Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. And I don’t think I should be interviewing today’s guest. I think I should be hiring his company. Joining me today is Brad Martineau. He is the cofounder of SixthDivison. They do marketing, automation, consulting. In addition to it, they also have other services that help entrepreneurs like me grow their businesses like help hiring and so on.
Brad, welcome to Mixergy.
Brad: Thank you. I’m excited to here.
Andrew: This is kind of outside of your focus. My audience is largely software entrepreneurs. What kind of customers do you have today?
Brad: We have customers all over the board. We’ve had the Church of Scientology out. We’ve had a division of IBM come out. I’ve gone to the University of Utah and one of their technology commercialization departments, down to real estate agents, MMA studio–a lot of people that you’ve actually interviewed.
Andrew: For example?
Brad: Laura Roeder, Amy Porterfield, Daniel Faggella…
Andrew: What did you do for them?
Brad: So, Daniel Faggella, when he came out, it was for his gym that he’s running up in DC. Primarily what we worked on was in his follow-up he wanted to be able to offer, I believe it was either an info product–this was like three years ago–it was either an info product or a supplement sales like around one of his information businesses. For him, we got fancier than we would now when we start. This was back before we learned that the key is you start simple and get fancy later.
What we’ve built is a system where he could have a series of emails going out and he’d have a little banner at the bottom that had an offer. Based on how long they’ve been in the system, that banner would automatically change, but it didn’t matter what the email was. So, the email would be the exact same for everybody, but their offer at the bottom would change based on what they had bought or not bought.
Andrew: Ah, got you.
Brad: Amy Porterfield and Laura Roeder was just getting–for Laura it was when she shifted her entire business model from like products to her subscription model right now, we actually went to San Diego, but we helped her make that shift and get the dash dialed in and all that stuff done.
Andrew: So, what would it cost me if I were to hire you guys?
Brad: So, our high-end offering, which is this, “I want to come out and just have everything done,” we do a makeover. You’d come out to our offices. It costs $12,000. You spend two days one on one with one of our consultants and basically what we do is come in and say, “Okay, you want to leverage automation in your business? What does that look like? What does it look like to have 100% of your business automated?”
And then let’s go take the most impactful areas of your business and let’s map out exactly what needs to happen there and then we dive in and we go build it. You walk out and it’s done. Typically, when I say you walk out and it’s done–and we were talking about this before–we take owners and say, “Okay, here’s the structure of what you ought to be saying in your follow-up. Now, go write it.”
Andrew: Do we write it in those two days if I bring my writer down with me?
Brad: Absolutely. And so, we do like the blueprinting and the planning in the first couple of hours in the first day. Then from there there’s a lot of split on, “Hey, you’ve got content you need to create and I’m going to go create a whole bunch of stuff.” Our coach will go create a whole bunch of stuff inside Infusionsoft or inside whatever. We work with Infusionsoft right now exclusively. So, we would go build the structure and the placeholders for all the emails and the reporting and the tracking and then the writer or the business owner would go create the content, shoot videos and then we’d merge it all back together and we’re ready to press go.
Andrew: We should talk about that. I’d want something more than just the two days. I’d want to continue. Also, I’d love to find a way for my audience to watch everything that we do so that we’re not doing it in isolation but they get to see what we’re tweaking, what we’re adjusting, every single thing except for the email addresses that we added to the system.
Brad: Totally. Would love to. In fact, quick story, blast form the past–so, you, a couple of years ago, three years ago, you were looking into Infusionsoft.
Andrew: Yes.
Brad: Do you by chance remember the name of the sales rep that you were talking with?
Andrew: Yeah, because every time I call Infusionsoft I see his face still. His name is Chase, right?
Brad: Yeah. So, he works for us.
Andrew: I know. So, here’s the thing with Chase. I negotiated like crazy with him.
Brad: I know.
Andrew: He would not come down a freaking penny with me. And I know for a fact that Infusionsoft negotiates down. But for some reason, I don’t know what it is, maybe he didn’t like me. Maybe he had no juice there. Maybe I just didn’t ask the magic question. Why didn’t he give me a discount?
Brad: We literally just were talking about it. He didn’t have the power. He went to his boss and his boss didn’t understand. His boss didn’t do it. We were just talking about it. He’s like, “I know. I tried to get him the hook up and I couldn’t get it passed off. He just didn’t have the power to pull the trigger.”
Andrew: I couldn’t believe it. All my friends were getting discounts. I’m so stubborn that I said, “I will not handle this insult. I am not going with Infusionsoft. AWeber all the way.”
Brad: Yes. That’s what he said.
Andrew: So, basically what I did was I burned both of us and one of us hurt more than the other. Congratulations AWeber, you won. The rest of us lost. Anyway, I did get the discount, though. I ended up going through one of their consultants. Their consultant gave me a deep discount. That’s the answer with Infusionsoft.
All right. Let me continue with your story and then I would love to, if you guys are up to it, to find a way to work with you. By the way, by find a way, I mean can we do it tomorrow? Can we find a way to set something up fast where I come in and everyone who is listening to me gets to watch everything and if I suck, they should watch it and if you suck, they should see it too. If we’re great, they can learn along with it.
Brad: Absolutely.
Andrew: And if we’re great, they can learn along with it. I don’t know how. But I’d love for them to watch the whole process unfold.
Brad: Absolutely.
Andrew: So, the reason this whole thing started, the reason that we’re here is that you got laid off.
Brad: Yes.
Andrew: From Infusionsoft.
Brad: I prefer to say fired because it’s more dramatic, but I’ll go with laid off. Yes.
Andrew: What happened?
Brad: I prefer to say that I got fired. It’s more dramatic. You get better responses that way. But yeah, I got laid off.
Andrew: I kind of believe it must be because Infusionsoft was growing so fast. How does a company that’s growing so fast layoff? Layoffs happen at Detroit. The company can’t afford to keep their people going. Did you do something wrong?
Brad: No. So, 10% of the company got laid off. This was March 3rd, 2010. It was either January or February. I think it was February. They hit a rough month. It was at a time where basically the CEO Clate at the time said, “Look, if we have another bad month, then we’re going to have to do layoffs and we won’t be able to do any severance.” So, they proactively, as a measure to make sure that the business was protected, they laid off 10% of the company. At that point, I want to say they were about 150 employees. So, I was one of the 15.
Andrew: Infusionsoft is marketing automation software, right? It’s a way for us to collect email addresses of people that come to the site and are interested in getting our newsletter and then to send them different emails based on what they do via email and how they interact with us. It’s also good for sales. It’s so hard to explain, but I think I should explain something about what Infusionsoft is.
Brad: I say it’s three components. It’s a core database where you can put all of your contacts, prospects, customers, partners. And then you’ve got email marketing–so, think of MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber bolted onto that. And then you’ve got a billing/online sales component bolted on too. So, I can charge people’s credit cards. I can send them whatever content they want and based on the fact that they bought one thing, I can start sending them new content. But it’s all of that kind of mixed together.
Andrew: So, I got the new Apple Watch, right?
Brad: Okay.
Andrew: And on it is a monitor that tells me how many calories I burned. And usually if I go for a six-mile run and take my son for a long walk in his stroller, I will not complete the circle that shows me how many calories I’m supposed to burn for the day. I have to do more than that. Today, I completed the circle because today I was dealing with Infusionsoft. The reason that I had all this heart going crazy is because of what you described. 500 things are going on at the same time and the person who we hired to handle it happens to be away on vacation. So, it’s on me and I’ve got to do it and between interviews. Anyway, that’s the frustration.
