Your business needs to work as hard as you do, with Gareth Everson ( topics - sales, marketing, small business, lemonade plan ) )

Speaker 1 (00:03) Welcome to Building Your Leader Brand. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Gareth Everson. Speaker 2 (00:11) Make sure you follow up for longer because 85% of people who will buy at some stage will buy 100+ days later. And if you're in that bracket of still following up, then you've got almost zero competition to turn that lead into a solid prospect and probably a paying client. Speaker 3 (00:34) Hi there, and welcome back to Building Your Leader Brand. I'm Bob Gentle, and every week I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing, and monetizing their expertise and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to this show, stop what you're doing, take a moment, deep breath, and look for the subscribe or the follow buttons. Those are the gateway to becoming my best friend. I will Love you forever. And my numbers will grow. And numbers, as we'll discuss today, growing are one of the best things in any business. If you like podcasts like this, you will love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap. 50 pages of everything you need to start, scale, or fix your expert business. 100% free as a gift from me. Just visit amplifyme.agency/roadmap. Now, not everybody knows this, but my business used to suck really badly. I was very much a local business, and I'm embarrassed to say I made pretty much every mistake we're probably going to talk about today. And to enjoy this wallowing in the ridiculousness that is the way I ran my former business, I'm delighted to welcome Gareth Everson to the show. Speaker 3 (01:46) Gareth, welcome. Speaker 2 (01:48) Thank you, Bob. What a lovely introduction. Speaker 3 (01:51) So you are the author of The Lemonade Plan. The subtitle of the book is Predictable profits from refreshingly simple systems. And one of the things I love about business is every business is essentially an inherently simple formula, and we make it so complicated for many, many good reasons, which we'll get into today. But for the listener who's meeting you for the first time, can you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and who you do it for? Speaker 2 (02:22) So I'm Gareth Everson. Thank you for the introduction. I'm probably best known for 3 things. Firstly, I'm a systems coach, and over the last 15 years, I've helped around about 450 of our fellow small business owners to build better systems, specifically around their sales systems. So helping them to manage their sales pipelines, and nurture the leads that come into their business more effectively so that they can sell more at higher profits and do more with their business as a result and become more choosy with the kind of clients that they work with. The second thing that I'm known for, you've mentioned the book already, LemonAid Plan. 2 years ago, round about this time, I went into what I would describe as a hibernation over winter. And I spent 3 months to put together all of my ideas around systems and marketing processes around this LemonAid methodology. And 2 years on, that's now on the bookshelves of about 2,500 businesses around the world. Whether they've read it or not is a different matter, but I'm pretty proud of that as an achievement. And then the third thing that I'm known for is I'm a software developer. Speaker 2 (03:45) I'm a JavaScript developer. I've developed utilities and CRMs and different products for an add-on software for different kind of famous name softwares to link things together or to make more things of them. And the thing that I'm about to do at the minute is go into hibernation again to turn the concepts from LemonAid into a software product for small business owners. Speaker 3 (04:12) I didn't know that about the software developer. Obviously, we were talking about software before, but one of the exciting things about software at the moment is you don't have to be a software developer to develop software. But understanding how software development works is a huge advantage. But it's also a huge advantage when you come to business, because understanding inputs, outputs, variables, subroutines. These things are all directly applicable to business. That's one of the things I liked about the Lemonade Plan. You don't put it in those terms, but it is in those terms, essentially. I want to talk about profit. I think this is going to be a great place to begin because we're all in business to make a profit. And yet statistically, it's a very small fraction of businesses that actually have sufficient cash in the bank to exist beyond 1 month of poor turnover, poor revenue, or losing a few customers. And it's heartbreaking and it's completely unnecessary, I've finally, finally discovered. With your business working with small business owners, I think you are best known working for businesses that operate person-to-person, a lot of the time local businesses. Businesses like that, they tend to start almost accidentally. Speaker 3 (05:33) They don't really have a plan. And the problem is all the advice that they get typically is from people who've never run a business, certainly never made enough money to sell a business. And if their businesses had been successful, had they run them, they wouldn't be doing what they were doing now. So there's very little good advice for small business owners out there. So what is it reasonable for a business owner to expect as profit? Take away the shame and probably the legacy of a decade of not having made a profit, not having built the business that is our pension like we promised ourselves 10 years ago. Drawing a line, what's reasonable for us to expect and how can we turn a corner? Speaker 2 (06:17) That's a really good way of asking that