Andrew: Coming up, do you have an inner dialog? Well, listen to how today’s
guest was effected by the cr*p that he kept telling himself and what he did
to stop it. Also for all those viewers who keep telling me that I need to
get into the personal side of entrepreneurship, I’m going to ask today’s
guest about crying at the side of the road and we’ll see how open he can be
about that, all that and so much more coming up.
First three messages, who’s the lawyer that founders in the Mixergy
audience trust, Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law. Have you seen
what Chris Prichard posted on my Facebook page? He’s new companies
incorporation pages, that Scott Edward Walker helped him get. Scott Edward
Walker is the lawyer that publications like Forbes trust. Go to
WalkerCorporateLaw.com.
Next, when my friend had to close her company’s office but still wanted to
give callers the impression that all her employees work well under one roof
together what service did she use, Grasshopper. With Grasshopper everyone
who works for you can have an extension. They can pick up calls on their
extensions no matter where they are or what phones they use and they can
transfer calls to each other, back and forth with ease. Get those features
and tons more at Grasshopper.com.
Finally, when Dave Jackson and Dave Petrillo invented a product that keeps
coffee at the perfect temperature, what platform did they use to create
their online store, Shopify.com. Look at how beautiful their store looks,
it’s because it’s built on Shopify. They did hundreds of thousands of
dollars in sales, Shopify stores are designed to help you sell. Patrick
Buckley invented an iPad case and used Shopify as his online store. Within
months he sold over a million dollars in cases. Get your beautiful online
store at Shopify.com. Here’s the program.
Hey there freedom fighters, my name is Andrew Warner, I’m the founder of
Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart and a place where … I got a
phone call from a Mixergy premium member recently. He called me up out of
the blue and he said, “Mixergy made a huge impact on my business.” I know
that he said exactly that because I’m an obsessive note taker, I wrote down
notes as we were talking. Even on private conversations I take notes and
then he started telling me about how Mixergy helped skyrocket his business
to over a million dollars in sales and I instantly said, “You’ve got to
come on and do an interview.” Well, here he is, Zeke, is the Founder of the
Outsourcing Company, a digital marketing agency, and he’s the author of the
Internet Marketing Bible, and I invited him here to hear his story, Zeke
welcome.
Zeke: Thank you Andrew, I’m happy to be here.
Andrew: Thanks, as you can see I had to redo the intro a couple of times. I
was smiling and I don’t know what during the intro. I’m excited to have you
on here. Our conversation was exciting for me to hear. So let’s see if I
can contain myself long enough to ask you a decent straight up question and
here it is. Can you tell the audience about the surprise announcement that
you made to your whole office recently?
Zeke: Yes, I just told them we were going to Costa Rica for ten months and
everybody was really excited.
Andrew: For how long, ten months?
Zeke: Oh, did I say ten months, no sorry, that would be too long, ten days.
Andrew: All right, yes, it looks like you’re also excited to be here. So
ten days surprise trip to Costa Rica, you’re paying for it, you’re going to
take them all out there?
Zeke: Yes.
Andrew: That’s kind of exciting, do you remember when you couldn’t even
take yourself to Costa Rica or maybe when you couldn’t do something that
the average person would take for granted?
Zeke: Yes, I was broke for a long time so yes I definitely remember.
Andrew: I remember for me it was, all I could afford to eat at the Chinese
restaurant across the street from me when I was starting Bradford and Reed
was fried rice with vegetables and I foolishly got the vegetables in there
because I thought it’s got to be healthy, they’re vegetables in there.
You told Jeremy, our producer, that for the first seven years in business
you were wondering every day if this is what you should even be doing. You
kept doubting yourself, you weren’t making much money. You told your wife
50 times, I’m telling your story, you tell me what life was like back then?
Zeke: I had a very early success in life and back then I was 18 years old
and I was feeling very confident and then I tried to replicate this success
with my second business and it just wasn’t happening so I was having this
internal dialog, doubting myself, just thinking was it just luck. Probably
I don’t have the skills that it takes; probably I’m not smart enough. Maybe
I just got lucky for a couple of years.
Andrew: And what is the dialog, does it just keep going on and on as you go
through your day, as you’re going to the supermarket and getting milk, as
you’re walking down the street, as you’re watching TV, as you’re waking up,
is it constantly, constantly going on, what you just said to us?
Zeke: I think it comes and goes, you know. Yes for some moments I was
feeling like really excited and super self-confident but then the next day
I was feeling low again and just doubting whether I doing was the right
thing and if it was going to be successful or not.
Andrew: And why couldn’t you get a job?