So, you get fired from this place. When you’re fired, do you feel a little bit down? Do you feel like, “My life is over?”
Brad: So, I had just had my fifth child in January. So, two of my brothers are the founders. They called me and came over because they didn’t want me to come in the next and hear like everybody else–
Andrew: Founders of Infusionsoft?
Brad: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. So, they fire you because they what? They want to make a point to the company that, “Hey, we’re willing to let go of our own guy?”
Brad: No, I don’t think that’s why. I would say I was younger and less mature and understanding. Let’s put it this way. Have you ever been around somebody who’s really smart and is a prick and a pain in the butt to deal with?
Andrew: Yeah.
Brad: That was me.
Andrew: Okay. Are you sure you were really smart at the time? They’re the ones who were running Infusionsoft.
Brad: You know what? That’s a great follow-up question. I was trying to make myself feel better and look better and you called me on it. Realistically, probably not. I had like my vision. It was me and I had my vision of what I wanted to do. It wasn’t really… Like, I wasn’t willing to give up on what I wanted to do to really buy in to everything that was happening at Infusionsoft. So, I was valuable and I provided a lot of value in different areas. That I do know. I don’t know necessarily that I was as smart as I thought that I was. But I hadn’t learned how to like go about getting things done without bugging people.
Andrew: But you said you had a different vision for where Infusionsoft was supposed to be than you brothers who owned it.
Brad: Yeah.
Andrew: What was your vision for where it was supposed to be?
Brad: I’m very heavily like a product-focused person. I’m big on the products. So, I had a vision of what the product could be and how we ought to make tweaks. Clate is much more of a marketing and sales CEO. So, when you have a marketing and sales leader in an organization, that’s going to be the predominate thing that’s going on. You’ve got marketing and sales activities. And it happens to the detriment of the product. So, me on the product side, I’m fighting for, “Hey, we need to do more stuff on the product side.” But I didn’t know how to fight without causing problems.
Andrew: I see.
Brad: So, I put myself in a situation where I was valuable, but also noisy. So, it made sense, like, “Hey, this is probably time.” I didn’t realize it then, but I was born with entrepreneurial blood. Most entrepreneurs would tell you that they’re certifiably unemployable. I was that. I just didn’t realize it yet.
Andrew: Wait, so, Clate is your brother?
Brad: No. Clate’s my brother in law. He married my sister. The other two founders, Scott and Eric are my brothers.
Andrew: I see. So, if you were honest with yourself, were you also a little bit jealous that these guys built this incredible software company? They’re getting rich every day and yes, they’re struggling, but they’re doing well.
Brad: That’s a great question. No, surprisingly. The reason why–this is a tribute to them–the reason is before they hired me back in 2004, they brought me in and they sat me down and said, “Okay, look, here’s the deal. We’re going to hire you into this support rep position, but I need you to understand something. We own this company and we’ve got plans to go do this. We’re going to sell it at some point.” This was back then when they were going to sell it. “And we’re going to make a lot of money and you’re not. You’ve got to be okay with that from the very beginning.”
So, I had gotten really clear on that. There wasn’t a jealously thing there. There really was just like an internal rift that I had a lot of things that I wanted to do on the product. Think of putting an entrepreneur in a space where they kind of own something but they don’t have complete freedom and it’s just a recipe for butting heads and that’s pretty much what happened.
Andrew: Where are you guys now with SixthDivsion? How much revenue are you guys making automating people’s businesses and helping them grow?
A So, last year, which is, I think, our second or third year, we did just a hair under $2 million. This year, by the end of this month, we’ll have done that this year.
Andrew: Wow. All right. So, we’re talking double so far.
Brad: I think we’re going to double this year. Yeah.
Andrew: Profit over half a million?
Brad: This year we’ll break half a million profit for sure.
Andrew: So, you leave the company which is kind of painful. I know things turned out okay. So, I’m okay pushing on that little bit of pain for a bit. And then you end up at Salesforce Dreamforce conference. Why do you end up over there?
Brad: Okay. So, that was about a year and a half later. And my now business partner Dave Lee, he and I worked together at Infusionsoft. So, he was the VP of Marketing and Sales over there for six years. He had quit about six months after me. He went and worked at this company up in Scottsdale that basically does what we do at SixthDivison but they do it for people that use Marketo and Salesforce.
Andrew: Now, Marketo is like the high-end enterprise marketing automation software.
Brad: Yeah. It’s like marketing automation minus customer database, minus billing and it integrates with Salesforce. It starts at like $3,000 a month or something or $3,500 a month.
Andrew: Okay. And he was doing this for who? Not his own company.
Brad: No, not his own company. It was a company called LeadMD up in Scottsdale. They’re like the equivalent of what SixthDivision is in the Infusionsoft world, they are in the Marketo world.
Andrew: Okay. So, he’s up there. You guys end up at the same conference. Why?
Brad: So, he’s up there. He calls me and says, “Hey, we need somebody to come work at LeadMD.” I’m kind of messing around with some stuff, but I hadn’t gotten into a groove of really what it means to be an entrepreneur, which is code for I was scared out of my mind. I have no qualms about acknowledging the fact that there was about an 18-month.
Andrew: What do you mean by scared out of your mind? Do you remember what you were afraid of or a time when you were especially scared?
Brad: Yeah, from the moment I got fired until we went to InfusionCon in 2012 was just constant fear running in the background.
Andrew: Fear of what? For me when it’s fear, it’s often, “I’m going to be homeless.” I don’t know why. I always think I’m going to be homeless. For me, it’s fear of people like Brad who maybe admired the work that I did are going to think, “What a loser this guy was. We were totally tricked by him.” It’s stuff like that. What is it for you?
Brad: You know what? So, when I left Infusionsoft, there wasn’t a person on the planet that knew more about how to make Infusionsoft work. I came out with my own expectations of, “I should go be successful.” It was literally the fear of–it wasn’t even a fear of not being successful. It was a fear of looking like I was struggling. I created this own pressure on myself that I should come out and this should just be easy and then it would be hard because it is. Then I get down on myself, like, “I’m going to be exposed as this fraud.”
I kind of built up a name in the Infusionsoft space of like, “All right, he’s going to go crush it.” It was like this crushing way to–I didn’t have an office space. I would go to Infusionsoft for the next year and a half and I would sit in the back room. I’d kind of walk in and everyone would know who I was. I’d go sit in the back office if it was empty. I literally would spend eight hours there and I wouldn’t get a freaking thing done.
Andrew: You were there to start your own company?
Brad: Yeah.
Andrew: Did you know what the company was going to be?
Brad: Yeah. I create a company that was called Infuse My Business. Basically, when they fired me, I said, “All right, well, this is what I know how to do. I know how to do Infusionsoft stuff, so I’ll go do a business doing this.” I started to do it and realized really quickly that services, the whole game of like, “What’s your project going to be? Let me quote it for you,” was not me at all. So, I was trying to force myself to do work that I had no passion for. I learned about myself that I have no discipline to do that. If I’m not behind something, I can’t even get myself up to do the work.
Andrew: I see. I’ve had days like that, where it’s your business. You know you need to do stuff. But for some reason, you can’t get yourself to even do the stuff you know.
Brad: That’s different. I have those days too sometimes where you just get into a rut. This was I had chosen to go into a business with the business model that I fundamentally, like my DNA, fundamentally against, just like fundamentally against. That’s why I was so afraid. I’d go to Infusionsoft, sit down like, “Okay, I’m going to do this.” I’d get hyped up then be like, “No, this is stupid. I don’t like this.” They had a basketball court and I loved playing basketball. So, about every hour and a half I’d go out and shoot hoops because it was the only way I could get a release from what was going on. I’d come back in and I had a severance and I had some savings. I could afford to be stupid for a little while.