question, Bob. We live in a meritocracy. So good businesses who are effective at what they do, how they serve their customers or clients, the experience that they give, the way that they sell, the price that they sell at, how they deliver it, and their operations, they're rewarded for the good work that they do. And really the boundaries in a society like ours that we live in should really be limitless. If you're effective at what you're able to do and you want to grow and you're good at doing it, the profit that you can then take from your business should really be limitless. Now, that doesn't always happen because life gets in the way. The concept of the lifestyle business is quite a popular one or has been a popular one for the last 10 or 15 years. But really, when it comes to what profit a business should be able to focus on and take out of their business as a metric, most people, even if they're running that effective business, aren't pressing the accelerator as much as they probably should do. You reflected on pensions, for example, and running a business that allows us to have a comfortable retirement. Speaker 2 (07:46) Almost all of the businesses that I've ever worked with, their first thought is, how do I keep the lights on in the business? How do I do what I want to do as an expert or as a local service trade business? How can I do that this month, next month, and in 6 months' time? Barely any of them are thinking about what does that business need to do in order that I can plan ahead much further towards either selling as an exit or taking enough out of the business to be able to live on in old age. That's, I think, the challenge beyond just the sort of economy constraints that we live in at the moment. There's almost a mindset challenge amongst small business owners that they're not doing enough to think about those things. Speaker 3 (08:33) I think one of the challenges that I see quite often is You're really good at doing the work, and because you're really good at doing the work, you're busy. Because you're busy, you don't have time to do the marketing, which creates this vicious cycle of taking what you can get and being really good at delivering on that. That can be a very difficult vicious cycle to break, and a lot of the time people break it just by hiring prematurely, in my opinion. My opinion may be wrong. I guess it's very case-specific. But what's a good route out of that? It's the universal vicious cycle of competence. Speaker 2 (09:10) I call it the sales cycle of doom, what you've just described there. And it happens in, if we're thinking about the classic microbusiness, so businesses between sort of 1 and 9 employees, which is the vast majority of both the economy here in the UK as well as the US and other Western civilizations. And if you think about it from that context and having either mouths to feed in your own family or amongst your team, that sales cycle of doom comes from being so immersed on that current opportunity in front of us, whether it's a sales opportunity or delivering the work that we've sold, that we, the broader we, don't give thought to what that pipeline looks like coming through next. And we don't have the systems in place to be able to generate or nurture those leads that then fills that pipeline for the next batch of work, the next revenue that's coming in in 2 or 3 months' time. Speaker 3 (10:15) Something I've seen quite often is you'll see 2 people running essentially the same function. They're delivering to the same problem. Let's say I think I'm tempted to go with electricians, but I think I want to come with something a little bit more relevant for what I know the audience is. So let's say business coaches. And I'm picking an outrageously generic term there. One business coach seems to be constantly bumping along the bottom. making a living, but not really emerging much beyond that. Another one seems to get all the premium opportunities and raises prices accordingly. And that business just blossoms. And he's got 5 or 6 associates working with him. I think I know what's fueling that, but I'd be interested in your perspective because I think the first guy is looking at the second guy and thinking, how do I do that? Let's play with that. Speaker 2 (11:20) Yeah. So I see this regularly, and you must do as well in your line of work, that that first guy who's struggling might actually be a more effective business coach and actually get better results for their clients. But actually the way that they run their business and their mindset about the way that they run their business is almost chipping away at any potential that they've got to be like that second example. And I think fundamentally it comes down to our mindset towards how we price what we do, what that experience is going to be like for our clients. In the book, I call it working with the end in mind. So the end of LEMONADE, the final E, is all about endorsements and getting repeat business, referrals, or solid reviews, the 3 Rs, from every piece of work that you get. So starting with the end in mind, how do we then work back to make sure that that experience that our clients have, what we price and what our offer is for them to be able to achieve that experience with us, and then working back beyond that to then have marketing that just works all the time to keep seeding those messages out into the market. Speaker 2 (12:39) It's not complex, but experts like the business coaches that you mentioned, or pretty much any business that's out there, fall into this trap all of the time that if we do good work with this client or customer that we're working with, or patients, we see it in healthcare as well, if they're getting the experience that we want them to do, then our business will just grow naturally. We won't go under if we provide that