Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner.
Get this–a few weeks ago there was an entrepreneur here at my office, like right down there, having a drink with me. One of the things I asked him is, “Why are you going to Jayson Gaignard’s event? You have to travel cross-country to go to this event. You’re not a big events person. What is it about Jayson and his event that makes you want to fly out?” He says, “You know, I sat down and Jayson got me kombucha.”
Is it kombucha, kombucha? I never get it right? But this guy loved it. He goes, “I love kombucha. I don’t know how Jayson remembered that the previous year I had come and I loved kombucha. But he did and he handed it to me and there are all these little personal touches sprinkled throughout the event and throughout all the interactions with Jayson.”
And this entrepreneur wasn’t the only one to tell me that. Several others had told me that these little touches are what Jayson wins them over with. And I thought I’d like to get better at these little touches. Frankly, it’s pretty freaking hard. They’re little touches, but they take a lot of effort. Remembering them is effort. Figuring out what to do to use what you remember is effort.
Anyway, I invited Jayson here to talk about how he does it to teach us. So, maybe you and I can get a little bit of the Jayson Gaignard system into our companies. Jayson runs the event called MastermindTalks. It’s an invite only event for entrepreneurs.
Jayson, welcome.
Jayson: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be back.
Andrew: Yeah. You were here before. You were talking about a past failure and your recovery from it. Your recovery basically led you to create MastermindTalks.
Jayson: Yeah.
Andrew: Tell me about this kombucha. When I said it to you today, did you remember who the entrepreneur was and what you did?
Jayson: Well, there are a few people in our community that enjoy kombucha.
Andrew: It is pronounced kombucha, huh?
Jayson: I believe so. I’m not a huge health nut, but I believe so.
Andrew: Okay.
Jayson: Yeah. So, that particular story, I think–and we kind of talked about it off-air–small kind of touch points that I have in conversations with people when I find out something unique about them, something they enjoy, something they’re passionate about, I try to capture that as best as I can, whether it be in a notepad or whether it be in some kind of online CRM or whatever the case may be so that later on I can use it either as a piece of conversation or as a gift.
Specifically because there’s a great saying, “Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple and it’s that hard.” And that’s a huge area of focus for me, making people feel special, which, to me, is what our secret sauce is when it comes to MastermindTalks. It’s a very competitive space.
Andrew: Yeah. There are tons of events. Frankly, you didn’t have a huge following. You didn’t have a huge blog. You did not have a jack anything. But you built up this event with really incredible people who are all getting together and coming, like I said, not for anything other than the Jayson experience that you’re creating for them, right?
It’s not like they’re coming in to learn how to grow their mailing list. They’re coming in because they are going to–they’re coming in for this experience of getting to know each other and have the experience that you’ve created for them. You kind of demystified what you did with this entrepreneur I was talking about and his kombucha. Can you tell us now what it is now publicly? What was it that actually happened? It wasn’t exactly how he remembered it.
Jayson: No. People have short memories. So, what we did was–I know everybody who comes to our events rather intimately. Many of them are close friends. I make it my job to pay attention to Facebook news feeds and see what’s going on in people’s lives and try to absorb myself into the world as much as possible.
In this case of this particular entrepreneur, in our last event, which was the second event that he attended, we had this intake form and in this intake form, we had a bunch of random questions and one of the questions was, “What’s one of your favorite snacks?” And he said kombucha.
So, it’s something that we actually used at our second event. We kind of talked about it offline that at the event itself we asked that to everyone in attendance. During day two, the event after break, everybody came bac into the room and their favorite snack was waiting for them right there. We had people who wanted kombucha, McDonalds’ fries, donuts with sprinkles on it–we were running all over the city to make this happen. Also, I’m based in Canada. A lot of the items were US-based. So, we actually had to drive over the border to go shopping at like Wegmans and Whole Foods.
Andrew: To get them this food that they craved as Americans. So, that was in Canada or was it the US?
Jayson: So, the first two events were in Toronto and then our last event was in Napa and then our future events will most likely be in the United States as well.
Andrew: I see. Was it that you remembered it from a past intake form that he filled out?
Jayson: Yeah. We did that one thing during the second event where we got everybody a gift. But then there are some people that we got it for them again or we made a joke out of it. For example, one year there was a gentleman named Stefan. At the event he joked in his survey form–we said, “How did you like the food?” or something like that. He’s like, “I could care less. I’d be fine with a baloney sandwich or ham sandwich or something.” So, at this most recent event, we brought him out a ham sandwich. During the event, when lunch was being served we handed him a ham sandwich.
Andrew: And the way that you’d remember it is you’re documenting it somewhere.
Jayson: We’re getting into that place now where we’re starting to document.
Andrew: I’m going to talk about it in a moment. I want to just slow it down and get as much of this as possible. There’s something that you said that is really important for us to take away. A lot of us have intake forms. New people sign up for something. We have to ask them questions like, “What’s your name? What’s your billing address?” etc. You’re asking those kinds of questions that you have to ask someone, but you’re also asking the kinds of questions that you don’t have to ask that lets you know what your personal likes are and then you’re including it.
So, I’m trying to think of how someone like me could use it. A member would join my site and I would ask them, as I said, “What’s your email address and name?” I could ask them something about a personal preference and then react to it. What I’m wondering is at my price level, at $25 a month, it’s very hard to do that.
At your price level, you’re talking about thousands of dollars, entrepreneurs who are, in many cases, worth millions of dollars who are coming to your event–it pays to do it. Is there a way to do it at a cheaper scale that someone who’s got a monthly software as a service company could use?
Jayson: 100 percent. I think this is playing off of a friend of mine’s philosophy. His name is Joey Coleman. He actually spoke at the first MastermindTalks events. He has this philosophy that if you get the first 100 days of a customer’s lifecycle right, you’ll have a customer for life.
He goes over a bunch of different examples of basically that onboarding process that a lot of companies overlook where they put all this effort at the top of the funnel, get people in the funnel and then once they get that sale, you just get whatever the product is and then there’s no support there. There’s no hand holding, any of that kind of stuff. So, it’s how do you alleviate that buyer’s remorse by going that extra mile.
So, there’s some stuff that I do where I have programs–I have an online program that’s like $10 a month that I’m trying out right now for my podcast. There’s stuff there that’s still very high-touch, like I’ll do voice recordings in the emails to that target audience specifically or I’m really accessible through a closed Facebook group or whatever the case may be.
So, I think it just requires you to be more creative with it. Obviously when people are spending $6,000 to attend our events, we have a little bit more budget-wise to go over the top. But there’s a great saying from “22 Immutable Laws of Marketing,” which is what works in the military works in marketing and that’s the unexpected. So, how do you catch people off guard by either offering them a really personalized experience or just going that extra mile.