Andrew: I see. And now this friend of yours, former coworker says, “Hey we can use you to come in and help us.” You decide you’re going to go do Dreamforce. You go to Dreamforce, which is a Salesforce conference, and what happened?
Brad: So, I got hired there. I got hired at the company. And then my second week we were going to Dreamforce. That’s where their clients are and they had a booth and everything, this company. So, we get over there. My business partner and I, we’re saying in the same room.
We go into the first session on the first day. It was something about how to use video marketing online. We walk in and sit down and in the first five minutes, it became very obvious to us that this was going to be an extremely archaic presentation. It was like, “Holy cow, I feel like I just went back a decade.” So, we left and we went and talked like, “Oh my gosh, this is lame.” We hung out in the hallway. We go in the next presentation. I don’t even know what the topic was, but we sat about five minutes and said, “Oh, I cannot. We can’t do this.”
So, we left. I had kind of planted the seed with him before, like, “I don’t know if this is going to work for me.” So, we went to–it’s right there in the Moscone Center–there’s one block behind. There’s an Office Depot. We got a big old Post-It note. We went back to our hotel room and we stuck them up all over the walls in the hotel room and started mapping out, “Okay, if we’re going to do this, what does the opportunity look like? What kind of company do we want to create?” Why are we doing this now and why didn’t we do it six months ago when He had first left? What’s changed? What are we looking at?” We basically mapped out the foundation of what would eventually become SixthDivison, what it is today.
Andrew: What did you think it was going to be back then?
Brad: It’s funny because what we painted a picture of is pretty much what we’ve created. He was going through and cleaning out his house and he found one of those Post-It notes. We had a bunch of notes that we took down. The big vision back then was we want to come in and we want to own the Infusionsoft space.
We want to come in and be like the Navy SEALs in suits when it comes to automation. When you think of the Army, the Navy, there’s like the Navy SEALs and then there’s everybody else. That’s what we wanted to create. In addition, we also wanted to create a place–for me, I don’t like wasting time on crap that doesn’t matter. So, we’re not going to track PTO. All the bull crap minutiae that comes with–
Andrew: What’s PTO, paid time off?
Brad: Paid time off. Yeah.
Andrew: Like for your employees, you mean?
Brad: For our employees. For anyone. I don’t want to spend any time with like, “Hey, can I take two days off to go on a vacation?” Like, “You’re an adult. I think you can decide. You know what you need to contribute to the team.”
Andrew: I see. So, it was what the product was going to be, which was consulting service for Infusionsoft, the level you wanted to be at–you didn’t want to be one of the smaller Infusionsoft people who was making $25 or $50 an hour, you wanted to be the elite force, that meant that you also take on a lot of responsibility and you didn’t want to run the kind of company where you were dealing with the BS of running a company.
Brad: Yes.
Andrew: I see. What I don’t understand is I get how the internal culture was going to be different, but I’m looking at an early version of your website, InfuseMyBusiness.com. It’s like four lines, five.
Brad: Yes. One of my favorite websites.
Andrew: “My name is Brad Martineau. I help small business owners rock it with Infusionsoft. I’m good at it too.” Then there’s a hyperlink, “Learn more about me.” “I’ve worked with some of the brightest entrepreneurs and marketers, read what they say. I send out sick Infusionsoft tips and sometimes I give away free consulting. Get in the loop.” It feels like the more I read about you on the old page, this is what you’re doing right now with SixthDivsion. What’s the difference?
Brad: It’s funny that you found that page. The primary difference is that we’ve built a team. When I was doing that on my own, I realized a couple of things about myself. You talk about the entrepreneurial journey. There’s nothing that will teach you more about yourself than being an entrepreneur.
One of the things that I learned is I can’t get behind stuff that has no–like, I’ve got to be building something and I’ve got to work with people. So, the primary difference between that website and where I was there and where we are now is we’ve got a team of people. We’ve created a methodology that we follow every time we work with clients. We’ve got a team of people that are as smart if not smarter than me when it comes to helping people with automation and with their space.”
Andrew: But in the beginning when you were doing it it was just you and Dave Lee.
Brad: At that point it was just me.
Andrew: At that point, where I’m looking at the website it was just you. But when you’re talking about going to Office Depot, getting some big Post-It notes, it’s no longer just you. It’s you and Dave Lee. You both see the opportunity together. I feel like that’s a major difference. It’s not so much the client work. It’s that you now had someone else to feed off.
Brad: Totally.
Andrew: Someone else to validate you and also someone else to keep you accountable.
Brad: Totally. If Dave were here, you’d recognize really quickly that he and are opposites in many regards.
Andrew: I can see it instantly in the photo. Every freaking photo I’ve ever seen of you, you always have a hat. Now I’m at the about page on your site. His first note is, “I don’t wear hats.”
Brad: Yes.
Andrew: And it goes from there, the difference in the two of you.
Brad: But you’re right on. We’re not where we are today if I don’t partner with Dave Lee back in 2010 or 2011.
Andrew: Give me an idea. Back in the early, early days, after you guys drew out what the business was going to be, how did having a cofounder like Dave help you out, help you get going in a way that you couldn’t before?
Brad: So, look, I’d love to sit here and paint this pretty story about how I had all the confidence in the world and I could just go figure stuff out. But for the first two years of the business, if I wouldn’t have had him, I would have folded and quit. It was the like, “Hey, okay, I’ve got this idea.” It was basically probably the most valuable piece was, “Hey, I’m thinking that this is all going to come collapsing down and I need you to talk me out of it.” We’d have those conversations back and forth.
This isn’t a conversation that you’d take home to a wife who’s watching five kids and who’s not like super into business. You don’t take it home to your neighbors that are working for somebody else. And you can’t really go to talk to–I hadn’t figured out how to go talk to employees. You can’t go to an employee and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about shutting down the business. Talk to me about this.” So, in those early days, it was a lot of just having somebody that could be like, “Dude, we’re good. We’ve got this.”
And, again, I’m a product person. So, my mind goes naturally to, “I’m going to create the best product and service that we can create.” And he’s a marketing and sales guy. He was able to take a lot of the pressure of marketing and the selling and all that off the plate so I could go do the product thing and he could help make the revenue happen. Again, we’re not here today if Dave Lee is not in the picture.
Andrew: The name SixthDivsion, where did it come from?
Brad: Well, it was after a long line of really crappy names. We’re sitting around trying to come up with a name. We had gotten to the point where when you’re naming something–and anyone that’s tried to name anything will get this–we had gotten to the point where it started to feel like we were spending too much time, but we hadn’t figured out a really good solution.
Going back to what I said before, our brand or kind of our image or feel we wanted was we wanted to be elite. We wanted to be like Navy SEALs in suits. I’m a big follower of 37Signals, but Basecamp. So, we were playing around, “Do we try and name the company to be what we do? DO we do like a 37Signals approach?” My favorite number is the number 13. We wanted to go kind of military-esque but not go full on like military team.
We’re sitting around and one guy goes, “Hey, what if we called it SixthDivsion? You could say Brad was the sixth employee at Infusionsoft and he was always building the Sixth Division.” And then it’s evolved from there. We’ve got a couple of different angles we can play with it. But it stuck. It was good enough and then we ended up getting a really good logo for it a couple of years later. I love it now. I had a little bit of reservations then. But that’s basically where it came from.
Andrew: I’ve got to pry into your personal life for a moment. Did you just say that you had how many kids?
Brad: Five.
