products I actually think are really useful from a project management point of view. It’s brilliant. Happy happy accidents.
So the next thing is communication. Now you’re not going to have to worry about this until Am I even spelling that correctly? That’s fine. Commun community action. People get it. Let’s just pretend that that’s a new word. Communication. Communction. Let’s just let’s just pretend that says communication. What’s going to happen is after a while you’re going to have to start hiring team members. You’re going to need virtual assistants. You might have sales people on board. You might have appointment setters to do the outbound. You might even have coaches or people to deliver the results for you. And you’re going to have to commune action. You have to communicate in a certain place. And to do that, I would suggest using Slack. Um, I don’t know if you’re sponsored by Slack. No, but it’s a good product, and we do use it. So, so Slack should be sponsoring us. Slack’s pretty awesome. This is basically just a platform where all of your team can communicate. You can create. By the way, this this can be a bit complicated. Slack, I I actually think WhatsApp Business is also quite good initially for communication from a if you’ve got a small team, a small group. Y um as you grow maybe Slack Slack is actually you have to log in and you have to I I would use WhatsApp Business as well for that. Very true. Very true.
And then the last thing that we’re going to talk about from an operational perspective is this wonderful thing called a VA. Now a VA—um, this is an acronym for virtual assistant. And a lot of people starting businesses they don’t know what a virtual assistant is. So I’m going to briefly explain it. And there’s loads of YouTube videos and tutorials on how to hire them and bring them in. I just want to make you aware of them. Basically in in countries like the Philippines, in Thailand, Bangladesh, India, etc. Um, because the economic situation isn’t as prosperous as the first world like in the United States of America or the UK, a lot of people are very happy to work for what you would consider a very small amount of money. And that can be, you know, $4 an hour, it can be $5 an hour, etc., etc. And so what’s going to happen as you build this business is there’s going to be tasks, and your time is going to start to be worth money. And so let’s say that you’re making uh £5,000 a month. And you know, let’s say that your time is therefore worth maybe 40 to 50 pounds or dollars per hour. It doesn’t make sense for you to be doing low-leveraged tasks when you could be paying someone 10% of what it would cost you to do it. If that makes sense. Now, a lot of people think this is unethical because they think it’s slave labor. But these people, they want to work for this amount of money. I like to pay my virtual assistants a little bit more than this because I’m in a fortunate financial position now where I don’t have to skimp too much on costs. But if you just do some research on hiring VAs, they can do lots, they’re very talented, they can do lots of different things for you in the business, and you can save yourself so much time, which is time that you can spend on getting more appointments, doing more sales calls or basically building a better product. And that’s what I want to leave you with in closing today. Quickly on the virtual assistants, just real quick. I’ll write it back down. No, how how do you find a virtual assistant? What’s quick quick help? So real simple process here. So, we can use a platform called Upwork. So, there’s a platform called Upwork that you can go to and you create an account. Fiverr, like you can use Upwork or you can use Fiverr. Fiverr is our sponsor. So, we’ll throw Fiverr in there. We’ll use We’ll use Fiverr. Also fine. We’ll use better. We’ll use Fiverr for this video. Um, there’s another one called onlinejobs.ph specifically for for um assistants from the Philippines. Um, and then on Fiverr, all you do is it’s real simple—or another platform, but we’ll use Fiverr. They give you a template to like a job template, and you fill it out, and then they will send out that template to people they think are qualified, and all you do is you interview them. You find the one that you think is the best fit for the job, and it’s that simple. The interview process is very straightforward when it comes to hiring virtual assistants. One of the most important things, there’s two important things, internet speed and device. Because of these these countries aren’t as economically developed, a lot of places they have really slow internet speed, and the devices they’re using to do the work can be quite slow and janky. You want to try and find a virtual assistant who’s using like a MacBook and an iPhone or a decent computer with a really good internet speed because most of them are very diligent and they’re very hardworking and they’re very good people, and that’s not a problem. But one thing that lets a lot of them down is the technology they’re using because you don’t want a lot of your business to be running on like 500 like megabytes per second—or that’s quite a lot of that’s quite a lot of internet speed—but you don’t want slow internet or bad devices because you need to ask them flat. Okay. So Fiverr, if you use Fiverr, it’s very easy to to hire a VA. If you got value from Charlie today, you can go follow him. His links are down below. I strongly recommend you follow his YouTube page. I watch it. I learn a lot from it. Hopefully, you enjoy today. We’re now off to have some chicken. So, see you later. Thank you. Take care, guys. See you.