Andrew: You’re saying that in the beginning a lot of it was you remembering things about your community because you want to keep it small enough that you could remember everything about them. But now it’s now no longer a small team of people, right? It’s a growing team of people. Now you’re starting to use software. One piece of software I saw you compliment on your Facebook page was ActiveCampaign, right?
Jayson: Yeah.
Andrew: I’m now learning more and more about ActiveCampaign. What is it that you like about that software?
Jayson: I don’t know if I can name the others software I was on before, but I wasn’t happy with it. It’s a very well-known software in the internet marketing space and CRM and ecommerce.
Andrew: I know exactly what you’re talking about. I have no trouble saying it because I think you even said it. It’s Infusionsoft. I use it. I love it. And at the same time, I’m frustrated by it. Everyone feels that way.
Jayson: Yeah. I met Clate, one of the founders. I love their story. I love how fast they’re growing, that kind of stuff. From a user experience perspective, it is brutal to use it. It’s clunky and it’s big and robust and I don’t like it. Because of that, I’ve never really fully adopted it. It has some capabilities in it, but there’s not a lot of integration and all that kind of stuff.
I basically met this gentleman named Omar, who runs the $100 MBA podcast and we were speaking out for the US Military about a year and a half ago. He’s like, “Oh, I use ActiveCampaign.” And I’ve never heard of ActiveCampaign.” He’s like, “It does everything Infusionsoft does to some degree and I love it. I’ve never used anything else.”
So, he’s scaling his business rather quickly. So, I said, “Hey, I’ll check it out.” I looked at it and I switched over and it’s been just a godsend as far as its integrations, like how to integrate with it SamCart for checkout process. It’s beautiful to use.
Andrew: So it’s a CRM. It’s a way for you to keep track of your contacts, but unlike the kind of CRM you might keep on your phone for a phone book replacement, this one is really made for online marketing, for collecting email addresses, for keeping tabs on what people tell you when they’re joining your mailing list and then customizing the messages to them.
Jayson: Exactly.
Andrew: So, now if someone says to you, “I really love kombucha,” or, “I really love McDonalds French fries,” you would find a way to get it into ActiveCampaign so that not just you would know it. Someone else on your team today and in the future who wants to work with that client would know it.
Jayson: Yeah. That’s the next step for us. Now that I am building a team, getting everything from my head out so that people can run with it if need be.
Andrew: So, you have a conversation with someone. How do you get what you’ve learned into your ActiveCampaign?
Jayson: So, historically what I do is if I have a conversation with somebody, after the conversation I remember some key points that were interesting to that conversation or to that individual. I would do a voice recording on my cell phone. Probably not the most technical approach to do it, but I do a voice recording, just say, “Hey, so and so’s daughter. This is her name. She’s three years old,” a few interesting points, “This is where his company is. This is his struggle.” Whatever. I have it in my cell phone. Once a week I’d go through all my voice notes, and then I would input those into ActiveCampaign.
Andrew: I see. You do that to this day like that?
Jayson: Yeah. So, it’s manual in that sense. But again, those small points of the conversation that people forget that they told you, when you pull them up in conversation or when you do something like buy somebody kombucha that costs like $4 but blows them away, that’s where it kind of pays off. Caring is the ultimate competitive advantage, in my eyes, to some degree. I have a deep level of caring for everybody that comes to our events that I know them intimately and want to know them even more.
Andrew: By the way, you introduced me to Joey Coleman after the first interview here. He did a course on Mixergy about how to do these kinds of touches. He’s so systemized. You are more of a natural. He might be a natural too. But he explains is his a much more systemized process. I really love that you introduced me to him. And then I got to meet him in person recently at your event, actually. It was just such a great introduction for me.
So, you get it into your system. Why do you just record it? Why aren’t you emailing it to an assistant? Why aren’t you more systemized than that? Why is it so manual of you typing it in? Is that just because–I’m about to give you a multiple choice question and my interview coach says, “No multiple choice questions.”
Jayson: For me, it’s one of those things. That is my unique position in the company. What I do is really the relationship side of things. You never want to outsource your core competency. I can’t get somebody else to do the curation of the attendees for MastermindTalks or all that kind of stuff because that’s really what I’m best at. So, it’s really that. The reason I capture it is for my own use, simply if I forget these smaller points I have somewhere to refer to.
Also, as we were talking about, I’m now building out a small team that will help me source gifts for a specific individual. So, if a child is born or something like that, we have some gift ideas we can send them, some unique things. If I haven’t had a touch point with them in the last couple months, then we’ll maybe send them a nice gift-type thing. And then beautiful thing about social media is that everybody, you can easily find out about people’s passions with just a little bit of work through Twitter or Facebook.
Andrew: How do you know what to look out for in a conversation? The typical things you’re supposed to are, “Did they mention their wife’s name? Did they mention their husband’s name? Did they mention a child?” And you want to write that down. Those are good. Actually, it really is nice to check in with someone and say, “How is Olivia doing?” But what are you looking for that the rest of us aren’t noticing, that’s more special than just, “How is your son?”
Jayson: Yeah. On the flip side, it could be really creepy if you just met somebody for a few minutes and then they follow up a few months later and be like, “Hey, how’s your daughter doing?”
Andrew: I’ve done that actually with people and they forgot they told me their daughter’s name and I happen to remember it and it does seem a little bit creepy. You’re right. No one ever says that it can be that way and it can.
Jayson: Yeah. For me, it’s one of these things that it’s the way I’m wired. In the relationship building perspective, there’s this philosophy called uncommon commonalities. And the deeper the uncommon commonality between two people, the deeper the bond will be. So, usually if I’m in a networking setting if I’m meeting somebody and they’re like, “Oh, I’m an entrepreneur.” That’s an uncommon commonality because not everybody in the world is an entrepreneur.
Andrew: I see. So, you’re looking for things that are unique to them and you–uncommon to the rest of the world but you two share.
Jayson: In the context of taking notes on people, I take notes on what is uncommon period. Ideally, if there’s a commonality between me, great. But in a relationship building perspective, uncommon commonalities are a strong link. But if I’m speaking to somebody, if they say, “Hey, I love rugby.” Well, not everybody loves rugby.
Andrew: Got it. If they tell you, “I like basketball.” That’s not uncommon. It doesn’t stick out. Rugby is
Jayson: If they say a team or a player of a basketball team, that’s maybe something worth noting. But again, the stronger that uncommon thing that they enjoy or whatever makes them unique is, the more it will catch them off guard when you send a gift or you address it in conversation it he future.
Andrew: I want to challenge something you said earlier because other people have said it. But before I do, you have to show people that invitation you showed me before we got started. As long as you’ve got a camera and your internet connection, rock solid, man. Let’s show that.