Andrew: Five kids. I’m looking at your brother on Twitter. He says that he has six kids. What is this? Is this a religious thing?
Brad: Probably. So, we’re from a family of ten. We’re all LDS, Mormon.
Andrew: That’s what it is.
Brad: That plays a factor.
Andrew: Are you still a practicing LDS?
Brad: Yeah.
Andrew: You are.
Brad: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. Is that prying for me to ask you this stuff?
Brad: No, I don’t care.
Andrew: Do you believe in the whole thing?
Brad: In the whole thing being what?
Andrew: The whole Joseph Smith story?
Brad: Yes, otherwise I wouldn’t be a practicing LDS.
Andrew: All right. I kind of feel like with other religions to say, “Hey, this is really BS.” But Mormons are in it.
Brad: Yes, they are.
Andrew: Does it feel like I’m prying? It feels to me like I’m prying, frankly.
Brad: Not at all. I’ve got no problem.
Andrew: For some reason, I have a lot of Mormon fans at Mixergy. I don’t know what it is. They’re very comfortable asking for water when I invite them over for scotch. No tea or anything like that, which is totally fine. I will pry into the whole LDS thing for hours. But for some reason on camera I’m not comfortable talking to people about their faith. I don’t know what it is.
Brad: Hey that’s fine. We’ll get you out here in the next little bit and we can sit down and have a great–
Andrew: No. If I’m paying $12,000, don’t tell me anything about it. Just talk to me about my business. I’ll tell you what, if there’s spinach in my teeth, don’t even tell me about the spinach in my teeth. Say, “Andrew, let’s get down to business.”
Brad: All right. You come out and then I’ll come visit you and then we can have a conversation.
Andrew: Then we can talk about water.
Brad: All right.
Andrew: You know what? I should actually do a sponsorship message. My sponsor is, according to–look at this, I just got a check right here in the mail–there are two things that I’ve learned about this. First of all, my sponsor is HostGator. I see that they just sent the check. I didn’t even open.
Second, look at the name of my company, speaking of company names. There’s the address. I’ll put it up. Everyone should actually see where the office is so they can come and say hi. It’s called the Andrew Warner Company because I incorporated before I knew what my company name was going to be. I just needed some incorporation protection.
HostGator is paying me good money because they like the audience that we have and they want the audience that we have here at Mixergy to consider hosting their websites, hosting their businesses on HostGator. If you do that by going to HostGator.com/Mixergy, you will get a whopping 30% off your hosting package. Brad, before we started the interview, I asked you if you had nothing but a HostGator account and you had to start a brand new business, what would it be?
Brad: Yeah. I’ve got a passion around helping people identify areas in their life where it just sucks up a ton of time and energy, breaking that stuff down and making it easier. One of those is in personal finance. So, I came up with a personal finance system that with an Excel spreadsheet and setting up bank accounts a certain way, you can literally spend about 15 minutes a week and have complete control over your finances.
Andrew: And so what would you do on that website? Would you teach it?
Brad: What I would do is–yeah. I’d create this standard kind of opt-in. I’d create some initial information that can get them excited about what I’m talking about. Then I’d have a course that I’d put up online that people can buy in too. At that level, because you’re talking about personal finances, we’d play around with pricing. I know I’d probably get beat out by some other people about needing to charge more or whatever.
Andrew: But you’d start off small and maybe play around with it later on.
Brad: So, I’d throw that up. I’d have some opt-in pieces. For me, I’d have a simple website, “This is what we do.” I’d have a page that talks about the people that have gone through our program that love it. I’d have a place where people can opt in to get free information. I have a place that explains what the program looks like and the ability to buy it. Then I’d create some way for them to be able to come in and actually access the content once they buy.
Andrew: You’re super into marketing automation, right? You’re one of the best on the planet. I understand that you’d give something away for free as a way of getting people in your system. Everybody does that. What’s the part that is Brad SixthDivsion magic that you would add to that flow that would get more customers than the person who’s listening to us?
Brad: My approach has always been that a lot of people like to lead with something that’s free, meaning the quality of what they’re creating is the quality of something that they would give away for free. My approach is any time we give anything away for free, I want it to be something that I could charge easily $100 for. People can get it and instantly consider it valuable.
So, it’s that combined with I want to ask for feedback. I want to know what people are saying after the fact. I believe that your best marketing aspect is the value that provide and the experience that you create for your leads, your prospects or customers.
Andrew: Wait, we’ve got to be more specific than that. You’ll offer something for free. What’s the free thing that you would offer for this idea? I’m still on the sponsorship message but I’m not even going to talk about the sponsor for a minute because I want to understand your mentality. You’ll have a way for people to save money, right?
Brad: No. It’s a way–
Andrew: Manage your finances.
Brad: It’s a way to manage your finances. I believe that all personal finance systems that have been created are all a copy of a lazy person that built it a long time ago.
Andrew: Okay. So, you have a brand new system. You have a new website. You want to give something away for free. Do you have a sense of what you might give away for free on the site?
Brad: I would probably do a couple part video series and/or what I’d play around with is that or a downloadable free report. Obviously you’ve got to see what converts better. But I would talk about I believe there are a couple of core mindset problems that people have that cause personal finance to take up way more of their time than they need to.
So, what I would do is I’d start by delivering that and say, “Hey, look, here’s this pain that you’re feeling in your personal finances. Let me tell you why that’s there and it’s not what you think it is. It’s because you’ve got these three core mindsets that are really messing with how you’re looking at finances. We can remove these,” and then I would dovetail those into, “Here’s the program that will teach you exactly how to–” it will give you the step-by-step and then I’ll walk them through the sales pitch.
Andrew: Okay. What’s the part that’s especially magical, especially SixthDivsion-y about that?
Brad: Especially SixthDivsion-y… I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that before. For me, there’s not like a magic SixthDivsion button other than when we create those videos, it’s not going to be something that we like sit around and we’re like, “Hey, this is really good and I think we can trick people into buying what we want because we made this.” It will be truly something that’s valuable that if they walk away and they don’t buy, they’ll walk away and they’ll be better off in their approach to their finances.
Andrew: What’s the most valuable thing that you gave away at SixthDivision for people that gave their email address.
Brad: Yeah. The thing we started with and we still happen to drive traffic to it, it’s the interview series. When I started off, I did an interview series similar to–
Andrew: I saw it. The one that you did with Jermaine Griggs, I remember exactly where I was where I listened to it. I think it was a three-parter, was it?
Brad: it was. There were follow up pieces that I did.
Andrew: But it was all video? Something like that.
Brad: Yeah. We went out to his office, hired a camera crew out there, the one that he goes to never, but we went there for the sake of the interview. And then I did a couple of follow-up pieces that talk about how he does some of the things he does.
Andrew: I converted it into an MP3 I think or downloaded it as an MP3 and I listened to it on my run. So, what made that more special than the average interview?
Brad: So, it was the interview and then it was the follow-up pieces where we actually–so, we did the interview. And then when you sit down with a guy like Jermaine and really the other people I’ve interviewed, they’re going to talk about a lot of really cool strategic things. And then the next comes, “Well, how do I implement it?” It’s cool to know what he does, but now how do I implement it?
So, the next parts of the video are when you go in there and I’ve got some whiteboard papers and I print out like, “Okay, this is actually what he does. Here’s how you can go build it.” So, it’s the, “I’m going to tell you what he does and you can hear it from his mouth. Then I’m going to translate that into something you can go implement it. I’m just going to walk through and show you exactly what it is.”