great experience because we'll always have enough word of mouth to be able to keep the lights on and to be able to give us enough to keep the business going, it's only terrible businesses that really go out of business. But if we're not thinking about what the exit from that sales cycle of doom is and not thinking about how we generate those more leads so that we can be choosier and so that we can charge more, and so that we can deliver that better experience to our clients, customers, or patients, then that's what makes that difference between the good but poor-performing business coach and the business coach who's able to grow, bring in associates, and be more profitable. Speaker 3 (13:53) So in your book, The Lemonade Plan, if people want to read it, there's lots of different sales strategies in there. I don't really want to go too deep on that because they are all in the book and people should go and get it. One thing I would like to talk about next is, again, you mentioned pricing. There's a lot of fear around putting prices up because I think people's experiences often when they're presenting a price to somebody, the person on the other end sucks their teeth and probably manages to get them down. So the very idea of putting prices up just sends the cold chills. People scratch their hair if they have any and think, how in the hell am I supposed to put prices up when I'm barely managing to cover things at the moment? We can speak about that, but I think there's a corollary, if corollary is the right word. I don't know. I need to go and Google that. I think I'm making words up, Gareth. I do apologise. But there's a phenomenon that I've noticed is that people are a little bit like goldfish. And what I mean by this, if I were to go to the tropical fish the tropical fish shop and say, give me 10 of everything. Speaker 3 (15:01) And I come back and I pour all those fish into my fish tank. I turn my back for 10 minutes, come back, you'll find there's 5 or 6 groups of fish. And we're a bit like that. We like to hang out with people who are a bit like us. And we like to sell to people who are a bit like us. And when we look at selling to people who are not a bit like us, it's very scary. And I remember being on the very first call with a new client. And I said, tell me about your ideal client. And his reaction, I've never forgotten how it made me feel. He said, my ideal client is the kind of person that will call me from their private jet. And I thought, good grief. I would never even think to try and sell to those people. But the fruits speak for themselves. We are scared of people who are not like us. And you spoke about the mindset around pricing and sales. And this is a huge part of it, that One advisor may just be comfortable with a different group of people, whereas the one who's struggling may just be comfortable with a group of people that aren't necessarily supporting the ambitions that he won't admit to. Speaker 3 (16:08) But this is fixable. It just comes down to awareness and desensitising yourself to the things you're scared of. We can speak about that, but let's speak about pricing fear more generally. Speaker 2 (16:21) So in addition to what you've said there, the busy business who's maybe sent out their proposal and then just got on with the other things that are going on, all of the clients that they're working with that are keeping them busy, probably forgets or doesn't overthink what's gone out in that proposal. The business that's in this sales cycle of doom, who is desperate for that next client to come, sees their intake of breath, as you mentioned, or perhaps a week or so later sees their lack of response as negative feedback that they don't particularly want to go ahead with you. When in actual fact, and this is classic for expert-led businesses, we're so immersed in the busyness of what we're doing and solving the problem that our expertise solves, that we can't quite get into our heads that other people have just other stuff going on in their business or their lives. And so in actual fact, if it takes somebody a couple of weeks or even a couple of months to come back to you and agree to work with you at the prices that you've set and quoted and can back, it might just be that life is getting in the way. Speaker 2 (17:39) And in actual fact, the opposite of what we should be doing when we think, oh, I'll go back and I'll make them an offer for a discount, What actually we should be doing is re-cementing that message that brought them to us in the first place and why they wanted to have that sales conversation with us in the first place and what they saw from our reviews and our testimonials and our case studies elsewhere, or what other people are saying about us over that period from when we've issued that quote or made that offer. Sometimes the best thing that we can do is just take our hands off and just leave it to our systems to continue to nurture that sales prospect, reseeding some of those messages that they may or may not have seen before, the testimonials, the frequently asked questions, or as I like to call them, the should-ask questions. Just drop them into a sequence after you've sent the quote. Where over a period of, it might be depending on your business, it might be anywhere from a couple of weeks through to, I've got a client where we've got a sequence that lasts 5 years. Speaker 2 (18:49) It's called the Quote Not Booked sequence. And they're literally sending valuable follow-up to these people for a period of 5 years. Not every day because we then space it out as sort of time lapses. But that's a business that doesn't have to reduce their prices. And that can instead focus on delivering great client service to the people that they are working with, or move on to the next leads that are coming off the pipeline who