James Schramko SuperFast Business Online Business Coaching

Video highlights: 00:20 – Your three customer groups 00:40 – Where banks and telcos get it wrong 01:57 – The 100% example 03:05 – Your second important customer group Boost your business growth with help from the SuperFastBusiness community Download the PDF transcription Transcription: James Schramko here, and today I want to share with you which group of customers you should pay the most attention to in your business. And it may not be who you think. Let’s say there’s three groups of customers, for simplicity. There are first-time customers, then there’s the regular customers who you see fairly often, maybe they’ve been there a while. And then there’s the super customers, the VIPs, the ones who buy the most, they’ve been there forever. Your priority customers So of those three, let’s hope that you can serve all of them really well. But if you had a choice, there’s one group that you want to pay particular attention to. First and foremost of course, that is the VIPs, because they’ve proven that they’re loyal, they spend the money, and like banks and telecommunication companies and finance companies always get this wrong, they’re always looking for new customers and they burn their existing customers. So I always give the best prices to my existing customers. I give the early bird notification to my best customers, and I suggest you do the same. “Banks and telecommunication companies always get this wrong.” CLICK TO TWEET Knowing the best How do you know who your best customers are? Look into your shopping cart or your email system, do some lead scoring where you assign points for your best customers so you can pull up a list of your top customers. You should at least know your top 10 customers, and your team should know your top 10 customers. In our team, we used to use a little tilde sign to distinguish who is a VIP customer. So we’d always make sure we look after them extra specially. OK, who’s the second group that you should look after? If you can’t look after all of them, let’s say you have thin resources, I’ll tell you. The very, very most important group to look after, as long as you’ve looked after your VIPs, is actually…no wait. I want to tell you about something I did earlier. The coffee shop experience I actually went and bought a coffee today, from a coffee shop nearby. Now I used to go to this coffee shop, it was a different brand, and I go to a couple of coffee shops around Manly fairly often. So over a year, I could buy quite a lot of coffee. Over four years, which is about how long I’ve been here, I’ve bought a lot of coffees even though I have a coffee machine at home. I like to go and leave the house. “The experience that counts for a lot…” CLICK TO TWEET I went to this brand new place today, and it was my first experience with them. So just to put that in perspective, 100 percent of my experience with this shop is happening when I make that first purchase. If they don’t get it right,

In the podcast: 03:13 – Our biggest driver 05:35 – Can you be guided? 10:01 – The role of experience 12:33 – The mental side of physical sport 17:37 – That thing called flow 20:30 – Some effective anchors 28:52 – Protecting our emotional horsepower 30:35 – If others can do it… 32:56 – Do you want to be in, or out? 36:45 – Picking your board of directors 41:24 – A quick summary Get strategy and mindset tips to grow your business inside SuperFastBusiness membership Download the PDF Transcription and 12 Insights and Tips for Achieving Better Performance Through Mindset Transcription: James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, I’m speaking with an expert in mindset. His name is Nam Baldwin from Equalize.com.au. Welcome to the call. Nam: Thanks, James. Great to be here. James: Now, we have a mutual friend. Someone who’s been on a previous episode or two on SuperFastBusiness, Brenton Ford. He’s a swim coach, and he introduced us. Nam: Yeah, great guy. I’ve been doing a session with him not so long ago. James: I’ve been working with Brenton for many years. It’s been fun for me to get an insight into his world because as we get to develop products and look at how we package his business and sell training workshops, it’s been interesting just to develop an understanding of things like paddling technique, breathing technique, and as someone who’s taken up surfing in the last few years, I’ve been more and more interested in that. I’ve often wondered how some large, old dude can just paddle straight around me on a tiny, little shortboard when I’m struggling to make it out to the back, especially a year or two ago when I was on those Mini Mals as my training. It seems that there can be quite different results gotten from just changing the way that you do things and especially the way that you think about things. Would you say that’s true? Nam: Oh absolutely. Thoughts create feelings and feelings create the way in which we perform. The better the state, the better the feeling that we have within us, the better we allow ourselves to tap into the potential that we have. James: So let’s talk about the things that you’ve been focusing on. From what I’ve read, you are an emotional and stress-control management specialist. You especially help people with breathing techniques. I noticed you help some big-wave riders and some Olympic kayak gold medalists, some footballers and even a world-surfing champion, Mick Fanning. That piqued my interest tremendously because of course he’s so popular in Australia that even regular people would know who he is. They would have seen him on TV, especially yesterday because he announced he’s going back on tour, and he’s ready to take on another world title campaign. Have you been working with Mick? Working with Mick Fanning

