Andrew: Hey there, Freedom Fighters. You know me, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. This place where I do interviews with entrepreneurs as in-depth as possible to help you understand, based on what they’ve done, how you can build your business. My hope is that as you listen to these interviews, you build a company, and then you come back here and let me interview you so you can teach other people.
Now joining me today is a guy who says that he had a business where he did it all. He was like the face of it, he was the superstar of it, he was the guy, he was the entrepreneur. And it felt great until it didn’t, and then he decided what he wanted was a product that sold without him, a business that ran even if he wasn’t there to be the face and be energy of it. And that’s what he got today.
His name is Ed O’Keefe. He is the founder of Marine Essentials. They make supplements designed to help people live longer and feel better. Yeah, supplements, I know that’s not usually the kind of thing we talk about here on Mixergy, but we want to learn from as many entrepreneurs as possible. We want to figure out what worked for them and bring it back to us, and so we’ll talk to Ed about that.
And this interview is sponsored by a new sponsor for me. It’s a company called KickoffLabs. Later on I’ll tell you why if you want to grow your mailing list, they’ve got this secret technique that helps you grow your list. It’s secret right now, but you know how things are online. Once it gets out, everyone’s going to copy it.
Anyway, I’ll show you what it is and hopefully you’ll use it before everyone else jumps on it. And it’s sponsored by Toptal. Oh, I’m so proud that Toptal is still a long time sponsor of ours. Toptal helps you hire developers. Later on I’ll tell you why if you need a developer, you better check out T-O-P-T-A-L .com/Mixergy. But first I’ve got to welcome Ed. Ed, good to have you on here.
Ed: Andrew, awesome to be here. Awesome to be with your amazing crew of people at Mixergy.
Andrew: Thanks.
Ed: And I love what you’re doing there, man.
Andrew: It seems like as I was reading the notes that my producer put together on you, that you’re the kind of guy who was like I was growing up. That I used to listen to self-improvement CDs, and I used to dream of being like those people. Were you that guy, too?
Ed: Yeah, when I discovered it, absolutely.
Andrew: When did you discover it?
Ed: Probably around age 20. Between 20 and 21 I was getting my degree in nursing, and I stumbled across “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” which then led me to study Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Brian Tracy. And once I got a taste of it, of, “Wow! You can actually create your own world, and you can go do these things,” I was done. My grades went from A minuses to C pluses very quickly because I fell in love with the concepts and idea of “you can actually dictate your future, become the person you want to be” type thing.
Andrew: For me, it was that and that was incredibly powerful to see that. And then the other part was, I used to really be into M?tley Cr?e, and when M?tley Cr?e would perform, feel like set their pants on fire, have the drummer go upside down. They would have groupies, they would have fans, they would have something to say. And I thought, “All these self-improvement guys are like that, in a very cerebral way.” Was that any part of it for you, too, that ego? That ego part of it?
Ed: Yeah. Now, looking back, you want to say you didn’t let ego drive you at all. But I say, yeah, “I’m going to go out and change the world and help people” is awesome, but there was also that idea of, “If I can get a bestselling book and be on stages and speak, of course, yeah.” That’s like the old joke is the closest thing you’re going to ever get to be in Bruce Springsteen, which yours might be M?tley Cr?e. So I think we’re in the same place.
Andrew: I wanted to be like Tommy Lee. That was the guy.
Ed: That’s right.
Andrew: I used to have posters of Tommy Lee on my wall, or pictures cut out of magazines of Tommy Lee. Who was it for you in the speaking space? Who was the guy you were trying to be like?
Ed: I had the opportunity to go watch, or spend 10 days with Jack Canfield, who’s the author of “Chicken Soup for the Soul.” And then I, right out of college, went and saw Tony Robbins. So at that time I wanted to be a hybrid of those two guys. And I obviously I love Brian Tracy, but that core guys back then. And I coached sports, as well. So if you ever see any videos of Lou Holtz, Rick Pitino, and I’m forgetting, who’s the one famous announcer? I’m forgetting his name, it will come to in a minute, but high energy, great speakers, great message. And quite frankly, the biggest misconception there, Andrew, was I thought being good at that was going to make me money, and quite frankly, that was one of the biggest traps is I went out and struggled for years just being a self-help junkie in some ways.
Andrew: One of the problems with stinking at that is you’re teaching people how to be successful, and so you can’t admit that you’re not successful. Did you have that kind of hellish inner issue?
Ed: I did. So much of what I just stuck to is the mindset stuff, which is then I applied to sports and spoke to athletic teams. But you know a lot of times with speakers, they want to switch from having a message to then teaching people how to be successful, yes. And the big question back was, how do you shift out of being in college and high school market or athletic market, and applying this to business? And the fact of the matter is I didn’t know that, and I think there is a little bit of disillusionment that this is going to easily transfer over, so if you feel good, you’re going to perform better. That’s not actually the case all the time if there’s not the right strategy put in place.
Andrew: Give me an example of, in the five years, and that’s what it was, you were broke, or you had no traction. Give me an example of one thing that really sucked for you.
Ed: So I’m on the South Side of Chicago, I used to go to the bar with my brothers who were three, four, eight . . . I’ve eight brothers and four sisters, so that could be one brother and sometimes it could be eight. But I had to borrow 20 bucks cash to just to buy a round for the four guys, and I had to sneak it into my brother, like Kevin or Mark [SP] like, “Hey, bro, can I get 20 bucks to pay next round?” So I don’t look like the only guy who couldn’t buy a round.
Andrew: Wow! That stinks.
Ed: That sucks.
Andrew: And meanwhile, they must be doing well enough to be able to lend you money, and you’re the guy who’s teaching people mental strength and how power positivity is going to improve their lives. All right, I get that, and then what I’ve heard about you is that you then took it to athletes, and that’s when things started to change.