are regularly topping up that sales pipeline for them. I don't think we should get into our own heads and think that just because somebody hasn't given us the yes to go ahead, that that necessarily means that they don't want to. If they came to us in the first place and they saw enough value in having that conversation with them in the first place. We should be confident around what our offer is and what our premium prices are. Speaker 3 (19:44) To reinforce that, something I noticed was a lot of the time, the reason people don't come back to you about your quote is not because they're not interested. It's because there's something about human nature that puts off the most important things that they have to deal with. And so often the most important emails in my inbox, they get left for days and days and days because I want to do them. And for the audio listeners, I'm making air quotes. I want to do it properly. For me, that's the most common reason people don't come back when I have a quote out. And I think a lot of people would probably find the same. One of the things that you do talk about in the book is Sales strategies, lead generation strategies rather than sales strategies. I think a lot of people can be in this sort of little spiral of unhappiness simply because they've been quite complacent that, okay, I have a business now. I'm going to get business through referrals and I'm super duper, so everybody's going to send me opportunity. That's fine. That can work. But it won't work anything like as well if you diligently layer in multiple sales strategies, lead generation strategies, I'll call them. Speaker 3 (21:00) And then, as you said, build in processes to nurture those. One of the things that winds me up no end is somebody gets an inquiry, they deal with it, it didn't turn into a client, gone. Mm-hmm. Or even worse, a website, that isn't interested in anybody other than get in touch or make an inquiry. That's 1% of website visitors. All those other people are still somewhere on the buying journey. We can establish a relationship with those people, and that activity alone can be transformational. I spoke to somebody who had 6,000 website visitors a month, and he was getting 4 inquiries a month. Speaker 2 (21:43) Oh my goodness. Speaker 3 (21:46) It's— I mean, my eyes water at the opportunity there, but you must kind of see this thing all the time. So for the average, we'll call it local service-based business, what's a logical lead generation mix for them to be looking at beyond build it and they will come? Speaker 2 (22:06) Yeah, I love that film. You've identified the 2 big ones. So firstly, 85% of people who discover you and would buy in the future don't do so for over 100 days, okay? Mm-hmm. And yet you've identified that, you know, in your numbers, 1%, some people quote 2% or 3% of people who discover a service are in buying mode. So it's anywhere between sort of 1% and 3% of people who come to your website, or discover you for a service that they need are probably in buying mode right now. The rest of the 15% that's not in that 85% who buy over 100 days later, they're going to buy within that, let's say, 90 to 100 days. But most businesses who even get those leads that are in that sort of almost like medium-term buying mode, that sort of within the 90 to 100 days, So many of them don't even follow up beyond that first week. And your follow-up doesn't need to be manual. It doesn't need to be you picking up the phone or drafting an email. It can be what I call in the book, your greatest hits sequence. I put it in music terms. Speaker 2 (23:31) I love music. I'm a complete music buff. Most businesses don't have a greatest hits email nurture sequence that goes out certainly the 90 to 100 days, if not the 2 to 3 years after somebody's made an inquiry. Most of them have the equivalent of the one-hit wonder. And the one-hit wonder is where somebody makes an inquiry on your website who is in buying mode, and you probably, whether it's now or in a few weeks or a few months' time, and you literally follow up once. Your one-hit wonder, once or twice. Then you have other businesses that kind of, I'd call it sitting in the middle, but actually it's almost as bad as the one-hit wonder single follow-up. I call it the workout playlist. And the workout playlist is where somebody's contacted you via your website, and just like if you're at a workout in a gym where they, for 45 minutes or an hour, The equivalent of that in follow-up marketing is probably emailing them for the first, let's say, 5 to 10 days really relentlessly, exhaustingly, and then you just fall off a cliff and you don't follow up with them thereafter and they are bad leads or call it what you like, really, really poor leads, time wasters, People use all sorts of different terminology for people that aren't ready to go. Speaker 2 (25:00) So the one side of the coin is make sure you follow up for longer because 85% of people who will buy at some stage will buy 100+ days later. And if you're in that bracket of still following up, then you've got almost zero competition to turn that lead Into a solid prospect and probably a paying client. The second thing is, and you mentioned it in your— as you position this, is most websites are structured around just 2 forms of lead capture at most. One is the generic contact us form, and nobody really uses contact us forms. And the second one in businesses, some like yours and mine, others like local service businesses, have this get a quote type message on there. Now, most people that are buying a service that they can't do themselves and need that expert for, whether it's a plumber, a gas fitter, a physio, a business coach, whatever it is, most people that are, that need that service, can't do it themselves, or they don't have the time, the