More Cheese Less Whiskers

Hello, and welcome to the MoreCheeseLessWhiskers podcast. Today, we have a special treat. We have my good friend, Steve Sims. Steve, you may know, is the head of the Bluefish organization, a high end concierge service that can help you do anything you can imagine like getting people married at the Vatican or having dinner at the feet of David with Andrea Bocelli entertaining. Anything you can imagine, Steve can actually make happen. I had the great experience of going to a taping of The Voice, the TV show, with Frank Kern. I got a signed guitar from Maroon 5 for Frank when we were doing an event together, and Steve's the one that made that happen. I’ve really enjoyed and have been the beneficiary of some great times because of my relationship with Steve. Now, he has a new book coming out called Bluefishing, and we started our conversation by talking about some of the things he went through in writing the book and some of the things he's doing to launch the book. We hit on the big idea, the evil scheme, the th

Welcome to the MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com podcast. Today we're talking with Jamie Larson from Burnaby, British Columbia. Jamie’s an audiologist and he works with people who need hearing aids and helps them get the right information to make the right choice. He's written a book and we talked about how he uses that book as a lead generator. It’s been working great and we brainstormed some ways to make his advertising, his initial offer in Profit Activator 2, more compelling versus convincing, as well as talking about some referral strategies. We had a great conversation. He's got a great action plan, and I think you'll enjoy this episode.   Links: MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com ProfitActivatorScorecard.com 90MinuteBooks.com   Want to be a guest on the show? Simply follow the 'Be a Guest' link. Download a free copy of the Breakthrough DNA book all about the 8 Profit Activators we talk about here on More Cheese, Less Whiskers...

Today, we're talking with Burke Jones. Burke has a brand new company helping people have greener lawns and get rid of all their weeds in some of the nice neighborhoods of Kansas. He started with some door hangers that offered a discounted price and he’s had some success already, starting to build a base of customers. We spent this whole conversation talking about taking advantage of the structure of a business with recurring revenue. The value he has is a business that every six weeks he's going to come out, do a treatment, and that will happen year after year after year. It's very back end, very after unit loaded. He's building his business up to where he'll have people in the after unit that are just recurring year after year after year, but, you have to start with the before unit, you have to start with where you are. We talked about the possibility of offering a free treatment at the end of the season as opposed to at the beginning of next season, when everybody else will be lined up, competing, trying to

Welcome to this week’s episode of the MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com podcast. A couple of weeks ago I was in Toronto and attended an amazing event called the Archangels Summit. The gentlemen that puts it on every year is Giovanni Marsico. I’ve been able to spend a little time with Giovanni and gotten to know him, and the mission they have for the event. It was held in the Sony Center in Toronto, which has capacity of 3,000 people. He had over 2,500 people in the room. It had a fantastic vibe and energy to it. The year before, he had 1,500, so he's almost doubled the size. He has some amazing speakers. This year, Simon Sinek, Damon John and Dr. Shefali Tsabary. Last year, Gary Vaynerchuk and Seth Godin. This year, he had Akon do a performance which had everybody on their feet. I was watching this thinking, "The energy of this is just so incredible, he really puts on an amazing show." What he's essentially doing is creating a community of people who are taking moonshots, who are building tribes and communities that

Welcome to the MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com podcast. My name’s Dean Jackson. Today, we're talking with Hal Cranmer from Phoenix, Arizona. Hal owns five boutique assisted living homes with just 10 rooms in each. We started out the conversation getting a sense of how that business works, how he finds people, and then talk about how we can differentiate what he has to identify people who are looking for that particular type of facility. The ‘smaller boutique’ is actually a word that we came up with on the podcast here. You'll see how we talk about using market data to compel people to raise their hand, and separating his before unit from his during unit. He was very excited by the end of the call and I think we have a real viable plan here. I can't wait to see him put it into action. Links: www.MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com www.ProfitActivatorSocrecard.com www.90MinuteBooks.com    