Andrew: I see. Whether it was at your business, SixthDivision or this fantasy business that we’re building on a new site, you would do some real training there. So, first you’re showing people the pain. Then you’re making them understand why the pain is there and what they could do about it, make it a little easier and then you’re showing them the process for doing it themselves. Am I getting it right or am I imagining it?
Brad: Totally. The goal for me is I want prospects that don’t buy to leave and be better off because they interacted with me even though they didn’t buy my product.
Andrew: Gotcha. All right. So, if you have an idea for a new business or just want to steal Brad’s idea, all you have to do is go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. You can put your site up in minutes. The fact that you’re using open source software like WordPress and they give you this one-click install means that if you hate them, you can just take your stuff and move it to another hosting company. But I don’t think you’re going to hate them. I think you’re going to love them like so many other people do.
If you have any trouble, I think you’re going to really appreciate the fact that they have a real phone number like Brad does where you can call up and actually have somebody pick up the phone and talk to you and really help you through it.
In a past interview, I tested it. I actually pulled out my phone. Within a minute and a half I got through to someone. I asked my interviewee, “What do you think of that?” He goes, “Well, that took a little bit long.” So, minute and a half, if that’s not too long for you, go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. The reason he said it was long was because he wanted to talk. He came here to do an interview, not to watch me get on the phone for a minute and a half. HostGator.com/Mixergy. I’m grateful for them for sponsoring and for sending this.
All right. So, now you’ve got an idea. You’ve got a cofounder. You’ve got some real clarity. How do you get your first client?
Brad: Oh man. Our very first client in what I would call our SixthDivision products and services–we were batting around ideas of how we were going to offer services. So, this was early on. We don’t really know what the right way to do service is. We just know we don’t’ want to do quoting hourly projects.
So, we had a couple of different offerings that we created and we decided to create one that was going to be called the Makeover. We were going to charge $10,000 to come hangout with us for two days or something. Now, keep in mind, I have never charged somebody more than like $3,000 to do anything. The whole idea, we got it from Dan Kennedy. He introduced it to us. But the idea of raise the price ceiling and then you can come back in and sell the thing you really want to sell and it won’t seem as expensive.
Andrew: Kind of like Apple selling those $10,000 edition watches, knowing that what they really want to sell is the Apple Watch standard or the sport.
Brad: And all of a sudden it doesn’t seem as expensive when you’re looking at it through the lens of a $17,000 watch or a $10,000 one.
Andrew: All right. So, you come up with this $10,000 do it for you Makeover. People fly in. They sit at your office. You guys will set them right within two days, basically what you described to me before.
Brad: Yeah. And we created it with very little intention of actually selling it. It was one of those, “If we can sell it, cool, but it’s probably not going to happen.” So, at this point, Dave is transitioning out of the other company at LeadMD. He was still there and I had since left and he was transitioning out.
He texted me one day and he’s like, “Dude, I think I sold one.” I texted him back like, “Sold one what?” And he’s like, “A makeover, $10,000.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” I don’t even know how we’re going to deliver that. We never really planned to sell that thing. It was a guy out in Georgia. He had just bought Infusionsoft the week before. And he called up and said, “Hey, I’ve heard stories of people buying Infusionsoft and leaving the Ferrari in the garage and I don’t want to.”
So, he came out and he sat with me for two days and I didn’t have near the structure or the process that we have now. But we went through and we built a ton of stuff into his business and his business took off. It was awesome. But that was the first client. I don’t even know how he found us. But he found Dave. I think he went through like the marketplace and found us. So, that was like where the first client came from. Where most of our clients have come from is we’ve always been a sponsor of Infusionsoft’s big user conference.
Andrew: Weren’t you also sponsoring–what’s his name?
Brad: Yanik Silver?
Andrew: I don’t know I’m blanking on his name–Yanik Silver’s event?
Brad: Yeah. We did. The first year we were in business, we did seven figures in our first year and it was because if there was an event where we thought there was somebody who might be using Infusionsoft, we were spending money and we were there. So, when we went to Yanik’s event, our sponsorship was probably like $10,000 and we got like six minutes on stage and a booth. We did a quick, hard-hitting pitch with an opt-in piece, text to opt in or whatever. We went there. We did GKIC events.
So, largely it’s been go to events, get people to want to buy our Makeover. We made it where everybody’s got to travel to us. Then our strategy really was there will not be a person that comes and work with SixthDivision that doesn’t leave and doesn’t love us. Period.
Andrew: All right. Let me break down this whole process of getting customers. But first, I’ve got to do that so the camera lightens up a little bit. I’m a very dark person. When I hold up something white like this on the screen, the camera thinks I’m white. In this case, the camera didn’t go too dark. So, I’ve got to adjust it.
The first customer I get the marketplace–that is Infusionsoft’s marketplace of service providers and software that help make Infusionsoft better. It’s a really smart addition for them to offer it and they make it–in fact, they almost push you to notice that it’s there when you login.
Brad: Right.
Andrew: So, that’s where the first customer came from. The second set of customers, was it from the Infusionsoft conference that you got them?
Brad: Yeah.
Andrew: So, you go to the Infusionsoft conference, you paid how much to get to speak there?
Brad: It was about $30,000.
Andrew: $30,000. Where do you get $30,000 that you’re going to speak at this conference?
Brad: Credit cards. You can put anything on credit cards.
Andrew: So, you really put it on your credit cards?
Brad: Yeah.
Andrew: You’re a family man with kids who depend on you. Did you feel like, “What am I doing putting this money on my credit card?”
Brad: You know, no. I wasn’t even processing at a level where I really understood. At the same time, we signed a three-year personally guaranteed lease on the space that we’re in now and then we committed to go to sponsor InfusionCon. It was $5,000 a month, I think, and we were putting it on a credit card or whatever.
At that point, I tell the story now and I kind of laugh that those were not great financial decisions. It didn’t even cross my mind like, “We have to be there. There’s no way that we cannot be at that conference if we’re really going to own this.” It wasn’t a consideration. If I were doing it again in a new business and I was considering going to an initial conference, I would think a little bit more about it. I hadn’t even got to that point where I could even process what I was doing.
Andrew: It does seem to make sense, though. Infusionsoft conference, you get all these Infusionsoft customers who are there. They care enough to pay tons of money to come to the conference. It’s not that expensive of a conference, but they fly out there, they have to give up some work, etc. You get up on stage. They let you sell from the stage. If you can only sell three of these services, then you end up making your money. But actually, that’s three at full price, $10,000. It turns out, according to my notes, you didn’t have the guts to charge the full $10,000.
Brad: No. Not a chance on earth. Remember, that $10,000, we’re not going to sell that. We went into the conference and we were going to sell the Makeover. We were going to sell it for $5,000. And then Dave went out to lunch or dinner with Clate, the CEO of Infusionsoft and he said, “Look, if you’re going to sell it for $5,000, you might as well sell it for $6,000. There’s no price elasticity.” I’m already literally freaking out about getting up on stage and selling from stage for $5,000 and now we’re going to add another $1,000 on top of it. So, we sold $6,000 and on top of that, we gave them a three-pay option with no interest.
Andrew: So, of course everyone is going to take the three-pay option. Did you have people flake on you on that?
Brad: A few. Not a ton.
Andrew: What do you say from the stage that gets people to buy from you?
Brad: So, I got up that year and I walked them through–at that point it was the iteration, at that point I was call it the They Do, I Do process. What it is is it’s a process for how to unpack your brain is the term that we use, but how to get the ideas of how you want your business to work, how to get them out in a way that you can actually go build.