inclination, or the confidence to do it themselves. So to ask them then to answer questions on a topic that they don't know enough about in order to get a quote from you is just absolutely baffling, especially if there's any sort of complexity to what you do. Speaker 2 (26:36) So this whole 2-prong strategy of either contact us or get a quote, completely misses all of those, you know, probably close to 100% of people that come to your website who have the problem. They're not on your website just by chance. They're on your website because they've got a problem and they've found you. If you're not capturing upwards of 10 to 20% of your visitors to help them where they are with the need that they have, then you've got the wrong pages on your website. You've got the wrong calls to action on your website and all very well have a get a quote call to action and have the generic contact us call to action. But if you don't have other ones as well that meet them where they are with the questions that they have, you know, with downloadable guides for common questions or buyer's guides or things like that, then you're on a hiding to nothing. And the thing that best represents you when you're not in front of a prospective client, your website, best represents your brand, best represents what you do, best represents how you're different from everybody else, if it's not doing the job that it should be doing, then you're paying money for something that's probably a complete waste of time. Speaker 2 (27:57) So those are the 2 big ones. What does your website say about you, and how does it meet people where they are in their discovery journey? Not least their buying journey. And secondly, are you following up with them? Are you nurturing them in a greatest hits way rather than a one-hit wonder type way? Speaker 3 (28:18) Trying to get a new sheet of paper on my notepad here. You're giving me too many good ideas here. Speaker 2 (28:24) I should be charging you for this, Bob. Speaker 3 (28:26) Yeah. It's one of the things I love about a podcast. The 100 days, For me, I'm punching myself in the face listening to this because, and I would think this is even in the expert business, it's probably universally true that the received wisdom is 2-week email sequence to nurture them, then put them onto the mailing list with everybody else for whatever it is you're sending out, your newsletter or whatever, which you probably don't even do. So I see a huge opportunity there. I think what I'd like to look at next is dealing with the stuff that comes to us is a really important thing. That if we're not catching the ball when it's being passed to us by the people who are even vaguely curious about our business, how can we expect to convert them over time? Another challenge I think people have is with inbound opportunity, Actually, in many respects, we're not in control of that. I mean, we're in control of what leads to that, but we're not directly in control of it, which leads us to look at creating opportunities, much more proactive lead generation strategies, which I want to come to in a minute. Speaker 3 (29:44) But what I wanted to address very briefly for the listener, and you probably have something to say on this, Is if you expect your web design company to take charge of this for you, you can forget it. It's a very rare thing that web designers think in these terms. They think of get in touch or book a call as mission accomplished. They're not thinking about relationship building, lead capture, the way that we're discussing it here. So you need to take charge of this yourself as a business owner. Do some homework. Talk to people. The advice I often give people is if your ideal client doesn't respond to what you're offering them on a website with standing up, kicking back their chair, flinging up their arms and saying, everybody shut up, I need to fill in this form, it's not ready. That's the level of excitement that people should have for what it is that you're offering them in order to build this relationship and continue to nurture them. Because it does 2 things. Number one, they're in a heightened state, which that peak state continues. Once people have established that, that's the basis upon which the relationship continues. Speaker 3 (30:57) And if your relationship is established on the carrier wave of, ooh, this looks interesting, that's the basis. If this looks transactional, I think there's something I can get out of this, fine. But if you can trigger a peak emotional state— That relationship continues quite differently. So I'm trying to decide whether to tell a funny story, but it's not funny, but it's a little bit too long. But basically, I was 85% of the way through writing a book, and it was a book on social selling because I'm really good at that. When I need clients, I've had to kill what I eat for 25 years. I'm really good at it. But I realised when I was at the end of this book, I don't do this stuff. I don't need to do this stuff. The book was written as a response to regularly talking to new clients who needed clients yesterday. And when you need clients yesterday, the only thing you can do is the modern equivalent of knocking on doors and saying, would you like to buy my thing, mister? And in that, it was really good, but I realised I don't do this stuff. Speaker 3 (31:59) I looked at how opportunity typically comes into an expert business. There's a very clear mix of something like 65% of opportunity comes in through our network. And there's a degree of control we have over that, how we shape our network, who we are to our network. Something like 25%, 20% through content and content marketing. Something like 15% of direct outreach. But that 15% is the only 15% where we have a very short reaction time. If we take action today, we'll see benefit very, very quickly. So