Today, we're talking with Victor Pacini. I've known Victor for several years and we've been working together on his program that helps schools fulfill the Erin's Law mandate. A law that mandates schools educate their students about sexual abuse. Victor has an amazing story, and an amazing program that provides a solution for schools fulfilling that requirement. Over the years he's perfected the way he delivers his presentation. He's written a book that helps schools understand their responsibilities and introduces them to his services, delivering presentations for them. It's been a great journey to see happen, and one that's been really successful for Victor in that he's completely booked across all of his programs. What we're talking about in this episode is specifically the opportunity he now has to expand beyond just ‘Victor’ and use the book and the system he's created, to keep himself fully booked and then help others to expand this opportunity and really help fulfill the Erin's Law mandate all over the

Today we have Janice Berthold with us, an insurance specialist in California, where she works with large companies, companies with 200 plus employees, who have large workers' comp insurance premiums. She helps them not only lower the cost of their premiums, but to change the way they approach worker's comp, from safety and risk assessment, through to creating a great environment. She’s had great success, and this year, a 100% close rate with the people she’s spoken with. As you'll hear, she really knows her stuff. She knows how to help people and she gets amazing results. This is a great bonus when you’re looking at a new marketing campaign. Knowing with 100% confidence that you're able to get an outstanding result for someone, really gives you the confidence to turn up the volume in the before unit. We talked about ways to amplify what she's doing today and take it from a one-to-one approach, going out to people individually, to a strategy where we can pick a pool of 1000 of her ideal CFOs and create a marke

Welcome to this week’s episode of the MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com podcast. Today we are talking with Scott Tonges from Pagosa Springs, Colorado, close to Durango, where my good buddy, Jeff Walker, lives. Scott is in a situation that a lot of people find themselves in. He has lot of specialized knowledge over a lifetime of helping people in real estate as an investor and as a broker with commercial and investment real estate. He has the heart of a teacher and he really wants to share that information with people. He just didn't know where to start, where to focus his attention, because he COULD do so many things in so many different ways to help people. We had a great conversation about where to start, how to think through the process, and I think that you're going to find this very valuable if you're trying to narrow your focus to a single target market. I started by asking Scott, what would be a dream come true for him. Listen in as the conversation unfolds.     Show Links:To find out more about the small gro

Today we're talking with Ben Frank from the hockey hotbed of Orange County, California! You don't really think about Orange County, California as a hockey hotbed, but he's a fellow Canadian and is very involved in junior hockey development in California, where they have a really great program. We talked a little bit about where the kids who join the programs come from and how, if they start early, they might stick with the programs for 10 years. We discussed ways of stoking the fire, the front end of this by exposing skating, really the gateway to hockey, to the parents of three and four-year-olds. That’s really one of the biggest opportunities because the more those kids are exposed to hockey, skating, the hockey rink and the environment as a whole, the more it would be a natural progression for them to take an interest in hockey. We talked about it as one of the ‘dig your well before you're thirsty’, strategies. To know that today's three and four-year-olds are next year's five and six-year-olds. By going a

Today we’re talking with John Blake all the way from Perth, Australia. The city that has the lucky distinction of being the most populated, isolated, city in the world. The good news is, that hasn’t stopped Blake from building a really nice business helping other businesses crack their marketing codes. We had a great conversation about the opportunity he now has to, instead of doing original work all the time; finding new clients, starting a new project, continuing to grow and raising the income by either doing more work or raising prices and finding a higher and higher value clients, we talked about the idea of getting leverage from the work he's already done by doing work one time that he can syndicate to other businesses all over Australia. This is a subject that's near and dear to my heart. Something I’ve built a lot of my career on is creating what I call scale ready algorithms; to crack a code, and then roll it out across the country to local businesses that can use that same strategy again and again. I