Zeke: Well, back then I’m from Argentina and I moved to the U.S., about six
years ago and I went back and forth but finally I met my wife so I decided
to stay in the U.S., but I couldn’t get a job because I wasn’t an American
citizen so I was really out of options. Like I had to make this work and my
wife was working two jobs just to pay for the bills so I was coming from
South America where we have all this macho culture having to be, having to
have my wife pay for all the bills was a big hit for me.
Andrew: I have to tell you, I don’t understand these American men who are
happy and proud that their wives go out and just work for them. I don’t
mean the kind where the husband decides that he’s going to stay at home and
take care of the kids but the ones who are just proud to just be leeches,
to be leeches off their girlfriends, to be leeches off of their wives. I
just, as a man I just couldn’t do and frankly women too, if they’re
leeches, I don’t understand how they could live with themselves. I’m with
you.
Zeke: Exactly.
Andrew: So, did you ever feel like this woman just shouldn’t be even dating
me? She married the wrong person, she’s going to discover how much of a
fraud I am or what were you thinking about that, about her opinion of you?
Zeke: Well, I think that I had something of that going on but I wasn’t
really understanding it back then, you know, I had started dating my, well
my now wife, but back then it was my girlfriend so of course when you start
dating someone you really need to impress that person and I just, I don’t
know, I was feeling very low and I felt like maybe I wasn’t good enough.
Yes I had a lot of that going on for sure.
Andrew: You know, I want to go into the business part of this but I’ve got
to stick here for a little bit because I know that for me in that situation
when I felt that I couldn’t afford the chicken in the chicken fried rice,
I’d just go for vegetables, if was in a relationship I would’ve screwed up
the relationship because I would’ve felt so inferior to the woman and to
other men out there and maybe even the reason why I didn’t get into
relationships back then is because I was working on myself this way but
here you were, you met a woman who you loved, a woman who was terrific, who
you ended up marring and you didn’t screw it up. Without confidence how do
you keep from screwing it up?
Zeke: So, this dialog that I had in my head, I had two different sides. I
had inside of you’re not good enough, you can’t pull this off but I had the
other side just stop being a baby, pull yourself together, just stop over
analyzing everything and just do what you know you have to do. So I think
that’s what kept me sane and balanced.
Andrew: I see, did you also in addition to any kind of inferiority or any
kind of negative talk, do you also have this feeling of I belong on top of
life, I belong somewhere bigger than where I am, did you also have that?
Zeke: Well for me, like, I was always an over achiever. In high school,
college, sports, I was always in the top 5 percent so it really pissed me
off because I’m like, I’m a smart guy, why is it not working for me. I
mean, I’m working my butt off, I’m a smart guy, why is it not happening,
why is it taking so long.
Andrew: I’m writing that down, I’m a smart guy why is it not working for
me, smart look, I’m even going to take my time to do this, smart guy why
not working for me because I want to answer that in this interview because
that’s an important question. I’ve asked myself that a lot of times in my
life and I can’t answer it in the moment because I’m feeling so down on
myself because I’m so deep in the details of the frustration and the
problems.
When you take a step back maybe now you can look back and say, ‘that’s why
that guy of a few years ago didn’t do it because I want to hear how you
answer because maybe it will help us answer it when we’re feeling that way.
Alright, I’ll continue with the story. You were saying that you were a guy
who was doing well. In fact at 18 you alluded to this, you had a business,
can you tell the audience about that business? It’s pretty cleaver what you
were able to do.
Zeke: Yeah, so what I did is, so I guess the advantage of growing up in a
third world country is that if you analyze what’s happening in Europe and
in the U.S everything there gets three or four years late. So you can take
ideas and implement them in your own country. So I was looking at some
American companies that were doing a really good job with online training,
eLearning. So what I did is I approached, I think it was like six or seven
different experts in different things and we developed courses in CD. So,
it was like how to learn to speak English. We had one for Italian, French,
speed reading, memory. So we basically created all these different courses
and the good thing about this is that I paid each expert $100 and then I
owned the contents so then I could burn a new CD, that’s like 50 cents
right? So it was like almost 100% profit after that initial investment.
Andrew: So you get them to teach. You then start selling it. I’ll get to
how you sold it in a moment and what kind of revenue you did at 18 with
this business but to get someone to teach English, to do it right, it’s not
easy. You can’t just put a camera on them and say hey, roll, I’ve got to
get something that’s gold here. It takes some time right? So how did you
get them to teach it properly?
Zeke: You know, looking back at it, I think that the quality of some of the
courses wasn’t that great but most of our customers found it very helpful
especially because there was no, I mean, it was either pay $25 pesos for
the CD and basically learn the whole language or pay $400 to a school and
take six months. So we were in a very unique space and there wasn’t a lot
of competition really. I mean it was just us selling this product. So,
yeah, but looking back at it, some of the products were not that great.