Podcast highlights: 00:36 – A bold move 03:03 – Picking only a good fit for your audience 05:13 – The curse of knowledge 09:22 – What complexity does to your brain 10:43 – Why explainer videos work 14:17 – What you need to be 17:44 – The importance of surveys 23:30 – It’s not about you 24:46 – Bridging to better understanding 29:40 – Why let others make your video? 31:57 – Is YouTube the strategy? 35:28 – Measuring explainer video success 40:40 – Face-to-face or virtual client encounter? 41:42 – An action step for listeners More high-level business training awaits you inside SuperFastBusiness membership Download the PDF transcription and 5 Keys To A Simple Brand Story Transcription: James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness. Today, we’re going to be talking about story. To do that, I brought in a story expert by the name of Eric Hinson from Explainify.com. Welcome. Eric: Thanks so much for having me, James. James: You actually reached out to me, Eric. That was somewhat bold. But I appreciated your straightup-ness. Eric: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve never been really afraid to reach out to anybody. Kind of a quick story, I reached out to Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz a few years ago, and he reached out to me. What he did was tweeted us and put us on Quora and really kind of just threw us on the map. That day that he tweeted, we had a good 200 or 300 leads for business. I’ve just kind of like moved on with that mentality of ‘let’s just keep doing this and keep talking to people.’ Honestly, most times, people reply. I think a lot of people are afraid to email people. I’m not. I think it actually works. James: I think what you did is quite rare. Most people do something once that works well and then they forget to do it again. So that’s a great technique. It’s one that I always look for when I’m coaching someone. What sort of profits have you been making and what caused that? We’re looking for the root cause. And if it turns out they’re on a podcast, I ask them, “So how many podcasts have you been on this week?” I like a direct approach. The fact is, people who come on this show end up with lots of exposure. I don’t run this podcast purely for commercial gain off these podcasts. I’m interested in connecting with my market and continuing on this developing body of work. We’re over 500 episodes now, and we’ve covered everything, from copywriting through to getting your DNA sample done. But I tell you what, story is a recurring theme. We’ve talked to Andre Chaperon about it – how to use it in emails. We’ve covered video marketing on YouTube with Tom Breeze. We’ve had numerous copywriting experts from John Carlton through to Kevin ...