Welcome to the MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com podcast. Today I’m talking with Wendy Gardner, a skincare specialist in the UK. She has a line of skincare products that she lovingly creates by hand, with all the finest natural ingredients. She offers a really individualized approach to skincare. We had a conversation talking about how to differentiate the skincare line itself, but in the second half of the conversation we dialed it in and talked more along the line of creating an experience for customers. Completely repositioning the way she looks at the relationship with them.   As you know, when you listening to these shows, I don't have any foreknowledge of what kind of business people have or a specific plan of where I want the call to go, but I think by exploring who your target audience is and who are your ideal clients and the result you could create for someone, it reveals the biggest opportunities. We settled on the idea of creating a 90-day experience for people where they get to go full immersion and bun

Today we are talking with Shawn Yergler. Based in Indiana, Shawn does something that helps home owners who have concrete driveways, pathways, walkways, decks, extend the life of their concrete make it look better and protect it from the elements. Essentially, a cleaning and sealing situation with the concrete. Shawn's had some success with every door direct mail - EDDM, (you can see a copy of the post card that he's using, at morecheeselesswhiskers.com/055), and we started by talking about how the awareness of this, the desire for this, a service that is not really a necessity, there's not a lot of utility value. It’s not a transformational service and people don't have to do it so we talked a lot about the right audience, and how to communicate in a way that lets the right people know it’s available.   Right now he has a postcard using a $50 off offer. We talked about a different way to frame the offer that would encourage people who are not ready to get their driveway re-sealed right now, but would like to

Today our guest is David Igono. Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but there are a lot of podcasts in the world right now! It seems like podcasts are becoming the hip, cool thing and David has a great concept for a podcast specializing in college golf.  Just like anything you create, you have to have an understanding of why your podcast exists. What is its purpose? For me, I’ve always found a podcast is not about generating leads, but it's more about converting leads. A podcast is more of a Profit Activator 3 vehicle, for educating and motivating people toward an outcome. It's a very noisy market right now so you still need to be able to do some lead generation. You're not going to be able to just put up your podcast and hope that people find it, but the good news is that you can be very specialized in the show you create, and that creates lots of opportunities for you. Once you get clear on who you want to be a hero to, then you really get an opportunity to be a market maker. This is something David and I

Every once in awhile I get to talk about one of my favorite things. I have two big loves in the world. It's marketing, of course, and it's applying that marketing to real estate, because that's how I started out my business. That's how I learned a lot of the marketing things that we talk about today and where I developed a lot of the principles that became the 8-Profit Activator. Today we're talking with Thomas March, a real estate agent from California. We had a great conversation. I'd love to apply the 8-Profit Activators to real estate. I think you're going to enjoy this as there are a lot of transferrable lessons because real estate is such a relatable business. Everybody's had a real estate experience. It translates well into other businesses.   Show Links:Show TranscriptGoGoAgent.comProfitActivatorScore.com     Want to be a guest on the show? Simply follow the 'Be a Guest' link on the left & I'll be in touch. Download a free copy of the Breakthrough DNA book all about the 8 Profit Activators we talk

Welcome to the 52nd episode of the morecheeselesswhiskers.com podcast. One year ago today we launched the More Cheese, Less Whiskers podcast. Can you believe it’s been a year already? Today I’ve got a real treat for you. As it’s our birthday episode, I wanted to do something special and I have just the thing. A few months ago, I was driving home from St. Petersburg to Orlando and I got a text from my friend Frank Kern. Frank was working with one of his clients on a nine word email campaign and had questions about some of the follow-up steps. What to do after the emails sent. So I said, “I’m stuck in traffic, let’s hop on my conference line, we can talk it out and hatch some evil schemes” as we often do. I want to give you a behind the scenes look at how this kind of conversation actually happens. The conversations we have in real life. We’ll maybe do this once a month, certainly when we’re together in person we’ll have conversations like this for days (when we’re not joking around, making fun of things and wa