Jayson: So, yeah, basically as I said “22 Immutable Laws of Marketing,” what works in the military works in marketing and that’s the unexpected. One thing we’re always trying to do is really raise the bar with the event, the lead up to the event. You think of the average event you go to. Usually you secure a ticket. There’s no communication leading up to the event. Maybe they send you a reminder a few days before.
But this last event, we did several things. We kept them updated throughout the entire process. We also did two things. One is these LCD cards. Now, this one’s not going to do it, but usually when we send these out by mail, when they opened it up there were three videos. The first video is me addressing them specifically.
Andrew: Could you hold it up center of the screen so people can see it–a little further, even if it means cutting your head off for a moment.
Jayson: So, the first video would be me addressing them directly and then the second video would play. But this is basically the card.
Andrew: I see. They open it up and there’s a beautiful video of the location.
Jayson: Yeah.
Andrew: That’s where the event is taking place, the one that they’re coming to.
Jayson: Yeah.
Andrew: And you’re saying it has another video on top of it or there’s a second card?
Jayson: So, all the ones I did for people were sent out to them. This was a sample one I had back at the office, which I grabbed on the way to this interview. But usually when they opened it, the first video they saw was me saying, “Hey, Andrew, I’m incredibly excited that you’ll be joining us at MastermindTalks.”
I do a message specifically to them, a personalized message. And then after that there were a few different buttons that they could pick, like an event update or a highlight reel of the venue. And then also everybody’s picture is the background. So, everybody who’s coming to this MastermindTalks event, we included their picture in the design.
Andrew: How many people?
Jayson: 150.
Andrew: So 150 people have their photos on the invitation on the website, I think, different places they’re in the background. What does that cost you to send out a video like that?
Jayson: So, these actually weren’t that expensive. I got a lot of people asking me afterwards, “How did you do this?” I looked it up on Alibaba. And I think we ended up paying about $20 a unit, $22 a unit plus shipping. It was a lot of work. It took about four days between my assistant and I because she was shipping and I was filming videos, but the reaction when people received it, people recorded videos. They’re like, “My kid is watching it. He won’t stop watching it. They were blown away.”
Andrew: And every one of them is customized. Dude, it would have been beautiful if you just said, “Here’s the location that we’re going to and I’m explaining to you how beautiful this event is,” but why go the extra mile then and spend four freaking days making personalized messages for people?
Jayson: Because the extra mile is never crowded. It’s one of those things. I put a ton of pressure on myself now. The first year what I did was I did audio recordings and I sent people audio recordings. The second year I did personalized videos. The third year, I did this. So, next year, I have no clue what I’m going to do. I feel like I have to show up at their house.
Andrew: Holograms.
Jayson: Yeah.
Andrew: You know, I remember asking Alexis Ohanian how he came up with his creative ideas like the one you just mentioned. And he said, “I smoke a lot of weed.” It’s the night before an event. I think the event that we did, he came in wearing–I don’t even remember what the local Washington DC hockey team is, but he had their jersey on.
Jayson: Capitals?
Andrew: What is it?
Jayson: The Capitals.
Andrew: Yeah. It might have been. I don’t even know. But he knew. He made sure to get the big jersey of that team and he came in to speak at this event that I was interviewing him in, in that jersey–huge. Got attention. People connected with him and it felt like he was local and not some Silicon Valley guy who felt he was too good for the room. I asked him, “Where do you come up with ideas like that?” He said, “I sit. I smoke weed. That creativity that comes from that experience is what helps me come up with the things that you’re noticing.”
I’m wondering do you have a process that does not involve weed because I just don’t like smoking it?
Jayson: Yeah. So, I’ve never done drugs in my life.
Andrew: That’s good.
Jayson: I haven’t even seen drugs. For me, I think creating–I think all great marketers, and I don’t position myself as a marketer, but I’ve surrounded myself with enough marketers to kind of tap into that empathy that you’ve built to some degree, being able to put yourself in the shoes of your prospect and see the world through their eyes and what their experiencing and that kind of stuff.
Andrew: So, what exactly are they seeing that would make them feel more connected to you if you send them a personalized video cards?
Jayson: I put myself in their shoes. If I’m spending $6,000 on an event that I’ve never been to before, that’s quite a bit of money. On top of that, our audience, they value their time more than they value money. So there’s a lot of this uncertainty. We’re both busy individuals. Two months out of your schedule gets pretty full. Four or five days out of your schedule looks pretty appealing. We also offer not only a refund policy for our last event 50 days out but a $1,000 incentive for people to cancel, which we were terrified of doing.
But just addressing those concerns by reinforcing it was a good move, by reinforcing this is something really unique and we care immensely about everybody in attendance. Those are just some things. It’s one of those things.
In regards to Alexis, one thing that I want to do with myself because I’m still in the business, in the planning of everything, I’m still very, very hands on and have a hard time letting that go because I care so much about the business and everybody that’s involved, I think just creating space. I’d like to take up mediation which would probably help with idea generation and that kind of stuff.
One tip I got from James Altucher and Claudia Altucher was–my old story was I landed a quarter of a million dollars in debt, didn’t know what I was going to do next. But what I started to do back then was idea generation on a daily basis. That basically would be me sitting down for 10 to 15 minutes. I’d pick one topic like business ideas. What are 10 business ideas I can come up with? And just start writing. Don’t judge them, just keep on writing.
Andrew: And that’s what James Altucher did. He would sit every single day and do that.
Jayson: And working that idea muscle–James Altucher’s philosophy is that if you don’t work it it atrophies. So, that’s kind of something that I do.
Andrew: Where do you write that?
Jayson: So, historically I would just write it on a notepad. I know James Altucher writes it on like a waiter’s pad. He carries a waiter’s pad with him everywhere.
Andrew: So, you still do it on a notepad. You don’t have it in your phone right now.
Jayson: No. I still do it on a notepad.
Andrew: Also, one thing we do as well is that we have quite a bit of space between our two events. We only do one event a year and the natural inclination of the way you’re successful in the space is to do multiple events and that kind of stuff. But if I did an event every three months, I couldn’t significantly raise the bar every three months. I need that space. So, we create that space, in essence.
Andrew: You do over $1 million now. I was just doing the math right now. I said $6,000 is what you mentioned per ticket times 150 people. That’s $900,000. You’ve got a car sponsor. I remember seeing that on your Facebook page. I couldn’t believe it was a car sponsor.
Jayson: Tesla.
Andrew: Tesla.
Jayson: Yeah.
Andrew: That’s a huge car sponsor.