that's what I'd like to look at today in terms of the proactive action we can take. Are there any strategies that you will typically find work really, really quickly for people? Speaker 2 (32:48) The thing that works most quickly is paid media. So you have a Really solid landing page addressing one of the most specific problems that your target market has in a very simple way, whether it's a downloadable guide that they, you know, one-page guide that they can consume in 10 minutes, or increasingly in this day and age, is there a way to embed something that's more interactive using some sort of GPT type model and have that interaction on your website and then putting in front of that paid media to speak to your target audience to come to that page, opt in, and then leaving it up to your systems to then filter through the people who've taken action on it that when you then follow up and nurture and have your greatest hits sequence, those who respond in a way that you want them to do, then to take action with them. Invite them to book a call, invite them to take the next step, download something else, do something else, really show you that they are target market. That for me and the type of businesses that I work with who are, I don't want this to sound derogatory, but a lot of the expert businesses that I work with are busy fools. Speaker 2 (34:19) in that they are absolutely rammed with what they're doing right now, but they don't know what business will look like in 3, 4 weeks' time or a month or so's time, depending on what the length of their sales pipeline is. Busy right now because they have an ability to sell and deliver work, but aren't really thinking about what comes through next. And so that immediacy of being able to generate the leads that lead to the next round of business, the next target client of business need to come from filling the top of that funnel most effectively. That can come from a broad volume of people that you then filter through almost like a filtration process through your follow-up marketing so that only the right people then take the next actions and you're seeding into that messaging things around pricing, around expectations of what you have of your clients, patients, or customers in those emails around the kind of outcomes that they can expect to achieve, giving them ballpark figures for what the cost of these things are through sharing case studies and examples. That to me is the best way. I think, of generating almost immediate interest now beyond your current network. Speaker 2 (35:48) I'm not a big fan of the colder outreach or the social media outreach where you are looking at people's posts and the comments that are in there and then jumping on DMs into those people. That's not necessarily because I don't think it works. It's because the kind of businesses that I'm working with who are effective at what they do, the thing that they do, their area of expertise, that they just don't have the time, the inclination, or the mindset to do that in a particularly effective way. I think it takes a certain type of mindset to want to do that and to want to do that kind of direct outreach. I'm very much more of a believer in leaving signals out there in the market, whether it's through paid advertising or direct mail or whatever it happens to be, beacons that people can find you on that then bring you back, then bring them back into your world. Speaker 3 (36:48) I 100% agree with you in terms of trying to create a weather system of opportunity around your business. However, I think there are people who find themselves in fairly stormy situations and they need a life jacket. And I think the way you described ads there is very compelling. And I think I have 2 questions that come from that, and then I need to get onto your amplifiers. But I guess I'll ask you both questions because they probably can be answered in one go. Number one, what's the least you've seen somebody spend for sustainable results? And number 2, what you advertise, has a direct bearing on whether you attract somebody that's a potential client or somebody who wants a free solution to a short-term, low-value problem for themselves. How do we ensure that we're attracting people who are, to be crude, buyers, rather than, to be equally crude, the freebie seekers? Speaker 2 (37:49) So to your question about what's the lowest amount people have invested to get a return, It's literally £5 to £10 a day. So if you think about it in, what would that be over the month? £150 to £300 of marketing budget. You're too busy to do that outreach, so you put it up to Meta or to whatever your advertising platform is of choice. Google Ads is a popular one, especially with the cost-effectiveness of video ads if you're comfortable on video at all. £5 to £10 per day is typically more than enough to start to fill that pot of leads who are coming in. And then the key thing is making sure that first, that all of your marketing, maybe with the exception of the ad, although there are things that you can do with that as well in terms of the messaging, but making sure that the landing page speaks to your target audience, making sure that every single communication that they have from you speaks to your target market and really filters out the people who aren't and why it filters out the freebie seekers or the hard negotiators or the people who— there are some classics where you'll take on a client because they don't have the expertise that you do And yet they think that they can manage you to do those things, and they end up being task setters rather than buyers of expertise. Speaker 2 (39:21) And that's just utterly the wrong way around. I've had some of those in my time, far fewer and further between than they used to be. But I think it comes down to how we set the guardrails for our