Ed: Started to shift. What happened is I discovered direct response marketing and the info marketing concepts, so like, “Hey, take the thing you’re talking about, create a manual out of it, create some audios out of it, and now sell that for 67 bucks, 97 bucks.” And I put that online, started selling it, and it was the first time I actually saw a correlation between, “Hey, the more I’m learning about marketing, and the more I’m creating higher end-products at 67 bucks, the more money I made.” And so that’s when I started seeing when you look at your emails and the first couple of sales you ever see come in from your shopping cart, I don’t care who you are, and I don’t care if you’re worth $1 million dollars or $10, when you see that first sale come through saying, “New order,” “New order,” that’s an addiction that is, I would say, a positive addiction.
Andrew: Yeah, I used to remember seeing my phone vibrate, “PayPal order,” “PayPal order,” and I would choke my wife. We were so excited. We’d see the name of every single person. And this was when you were starting to . . . this was when you were still going through the . . . this was when you were going after athletes, right?
Ed: Yeah, my first program was called “The Ultimate Volleyball Success System,” then I changed that to “The Ultimate Coaching Success System.” That was my first impact.
Andrew: What’s one thing you did that got you customers back then, back when you were just getting started with these info products?
Ed: Facebook was not around then, right? So I was doing postcard direct mail to mailing lists. Somebody realized I was doing, but I was doing email drops to people’s subscriber lists, and I didn’t really know what that was, but there was another form of direct mail online, and it worked, and it’s still a form of media we use today.
Andrew: What do you mean by email drops?
Ed: There were guys that would have coaches as subscribers. And they might be teaching or have a book on how to coach volleyball, and then I’d come in and rent his list or pay him a commission, and he’d do an email drop to his list. And that were some of the first few things that started working. The challenge was that wasn’t scalable in that type of market, and these guys didn’t have a lot.
They don’t have money. So it’s not like you’re dealing with a big market that has a lot of excess cash lying around. So I quickly realized that I was . . . I got on to this product creation treadmill which is, I’m trying to create more products, trying to create more products, but I was only making incrementally more money, not it wasn’t leverageable, and it wasn’t exponential, which now, I really only focus on, “Is this thing going to be leveregeable and exponential?” If that makes sense.
Andrew: I see one of your early info products. It’s called “The Ultimate Coaching Success System,” like you said. I’ve got the table of contents here. “Start with Yourself!” is the first chapter, then you keep going, and it’s, “Beware of The Expert Who Yells in Anger at You While Teaching you to Manage Your Emotional State!”
Ed: Yeah.
Andrew: Next chapter is, “Creating a Powerful Team Belief System!” Even your dedication page is, “Dedication and Thanks!”
Ed: Yeah, I was pretty excited, I still am. I just probably use less exclamation points, but definitely excited about life. I still am. I mean, if you’re not passionate, what are you doing?
Andrew: Okay. And so this was good. It was on a treadmill. It wasn’t really the most profitable people you could go after. The version I’m seeing here was on some school’s website. I guess one of the students shared it. And then, you hit on dentists. What was it about dentists that drew you in?
Ed: One day I was sitting in front of my computer. It was one of those nights, like you asked me what sucked? Really, I knew I would crack the code eventually, but gosh, it was taking a long time. And one night I was sitting in there and I got an email from my virtual mentors guys who were teaching “how to grow your business” stuff. And they were selling something for 1,000 bucks, and here I was selling something for $67.
And Andrew, that was the night where I got punched in the face with reality of, “This business is not going to take me where these guys are going.” And I made a decision, and I remember the voice in my head literally said to myself, “I am in the wrong business. I need to be in a different business.” So what I did is I actually approached those guys and said, “Hey, how can I work for free for you guys?” And they said, “Well, we don’t do that.” And they said, “But we do have licenses, meaning you can license our program.” And I was like, “All right, cool.” So I found a way to get the money, and this is where . . . then I went to a dental market. I did the research they told me to do, and I just . . . it was a competitive market, it was a white collar market, they had money, they were spending money on advertising, and I had a new marketing system that was designed by pros. So gung hoingly [SP], I took the leap of faith and jumped in.
Andrew: So they were creating it for a general market. You then took it to the dentist? Is that what it was?
Ed: Yeah, they had some guys in the chiropractic market, the CPA market, the financial planning market, the real estate market, and so they had proven the concept. Yeah, so I went into the dental market with it.
Andrew: So what about this? I’m looking at an early version of your site. It was called “Dentist Profits”, right?
Ed: Yeah.
Andrew: And headline, “The Amazing Secrets of Building a Multi-million Dollar Dental Practice!” I could see why dentists would want to read that. By the way, exclamation point at the end of that headline. “This little known secret weapon that has been jealously guarded for years will show you . . . how you can get more high quality upper income patients in one month, how you can produce a constant stream of new patients to pay, stay, and refer, how you can build a million-dollar dental practice.” By the way, this is really well-written. Who wrote all this?
Ed: Part of my licensing agreement was I was able to take some of the stuff that they had had, but one of the first core skillsets that I had to master, and I realized would make me more money, was the art of writing sales copy. And when I discovered that, “Hey, look, I can be 26 years old, 27 years old, but if I can write copy, I could sell to somebody who is 55, 65, 1,000 years old. And if they have money and the values, the right preposition, you can make that sale.” I think what you’d discover with all copies is when you built your business, you knew how to get in because you used the art of the language to make it sound like it could a lot from calling, right?
Andrew: Yeah, Bradford & Reed, my first company. And actually before that, my brother and I did a little email marketing. And it was so fun to see that if I experimented with one kind of email and it hit, that I’d discover a new way to talk to people. It was so incredible, so empowering to think that if I spend a little time, got really creative, and came up with the right headline, the right subject line, then I could get people to open up my email and buy from me, and I’d get more money, and I grow the business. That sense of power of unmatched by most parts of the business. You can’t really make a design change and see sales go up as easily as you could change language and see sales go up, and bonding up, and so on, with your audience. So powerful.
Ed: Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew: What did you study to be able to that? I didn’t have any formal study.
Ed: Jeff Paul, Dan Kennedy, Gary Halbert, John Carlton, from probably age 25 to 30 was my grind, learn that skillset and learn how to sell from state, because we started doing seminars to my clients. And facilitation of the room, and the ability to use words to move the room literally is your most important skillsets. I’m amazed when guys run seminars and they have no idea how to control a room.