Jayson: It was great. We did a behind the scenes tour of Tesla on May 1st with a bunch of our attendees. It was fantastic. That’s the event itself. We have sister events. We had a Mastermind group for the past few years, which was $20,000 a year. Yeah, we’ve broken that $1 million mark. For me, I had a business that was doing $7 million a year. That’s my standard. So, $1 million is still like small potatoes to me. But I have no desire to like get to that range again. Money, that whole $1 million doesn’t mean that much to me anymore.
Andrew: Don’t turn into hippie on me. I want to come back to these smaller events that you do because I’m interested in them. I should say anyone who’s curious about your past should watch my past interview with you. Just do a search for Jayson. He’s the only Jayson I’ve interviewed who spells his name J-A-Y-S-O-N. And I still have this thing that I want to ask you about that you about that mentioned that I want to challenge you on a little bit because I’ve heard other people say it.
But first, I should say that my sponsor is HostGator. If you need to host a website, just go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. They will give you 30 percent off and I’ll get, of course, credit for introducing you to HostGator. What I like about HostGator is you get to install with one click lots of different open source software including WordPress, which is what Mixergy is built on.
If you’re ever unhappy with them, and I don’t know why would be, but if you are ever unhappy with them, it’s very easy to take your whole site and go somewhere else. You can’t do that anymore because new products today make it so easy to get started and so hard for you to leave. You’re basically trapped with all your content on their platforms. But with WordPress and with other platforms that HostGator will host, you can do it.
Jayson, I’ve been asking past interviewees if they had to start over fresh, no money, all they had was a HostGator account and a website, pretty much any kind of website they could put on it, what would they start? What new business would you start if you could do it from scratch? I’m just talking to give you some time to think, but it looks like you’ve got something so I’ll shut up.
Jayson: Oh no. I was going to be like “Facebook.”
Andrew: It’s got to be simpler than that because you can’t have developers.
Jayson: Yeah. For me, oh god… If I’m starting from scratch, depending if I had a wife and a daughter at that time, I would intern for somebody. I don’t know how that would look from a website perspective.
Andrew: So, you wouldn’t even start a website. You should just get an internship somewhere else.
Jayson: Yeah. I would definitely reach out to somebody who had my model of success to some degree and do everything I can to intern. I have a ton of friends like Ryan Holiday. The reason he’s so successful and what has led him to this path is–
Andrew: He worked for Robert Greene.
Jayson: Yeah, Tucker Max and Robert Greene. That turned into him being Director of Marketing at American Apparel.
Andrew: Wait Tucker Max? Oh, Tucker Max did not work for Robert Greene. You’re saying Ryan Holiday worked for Tucker Max.
Jayson: Yeah. So, Ryan worked for Tucker first and then Tucker introduced him to Robert Greene. Robert Greene introduced him to American Apparel where at the age of 23 he became the Director of Marketing of a $500 million business. I know a lot of people who have had that story and I’ve had mentors along the way.
So, if I were to start from scratch, I wouldn’t even build a website. I’d use Amazon. I know a lot of people make a ton of money selling products of Amazon and white labeling it. But I would really reach out to somebody with my model of success and just intern under them until I could make it a paid potion.
Andrew: Why do an internship and not do an interview series like I have or a blog the way Ryan does today? There’s something about an internship that you find really important. I don’t want to brush over that.
Jayson: Yeah. Success leaves clues. And success leaves clues and proximity is power. So, being able to surround yourself with somebody who, again, is successful–whatever success looks like to you. It could be relationships. It could be health and fitness. Doing whatever you can to surround yourself with them. Just through osmosis you would learn so much, small cues and stuff like that. Mentorships are the only reason I’m successful. I’m not that smart. I dropped out of high school. The only reason I’m successful is I’ve always surrounded myself with people who are one or two steps ahead of me.
What that does unconsciously, there’s a primal part of our brain that we all have a deep desire to belong to a tribe because 10,000 years ago if you didn’t belong to a tribe, they kicked you out, you would die. You’d either get eaten by an animal bigger than you or you’d starve to death. But if you surround yourself with people who are one or two steps ahead of you now, what that does is it unconsciously forces you to bridge that gap between where you are and where they are as quickly as possible so you can feel like you belong. So, it’s a huge motivator on so many levels and then you absorb the way they think, their network.
Andrew: Here’s how I would take your idea in a different direction. Again, I’m just starting with a HostGator account and nothing else. I’ve found that a lot of internships are not that great. We remember Ryan Holiday because he’s an outlier. So, I want to be someone who’s a little bit more than just an intern.
My way of doing it would be to say, “I’m going to do 52 internships, one a week with 52 people I admire and I will blog about what I’ve learned from them.” And the reason I blog about what I’d learn from is so that the rest of the world gets to meet me and because then everyone oft these guys would know they’re not just housing me in their office and getting me to make copies. I am reporting to the rest of the world on what I’m learning from them.
And then what I would do is–now I have this community of people that are all coming to me to see how interning. Because HostGator also will host a membership site for me, I will create a membership site for other people who are dong internships too–all for free, all on just one account. And now I’ve done something that’s a little bit higher profile, that connects me with 52 people who I can learn from and that then opens me up to the rest of the world to get to learn from me. What do you think of that?
Jayson: Mr. Andrew Warner, you are a master of scale. You just took what I did one on one and scaled it out. There’s definitely something to be said about that. Also, sharing your experience and all that kind of stuff. That’s the one thing–I enjoy podcasting. I don’t do interviews. I do solo episodes. But it enables me to scale a message. If I have a one on one conversation, it doesn’t leave those two people. But throwing it up on Libsyn or something like that or iTunes, hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people can listen to it. I love your model of scaling and delivering value to the masses. This is why you’re so great at what you do.
Andrew: If you guys want to take that idea or frankly if you have any other idea–if you smoke weed, smoke some weed, sit down with your HostGator.com/Mixergy website, sign up and you’re going to get 30 percent off. Frankly, this idea I just came up with, I’m just looking at their website, $347 a month to start out.
I think you could launch the idea that I just came up with with $347 a month. They have tons of themes for you. But frankly, don’t mess with the themes. Nobody cares about the themes. No one is going to love you for your theme. Pick a simple theme and build your idea out on it. HostGator.com/Mixergy–I want to see what your idea is. Send it over to me.
All right. So, Jayson, here’s the part that I’m doing as we’re talking and that’s partially why I had to wait until now so I could keep doing it. You said with social media we could see on people’s profiles what they’re up to and what they care about and then find stuff to give them based on that.
So I’m scrolling through your Facebook page right now. I see Matthew Monroe says, “Word Domination Summit…” Well, that’s what Matthew Monroe is talking about, World Domination Summit, one your page. You posted the stand up desk 2.0, which is basically a stand up desk with a lean back thing on it and a desk attached to it. It’s actually a Kickstarter campaign. I didn’t realize that that wasn’t just a joke.