expectations of who we want to work with and who we don't want to work with. And then if they do filter through and end up on sales calls, we just make sure that those sales calls are shorter than they would be for the people that we really want to speak with. And so there are ways that we can manage all of those things. I've now forgotten what your second question was, Bob, answering the first one about the cost-effectiveness. Speaker 3 (39:57) Well, it was to do with how we can ensure that we're attracting buyers rather than freebie seekers. And you have kind of addressed that. Yeah. Let's get into Gareth's amplifiers. So these are 3 things listeners can go and do, read, eat, smother themselves with. 3 things that are valuable to you and you think will be valuable to other people. There are no rules, anything you like. Gareth Everson, amplifier number 1. Speaker 2 (40:25) I've split these into a strategy, a tactic, and a tool. Speaker 3 (40:31) I love someone who's prepared. Speaker 2 (40:32) Yeah, I love listening to the amplifiers that come through and there's definitely a certain type of amplifier that draws my attention more than others. The first one is a strategy. And whilst we've talked about systems and tactics on this call, I think we need to take a step back and think about that expert-led business and what the future looks like for that founder. Typically, the founder of those businesses, they're by and large tiny businesses, either one-person businesses or at most, certainly under 10-people businesses. And the founder is responsible for everything. But the thing that they end up getting stuck doing is working in the business instead of taking a step back and thinking about what their future is. for that business? And how are they going to leave that business at the end? There are only 3 ways that we can do that. One is that we, and it's a sad one, is that we literally die in service. So we're running that business until we're 6 feet under, and nobody wants that to happen. The second way is that we're building that business for exit. And I love a book, it's a book that I read 10 or 15 years ago called Built to Sell by John Warrillow. Speaker 2 (41:55) Anything by that guy is absolutely outstanding. His second book, The Automatic Customer, is the thing that took me down this path of software, an outstanding book. But when we think about exiting, it's a very glorified space. And you'll watch The Apprentice, or you'll see content put out by exited founders who are lauded and celebrated as the be-all and end-all of business. But actually, if we look at the numbers, there's only about 0.3% of businesses in the UK, and I'm sure it's similar for the US, that end up exiting their business through a sale. And so for the vast, vast majority of us who are running a business, even if we do have that intention to sell, 99.7% of us won't sell for an exit, won't be able to sell in such a way that it gives us a retirement-defining exit. And by which I mean upwards of £500,000 or £1 million in exit. There are some really sad statistics around all of this. And so then there's a third path of how we can exit our business, and it just comes from winding down the business and selling off the assets and taking enough out of the business in order to be able to exit and retire. Speaker 2 (43:22) And there are some really sad stats here as well. Director-led businesses, only 20% of directors are paying into a private pension fund. And more than 50% of people that run a business end up retiring on nothing more than the state pension. And so from a strategy perspective, and this is my amplifier number 1, I really want the listener to think about what their exit plan is. Because realistically, if 99.7% of businesses aren't going to sell, we need to be generating enough profit in the business so that we can extract. So build to extract instead of build to sell. That's what we need to be doing with our business. And in the UK and the US stats are pretty similar to this. In the UK, if you're running a profitable business, prior to paying corporation tax, you can take out up to £60,000 per director per year into a SIPP, a private pension. And I want your audience to think about that a whole lot more. And if you want to dive deeper into it, there are 2 resources that I can give you there. One, I've talked about this a little bit in some of the featured posts on my LinkedIn profile. Speaker 2 (44:44) If you go to those, you can see some introductions to it. But the key one is a recommendation to check out a couple called the Donegans who run a completely not-for-profit service called the Rebel Finance School. And it's absolutely transformed me and other people that I've introduced into that concept to think about their business in a different way. So Rebel Finance School is the outcome of having that more strategic thinking about how you're going to exit your business. That's my number one amplifier. Speaker 3 (45:17) I've never heard of Rebel Finance School. I'm going to have a look at that. I think one of the things that I really appreciate now is being able to pay into a personal pension at a rate at which I never thought would be possible for a business like mine. And what that taught me is this is possible in any business. And if it's not possible for you, it's going to come down to 2 things, systems and what's in your head, what you believe about your business. Both of these are fixable. And I think a lot of business owners, they become resigned to this is how it is. And they have the occasional moment of, I'm going to try something new. And then it fails again. And, well, it's just not possible for people like me. That's not true. It absolutely is. But it won't be whatever you're doing right now. And it will probably be uncomfortable for a while. Speaker 2 (46:10) And