Welcome to the MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com podcast. Today we have a great conversation with Amar Ghose. Amar and some of his partners run software as a service for maid companies called ZenMaid.com. We talked about a lot in this episode. It's very fractal in that we jump around talking about each of the Profit Activators and how there are specific things to focus on in the During Unit including how people use your service and what the dream come true experience is that you provide so you can highlight that in the Before Unit. We also got to talk about some great example of separating the compelling elements of Profit Activator two from the convincing education of Profit Activator three. In Profit Activator two, we want to focus on only the job of getting people to raise their hand. We want to start a dialog. We want to turn invisible prospects into visible prospects. I think you're going to find all this very helpful if you have any kind of an ongoing membership service, so tune in!   Show Links:Show Transcrip

Welcome to the More Cheese Less Whiskers Podcast Today we are talking with Ashe Higgs from Tempe, Arizona. Ashe runs a martial arts program called I Liq Chuan and as you listen to this episode, you'll see the underlying structure, the puzzle that we're trying to solve is essentially, he has a location where he serves members through classes and private lessons, so how can we best fill that capacity. That’s the mechanics, the logistics of what actually happens and you can overlay everything that we talk about to any business that follows that model. It could just as easily be a fitness studio, an after school tutoring program, a tennis or golf instructor or anything where the model is that you find people, you bring them into your environment, you let them experience what you have to offer, and they join to stay as a member and continue to use those services. It's important you understand the underlying limitations, constraints or goals for what we're looking at here. It's often the case when we start out to w

Welcome to the MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com podcast. Today we have an international caller from Switzerland, Roman Bourquin, and we're going to really focus our time getting deep into Profit Activator number one. This is the most important Profit Activator. Really selecting who your target audience is, really getting to understand what it is that they're going through, what it is that they need and are looking for, helps identify the intersection of what they really need and what you can offer. What is the dream come true scenario that you can provide for that audience before we ever get to think about Profit Activator 2, how to get them to raise their hand. I think you're going to really get a lot out of listening to the wheels turning and how we can dig into understanding what an audience really wants, where they are, how to structure the way that we look at it.   Show Links:Show TranscriptEmailMastery.com book Breakthrough DNA book 90-Minute Books     Want to be a guest on the show? Simply follow the 'Be a G

Today we have a treat. We're talking with Taki Moore. For those of you who don't know him yet, Taki is a coach who coaches, coaches, helping them build million dollar coaching practices. He’s one of my favorite people to brainstorm with because Taki like me is a 10 quick start on the Kolbe measure, and he implements like crazy. We'll hatch an evil scheme, he'll implement it immediately and come back and share the results. We were messaging last night. He was asking about what strategies we could use with chatbots. It was a great thread and I thought that's a great idea for a MoreCheeseLessWhiskers episode. So in this call we talk about the role of chatbots in our Profit Activator 3 lead conversion system. I think this is going to be a really great way for you to set a context if you're going to go into using bots and automations to help convert leads.   Show Links:Show TranscriptEmailMastery.com book Join the Email Mastery Group: Email Me     Want to be a guest on the show? Simply follow the 'Be a Guest' link

Today I'm talking with Todd Herman. Todd is the creator of the 90-Day Year and, if you’ve been paying attention over the last couple of years you'll have seen this idea getting a lot of traction. He has a very mature business and a great launch-based model. We talk about how to really capitalize on the biggest asset he has, which turns out to be his list of all the people who, in Profit Activator 3, have responded and raised their hand as being interested in the idea of a 90-Day Year. His biggest opportunity is to really expand the way he leverages that asset and help those people take the next step. We focused a lot of our time this episode, really going deep in that concept. This is an episode you’re really going to enjoy.     Show Links:Show TranscriptEmailMastery.com book Join the Email Mastery Group: Email Me     Want to be a guest on the show? Simply follow the 'Be a Guest' link on the left & I'll be in touch. Download a free copy of the Breakthrough DNA book all about the 8 Profit Activators we tal