Andrew: I don’t know how to control a room. What did you learn about controlling a room that I could learn?
Ed: Something as basic is, where’s the music volume at when people walk into the room? What’s the music sequences set up? When someone eyes’ on me at all times, so that the moment I’m done, send them out to break, the music’s popped up. Do you use a way to manage the room?
Here’s one quick trick. In the first three minutes, have them pick up their pencil, write something on a piece of paper, turn to the person next to them and say something. It doesn’t matter what it is. But what you did in that moment is you forced them to move their physiology at your command, you forced them to go do something, and then you told them go interact with the next person next to them. So in that small space in time, you took control by saying, “Look, I don’t care who you are . . .
This is what you unconsciously did. I don’t care who you are, where you came from.” And there’s tons of yes sets you can sequence in to create that, like, “Who came from the West Coast?” “Who came from the East Coast?” So they’re all raising their hand. You can all do that, and it brings the room together in one way, creates an unconscious rapport. Secondly is it says, “Who’s the boss in the room? I am, and I’m going to tell you what to do.” But it’s done in a fun way so they enjoy the process.
Big room, it’s hard to encounter, but your hands will have more of a down . . . your palm will be facing the ground more, because it’s more of an authoritative, yes. It’s more like, “Hey,” it’s a very unconscious authoritative command, whereas here, in a small environment, you could like, “Look at my smile went up, my hand, my palm went up.”
And so that’s just ways to gain rapport with the room. And something we did, and this is for people who sell from stage, in the first session, we’d always end up, especially at seminars, we’d always end up doing something where they get a free thing, if they filled out a form and they ran back to the room, and did that thing. And all that was doing was unconsciously training them that it’s okay to fill out a form, and go to the back of the room, and hand it in. And so then when you sell something, the wheels got grease, the momentum went going. I’ll teach you . . . can I share one more cool thing that . . .
Andrew: I could listen to this for hours, of course.
Ed: Cool. Usually when I facilitate a mastermind or small groups, I’m less worried about that type of control. I’m more worried about engagement, and interactivity, and the unconscious rapport that’s going on in the room. And the way I gauge that is how people are sitting and their body language which is a longer thing, but I listen to the volume and rhythm of the room on the breaks. So if it’s all the same rhythm, and as the meeting goes on, every break it should be slightly louder. And that means people are feeling more at home, they’re engaged, and if I go and visit a seminar and I’m speaking on stage, and I come in, and I can feel that . . . I shouldn’t say feel that. You can feel it because you could sense it. And what that usually tells me is, “you got to do some emotional state shifts in the room pretty quickly,” which . . .
Andrew: Where do you learn all this stuff? How do I learn more of it?
Ed: I studied NLP, I studied some hypnosis, and then when I was broke, I went and worked with company called The Learning Forum. It had to be between ages 25 and 27, where we ran 10-day camps for teenagers. And they were a great training program because I was able to learn a ton but also apply everything I’d learned on state management, stage anchoring, lot of fun stuff, man.
Andrew: Wow! I wish there was a book on this, but I know that there . . . I don’t think there are, and I don’t think that’s the way to learn it.
Ed: Yeah, that’s not the way to learn it, but there are books like, there’s a lot of NLP books out there that are just so boring and stuff, whereas you can experience it and have a lot more fun, which is really, probably in my opinion, the best way to learn.
Andrew: All right, let me talk about my sponsor. And you know what? I love your feedback on the way that I’m doing this sponsorship message because I think that you really have a good way of getting ideas out there.
Ed: Thanks, man.
Andrew: The first sponsor is KickoffLabs. Here’s the problem they solve. You know, if you’re listening to me, in fact, frankly, if you heard Ed’s story, the power of email. Ed built his business in the beginning by reaching out to people via email. I know that I did that. I know that I still do it. The problem is how do you grow your mailing list?
KickoffLabs has a handful of tools for doing it, and the last one is the most powerful, I don’t think others have had it. Here’s what they do. They give you a form that allows you to collect email addresses. A lot of people let you do it. Theirs actually happen to increase conversions more than anyone else, more than . . . let’s say not anyone else, but more than most.
The other thing they do is that they give you these widgets. One of the widgets is one that when, say, someone’s about to leave your site, can pop up only when they’re about to leave your site and say, “Hey, before you go, we’ve got this free PDF that I think you should get. Give me your email address and I’ll send it over.” That’s really powerful.
Now, the other thing they offer is a tool for sending out those what they actually call bribes. They actually use the word “bribes” on their website. So you have a tool that makes it easy to send out those bribes. They also have a tool that then . . . actually, one of the things that they do, too, is they integrate well with all the email systems that you have. So you can give out the bribe using KickoffLabs software, but also then send people to whatever mailing list system you happen to use.
But here’s the best part, after someone gives you their email address, usually what you do is, what? You say, “Thank you,” and maybe you say, “Go confirm your email by checking your inbox.” That’s really helpful, but it’s not helpful enough. What KickoffLabs does instead is saying, “Thanks for downloading this free report. If you tell a friend about this report that you just signed up for . . . I mean, you just trusted us with your email address, so if you tell a friend about it, and your friend gets this free report, too, we will give you another free report, or free video, free training.” They allow you to incentivize people who gave you their email address. They allow you to incentivize those people to tell their friends.
And so you could do things like, if you tell a friend about this, we’ll give you 10% off. If you tell five friends and they join, we’ll give you 50% off,” all kinds of different incentives like that. I haven’t seen anyone else do that. That is incredibly unique to KickoffLabs. It’s not been exploited yet, it’s not been overdone, it’s something that you can experiment with right now and start to see results. All you have to do is go to KickoffLabs website. They’ve got a long URL but it’s worth typing, and here it is. It’s Try . . . because they want you to just try it out, no obligation. Try.KickoffLabs.com/Mixergy.
I found a couple of Reddit posts here about them. Here’s one from a guy named Dan from the Power Toothpaste, who said that he launched with over 20,000 people who joined his mailing list. And here’s the cool part, 84% of those people joined just because of this incentivized sharing thing that I told you about, 84%. Talk about power.