Let’s see what else you’ve posted. You posted a link to Tony Robbins. He’s doing events in hologram. All right. Do we have enough information here that you would pick out something really interesting from if you were on the outside trying to understand Jayson?
Jayson: I think it takes a little more digging.
Andrew: I have to scroll three pages down.
Jayson: Than three posts. For example, my wife is fantastic at this and she does a lot of this high touch gift giving. I’ll give you two quick examples. Ryan Holiday spoke at our first MastermindTalks. He’s a close friend of mine. What she did was she found his reading list on his blog. She found his favorite boo and she found a copy of this book signed by the author who passed away like 100 years ago and we gifted him that. He was blown away.
Andrew: Wait. The reading list meaning every book on the reading list?
Jayson: So, he has like his top 25 books to read. His number one book, my wife ended up finding a signed copy of that original book.
Andrew: What’s the book?
Jayson: I don’t remember.
Andrew: Let me see. “Ryan Holiday reading list…”
Jayson: I wish she was here. I kicked her out of the house so I could do this interview. I should have kept her around.
Andrew: I feel bad, but thank you.
Jayson: Another guy–this is another example–Aubrey Marcus from Onnit, she gave him a gift that blew him away. He wrote a poem. She got that poem engraved on a journal, on this like leather bound journal and it had like a fountain pen and stuff like that and he was absolutely blown away by it. These are all things you can find online. You just have to get a little creative with it.
Andrew: I see Books to Base Your Life On number one book is “The Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius. He is dead. It’s true. Did you get him a signed–no.
Jayson: No. From Marcus Aurelius–
Andrew: Imagine you got that and he was too embarrassed to tell you, “Hey, you know what?”
Jayson: I think it’s “See Sammy Run” or something like that. He has multiple different reading lists but he has this one where he talks about his favorite author constantly. So, those are some examples, purely just doing research online.
Andrew: I see. All right. So, it takes a little bit more than what I’m talking about, but I can see how this stuff is online, what Ryan says is online. Here’s another one. This is the one that I emailed you to say, “Is this unusual or can we have a whole interview on it?”
Around the time of the Napa event, I saw on Jim Kwik’s Facebook page he said, “Just arrived in Napa Valley. Excited to speak for MastermindTalks. Found my favorite superhero waiting for me in my room.” And it’s a framed copy of “The Green Goblin and Spiderman,” I guess the Green Goblin and Spiderman are fighting in it, with a handwritten note from Candice and Jayson. What’s the process for coming up with that?
Jayson: The same somewhat process. We know Jim a little bit. We know he’s huge into superheroes and comic books and stuff like that. What happened was we knew who his favorite character was. Oddly enough, my wife is into comics as well. When she was shopping for comics once, this one guy brought up this unique piece he had. We ended up buying it far, far in advance before we knew that he was speaking at the event.
Sometimes we bankroll some of these gifts. If a unique opportunity comes about, we’ll just buy the gift. I have my wife’s Christmas gift already because I bought it and I just have it out of the way.
Andrew: A year in advance. Where do you even hide all this stuff?
Jayson: I can’t tell you where it is.
Andrew: You have storage for all the gifts that you’re buying for guys like Jim Kwik?
Jayson: We keep it around the house in certain areas. But we do kind of stockpile gifts because we know eventually we’ll buy them a gift and this is the perfect gift. So, yeah, in the case of Jim, it just came our way and then oddly enough he was speaking at MastermindTalks and we usually buy all of our speakers a very unique gift, so that’s when we gifted it to him.
Andrew: Let’s take a look at the knife. How about that? I’m looking at my notes and I see you’ve got a knife sitting next to you. What’s up with that?
Jayson: So, this is part of, again, that whole lead up to the event. This was actually done by a friend of mine named John Roland who’s huge into Cutco knives as a number one sales guy. But basically what we did was we did a little bit of a play on them carving out time to be at the event. Basically the knife, I don’t know if you can see it.
Andrew: Yeah. It says “MastermindTalks” and there’s some text above it.
Jayson: Yeah. So, the text above it says, “Handcrafted exclusively for the Jayson and Candace Gaignard family.” So, we made one for ourselves. This was a sample first. But we did this for all of our attendees where we addressed the person that’s coming and the spouse and the family as a whole. And then sometimes we put their business logo there. Sometimes we didn’t. It would depend on the relationship between the spouse. Sometimes there could be animosity towards the business. So, you don’t to be like, “Hey, it’s a reminder my husband owns this business that I hate,” type thing.
Andrew: It is. The animosity that the wives have is that they’re basically widows because the men go and do their own thing a lot.
Jayson: Yeah. And the huge thing is we try to address that. This year we had a spouse component to the event.
Andrew: I heard so many positive things about that. I don’t know if you heard the positivity for that. They loved it. That’s the only reason why this stuff came up.
Jayson: Yeah. That’s one thing. People think as entrepreneurs we have a deep desire to be connected to like-minded entrepreneurs, but the spouses of entrepreneurs, that’s incredibly isolating. So, just getting them to connect with other spouses normalizes their lives as far as what they’re going through.
Often times you feel like, “I’m the only one that deals with a husband who always has to travel or works late hours,” and that kind of stuff. When you actually are able to connect with other spouses who are going through the same thing, it just normalizes that experience and you build this compassion from it.
So, these knives basically were sent out. They were about $200 a knife, I think.
Andrew: Why spend $200 a knife? What’s the connection to the knife that’s so important?
Jayson: So, the way we positioned it–so, there are two things. One, the way we worded it was, “Thank you, Andrew, for carving out time to be at MastermindTalks.” So, there was a little play on words there. But there’s also a philosophy that I learned from my buddy, John Roland, which is cost per impression when it comes to a gift.
So, if I give somebody a gift like an Edible Arrangement or something like that, they eat it. It’s gone. They no longer remember it. Something like a knife like this they use on a daily basis. So, consciously or unconsciously they will remember who it’s from and I will stay top of mind in that sense.
A great example, I heard a company, I remember reading a book once about company culture and that kind of stuff. They would talk about like never give cash bonus. Somebody will take a cash bonus and put it right into their mortgage, never see it again and forget about it, forget that they ever got the cash bonus to begin with.
However, what they did was throughout the year they give you points. If you did good things for the company, you’d get points. At the end of the year, there would be this catalog of items you could buy with the points, like a big screen TV or trip or whatever the case may be. Their philosophy was every time you looked at this TV, you’d know where you got it from. It was that cost per impression. That’s really what these were for. $200 is a lot of money. But again, I’m top of mind every time somebody gets to cut something in their kitchen.
Andrew: You know what? Hal Elrod sent me three knives from Cutco. First of all, I had no idea who good they were. I only interviewed him because he’s a door to door salesman. They were so freaking good. They actually really are good. It makes a difference. The second thing is I see it in my house and people ask me about it all the freaking time.