Video highlights: 00:10 – How do you organize your schedule? 00:45 – How do you deal with speakers who go over time? 01:48 – Never say THIS (It is a sure sign of an unprofessional) 02:28 – Getting your audience into the room on time 03:55 – Should you film an event for content? 05:45 – Is a five-day event overkill? 06:55 – The live exercise portion 08:26 – How big a crew should you have? 09:37 – Why the food costs so much See James’s live event tips in action at SuperFastBusiness Live 2017 Download the PDF transcription and Live Event FAQ Transcription: James here, and today, I’ve got some follow-up questions from the last video I did, which was about running a live event. Organizing sessions The first question is: You do short sessions. Do you have a session and then a break? Or do you stack sessions together? Well, I like to start the event around nine o’clock. We do a maximum of 90-minute session, then we go into morning tea. And then after morning tea, we do two blocks of 50, and then we have lunch. Then we do another two blocks of 50. We have afternoon tea. And then we have a shorter session at the end of the day and finish around about five. I don’t want to have people starting at eight. I don’t want to have people finishing at seven. At least, there’s plenty of time to do other things to catch up with each other and socialize. But keep the blocks fairly short. When speakers go over time So, what do you do if a speaker runs over time? Well, unfortunately, you have an unprofessional speaker. Make sure you’re very clear with your speakers that your times are set. You need to give them some things that will help them – like put the time on a countdown in front of them. Have someone in the front row with an iPad. Have some time cards saying, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes. And ask them to acknowledge. Just a little yes or a thumbs up so that they know that they’re on time. Now, if they happen to be still talking at the time that you’re supposed to be finishing, just go up and help them off the stage because you need to be strict with your times. I’ll cover this more in the next little tip. The other thing to do is if they finish early, throw it open to Q&A. Just get ready to rescue them. Get up there with your microphone and throw open the questions. And then a final strategy is if they do finish a little bit early, then break early. Give people more time to talk to each other. What a bonus – you got through the material in time. “Advanced Event Tips” CLICK TO TWEET A speaking tip By the way, here’s a speaking tip – never say, “I don’t have much time. So I’m going to go really fast.” The audience will just groan like, ‘Oh, gosh, they’re not professional enough to structure their presentation. All that time they had to prepare and to get it right, and now they’re making me have to be overloaded?’ Don’t shift it across to the audience.

In the episode: 00:50 – Accidental discovery 03:25 – How Wanderer Bracelets came about 04:57 – Fitting the product to a market 06:55 – The SCAMPER method 09:21 – The mindset that makes it work 10:59 – Building the team 13:07 – How important are live events? 16:23 – A couple of essential tools 19:13 – Working the system 21:55 – Some challenges of working remotely 25:35 – The layout of day-to-day 28:32 – A brief call recap 29:19 – Knowing who to hire next 32:19 – SuperFastBusiness Live from Ben’s viewpoint Ben and other world-class business experts will be sharing insights live on stage at SuperFastBusiness Live 2017 – Join  them Download the PDF transcription Transcription: James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. It’s my absolute pleasure to introduce our guest today, Ben Katzaman from WandererBracelets.com. Welcome to the call. Ben: Thanks, James. Excited to be here. James: The reason for our call is in just a few weeks from the time of recording this, you’re heading over to Australia to talk about how to scale an e-commerce business at my SuperFastBusiness Live event, which we’ll also record, in case someone listening to this wants to catch up with that session. The real story behind your introduction to me is that we were sitting beside each other at a dinner in San Diego at Ezra Firestone’s conference afterwards, and you were just sharing with me this incredible journey you’ve been on with your own business. I said to you, “Please come and share this story with our audience.” There are a couple of things there. Firstly, a lot of people are, I think, trying to find out what they should do with their life or what they want to sell is a big, common question. In your case, it just was there. It was surrounding you, and you recognized it. So that was one part of it. The second part is, you’re quite a young man, and you’ve scaled a significant business producing hundreds of thousands of units, selling e-commerce, and you’ve got a large team. You have 40 people in your western team, the United States, and then you’ve got 150 people in your Bali team. So that’s a significant impact that you’re having on the universe in terms of creating stuff. So that’s how this came about. Today, we’re going to talk about what’s involved in growing a business quickly and at scale, but also, and most importantly, remotely. Because you’re not sitting in an office every day, are you Ben? Why work remote? Ben: No, I’m not. I’ve got an office in Florida now as we’ve grown. We just opened a full office a couple of weeks ago. But over the last two years since I started the business, I’ve spent a lot of time in Bali, Florida, Hawaii, Seattle, Oregon, San Diego, San Francisco, LA, Austin, New York, Australia, Bangkok, the Gili Islands. So I’ve spent more time remote than I have been in one place or with one team or the other. And that allows me to spend a lot of time with people I care about and meet people that I would never be able to meet otherwise, tap into new communities and nurture relationships.