And the next person who I’ll tell you about is Stephen Turliuk of Northwood that he got a 50% conversion rate on the landing page from KickoffLabs. I’ve got a ton of notes here from KickoffLabs. I don’t want to overdo it or oversell it. I want you to just try it. If you like it, go ahead and keep using it and tell me about it. I’d love to talk about you in a future spot for them. If not, tell me about them too, and I’ll go and yell at KickoffLabs. Here’s the URL, Try.KickoffLabs.com/Mixergy. They’re the sponsor.
What do you think of the way that I did it? I got in my head a little bit, frankly. A moment there I looked at you and I said, “Ooh, what if he doesn’t like this part?” And then I said, “Shut that point out. Keep going, Andrew.”
Ed: Yeah, way to shut it out. No, you’re fine, man. I’ll shoot a little video and send it to you. I always say, in this day and age, man, if you’re not doing anything viral, and if your business isn’t getting viral, it’s a great way to measure whether or not you’ve got something worth building.
Andrew: What do you think about the way that I sold it? As a guy who sells for a living, as a guy who knows even hand gestures, I didn’t do any hand gestures, now that I think about it. I never smile on video. I should have at least said, “KickoffLabs,” and smile. But I looked very serious.
Ed: You’re a good looking man, Andrew. You don’t have to smile.
Andrew: I noticed you, you’ve smiled several times in this interview. I’m very . . . right now I’m smiling.
Ed: You’re funny.
Andrew: Any feedback like that on the way that I sold and the way that I promoted my sponsor?
Ed: Yeah, I would say, who are the biggest people that are using them that people would know about? Like Dollar Shave Club, I know, uses one thing, but if you say like, “Hey, if you want to get to the same place like Dollar Shave Club, so and so are using, you’ve got to get with it, because [inaudible 00:24:20]”
Andrew: The credibility indicators, the social proof.
Ed: Yeah, credibility. And, “Just give me . . . tell me what my main benefit is.” And then that’s it. “Hammer me home. Hammer me home with a big benefit and a big kiss.” That’s all [inaudible 00:24:36]
Andrew: After this interview I’m going to look if they have any big name clients who have started with this new system. And if they do, I will integrate that, and, of course, I’ll do that in the next sponsorship message that I do.
Ed: Yeah, and [inaudible 00:24:46], and they should go buy a couple, selling their system, give it away, get some people going. Whatever, it’s all good.
Andrew: Thanks for the feedback, and your business is growing well, coming back to your dentist business, which was called Dentist Profits. You’re starting to get big, serious revenue. How much did you bring in it?
Ed: I think our best year in the dental space is about 6.5 million. And so I had about four business units working at the same time, because I figured out that if you niched to the higher end . . . within every market, you’ve got your lower end, you’ve got higher end, and then we created specialty programs for Implant Dentists, for example. We created team training systems that train the team, because the one truth about most, probably every business, but especially in professional practices, they don’t want to even talk to their staff. I am kind of jokey, but they don’t want to train their staff at all.
And I found that true even in the entrepreneurial and Internet marketing world. If you had a business that has the potential of actually doing the training to the team for them, it will create a lot of stickiness where guys won’t leave you even though they might be bored of you, they’ll keep paying you because you’re integrating their team.
Andrew: Oh, if you train their team, then you’re part of their team, at that point. And that’s what you added.
Ed: Bam! And then the coolest thing about that when you’re in the market, like I was, where it was built around me, this business was not built around me, and that’s why I was able to actually sell it off.
Andrew: The train the team part wasn’t.
Ed: Yeah.
Andrew: Versus the part where you were creating . . . well, actually, were you ever creating content for them?
Ed: I was, yeah. Dental side, I was creating a lot of the marketing. Yeah, I was doing a lot of work for them. I was intricate part. And I started leveraging myself for hiring copywriters and others to do it, other dentists, even, that wanted to be in the info side. But with the Team Training Institute component, I was able to find a really, really highly talented consulting who was in that space, who was one of them, who is in a hygiene department, could train the team on how to sell, and that was a great relationship.
Andrew: They were training the team on how to sell, and you said, “I want to train the team on other stuff. Can we partner with you?”
Ed: No, no. Yeah, she was already out there. She was the speaker, and I said, “Hey, you don’t have to be on the road 200 days a year,” which I might be exaggerating a little bit, but I was like, “Here’s a better way to run this business where, let’s just create a virtual coaching program, but also then we run live masterminds. And instead of you going speaking at every single event that you’re on the road, maybe you’ll make a few grand, pick up a client here and there. Come on, you can make 20 times that by doing this a little bit differently.” And it was a great relationship, highly profitable business, too.
Andrew: That’s pretty impressive that you realized that you can train the employee of dental offices, and you could then have a tighter bond with the dental offices. What I’m wondering is, how did you even know what to teach them? How did you know how to go in there? Actually, how did you know how to teach them, before I go and fire off another set of questions?
Ed: Two answers there. Number one, I built in a belief system that I could learn anything very, very rapidly. Like when I was younger, so around 25, 24, 23, 22, when I was learning all the mental strategies, really that’s a really good core belief system. And so when I started seeing . . . I’d say I run into a lot of people, but this one lady, Wendy Briggs, was just very, very, very good, and the dentist loved her. And so I was able to take a lot of her core structure things and then just add language patterns that worked, like what they weren’t doing well. And it was very easy for me to look at it and then teach them better ways to use language to communicate better to patients.
Andrew: What did you teach them how to do?
Ed: Most dentists try and sell dentistry in a very different way, whereas one of the things we did is, we categorized . . . there’s three ways you can handle the situation. You’ve got good, better, best. You get to tell us, after I give you all your options, you’re going to tell me where we’re going to go with it. And it really put the patient in control so that they were dictating their own patient care once they were fully informed and knew all their options. I’m a little rusty on it, but what I always was most concerned about is how we’re setting up expectations and pre-framing things so that it supports the patient’s best outcome at all times. And it sounds simple, Andrew, and it really is, but most people weren’t doing it.