So, everything we do, I want to make sure that all the services we do, we’re building a structured process that anybody else can follow and we and actually install in a company when we leave so they can be successful. So, I walked them through that process. At that point for them–there have been a lot of iterations since then–but at that point for them, it was like a breath of fresh air. It was basically like, “Oh, there’s hope. This thing can work. There’s a method to the madness.”
Andrew: So, you were teaching them this process that you developed.
Brad: Literally what I did is I got up–we had an hour–for 50 minutes, I walked them through the process. I gave them time to do their own blueprint. And then at the end I basically said, “Okay, here are some people who have come out and worked with us.” It was Sean Greeley and Dan Bradbury. And they had won contests with Infusionsoft before. They got up and said, “Hey, these guys are really smart.” I said, “Hey, we have a Makeover and you come out and we can do this for you. It will cost $6,000.” I still have the slide deck. “It costs $6,000 or three by $2,000. Come sign up.” And then there was a rush that I had never experienced before.
Andrew: How many people bought?
Brad: That night, I think there were 35 or 40 that bought. By the time we left the conference, we left with 66.
Andrew: 66. We’re talking about $396,000 in sales.
Brad: Yeah.
Andrew: And you can’t even drink champagne because you’re LDS. You must have gotten the best Evian they had at the hotel.
Brad: I will never forget walking back. So, I’m one stage and everybody comes and asks me questions, right? So, I have no idea what’s going on in the back of the room. We get done and I walk out. I’m exhausted because I’m like freaked out the whole time I’m presenting like, “Nobody’s going to even listen to me.”
We get out and we start walking back to our room. There are four or five of us or whatever. I’m like, “How many did we do?” And they’re like, “37,” or 38 or whatever. And I was like, “Are you freaking kidding me?” My brain didn’t even process anything else, like that just happened. We just did that. I couldn’t even process the fact that that just happened. I was kind of in a stupor all the way back to the hotel room. Then I couldn’t sleep. It’s all good.
Andrew: The process–I’m thinking about, frankly, somebody listening to us copying you, not so much for Infusionsoft, but saying to themselves, “I work at a company where there’s something that I do really well. People are paying tons of money to buy it from the company. Would they want to pay me as a consultant to make it better, to set it up for them and so on?”
In fact, there’s someone in my audience specifically who does, for a major company, he does procurement services. Apparently these big companies hire this major company–actually, I shouldn’t say their name. They’re a very well-known company that bigger companies hire to help with procurement services. He says, “You know what? I could do this for them as a consultant. Even help them work with my major company because they could use my help.”
What they need is that system. How do you figure out your system that you could get up on stage and teach and sell to people confidently for $6,000 even though it’s worth $10,000 or more. Where do you come up with the process? How do you put it tighter?
Brad: Lots and lots of hours. Malcolm Gladwell talks about 10,000 hours.
Andrew: But there are a lot of people that do 10,000 hours. They don’t know what they do. They just feel it, right?
Brad: Yeah. So, there are two elements. You’ve got to have the time. Without the time, the in the trenches expertise, it doesn’t count. And the other thing is you’ve got to have a really, really high–what’s the word I’m looking for? You’ve got to be stubborn. Like, I’m stubborn to the point where I don’t want to do anything unless I’m building a system or a process that the people can come behind and follow. It’s the way that I’m wired.
Andrew: I wouldn’t expect that. I wouldn’t expect it. I can see it in your output. I can see it in your interview with Jermaine. Where can someone get that interview with Jermaine? I think it’s really good. Go Google it. In fact, if you Google it, you wouldn’t even be hit with an email request anymore, the one that I saw. It’s just available online.
Brad: It’s on Jermaine’s site. You can just go watch it. He’ll be the one that pops up. But yeah, you can go to Jermaine’s site on his blog and look for “Brad Martineau interviews Me.”
Andrew: I saw it on Automation Clinic.
Brad: There you go. That’s Jermaine’s site.
Andrew: That’s his site. Yeah. Frankly, it’s just a Wistia video. I don’t remember how I converted it into an MP3, but I did so I could listen to it on the run. So, I see the system in the way you talk. But help me understand how that played itself out before you started a company so that when you started your company you had the system to count on. How did that play itself out when you were working at Infusionsoft?
Brad: So, I spent about a year and a half doing freelance consulting in between the time that I got laid off Infusionsoft and we started SixthDivision. In that time, again, one of the reasons why I hated that so much is because it was just like brand new projects over and over. Like everything was brand new and there was no structure to it. So, as I started working with those people, what I’m looking for is, “How do I make this easier for me to do the next time?” So, I started to look for–literally my brain is always processing through, “If I meet with an Andrew…”
Andrew: There’s no “an Andrew.” The Andrew.
Brad: The Andrew. Yes. My apologies. If I meet with The Andrew, I meet with a real estate agent, I meet with a mortgage professional, I meet with a bankruptcy attorney–I’m thinking of the people I worked with back then–somebody who’s a vet for dogs and he’s got some info products. I meet with any of them–how do I listen to what they’re doing and then have a systematic process for documenting it? It was a tool for me.
Andrew: I did this set of interviews on how to systemize. Here’s how deeply I got into it. I used to host poker at my house on a regular basis. I had a checklist for what needs to happen before poker is ready, like, “Make sure you wipe down the toilet so that it looks clean.” All the little details like that were taken care of. But it’s a house poker game. Most people would say that’s a little excessive. I felt really relieved by it because it allowed me to prepare to have people over for poker on a regular basis anyway. Do you do that too or are we just talking about business?
Brad: Absolutely. The reason why SixthDivision exists–and this is something I’ve discovered about myself–I’ve got a deeply held belief that most people in the world spend most of their time caught up in things that just don’t matter.
If you don’t have that checklist, then what you do with your poker night, you’ve got a flurry of activity to get ready and it’s weighing on your mind. When you have a checklist, what happens is it takes you way less time to get it done and you’re not thinking about it before. You’re not thinking about it afterwards. It creates space in your life for you to consider other things that aren’t important.
For me, on the business side, that’s actually what we do. The structure is actually what allows us to get to important conversations like “What should my messaging me in the first place? Am I even offering the right set of products or services?” most people can’t get past, “Where should I put this email and how do I build it in Infusionsoft and how do I get my reporting?” When we get just eliminate all of that because it’s systematic, all of a sudden–
Andrew: So, did you when you’re working for Infusionsoft, literally end a phone call and update a checklist or make it as you went along or was it just this mental checklist that you were building without even being aware of it?
Brad: The checklist component came later. When I was at Infusionsoft, I was working on building the product, not really the consulting side. But when I first started doing this, it wasn’t a checklist of, “Here are the things to do.” That came afterwards. It was, “How do I sit down with The Andrew, listen to his business and then how do I display it so I can turn around and say, ‘Hey, here’s what I’m going to go build for you.’ And have it make sense where I could do it for any company?”
So, what it really was was it was a worksheet. In my mind, I had a set of guidelines around it. Once we had that outlined, then I went and I started to create a checklist of, “Okay, here’s how we’re going to run the Makeover process. Here are all the things that are going to happen.”
Andrew: You know what? You mentioned The Andrew. I want to be real in this interview and be myself. But I have to admit that one of the places that I jumped in and said The Andrew is because I was looking at past interviews and I felt like I’m not owning the camera anymore. I am good at the conversation, but I’m not owning my presence. I’m only admitting my weaknesses and not showing my strengths. So, I said, “I’ve got to start doing more of that.”
At that point, when I said The Andrew, it was a result of that and I go, “This is just a little bit too much. Now I’m becoming a little bit like those jerky bloggers that I can’t respect or it’s time to scale it back or at least acknowledge it.” And then you parried it back and I said, “All right, perfect opportunity for me to talk about that.”