In this podcast: 02:55 – Should you deliver a live workshop alone? 04:58 – THIS is what you might focus on 05:30 – The whole point of having an event is… 07:16 – How do you take care of your best customers? 07:56 – A streamlined event checklist 08:45 – Avoid THESE mistakes 10:30 – Is there an ideal number of attendees? 15:39 – When working with suppliers and crew 16:50 – What makes an event good? 17:17 – Leveraging before and after the event Claim your FREE Live Event PDF Checklist HERE Download the PDF Transcription and Live Event Checklist Transcription: Hey, James Schramko here. Today, I’m just making a quick little episode about events. I’ve got this on my mind at the moment because I’m coaching a few people in SilverCircle, and they run events. They run high-level events. I’ve been doing debriefs. A friend of mine, Kyle Gray, called me up and he wanted to talk to me about events and what’s involved with those. It sort of brought out a few memories. I wanted to share those because I think the story around that might be interesting as I’m in the lead up to my own event, SuperFastBusiness Live. That’s actually the 12th event, the big event that I’ve run over a decade. There are probably some ideas that I could share with you that might help you if you’re thinking about running an event, that’s why this might be interesting. I’ll cover some specific differences that I think are different about the events that I run and how I advise my students that maybe if you’re running events, you could see if there’s something there for you. If you’ve never run an event, then this might save you a whole bunch of stress. Running events then So in terms of what we teach in SuperFastBusiness Live is very different to the old days. Before, we used to encourage people to bring a laptop. My very first event was pretty much a nightmare to organize. I thought that I would sell maybe 10 or 20 people a ticket to this event from stage at World Internet Summit. But it turns out, there were 550 people in the room at this event, and I had over a hundred people come along to my event. There were about 130 something people. They were bringing along their laptop. I had to organize WiFi. I was going to show them how to research a niche, find a product to promote as an affiliate, get an affiliate link, and then write the sales copy, find an image, put all of that onto a website, and make it go live on day two. I was told it was impossible. ‘This is not going to happen.’ But with the help of my clever friends like Dave Wooding, who is a genius technology guy, and Sean who helps me out with my events, we managed to bundle together some software that helped people build a website online. I was able to get a server from Liquid Web, and I was able to hook up WiFi somehow. All of the students were able to build a website. My guarantee, by the way, just in case you’re wondering how I made the offer so compelling,

Podcast highlights: 01:15 – James’s eye view of Dale’s background 02:35 – Business advice and artificial intelligence 03:38 – What AI is doing to the internet marketing landscape 06:22 – The technology you should pay attention to 10:53 – What do the changes mean for business owners? 15:54 – Entering the messenger space 18:57 – E-commerce via messenger 19:50 – Is world domination next for Facebook? 22:06 – Earpieces and implants 24:15 – Some of the tools you can use today 26:15 – What’s going on with BRiN 28:52 – Possible first steps after hearing this podcast 33:09 – Last thoughts for the listener Stay up-to-date on online marketing developments when you join SuperFastBusiness membership Download the PDF Transcription Transcription: James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today I have a special guest, a friend of mine I’ve known for many, many years. In fact, I’ve known my guest today for probably over 20 years, which is a long time, actually. Welcome, Dale Beaumont. Dale: Thanks so much, James. James: In the early days, I remember you were this little kid on the news publishing books. That’s how I first heard about you. What a journey it’s been. Dale: It has. It’s been quite incredible. That publishing journey was over 10 years ago now, but I’ve been doing lots of other things since and looking forward to having a chat and to seeing how I can add some value to the audience. James: So just a quick overview from my lens. I’ve known you first as this little kid publishing books. Then I actually went and had a chat to you at some point in your office up on the Northern Beaches, when I was asking you about how I might go about structuring a book, and you were quite an expert in publishing and you had a subscription model back then where you were helping people with business education. Then you developed a big platform called Business Blueprint, which is I guess a live event/membership hybrid program that’s been very successful. And I’ve seen you in different places all around the world now. Whenever I go to a conference or an event, you’re often there. And you’re one of the big players in Australia, at least for CRM software sales, and I’ve known you through that community. And here we are. Watching you now, I’d have to say you’re a bit of a trendspotter, and your newest venture is into this new area of technology. And the bullet points I’ve made about our chat were, “chatbots, voice-powered search, and artificial intelligence.” And you’ve got this new project called brin.ai. Why don’t you tell me what brought you to this point and what is BRiN? What BRiN is Dale: Yeah, OK great. So for the last 10 years after publishing all those books, I’ve been working in the space of business education, and we’ve built Business Blueprint into one of the largest and most successful business education companies, and it’s been a wonderful journey. However, in terms of their worldwide audience, we did some research and found out that there are 500 million small business owners around the world, and only one percent of those business owners have access to a business adviser. And we looked at the reasons why, and a lot of the reasons are kind of proximity, also the cost as well, and the fact that it’s simply not sort of scalable.