Andrew: This is where I irritate my audience . . . I was just cutting you off as you were talking. But once you teach that, why do you need to keep coming back?
Ed: Great. Repetition is the mother of all skill. That would be probably one very easy sales point to that. Number two is, most of these offices are always turning their staff over. And there’s always more to learn, so if your hygiene department is cranking, your case acceptance always needs improvement. And whatever they focused on, improved. And frankly, we’ve dealt with, after someone had been a client for a couple of years, yeah, you’d see the eyes roll, like, “Wow! They’ve already heard this before.” And we tried different pathways, building pathways. But some of that’s kind of an inevitable law of diminishing returns will kick in at some point in any business.
Andrew: Then you told our producer, Jeremy Weisz, that you went to his seminar, people were talking about the supplement business, and something just went off in your mind.
Ed: I think that, very similar to even probably how . . . This is when started realizing it. When I transitioned to the dental phase, I wanted to see if I was a real marketing expert, how good would I do if I took myself out of being a coach and consultant, even though we were marketing. We were doing very high level marketing as you’d seen with the sales copy, but if we had to go sell real product to a broad mass amount of people, and it didn’t rely on who Ed O’Keefe was, at all, could I pull it off? And I believed I could.
Andrew: Was it, “Could I pull it off?” or, “I have to pull this off because I can’t keep having everything be on my shoulders”?
Ed: I think more what I was . . . When you talk about values, people move towards or move away. I was moving away from the fact that I had a lot of staff on my team that were family, people that probably were underperforming that I had too close of a relationship with, where I was kind of like, “Man, I got to go pull this off, is I need to get out of this business,” because after 2008, like I said, things had changed, and I wanted a business I could scale, like do 10,000, 20,000, $30,000 a day, that I’m sitting here talking to you and, guess what? We’re making sales right now.
So I wanted to build a business like that, and prove I could do it, unlike, not to throw people under the bus, but since your audience likes bluntness, 98% of the Internet marketing consultancy gurus out there have never ran a business. So I wanted to go out and make sure that, “Hey, before I . . . my next training ground is going to be real business selling real stuff, so I could learn that side of it.”
Andrew: And then you told Jeremy everything fell apart.
Ed: Well, my first attempt, yeah, because . . .
Andrew: What happened?
Ed: I thought I had the right mentors and the right people guiding me, and what happened was we set the business up to be a free trial model, which meant we would give the first bottle away free, because that’s what most people were doing in the supplement business. And I put my trust in the relationship, so in the traffic world . . . you generate a lot of traffic, so much of that’s relationships, right? You know that. You’re buying ad space from people. I was buying my customers and paying a commission to certain person that a really close mentor said was completely a great choice, clean partner, whatever.
And what happened to me was we started throwing all these sales through our free trial model, we were paying up the commission, because the way they said it was, “Wow! You need to pay this out so that we can continue to scale,” even though my best judgment said, “You didn’t validate whether or not these rebuilds were going through or not,” and all of a sudden we were 30 days on the road. Every single credit card that went by, with the exception of maybe 5% of them, was fraud, meaning it was either a stolen credit card, or it was a credit card that someone bought on the black market, and it got pinged for the shipping and handling $2.95, or whatever it was charging, and then in 15 days, none of the rebills went through, 45 days, none of the rebills went through. And so I had been out I think probably between 50 to $75,000, but then I ended up having to refund any of the money that actually went through in attempts to save the merchant account at the time. And, yeah, some pretty . . .
Andrew: Did you save the merchant account?
Ed: No, they totally lied to me.
Andrew: You lost it.
Ed: Totally lost the merchant.
Andrew: Who was this person who made this introduction? Let’s get the name out there.
Ed: No, no. It’s something he’ll have to live with.
Andrew: Someone well known?
Ed: No. But here’s the thing, at the end of the day, let me just say it was my fault. It was my fault. I should have vetted the traffic better. I should have kept the volume lower so that my . . . like Richard Branson says, you’re number one job is to protect your downside. So now when we go into things, even though I’ve grown the company to 20 million, our best year was a little over 28 million . . . I can talk about numbers, too. The longer I’m in business, especially with buying traffic and stuff, you have to prove the concept at a small level before you scale something quickly, because, man, it’s so easy to lose money on the Internet when you’re in such a hurry to grow when, as you know, it’s about profit. It’s about doing it properly so your customers have a good experience, so you enjoy your business, so that if you scale it, in my opinion, it’s healthy for everybody involved. It’s good ecosystem. And I like saying it’s my fault because it’s an expensive lesson, man.
Andrew: You seem to have recovered. What did you say your revenues were?
Ed: Our best year was around 28 million.
Andrew: Twenty-eight million, and how about 2015?
Ed: 2015, we’re doing over . . . you’re going to like this, we’re over 6 million, and more, I want to say, percentage-wise, way more profitable than ever before, and cash flow profit better than ever before.
Andrew: So more profit now than when you were doing 28 . . . you said 28 million in sales?
Ed: Yeah, when we did 28 million, our profits was over 3 million. But the volatility in that type of the way we grew with so many different affiliates, and so many things, it just really was not a fun business the way we had grown it.
Andrew: Wait, I accept this stuff is not fun, and a lot of things that are worth doing, like my best runs are not necessarily the most fun, but the ones that I get the most distance out of. You’re willing to not have fun. What else is there that kept you from doing 28 million?
Ed: When you’re specifically in a supplement business, our product has 90-day lead times. It’s a super high quality product. And so you’d have one affiliate or one traffic partner pick the product up, sell, say, 5 million for you in a matter of two months, and then he’s done promoting you and he moves on to the next product, well you are ordering 90 days in advance based on that potential revenue in order to keep it to going. And so, when I’m saying not fun, I mean I’m not worried about working hard either, but when you have lack of predictability and the volatility is too much, the swings in net profit were just not . . . I’d rather control my own traffic, have good strategic relationships that are more predictable, and just have a nice high profit business than what we did in 2013. I’ll just put it that way.