for 80% of directors out there, Bob, who aren't like you or I, they're not paying into that private pension pot. And so we know that that's a problem that exists and that's out there. So that's my strategy amplifier. Speaker 3 (46:25) Amplifier number 2. Speaker 2 (46:27) Amplifier number 2 is a tactic. And this comes from, I can't take full credit for this, but it ends up as chapter 12 in my book, The Greatest Hit Sequence. And we talked about it a little bit. On the podcast already. I got the idea for the greatest hit sequence from a mentor of mine, a chap called Dean Jackson, who's one of the forefathers of direct response marketing. And it was him who I learned this split of the 85% who buy after 100 days versus the 15% of people who buy within that first 100 days. And so the tactic I would encourage all of your expert-led business owner listeners to follow is to have a look at what their nurture marketing looks like once they've captured a lead via whatever means, via their website, social media, through referrals. We typically, and this is the broad we, I'm not including myself in this, but the broad we do not follow up anywhere near enough to be able to escape from that sales cycle of doom. So go and check out Dean Jackson on his YouTube channel. And if you want to download chapter 12 from my book, the greatest hits sequence chapter, I'll include that as a free download for your listeners, Bob, if they go to lemonadeplan.com/chapter. Then they can access that free chapter. Speaker 2 (48:01) And if you like it, please do then buy the book. But that's my tactic. Have more of a follow-up to your leads. Speaker 3 (48:09) I love it. Also guilty. I know what I'm going to be doing this afternoon. Amplifier number 3. Speaker 2 (48:15) Amplifier number 3 is a tool. And I could, I could speak about any number of tools. I literally spend my entire life in software. And in systems for my clients. But the one that has made the most difference to me over the last 6 to 12 months, if you're familiar with NotebookLM, which is Google's, it's Google's own, I would describe it as kind of a private LLM. So you feed into it sources of material and it will, you can interact with those materials using NotebookLM. Only around those materials. So it restricts its engagement with you on just those topics. Now NotebookLM is really well known, so that's not my tool of choice on this. The one that's turned this into an asset that I use on a weekly basis is an add-on, it's actually a Chrome extension for NotebookLM, and it's called the NotebookLM Web Importer. And what you can do with this Chrome extension is one of, one of its features is you can plug into NotebookLM Web Importer a YouTube playlist. So instead of typing out every single URL of every single YouTube video that you want NotebookLM to use, you just copy and paste the playlist into NotebookLM Web Importer. Speaker 2 (49:43) It will then create its own notebook for you And let's say there's somebody, an expert who's out there, or a guru, or some resource that you would otherwise have to spend, let's say for argument's sake, 200 hours watching their YouTube content. Using NotebookLM Web Importer, you can basically import that playlist into NotebookLM, and you can have that direct interaction with that content in that app. It's $39 as a one-time fee for the Web Importer, and it's probably the best $39 I've spent on anything in certainly 5 to 10 years. And it's an outstanding little tool, time hack, knowledge hack, and it's probably the thing that's best guided and helped me shape my thoughts in the time that I've been using it. And it was $39. Speaker 3 (50:39) I can think of so many uses for that. The mind boggles. Gareth, you've given me an awful lot to play with today. I've had the best time. I've got an awful lot of homework, as often is the case. If people want to get closer to you, if they want to find out more about you, what's the best way for them to do that? And where do you like to hang out online the most? Speaker 2 (51:01) Online, you can find me under the handle @GarethEverson on virtually all social media networks. I'm mostly on LinkedIn, grudgingly. I really dislike it as a platform, but that's probably where I am most active. After that, Instagram. But @GarethEverson is where to find me. If you go to garetheverson.com, you can sign up there for my— I do basically a weekly email essay that also ends up on my blog. And if you like some of the topics that we've talked about today, some of the contrarian takes on business, sales, and marketing, then that's where you can get my content there. Speaker 3 (51:44) And it is good content. Gareth, you have been really generous with your knowledge today. I've really enjoyed this. And I think for the listener, the one thing I would take away from this is systems. Yeah, systems are great, but systems fueled with courage, that's what moves the needle. And that's courage in so many ways. And I would think what I would invite you to pay attention to today is what triggered anxiety, what triggered fear, what triggered jealousy. Pay attention to that, because that's usually a very good sign of the direction you should be going, not the direction you should be avoiding. At home, thank you for listening. That does bring us to the end of another episode. If you've enjoyed this, Again, I'll remind you, you can leave 5-star reviews wherever you heard this podcast. That's 5, count them, don't miss one. Somebody did once and it properly got my goat. Similarly, you will love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap, 50 pages of everything you need to start, scale, or fix your expert business. Visit amplifyme.agency/roadmap. Thanks at home for listening. And Gareth, thank you so much. much for your time. This has been awesome. Speaker 2 (52:56) Thank you, Bob.