Jayson: It’s funny. That’s one thing in regards to the quality of knives. I don’t know if Cutco is big in Canada because I had never heard of them before.
Andrew: I never did either.
Jayson: I heard they were amazing knives as well. Why that worked out really well is because when people got this, I’d say half of the people would take a picture and post it to Facebook or Instagram and we have like dozens of those screen shots of people sharing it. But the comments would be like, “Oh, that’s a Cutco knife? That’s a great knife.” That’s the one thing. You never want to gift something that’s crap. So, the nice thing about Cutco is because it is a great brand, people reinforced, “Oh, that’s a great knife.”
Andrew: I was really expecting it to be a pretty shoddy knife, frankly. The only reason that I thought it would be shoddy is because they sell it door to door. I thought it was more about the salesman than the product. I was wrong. But the salesman was really good.
Here’s another cool thing about Cutco–when I interviewed Hal Elrod about how he built his Cutco business, the Cutco sales people are so rabidly supportive of each other and so curious about what it takes to be a good salesman that they will share the interview.
So, my interview with Hal about how he did this door to door stuff was shared and commented and talked about in a way you wouldn’t expect a guy who just does knives to be shared. Anyway, I haven’t interviewed John, maybe I should. But I saw Hal was at your event also.
Jayson: He was. He’s been to almost all of our events. He’s signed up for next year as well.
Andrew: How do you know who to invite to the event? It feels like that’s also key.
Jayson: That’s our secret sauce. I think that’s really what it is. I have no problem sharing it. It’s more of an art than a science, which is at our first MastermindTalks event, we had 4,200 entrepreneurs apply for about 140 spots. And initially I went through every single application one by one. Those that I thought weren’t the right fit, I sent them an invitation. When they secured a spot, I hold a phone call with them.
During that phone call, I had a hard time assessing my traditional model of entrepreneur is somebody with a traditional business and traditional overhead and staff and all that kind of stuff, but there are a lot of people in the world now who are entrepreneurs who just need to a laptop to run a multi-million dollar business and have a team of contractors and that kind of stuff. The business landscape has changed, so I have to kind of shift my model. But they had to be an entrepreneur.
During the phone call, I assess, “Are they going to get great value from this event? Are they going to be a good fit?” I had a hard time with that as well. Some organizations you join, your business has to do EO. Your business has to do seven figures. Your business can do $1 million in sales but you spend $1.2 million to make $1 million. That’s not a great indication you’re an entrepreneur. At the same time, your business could do $100 million but you’re a jerk and I don’t’ want to spend time with you.
So, after every phone call I ask myself, “Would I want to have dinner with this person?” And if the answer was no, I knew it in my gut right away. If the answer was no, I’d refund their money. The first event we’d refund $43,000 in paid tickets. The second event we changed up the model where over the year, I identified about 120 entrepreneurs that I thought would be a great fit and I reached out to them individually by doing video emails. I had 78 percent of those people sign up for MastermindTalks for the second year. Our third year, that event sold out four months in advance and that was just through referrals.
Andrew: Roughly four out of five people who you created a video for ended up buying a ticket and flying out and coming to the event?
Jayson: Yeah.
Andrew: Wow.
Jayson: For the second event. And the third event, we somewhat used the same philosophy. I don’t know what the conversion rate was. But it was probably the same, if not a little better. The next event–we have to rethink about it because we only allow a third of our attendees to come back historically. We are offering 45 spots. At the last event we had 97 order forms. So, we’re kind of figuring out what to do now that we have significantly more demand from the right people than supply. So, we’re almost ten months out of the next one and that’s when we have to figure it out.
Andrew: I should have dug in deeper earlier, so I’ll circle back. You said cost per impression with gifts matters. I understand a knife gets you a lot of impressions for the cost because people have it in their knife drawer. They’re not tossing it out and it comes up in conversation when they’re carving the turkey or whatever. What else is there that has a high impression?
Jayson: God…
Andrew: A lot of people think of shirts, but we’re done with shirts. You’re not wearing a logo shirt. I’m not wearing–
Jayson: This is why you need to bring John Roland on because he’s great at this kind of stuff. He sent me a pair of headphones, these LSTN Headphones which are all the kind of rage right now. I got that from him a couple weeks ago. His philosophy is that you also want to engrave people’s names on it. I always thought that was weird until his reasoning for it is like, “Somebody will spend $100 million to like sponsor a wing of a hospital so that they can put their name on it. People’s names matter.” So, a lot of the gifts that he gives, they’re engraved, for the most part, and personalized in that sense. So, I’ll try and think of other cost per impression gifts.
Andrew: Do you engrave it with your name or their name?
Jayson: Their name.
Andrew: Never your name.
Jayson: No. So, that’s the one thing. Never brand something. If it’s branded, it just completely takes the essence out of it.
Andrew: So, you would never send them a knife with your logo saying, “I’m looking forward to seeing you at MastermindTalks,” with the idea that now your logo will be in their knife drawer.
Jayson: Yeah. I think that would be a huge mistake.
Andrew: Why is that a mistake?
Jayson: Just using branded things. If I wanted a knife, I could buy a knife. That’s the one thing. If I got a knife, I’m like, “Oh, this is good,” then I could probably buy my own set to some degree. It just shows a deep level of caring and almost being humble to some degree that you don’t need to plaster your logo everywhere because the people who matter, the people who signed up for your event, they know who it came from, right? So, there’s no reason to–it’s a great conversation piece and that kind of stuff. But again, there’s no reason to–
Andrew: It makes so much sense and it takes a level of trust that pays off, trust that if you don’t put your name on it, they still will remember you.
Jayson: Yeah. If you’re not remembered for doing something like this, there’s something wrong with your business model, not necessarily the gift itself.
Andrew: Here’s another one I saw. Our producer, Jeremy Weisz, had a photo up of a book you gave him, the Elon Musk book. What’s your process for that or did you send it to all the entrepreneurs knowing that every one of them is going to love Elon Musk?
Jayson: No. So, that’s a unique one that you caught. So, in the intake form for our most recent event, we asked everybody, “When you hear the word successful, who’s the first person that comes to mind and why?” And Elon Musk came up probably more than a third of the people in attendance.
So, what we did was he had a book coming out two or three weeks after Mastermind Talks. So, we pre-ordered a copy for everybody who said that they loved Elon Musk. So, that was just a unique opportunity that the starts aligned. We knew that these people loved Elon Musk. The book was coming out so we were guaranteed that they didn’t have it. So, we preordered a copy for everybody and that’s how they got it. So, that was a good catch. I forgot about that one.
Andrew: That’s fantastic. What other questions can you ask that will draw people out and get you ideas for gifts?