There’s more lessons in there, but I like the way . . . some people’s personalities as CEOs and operations guys enjoy the scale end of it. I’m a lover of the marketing side of it, and I also have seven kids, and so I’m a very . . .
Andrew: Wow! Twelve kids for your parents, seven kids for you, is this a religious thing?
Ed: Well, it’s a spiritual thing. It could be called sexual thing, too, Andrew.
Andrew: It sounds like its organized religion that’s telling you to do this, no?
Ed: Not at all. We just love kids, and we love having a nice . . .
Andrew: I love them too. I have one. I love them. Let me do a quick sponsorship message for Toptal. Guys, if you’ve been with Mixergy for a while, you know that my website was pretty bad for a while there, search especially. Once we hit over a thousand interviews and you couldn’t find the one you wanted, it was a real pain. I’d get emails from people saying, “I know you have some interviews on creating funnels, find them for me.” Or, “I just want to find . . . ” I talked to a guy who was a member, who was a little frustrated. I got on the phone with him, I spent about an hour, and he said, “Andrew, what I’d really like to do is see the guys who are like the old school leaders. That’s who I’m really curious about, the people who just endured. How do I find that?”
Anyway, all those kinds of things kept coming up. And so I went to Toptal and I did what everyone else would do. I just filled out one of their forms, I got on the phone with one of their people, and I told him exactly what we needed. And I said, “I need someone to fix my search because my guys just don’t have the capacity right now. I have someone in New York, I have a team in India, and none of them have the freaking capacity to get things done. I need one person who’s going to own this problem and solve it for us.”
And so they introduced us to one person, and that person wasn’t a great fit. And they introduced us to another person, and he was a fantastic fit. We hired him, he created this incredible search, and then Michael, my brother who runs our tech then designed it up to look like our previous site, and it was just such good functionality in such a bad design. We finally said, “All right, it’s more than just this software, we have to do it right,” and we redesigned the site.
And that’s what people are seeing right now when they go to Mixergy, because we wanted it to be worthy of this code this guy created for us, this new approach this guy created for us. And that’s what we did. And that is, to me, one of the benefits of working with a great developer, someone who understands your problem, who can solve the problem for you, and can take ownership of it and think like a product creator, instead of just thinking like a pair of hands. We have those in this team that we work with in India. They’re not bad but they’re a pair of hands. This guy was able to think in a new way and solve this problem for us.
And that’s the power of working with Toptal. This is the reason why so many top companies work with Toptal. You actually asked me earlier, Ed, to include the names of companies here. I’ll give you guys top companies. Airbnb, those guys have money to hire from anywhere they want, and a name that will drop people, and they work with Toptal. IDEO works with Toptal. Zendesk is just a good company. Andreesen Horowitz. We’re talking about the bluest of the blue chip investment companies invested in Toptal. And we did at Mixergy hire people from Toptal.
So if you need a developer, just like we did, one who is going to be more than a cheap pair of hands but be really a brain and help you think through, and grow your business, and grow the product better than you could on your own, I want you to go to Toptal.com/Mixergy. I listen to myself sometimes and I realize that I gobble up certain words. I’ll say it slowly. Top as in top of the mountain, tal as in talented, Toptal.com/Mixergy. When you go there you’re going to get 80 free Toptal developer hours when you pay for 80. That’s unheard off. These guys really want to work with the Mixergy community because then they get a reputation in the startup space. So they’re giving you 80 free Toptal developer hours.
In addition to that, if you think that everything I’ve said is just I’m full of it, because I’m getting paid to talk about them, and you’re not happy with the results . . . I don’t believe that will happen. But let’s suppose it does. They’re going to give you a no-risk trial period of up to two weeks. That means you’re not 100% satisfied, you won’t be billed. And don’t worry, the developer will still get paid because they’re good people over there at Toptal. So if you need a developer, go to Toptal.com/Mixergy.
You know what? Actually, frankly one more thing. If you need an introduction, I will personally introduce you to my guy over at Toptal. He apparently is happy when I make introductions, so I’ll do it. Just email me, andrew@mixergy.com, and I’ll introduce you to Toptal.
All right, so this first thing didn’t work for you, Ed, and so you said, “I’m going to figure out this supplement business.” Why were you so determined to figure out the supplement business? Don’t you know that supplement business has a bad reputation?
Ed: Yeah, and it should, for a lot of reasons. I stumbled across a consultant who organized a longevity doctor for me, and a few other . . . I hired a pro team that were working for me at this point.
Andrew: Oh, this is internal team.
Ed: Yeah, they were all subcontractors, but it was like this one girl, Daureen Papinchak was her name, she had been in the supplement direct response space for a long time, and I decided I want to go in direct mail with it because it would hedge all the shadiness that was being seen online. And when you go in direct mail, by the way, when you’re selling to other highly, or people who are known as supplement buyers, they’re way more educated. So you have to build a great product, which rarely do you ever hear about that when you go study an online guy, he just says, “Well, this is how you make money with things.”
So I stuck with it. I mean, I believe in supplements. I take them. I’m a customer myself. Everybody quits on the first third of the mile, I needed to get past this and use my lesson as a just a stepping stone, and sometimes, perseverance.
Andrew: You went to use paper ads before you went to online advertising?
Ed: No, I went to direct mail. Direct mail is inexpensive. Our first mail drop was $60,000, 30,000 pieces or 60,000 piece test. Each piece cost about 76 cents out the door.
Andrew: So you just spent tens of thousands of dollars to test this thing, to see if you could even make it work? You don’t even do it in small increments to see?
Ed: Yeah, I violated my own thing, but that’s what they . . . I allocated a budget to get after it. I felt like I had the right team and the right advisors, and just got back in the horse, buddy.
Andrew: And so you spend tens of thousands of dollars and your team knew where you should place ads, and the ads worked? Where did you buy direct mail lists?
Ed: Which is actually a great question, is that we call it ground zero testing, is that if it’s not going to work here, it’s not going to work anywhere else. So you go to your highest potential performing list first, and then you roll out sequentially from there outside of that.