But let’s move on. You get off the stage. You get all these sales. It’s terrific, but at the same time, you end up with payment issues. In fact, you had an issue with American Express and disputes. What happened?
Brad: Yeah, American Express. So, we had a guy that bought, didn’t fill out his order for the right way. So, we charged the full pay of $6,000. The event ended on a Friday. So, we charged it that night. And then Saturday at some point–he never reached out to us. He basically went to AmEx and ran and dispute because he mentally thought he had checked off the three by $2,000. It’s the whole game of merchant accounts, right? We had gone to our merchant account and told them, “Hey, we’re going to see a spike in processing.” We’re a fairly new merchant account anyway.
But we hadn’t learned the lesson that AmEx plays by their own rules. They don’t get communication from your other merchant account. So, they got a dispute. It wasn’t a charge back. It was just a dispute. They locked up not only all the money we had already charged, but they locked up all new charges from AmEx that went through. They held up I think it was like $175,000 or $180,000 for six or twelve months or something. We got little bit sand pieces back.
Andrew: Whoa. Does that cause problems for you? You don’t have any inventory. You don’t have cost of goods sold. If anything, it’s kind of helpful, I imagine, because it reduces your taxes. I imagine you were on a cash basis back then.
Brad: We were on a cash basis. This was at the beginning of the year. So, we got all the money by the time the year was done. But what it did do is, again, super young business, not necessarily like were not on top. We didn’t have our pulse on the administrative and finance stuff. So, what it did was it forced us to be smart in a time that we could have been really stupid. We could have been like, “Oh, sweet, we made it. Let’s go do this and this and this.” All of a sudden it was like, “Yeah, you made it, but you’re not getting your money.”
So, it forced us to be smart. There was some pressure of like, “All right, this is going to be tight.” But never really ran into any real problems. It was just the chance of problems. But it forced us to be smart because we didn’t have extra cash laying round. I look at it and say, “Thank you, AmEx, but you do not need to do that again.”
Andrew: I’ve got to say to anyone that’s listening to us, if you ever have a problem with a company that is a smaller, newer company, don’t dispute it. It really hurts the company so badly that it becomes a memorable experience for them. Now, I’m not holding it against anyone who does it. But I do know that I look very favorably on someone who emails back and says, “Hey, I’ve had this issue. I don’t want to dispute it. Are you guys for real? Is everything okay?” Or even if someone does a dispute and we check in with them and they go back to the credit card company and say, “I’m working it out with the company. I made a mistake.”
There’s so much damage that you could do that the opposite is incredibly helpful and appreciative. New entrepreneurs get all these disputes directly in their inbox, which means that five years later when their searching their inbox to get your phone number because you’ve started to do business or refer you to someone else, boom, that comes up and they never forget it. It’s such an easy thing to do properly and an easy thing to do.
Brad: I still remember the guy’s name.
Andrew: I bet you do. I’m not going to ask you to embarrass him because that’s not who you are.
Brad: I wouldn’t say it, but I remember his name.
Andrew: Yeah. You remember that stuff. I don’t think he meant to do anything bad. You’re not aware of the fact that there’s a real person on the other side of it. There’s an advantage to be had by dealing with them like a real person. Thankfully we use Stripe so everything seems to be okay for us. Our dollar amounts are smaller per sale. If this ever comes up, people do deal with me very well and I’m always appreciated, but I can’t imagine what would happen if it was early on.
All right. I’m still looking down on my notes. That’s why I’m not looking you in the eye. It’s not that I’m ignoring you.
Brad: No, you’re good.
Andrew: So, now you do this. You continue with other conferences. It’s getting up on stage that really matters. The first one, you were training and then you did this small pitch at the end. Can you give me a tip based on having done this over and over again, now that the rest of us can learn about how to sell from the stage properly?
Brad: Yeah. This is kind of my formula when I create presentations. It’s worked to whatever extent it’s worked for us. We’re where we are and we’re doing all right. So, you’ve got to start at the end and figure out what mental state does the person that I’m going to try to get to buy need to be in for them to make a buying decision. Now, what hat requires is it requires, “What do I need them to get excited about?” and then also, “What do I need to realize are going to be there concerns?”
So, I’ve got my offer. You ought to have things in your offer that correspond with what they’re going to get excited. So, you’ve really got what’s included in the offer, what are they going to get excited about? What are all the concerns I’m going to have to deal with? And then my style is I’m going to teach real content for the duration of the time.
So, I don’t create fake content just for selling. I’m going to teach real content so that people can leave and say, “That was freaking amazing,” even if they bought or didn’t buy. But in the content, what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to take all the elements in your offer, all the things you want them to be excited about and all the concerns they’re going to have and you’ve got to address them throughout your content so that the time you get to the very end they’re not hearing that for the first time.
Andrew: So, what’s something they might be concerns about that you would work into your content?
Brad: I’m a brand new Infusionsoft user. I just started. I’m not ready for you guys yet.”
Andrew: Gotcha. So, how do you weave that in earlier into the presentation?
Brad: So, one way to do that is I would take an example of what we’re teaching and then I would bring a customer of ours up and say, “Look, as an example of what I mean by this point, here’s this person. This person came to us when they had been on Infusionsoft for a week. We’ve got a bunch of other clients like this person, brand new Infusionsoft users. Here was the outcome that happened for them.”
Andrew: I see. And now you’ve addressed it.
Brad: Another way is when you have bonuses or different elements of the offer, what I want to do is at the end of the presentation, I want them to have the least amount of processing time. So, if I have a bonus–like, we have a membership on the back end where you get ongoing help and support after a Makeover. It’s called the premiere membership right now. We’re going to rename it. I want the person to be excited about that because it’s super valuable. There’s no way at the end when I’m trying to get them to buy and take action that I’m going to be able to explain what it is.
So, I’m going to talk about that in my presentation. I would do it the same way. A third of the way through I’m going to talk about how we an talk about one or two or three things in our premiere membership. I want to make sure that when I get into my pitch, anything that I’m addressing in my pitch I should have already addressed once in my presentation.
Andrew: I see. All right. I think I’ve got everything here. Maybe we should talk a little bit about the products.
Brad: Okay.
Andrew: You still have that two-day–
Brad: The Makeover. Yeah.
Andrew: And then you have two other products according to your website. What are they right now?
Brad: I’m going to go away from the website. I’m going to tell you as of the middle of July what we’re going to have, which is really what’s going forward if that’s all right with you. So, we’ve got the Makeover, which is, “I want to come out and I want this done at lightning speed and I want your system that I can take and I can install in my business.” It’s the Makeover, two days, you come out and sit with one of our consultants here. We’re in Arizona.
The other offering that we have here is I can give you the methodology and the system. I believe that if anyone is going to get into automation and in particular Infusionsoft or whatever tool, they’re going to be at a disadvantage if they don’t have somebody internally that understands and knows how to use it. I don’t mean drag and drop. I mean knows how to take what’s in your head from a strategy standpoint and get it built.
So, we’ve got the entire program with all the video training and all the resources and worksheets. We can give it to you and you can go through. You can learn it yourself and use it as a training library if you’ve got to let go of an employee–
Andrew: I think I even saw one of your customers in preparation for this interview. Didn’t he have like templates that you sold him or something?
Brad: That’s the one that we’re coming out with. So, our offering that will be ready to go first week in July is we’ve gone through and what we’ve realized is across all the different business types, when you get to the campaigns–again, I deal in the world of automation and systems. The structure of a webinar campaign, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in. The structure is the same. There are some variations, but the structure is the same. The structure of how you’d run a sales process is the same. The structure of how you’d run a membership site is the same. The content might change and you might have some nuances, but they’re all the same.