Jayson: I think for us, definitely our intake form, it helps immensely.
Andrew: But a question like–
Jayson: Another great example, this is another special one we did this year for the first time ever. We asked people, “What’s something on your bucket list?” Something that simple. Three people in attendance said, “Going on an African safari,” and there was a handful of people who had been on an African safari at MastermindTalks because we would also ask, “What is the most exciting thing you’ve ever done?”
So, we’d sometimes during the event we’d sit them next to each other and not tell them. One thing we did was we brought on a sponsor to sponsor an African safari. What we did was the three people that were there, they are all men and they were all physically fit. So, we made them do a pushup contest and the person who won the pushup contest actually won this $8,000 safari. So, even helping people meet their bucket lists or whatever.
Another great example–we asked people, “If you could have dinner with three people living or dead, who would they be and why?” Some people said James Altucher. Well, James Altucher will be at the event. So, I’ll seat you next to him at dinner. So, we do stuff like that. We’re in a unique position where they have to fill out the intake form before they come to the event. The average software as a service company can’t just send out a survey and be like, “Hey, we want to get to know you better and expect a good response rate.” So, we’re unique in that sense.
However, you could also have somebody on staff to do an hour or two a week, go deep with some of your top customers, your top ten customers, dig as deep as you can on their social media profiles and get as much dirt as you can, to some degree, so that you can be creative when it comes to gift giving or acknowledging other stuff.
Andrew: A lot of this stuff costs money and has connections. I understand how you are in a very unique place because the people who come to your event are superstars. Tim Ferriss is sitting there next to me. Joe De Sena, founder of the Spartan Race is sitting at dinner there. The guy is such freaking good storyteller. You have access to him. He owns like a town, I think. There’s so much that’s going on with these people.
So, you’re in a unique situation. I don’t want people who are listening to this to say, “If I ever sold my software, if I ever sold access to my site for $6,000, then I could do this. But until then, Andrew, stop wasting my time.” There’s got to be something that doesn’t cost money, that’s more accessible. What example can you give me of that?
Jayson: Yeah. It doesn’t have to be as big as like big gifts. It could be something as simple as when somebody signs up for your service, having an auto responder or even just a personal outreach from somebody form your team saying, “Hey, I just saw you signed up. It’s been a couple of days. I wanted to make sure everything is running smoothly.” Not all companies do that. That’s a way to stand above the crowd.
One thing I do from a relationship building perspective–when I say relationship building, it’s with all my attendees, my customers–on January 1st, I sent an audio message to everybody individually who was pretty much in my network. I did like 300-something audio messages to people saying why I was grateful for them specifically.
It costs nothing to do it. A Soundcloud account costs me $6 for the month. It took time. It took a lot of effort, but it goes a long, long way. Depending upon if this is a personal thing or a business thing, there are always ways to increase those touch points. You just need to be creative about it. It can be something as simple just as an outreach to one of your top customers and then just connecting with them.
Andrew: That’s such a good idea, actually. Do you ever get to a place where because you’re so natural at it that you accidentally ignore someone? You don’t have a checklist that makes sure that every single person on your list got hit with something. So, there are some people who got twice as much as others and some who got none?
Jayson: So, I’m not a super internet marketing guru, automation stuff. I know guys who are just ninjas at that kind of stuff and I’m not there. Literally, for the onboarding process for our last MastermindTalks event, I used a Google spreadsheet. So, when I’d send an order for the knife, I’d put the tracking number. It was very, very difficult in that sense.
So, I don’t have a perfect system on that front. But the nice thing about us is we only have 150 attendees. Even though everything is not perfect, its’ still relatively management. We’re hoping to implement better systems in the future for sure.
Andrew: Do you ever get anything wrong? Do you ever accidentally say to someone–yeah, you did.
Jayson: One thing comes to mind specifically, when we sent a knife to one of our attendees. Also, we don’t have the spouses names often times. So, we’re addressing the spouses on the engraving on the knife. So, we’re digging through Facebook and saying, “Who are they friends with that has the same last name that they do?” And then click on that profile and are they in the same pictures? Do, they have kids in the pictures? We’re doing that level of deep digging.
There’s one friend of mine who I reached out and I wrote on the knife, “Handcrafted exclusively for Jason and Brenda so-and-so family.” I didn’t realize that Brenda was not his wife. That was actually his girlfriend. So, they got the knife and they laughed about it. We’re all kind of friends on some level. I was like, “Shoot.” I was kind of made I spent $200 on a knife and it wasn’t correct.
Andrew: Wait. Did you just reveal to his wife that he has a girlfriend?
Jayson: No. That would be funny, wouldn’t it? No. But basically, the girlfriend received it and she was like, “I didn’t know that we were married,” just as a joke-type thing.
Andrew: Oh, I see, just that they were dating and they seemed like they were married. Got it.
Jayson: Exactly. So, he was divorced. I didn’t know that. Thankfully we didn’t put his ex-wife’s name on it. Thank god. But we put his girlfriend’s name and we made it look like they were married by using the same last name. The one thing too was that she had a different last name on Facebook, but my wife has a different last name on Facebook.
Andrew: I was wondering about that. My wife does too.
Jayson: Yeah. So, it proves to be a little difficult. Sometimes you’re playing a little bit of a guessing game. But people see where the gesture came from and it was a nice conversation piece for the future.
Andrew: Yeah. I could see that. All right. I think I’ve got everything. Did I miss anything? Actually, do you have any other stuff there? You’ve got a knife.
Jayson: The one thing we did this year which really blew people away was in our workbook, we did an attendee rolodex but not just like a traditional attendee rolodex. Often times you’ll go to an event and you’ll get a PDF of the attendees and it’s these bios in the third persona and your eyes kind of glaze over. They’re kind of boring.
What we did was with those intake forms, when we ask people, “Share an interesting fact about yourself. What’s one of your top business achievements, top personal achievements?” Basically we created a rolodex of everybody in attendance including all of the speakers so that people could connect on a deeper level than, “What do you do for a business? What industry are you in?”
Andrew: You put their contact information there too?
Jayson: Yeah. So, with their permission, we put their contact information in. This took us probably almost 100 hours to do. Once we got the answers form everybody to be about 15 answers each, we’d go through them and pick a top three or four and then we’d put them in the workbook or in the attendee rolodex.
And again, coming down to uncommon commonalities, that’s when you start to see stuff like somebody has on their bucket list they want to go on an African safari and then somebody, the most exciting thing they’ve done is go on an African safari. So, we’d sit them next to each other or we’d see it on the workbook and that kind of stuff. So, that’s another step that we’ve done to really enhance the experience of our events.
Andrew: That’s a really well done thing. I really like the event. If you could describe it beyond just an event for entrepreneurs, how would you describe it? What’s the purpose of the event?