Andrew: Who did you buy these from? Who were these people?
Ed: I worked with Macromark. Macromark list brokerage, yeah. Great guys, by the way.
Andrew: I don’t know them. Macro . . .
Ed: Mark. Yeah, great guys.
Andrew: Direct mail list management. So who were the most likely to buy from you? Was there a characteristic, or did you buy people who were subscribers of some magazine? How does that work?
Ed: You’re buying other buyers of other supplement company lists. You can go outside of that, but the probability of those converting are going to be less than going after other supplement buyers.
Andrew: Okay, all right, did that work for you? Did you make money out of that?
Ed: It worked, man. Yeah, you made money the first round. We rolled over for about a year and a half. We probably mailed over close to 2 million pieces. And as it started to fatigue in the direct mail pool, I started testing online on my own where I bought my own media, and the difference between direct mail and online was I was profitable within five days, where in direct mail, it took me 45 days to get the cash back in the door.
Andrew: So I’m wondering, why not go online first?
Ed: Because continuity in supplement business was being scrutinized so highly by the FTC at that time that I just wanted to stay clear of it. In hindsight, did I need to go that route? I don’t know. But I like the route I went, because I went on and hired a professional copywriter, not myself, pro level copywriter. I had a great doctor. We worked with great formulators. And so that product is still is as relevant as it was seven years ago, and quite frankly, it will be in 20 more years because it’s such great science.
Andrew: Now I’m trying to figure out the model here, the first bottle is free if you pay 6.95 shipping, but I’m assuming there is continuity. You’ve actually just mentioned it. I’m looking to figure out where the continuity is. Usually the way it works is you get the first one free plus shipping, and then each month after that you get another bottle, and you have to actually pay that full price plus shipping. I don’t see where that . . .
Ed: We don’t give away a free bottle anymore. That’s the [inaudible 00:48:24]
Andrew: Really? It’s what I see. I see the Cross Fit version.
Ed: Yeah, that’s just a test. It’s doing very okay, very little traffic goes to that. I would have sent you over a [inaudible 00:48:35] one. Right now our offer proposition is one bottle for $69, two bottle $1.19, and four bottles at $1.99. Forty percent take the four bottles, by the way, and 30% of those will buy six more right away. By the way, for all you listeners who are selling products, I just gave away some really good tests on . . . blew me away, you think that you should buy more of something similar, right? People buy more of the product they just bought for a discount.
Andrew: Even before they try it?
Ed: Yeah, isn’t that crazy? They like the story, they like the idea, they want to save money.
Andrew: What about the MSM? Is that a page I should be looking at to see where . . . I’m looking for your sales page looks like now.
Ed: Well, you can find our . . . if you just type in Marine-D3 and Marine Essentials, but we have what I would call our branded site, which is the Marine Essentials, and then we have what I would call a direct response sales funnels, which you really search to get to. We drive traffic straight there off ads, and off emails, and off . . .
Andrew: And they’re not . . . are they on Marine Essentials?
Ed: Well, they are but they’re hidden from the public. And the reason we do that is because your buyer experience through that, we try to keep you in a vacuum so you focus on that presentation, whereas if we sent you the shopping cart, you can get distracted by . . .
Andrew: You went to send them to one thing, one page, one offer, one . . .
Ed: Exactly, one thing. So for show notes though, I can send them over to you so that you guys have it.
Andrew: Oh, really? So we can actually see this.
Ed: Whatever you want, man.
Andrew: I’d love to see that. I’d love to see what your sales copy looks like.
Ed: All right, cool. Thanks.
Andrew: Why did you stop the continuity?
Ed: On the free bottle, I didn’t want people jumping in continuity due to charge back reasons, and then one of our upsells was going to be, “Hey, if you like this, would you like to get to savings?” Because the biggest thing is that people . . . the reason why the supplement business has such . . . we do an opt-in program rather than a forced continuity because you’ll make more money as a company, but as a . . . there’s a new book coming out called “Good Profit”, I think it’s . . . forgot the guy’s name. I bought it yesterday. You’re going to have bad profits, which means people are just going to leave your company because they didn’t want the second, third, and fourth purchase. You’re just hoping they don’t cancel. And that’s not how I wanted to operate.
Andrew: Charles Koch?
Ed: Yeah, Charles Koch. He was mentioned in the book, “The Ultimate Question” which is famous for the Net Promoter Score, and I’m glad Koch created his own book, so I just bought it now. But good profits are when people like enjoying this experience. Good profits is what Mixergy has. Man, people love what you guys are doing. They’re going crazy over it. So you have people who love coming back. Bad profits are when people are forced to buy, and then after the second interaction they’re done with you.
Andrew: I think the one that I’m looking at here for Cross Fit was an unchecked box that says, “Then please send be one bottle of Marine-D3 every month for 55 bucks off the regular price.” No, “Then please send me a bottle,” and I guess it’s $67, or if I check a box then I get membership for 30 bucks a month, right?
Ed: Yeah, that’d be correct.
Andrew: I see. Then actually that could be misleading to people, because they’re looking at getting a free bottle, and then there’s a checkbox that they may even miss on the bottom that tells them, “Essentially you’re going to get charged again, and you decided you’re going get charged $67 or 29.95.”
Ed: Yeah. I wouldn’t call it misleading. I’d call it confusing. That’s probably why that campaign’s not working very well.
Andrew: Okay. Frankly, I think we make it very clear we charge monthly. If you join Mixergy Premium, you’re going to get charged monthly. And we still have people who are confused by that. So we refund the other month and life is good. What else did you do grow? I’m looking here at sales that are really impressive, really big. What did you do to go beyond the first test that you did online?
Ed: What I teach all my mentoring clients, where I teach I say, “Look, your job is beginning is to figure out what is the thing that they’re going to buy, and what’s the sales message that they’re going to buy from?” And if it takes you one year, or two years, or three years to figure that out, and then you combine it with the right economics meaning . . . we took the direct mail pricing which is a lot cheaper because they’re selling to people that are used to getting cheaper offers, and we tried it online. We were getting good conversion rates, but our average transactions were so low.