Video highlights: 00:14 – When there’s ambiguity… 00:29 – Don’t obsess on THIS 01:01 – Where to tie the impact of the pay 01:38 – How to remove conflict 01:54 – To have stability Need help in formulating a better pay plan? James can help you. Get coaching HERE Download the PDF transcription and 5 Rules for Formulating a Pay Plan Transcription: James Schramko here, and today’s tip is around how you pay people in your business. Now, I’ve got five rules that will make things easier for you when you’re coming out with a pay plan. Simplicity is key The first rule is it must be simple. It’s got to be simple to understand because if there is any ambiguity, this can cause you, or your employee or contractor a massive heartache and loss of energy. “Ambiguity causes massive heartache.” CLICK TO TWEET Reward what you want Two, you’ve got to reward the results you want. There’s no point paying for something that you don’t want. A lot of people obsess about paying an hourly rate, but what you’re buying is one hour. It doesn’t necessarily stipulate a particular result that you’d like to get for that hour. “Why pay for something you don’t want?” CLICK TO TWEET So have a look at other ways you might be able to pay people. Maybe you can pay per project. That way, they can complete the project in whatever time they like. But you get a specific result. Always reward what you want, and this is especially important if you have sales people. Pay for ability The third rule is that the result you want has to be able to be impacted by the person who is impacted by the pay plan. There’s no point having a team budget percentage payment that the team members can’t actually impact. It’s not their fault if something happens to the business outside of their control. So when you actually pay them on that, that can be very disenchanting and they can lose motivation. Again, the more directly you can tie the impact of the pay to the ability to the employee to impact that pay, then that is better. Have a fair pay plan Fourth, it really should be fair. Anything that is out of alignment for too long won’t continue. If you don’t pay the right amount, or if you pay too much, one party is going to be upset and it’s going to lead to conflict. So to remove conflict, have a fair pay plan. Sustain rewards And number five is ideally, you can sustain this reward mechanism for some time. That way, you have stability, you build up loyalty, you have consistency, and a lot of people who are contracting to you or they’re basically employed to you are going to look for that stability. It’s going to provide a nice bedrock to have that employee-contractor relationship. So hopefully, you’ve enjoyed these five tips on how to pay better and get a better result in your business. If you do this,