Jayson: Well, content is abundant. Some people may come to events or our event for content but what they leave with is community and that’s far more scarce and far more valuable. So, that’s our huge focus every year. Speakers from the stage are great, but for us, the stage is not a pedestal. There are amazing people in attendance who are also speaking on stage. So, making everybody feel unique in that sense throughout the event matters, but getting people to leave with community.
Andrew: How do you maintain that community? Actually, you know what, what I heard from someone is–I was trying to figure out a community for Mixergy and they said “Jayson does this–every post has to start with give or ask.” Where is this? What is this thing?
Jayson: Yeah. What we do is we take the relationships from the event and then we pull it online. So, after the first day of the event, we throw everybody onto a Facebook group. So, they already met face to face to some degree, so they pull that energy online. Basically, the model of our Facebook group is either you’re asking for something, you’re giving something or you’re praising somebody.
I got this actually from Tim Ferriss. It’s worked like gold. We’ve had our Facebook group for three years now. Every year we kind of clean it out. We only allow the newest attendees to be a part of it because it is a one-year kind of community. But often times with these Facebook communities, it could be people promoting their, “I have a new blog that just came out,” or a lot of stuff that’s solicitation. We have a strict non-soliciting policy within our event.
So, it has to fall within those three categories–either you’re asking for something, you’re giving something or you are praising somebody within the community because you had coffee with them or they gave you some guidance or that kind of stuff.
Andrew: Jayson, these interviews that I do here on Mixergy wouldn’t really amount to much unless there was a mission behind it. If it’s just me chatting with other entrepreneurs, it gets boring. But my mission was I started this company and it didn’t do very well and I wanted to learn from other entrepreneurs how to do better and let my audience learn along with me. So, there’s a mission there. What’s yours? What’s the mission beyond getting entrepreneurs together or is that the mission?
Jayson: I think that was a pretty big pain point for me. It’s really pulling entrepreneurs out of their businesses, out of their business so that they can see the forest for the trees. The people that come to our events, we have a saying that an entrepreneur is somebody that goes from working in their business to on their business but there’s a second tier of entrepreneur that goes form working on their business to working on themselves. These are individuals that focus on growth in their personal life, their health, their relationships, their business as well.
So, it’s just helping create that community and that environment for them to pull out of their business and their busyness and also that community to support them in whatever success looks like to them. Nothing jazzes me more than seeing two entrepreneurs connect and going for coffee and helping each other out and that kind of stuff. That’s my biggest payoff.
Andrew: Actually, you know what? There is one other thing I wrote here in my notes. You mentioned the Mastermind Groups. I forgot to go back and ask you about that. What are the Mastermind Groups?
Jayson: So, we did this for the first two years, which was we launched a Mastermind Group from Mastermind Talks. Events are greats. You learn a lot of cool tools and tactics but often times you get back to the office on Monday morning and you just get back into the business of things you don’t implement.
So, we decided to create this Mastermind Group which was quarterly retreats. They’re very experiential. So, we did a behind the scenes tour of Apple. We did a behind the scenes tour of Soleil, the Bellagio, a lot of cool stuff like that. But it was a small intimate group. It was $20,000 a year a year. It was about 15 people in the group. It went really well.
We did it for two years. It was a great model financially. But I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I thought I would enjoy facilitating Mastermind Groups and talking about people’s problems. I didn’t. It didn’t light me up. So, instead we switched to a new model where people go to the Mastermind Talks for different wants and needs. They’re from various industries, various different business sizes. So, you can’t appeal to everybody’s model of the world.
So, Mastermind Talks, the event itself is very kind of broad. So, there will be some personal brand talk. There will be some health and fitness talk, all that kind of stuff. But this year we’ve branched off with three sister events, which as more specific. So, we have one on personal branding with Joey Coleman, oddly enough.
There’s this gentleman named Philip McKernan that we partner with. We’re doing a couples retreat and then a clarity retreat. And that model works really well for us and there’s a lot of opportunity to do those events in the future. So, it’s something that lights me up to do. So, that’s kind of our structure for that, but our Mastermind Group historically was that $20,000 a year thing which we just ended recently.
Andrew: Makes sense. All right. I’ve learned a lot from this conversation. You also mentioned earlier Omar Zenhom. I think I’m pronouncing his name right. Omar actually taught me something that I keep forgetting to bring up in the interviews. He showed me that in our podcast notes, we can link out to stuff.
I keep meaning to say that if you’re listening to this interview via a podcast app, you should be able to click on my face or click on the logo or slide it up depending on what your app is and you’ll see some notes on Jayson and you’ll see a link that takes you into the iTunes store where you can rate this interview if you like it or if you haven’t subscribed and just happen to have one program on your phone, you can subscribe to the podcast.
It’s all there thanks to Omar. He’s taught me so much. I keep forgetting to bring it up. He said, “Bring it up. Let people know that in the interview that that’s what they can do because no one’s going to think to slide up on your face or click your nose or whatever it is they need to do.”
So, guys, click my nose, slide up on my face, whatever. In the interview notes, you’ll get some info on Jayson and you’ll be able to sign up to this podcast. If you prefer, you can also go to Mixergy.com/Podcast and subscribe. Now, I urge you to not just do that on your phone but to take your friend’s phone and sign them up also. Once you do, you’ll change your lives and that’s a lot of impressions for no money at all, more even than a knife.
Jayson, thanks so much for doing this. What’s the URL if people want to go check out the site?
Jayson: MastermindTalks.com is the event itself. Yeah. Thank you for the work that you do. I’ve been on a lot of podcast interviews and you are by far the best in the space.
Andrew: Thanks. I work like crazy on it. I’m looking now even at research that someone did on you last year in preparation for the interview. I hired a researcher. I said, “Here’s what I need to know about this guy. I want to know does this company that he said he built, was it real? I want to know who else says anything about him. I want everything.”
Jayson: So, listen, I’ll say this really quickly. I’ve told several people about this and I’ve done probably 50-60 interviews right now. You did an interview with me and you brought up my old company and the names of some of my old employees that I forget, but you guys did digging on it. Oddly enough, I reconnected with one of my old employee I haven’t seen for four years. I told him the story. I was like, “I was on the interview and this guy brought up your name and I was like blown away.” The importance of research, right? The information is out there, you’ve just got to care enough to get it. You care immensely about the quality of the content you put out and it shows.
Andrew: Yeah. I really do. I’m so proud that you came back on here to do this interview with me. I really appreciate you all out there for being a part of the Mixergy community. Thank you so much for being–I was going to say if you subscribe, but for listening anyway that you like, especially if you’re subscribers. Jayson, thanks.
Jayson: Thank you, my friend.
Andrew: You bet. Bye, everyone.