And then I saw some guys selling to the golf market charging $69 for one bottle, and they’re charged 1.99 for four bottles. And I was like, “Man, we got to test that pricing.” So we did. And Andrew, it was like overnight, our average ticket jumped by 100 bucks because of the amount of people that would pick the four bottles. So the $69 was really a driver to get them to choose the higher number for the savings. And if your conversion rate dropped a little bit, it didn’t matter because the overall economics worked. Once we have that, we were able to go out and buy traffic. We were able to go to affiliates and say, “Look. We can pay you 130 bucks a sale, 150 bucks a sale. We can go back . . . ”
And so when you’re in that position where you’re the guy in space who can just go buy it, all of a sudden, traffic people show up out of the woodworks and you’re famous for a few months.
Andrew: Is the main site MarineEssentials.com, because I’m looking at your traffic from SimilarWeb, and it doesn’t look like it’s that huge.
Ed: We have a couple of different sites. We have funnels on MarineD3, and mostly, to be frank, we don’t buy as much as we used to because we don’t have to. And like I said before, the way I have it structured now it’s meeting all the needs within my life that I want the company to meet, if that makes sense.
Andrew: You’re saying you’re making enough money, you don’t need to push and make [inaudible 55:24]
Ed: With the current structure, it’s I’d rather move slower and more strategic based on the things I’ve learned over the last five years, rather than try to hustle up the next offer as fast as you can.
Andrew: What’s the other domain? It’s Marine-D3?
Ed: No, it’s MarineD3.com.
Andrew: MarineD3.com, that’s the other big domain.
Ed: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. So why are you doing this interview with me? What’s the goal?
Ed: I think that one of the things that . . . I turned 40 this year. I don’t know if you’re familiar with . . . you’re familiar with Wayne Dyer, right? You know, the spiritual dude.
Andrew: Yeah, used to be on PBS a lot. That’s my experience with him.
Ed: He shares a great quote that Carl Jung said, which is, “You move through seasons in life where, in the . . . ” I forget it was, “There comes a time when you move into the afternoon of life where you have this false assumption that the rules that served you in the morning were still going to serve you in the afternoon. And then by the time you get to the evening, you realize that the rules you lived by in the morning were a lie.”
And I think the first 23 to 36 was a big hustle to figure out how to crack the codes. You know, learn media buying, learn copywriting, learn how to command the stage, learn how to sell products. And so I’m wrapping up a book called “The Art of Time Collapsing: How to Create the Life You Wanted Right Now.” We launched our own podcast, “Ed O’Keefe Show.” And I really feel like this is the next phase of starting to get out here and teach, and to make the maximum impact to start a platform similar to the things you’re doing, man. And the world needs this stuff. If it sounds too altruistic, that’s fine, but it’s just reality. And so I’m doing podcast to promote my brand and start contacting and helping people.
Andrew: Why aren’t you waiting until the book comes out? Frankly, by the time this interview is out, the book will be out.
Ed: Yeah.
Andrew: But why are you doing this now?
Ed: Because I believe in the whole tectonic shift method, which is like people see the tsunami hit the shore, but the fact of the matter is the earthquake happened hundreds of miles off, and it was underground, no one noticed. So you have to be working for where you want to be 6 months, 12 months, 3 years, right now. And like anything, you asked about commanding stage, I want to keep getting better at delivering the message and building my network with guys like yourself, and your audience. And it takes time, as you know. You don’t want to be someone who forces it. You have to enjoy the journey and learn along the way. I guess, that’s my answer to you.
Andrew: That makes sense. I think that is a better approach. I think a lot of times, people have a book to promote and they do a lot of publicity just around that one book, and people are sick of them and they feel like they are being used because otherwise they never hear anything from them. So I think this makes more sense, and I think if people want to follow up with you on this, I’ve got so many tabs now with your website . . . with lots of your websites on them in my research. What’s the number one site that they can go to?
Ed: Right now, EdOKeefeShow.com.
Andrew: Let’s say it a little slower, EdOkeefeShow.com, right?
Ed: Yeah, EdOKeefeShow.com, and then I’m giving away two chapters right now. So by the time this is aired, if I do not have it done, man, you are welcome to come over and just slap me upside my head. And I’m going to do the free giveaway model, and right now I’m planning on recording about . . . have you seen the Master Class videos that are coming out now with the . . . ?
Andrew: Brand new site called MasterClass.com, interesting, right?
Ed: Yeah. So I’m thinking of orchestrating a similar type experience, maybe a day or two days here in Chicago where I take some of my clients and people who’ve gone through my free book, and just creating an environment where they can grill me on all my concepts. Because one of the things that my intention with book is I study the soft side of success like the feel good stuff, the meditation stuff, all that stuff, and I also study the hard side meaning the actual tactics and strategies of how to sell, how to do marketing, how to do accelerate learning. And most things I see are either one or the other. And the fact of the matter is you could be so lost on one pathway and you’re wondering, “Why am I not connecting the dots?”
And I feel that you have to be able to connect both sides of the puzzle, man, or else you’re . . . like the guys who connect the sales dots end up being frustrated and burnt out, and wondering where their purpose is, and they’re all the way down that path. And the meditation dudes, and the spiritual dudes are still meditating, under a tree wondering why they didn’t attract everything. So you got to be able to combine the soft and the hard. And my intention with this book is to do that. So it’s been something.
Andrew: Well, thanks for coming on here and talking about how you built your business. Congratulations on how far you’ve come, the website we’ve talked about. Why don’t I talk then about my two sponsors? They are KickoffLabs, and they got that long URL. People, if you’re sponsoring Mixergy, you got to go shorter. It’s like one subdomain away from being great. But I’ll give it all, because the product is fantastic. Try.KickoffLabs.com/Mixergy. And, of course, we always link to it in the show notes. And the other sponsor is, if you need a developer, it’s Toptal.com/Mixergy. Thank you for doing this interview, Ed.
Ed: Awesome. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Andrew.
Andrew: Thank you, all, for being a part of it. Bye, everyone.