So, what we’ve done is we’ve gone through and we’ve built a library. Right now we’re sitting at about 35 campaigns. There are really about 10-15 core campaigns and then we’ve got variations. So, we’re going to have this membership. It will be called the Automaters Membership. There are three things that come with that. One, you come in and every month you get a credit into our library and we can push a button and drop the entire campaign into your application totally built with baseline set of copy. You just go change the content and the thing is ready to go.
The second thing you get is every week we’ll hop on a phone call. We’ll do a live group phone call. You can ask any questions you want about the campaign that you’re trying to build. And then the third piece–because we’ve got a systematic process for implementing, we’ve also built–this is what will be ready come the first week in July–a dashboard tool where once you’ve built following our methodology we just drop the campaign into your app, you can log in to our tool and you’ll have a full dashboard that tells you where people are right now, what’s been happening over whatever timeframes and what your conversation looks like.
Andrew: Right. You’re talking about those little widgets that Infusionsoft gives you with numbers showing you where everyone is.
Brad: Those you have to build all those out after you build the campaign. With ours, you just log in. Literally, as soon as the campaign is built, it shows up in our tool.
Andrew: You know what? As I talk about this I realize maybe I shouldn’t be talking about this publicly because the whole marketing automation thing has a bad reputation. Info marketing or education marketing or content has a really bad reputation too. It feels like it’s not real. People might be losing respect for us. Forget us. They don’t know you. They’re learning from you right now. They might be losing respect for me. What do you say about that? This whole space is a little bit unrespected, I’ll go with that word.
Brad: You’re talking about he info marketing space?
Andrew: Yes. Even, frankly, marketing automation outside of software.
Brad: So, yeah, we’re talking about the same people–you’re talking about colleges, like the info marketing space, same thing, right? For me, information, it’s a training. It’s a program. So, if a certification is okay. How is a certification okay but information is not? How is a college degree okay but information is not? There is no difference only that the college decided that they get to hand out a piece of paper that someone else thinks is important.
So, for me, I don’t even pay attention to it because I want to go learn. Anyone that has accomplished any level of success realizes that–I loved one your about us page where you talk about what Mixergy is about. “I want to get people together that can inspire other people to go do what they do. I want to inspire people to have a cause,” like all the things that you listed off on there. And the one that I love, this is the one that came to mind, “I want to help people understand that no one person knows it all.”
It’s a sharing of information. I feel like there are a lot of people think that information ought to be free because it’s information. I think that where you create value, you should be compensated. So, if come into your world and I can say, “Hey, you’ve got a business. I can show you how to do all this stuff easier and it’s going to save you a bunch of time and money,” I just created value. There’s no reason in my mind why I shouldn’t be compensated for that.
Andrew: All right. So, suppose Mixergy starts working with you. We come in for two days. It would be me and a writer who would come in. I’d have to fly the writer out. We put us both in a hotel. But you guys are in Arizona, so it can’t be that expensive, right?
Brad: No.
Andrew: It’s not like San Francisco where it’s going to be $500 a night.
Brad: No.
Andrew: We do two days. I end up walking away with all the email scripts if she can write fast enough ready to go, right?
Brad: Yeah.
Andrew: The automation is in Infusionsoft ready to go.
Brad: Yeah.
Andrew: And the landing pages are ready to go, right?
Brad: Yeah.
Andrew: They’re ready to go anyway. Inevitably what’s going to happen is a week later things won’t be that good or we want to improve them.
Brad: Yeah.
Andrew: Do we improve it on our own?
Brad: So, it depends. We do have another program that’s an ongoing program where we can do service. It’s called our Elite 100 program. So, if you decide to enroll into that you’ll have a coach that you’ll work with. There are different levels. So, it depends on what you decide to do. But we can help on an ongoing basis to make tweaks and changes.
But our long term vision is I don’t want Mixergy or anyone else’s company’s success to be dependent on us. I want to help. But what we’re going to do is we’re going to help implement and install this system and process of implementing so at some point you don’t need us and the reason why you stay around is because we’re providing value above and beyond just, “Here’s how to drag this stuff here and cross T’s and dot I’s.”
Andrew: How often can we get together with you guys? That’s the part where I think I can open up to the audience. So, they can see me before we walk out there. They see me afterwards with what we have. And then ongoing, I think following along is interesting.
Brad: So, anyone that gets into our Elite 100 program, we’re on the phone once a month. How long we’re on the phone depends on which option you get into. But we’re checking in monthly. If our clients need more than when you’re in the Elite 100 program, we’ll do that at a discount if you need more time.
Andrew: What’s the price of that, the Elite 100? It seems like that’s where I need to be.
Brad: Yeah. There are two different levels. The base level is $1,000 a month. We do a couple of Masterminds in person at our office. We do a monthly call with me and all the other Elite 100 call members. Then you get a one on one call with your coach The higher tier is $2,500 a month. You do all of that plus you come out every six months and you do another Makeover.
Andrew: Okay. All right. I like it. I want to find a way to get this done. I think it would be compelling for the audience. I’ll tell you why I think it’s compelling. I have this little Slack group that I created. Did I say this in this interview? No. I said it in a past interview. I was interviewing a guy in Japan who happened to be on Slack and all these communities.
I said, “I’ve got try Slack. Nobody is inviting me to a Slack group.” He goes, “Yeah, well, they’re all very restricted.” I said, “You create one right here.” And he did. And I’m in there. I’m going in there and I’m saying, “Here’s what I tweaked today. What do you guys think?” They’re giving me this great feedback. I’m getting excited because they’re all watching as I do it and then they see the results. There’s this back and forth. It feels like this camaraderie and I want more of that.
Brad: Yes.
Andrew: I’m not going to follow up with Chase on this because Chase is not going to give me a deal. Who do I follow up with to make this happen?
Brad: I will follow up with you. I’ve got your number. I’ll make it happen.
Andrew: Can we lock something up–I want to talk to my team on Thursday and see if I can get my writer out. Can we talk after that?
Brad: Yeah. So, Friday all day we’ve got a consultant coming in. So, we’re going to be tied up all day Friday. But if you get back to me–well, you’ve got all my info. If you follow up with me after you meet on Thursday, I can get back to you maybe Friday if I’ve got a window depending on if we get done early, otherwise Monday for sure.
Andrew: All right. Congratulations on all your success. Everyone out there who wants to check out the rest of Mixergy–not the rest of Mixergy–if you want the rest of Mixergy, you’ve got to go to Mixergy.com and sign up and pay for all the old archive. But if you don’t want the old archive, if you want all the things that are new as I come out with them, all you have to do is subscribe to the podcast.
When you do, you get every single new interview for free. Where do you go to get that? Whatever podcast app you like, even if it’s that piece of garbage that Apple includes with their app. In fact, don’t even use it, frankly. Go install Overcast or Downcast if you’re on an iOS or if you are on Android, I really like DC Cast. There are so many good ones. Whatever you prefer, search for Mixergy. Sign up and you’ll get every single interview as I publish it online just like this one.
Brad, the website is SixthDivision–you know what? I have a very New York accent when I say “sixth.” Can you say the company name?
Brad: Yeah. SixthDivision.
Andrew: SixthDivision. And I’m really grateful to you for doing the interview. And I’m also grateful for Anne Marie Ward for hooking it up. She went to ICon, the Infusionsoft conference. She met you. She figured out what your revenues were by talking to you. She said, “Andrew, you’ve got to interview this guy.” So, we did.
Brad: Awesome.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for being a part of it. Bye, everyone.