In the video: 00:16 – Is this where you’re at? 00:55 – What OLB is 01:30 – The payoff of OLB Learn more about OLB when you join SuperFastBusiness membership Download the PDF Transcription and A Guide to Scaling Your Business Faster Transcription: Hey, James here. I promised to make some videos this year. So today, I want to talk to you about the OLB strategy, which is going to help you a lot this year. So what does OLB stand for? I’ll get to that in just a minute. What’s your current situation? So the current situation that you may be in this is that you’re handling stuff like your emails, and your email broadcasts and stuff directly. Maybe you’re also editing and creating your content and then syndicating your content directly, maybe even running Facebook ads. Maybe you’re mucking around building your own website and leadpages. Maybe you’re handing customer support via inbox. What is OLB? If you’re doing all of these things, then you’re very, very direct. You’re going to find it hard to scale. These things don’t really scale. What I suggest you do is you go the OLB, which stands for One Layer Back. So now, you transfer all these things to somewhere else. “Transfer the things that don’t scale.” CLICK TO TWEET So for example, emails and support and looking after customers should be done through a support desk. So that’s one layer back from you. You should also be dealing with a team. Your team should be building your website or an outsourced supplier. And your team should be sending email broadcasts, and your team should be editing and syndicating content. So I deal with them in Slack and in GoToMeeting. So I am one layer back. OLB – One Layer Back. “Focus on what you really want to do.” CLICK TO TWEET The benefits So now, I can focus on the stuff that I really want to do, which is make the occasional video, do the occasional podcast, and then I give it to the team and let them do it. What does this mean? It means I can run my business from a mobile phone. I don’t need to have editing software, I don’t need to know how to use my CRM, I don’t need to know how to build a website, because the team is doing all of that stuff. I can outsource the help of a Facebook expert. I don’t need to know that either. I need to actually get rid of all of these tasks. I need to be one layer back from the action so that I can focus on the high-level stuff. So I hope you have more OLB for your year. If you enjoyed this video, let me know, so I might make you a few more. Grow your business faster and smarter with expert help from our community Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to comment on iTunes.

In the interview: 00:57 – Some background on Kevin 02:47 – What it means to go deeper 05:51 – The highest level of achievement for an email 09:33 – In other words, get real 11:35 – A couple of useful tactics 13:07 – Building performance material 14:49 – Do videos help you connect? 19:41 – How Kevin’s Uber video came about 23:31- Do you have to be a performer? 24:44 – When content is shallow 28:12 – One out of ten videos… 29:33 – Behind Kevin’s driving videos 34:16 – A quick recap 35:46 – James’s podcast record 37:47 – How to avoid being douchey See Kevin’s SuperFastBusiness Live presentation inside SuperFastBusiness membership Download the PDF transcription Transcription: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. And today I have my very good friend, Kevin Rogers from CopyChief.com on the line. Kevin? Kevin: James, it’s exciting to be back with you. James: It is. You’ve been on this podcast before, so we will link to the previous episodes. And you also spoke at SuperFastBusiness Live, and your presentation was a stellar success, because in that presentation, you delivered a card system, a framework that one might use to develop a good sales copy approach. If you’re starting from scratch, or you’ve got to come up with an offer, you could go through that card system and step-by-step map out a compelling sales offer, which was really well received. It’s available as a recording in SuperFastBusiness.com. One of the things that made that training so good, it was hilarious. You delivered it so well because you’re quite funny, and there was one line in there that I particularly loved that I’ll save for listeners to discover when they go through that training. But lately, you’ve been developing your communications to a whole new level. That’s why today, we’re talking about how to go deeper with your customer base. Kevin: Yeah. It’s great topic. I think, it’s one of those things that when you kind of crack the nut on it, and you start to get the level of feedback that we appreciate, those of us who have worked really hard to crack this nut, it’s invigorating. And suddenly, you never have to struggle for what to say. When we’ve got too much in our heads and we have these inhibitions about reaching out and communicating, all that goes away, and it just becomes like a great conversation at a bar or a coffee shop or something, right? James: So let’s just get a little clear on this. When we say going deeper with our customer base, what does that mean to you? What it means to go deeper Kevin: Well, for me it means that I can feel it when I write something. So I’m a copywriter. So oftentimes, it’s me sitting and writing that these moments happen. Although I’m working more and more with live video and posting spontaneous video, which we can talk about, but for me, here’s what I realize – I had this revelation recently that I’m all about performance. That is what fuels me. So for instance, you mentioned me speaking at your event. That was very exciting for me to travel to Australia,

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