Andrew: I see, OK. All right, I remember living in Argentina where I
couldn’t get the things I was used to. Like I couldn’t watch HULU for
example, I think or one of those sites, I just couldn’t watch them. So I’d
go down to the street and for a couple of pesos, less then a buck, I could
get a movie if there wasn’t a cop who was hanging out right in, like
looking for his own DVDs and crowding me out it. You know, if he was then
I’d have to wait and step aside. But it’s such a part of the culture to do
this. So how are you walking into this culture and saying I got CDs for you
guys to buy and I know you’re not buying all this Hollywood stuff, but
you’ve got to buy mine. What do you do to sell in that kind of environment?
Zeke: What I did is basically I purchase a list of people who had bought
online before. It wasn’t a very good list because those people had bought
completely different products but back them selling emails is still free
but now we have all these filters and back them as long as you had a list
you could email them as long as it said if you want to unsubscribe just
click here. That was the only regulation. So that’s how I did it.
Andrew: I see. So you basically buy the list, pretty inexpensive because
the list is sold over and over again and you still have to get them to buy.
Tell me about the copy?
Zeke: I think I’ve always been a really good copywriter. I’ve always been
really good at understanding why people buy, what are the main benefits of
a product and how to position it in a way that It’s unique, you need to
have it right away.
Andrew: So, what are some of the things you knew even back that then that
you need to include in a sales letter, an email letter that makes it feel
like something you have to buy right away?
Zeke: Well, the subject line in the email is, that’s half of your battle is
there, getting people to open your email. Once they open it you have about
half of a second for them to decide whether it’s something that’s worth
reading or not.
Andrew: So what did you do? Blow my mind with something you did to get
people to open up an email or to keep reading after they read the first
sentence or two?
Zeke: So, for example, using the learn English product, one of the things
in Argentina is that back then it was, well, I think it’s still that way,
but it used to be really hard to get a job. And being bilingual was a huge
plus but most people, like, they claim to speak English but not really.
I think that the subject line was something like “When your boss finds out
you can’t really speak English, are you going to lose your job?”. I mean,
something that spoke to the pain or “Are you looking for a job? Stand out
from the competition.” Something like that. Because I knew that that was
the main reason why people were learning a second language.
Andrew: So, I guess if I were going to write it under the circumstances
that you are reaching your audience, I might say something like subject
line “You’re going to lose your job” and then in the first sentence of the
email I might then tie in how they might lose their job but they might hear
they’re going to lose your job unless they learn English or something like
that.
Did you do anything like that because you really worked with a list that
was emailed to over and over again and you needed to do whatever you could
to get people to open it up and to really pay attention to buy from you.
Zeke: Yeah. I mean, normally what I did is try to identify the two or three
main pain points and come up with solutions to those.
So in this case [??] would have been about not being able to land a job as
the problem and learning all the skills was the solution to that problem.
So I always started the copy asking questions like “Do you feel insecure
every time you go to a job interview? Do you feel like you don’t have all
the skills required? Do you feel like other candidates are always more
qualified?” And then I had their attention and I could go on and talk about
the solution.
Andrew: How did you know that was their pain?
Zeke: Half of the time I honestly just took a guess and sometimes I tested
two different pieces of copy and one worked better than the other. And keep
in mind that I was always selling the same products. So I would rotate and
comeback to the first one again.
Andrew: Oh, I see. You had about ten different products so you were able to
do one and then try the next and then the next and the next all through the
same list and that way you can keep experimenting but also keep it fresh.
Zeke: Yeah, and something else I did that I think it’s really important for
entrepreneurs to do is for the first two months I actually delivered the
products myself. And I did this, there was a reason for this because I
could pay someone $5 an hour or less to do the delivery but I wanted to be
in touch with my customers. I wanted to know why they were buying and I got
a lot of feedback that I could use to go back and improve the copy and have
it…
Andrew: Like what?
Zeke: Like, for example, I would just talk to them. For this course, I’ll
give it to them and ask them why they were interested in learning English
and that basically got the whole conversation started and that gave me so
many ideas to go back to the copy and perfect it for the next one.
Andrew: Oh, I see. So they tell you then that they’re worried about their
boss discovering that they don’t really speak English well and then you
included in the copy next time.
Zeke: Yeah. I’d go talk to them and they would say ‘I’m trying to find a
job and everybody speaks English but my English is very rusty so I just
want to get better. So, I knew some of the things.
Andrew: How much revenue did you earn a month on this business?
Zeke: The revenue and the profit was pretty much the same because I was
doing everything myself and the CDs were so cheap, so it was about $20,000
a month.
Andrew: And so, how much were you selling per CD?
Zeke: I was charging $25 pesos per CD which is…
Andrew: $5 bucks?
Zeke: Yeah, $5 U.S. Dollars.
Andrew: So, that’s a lot of CDs for you to be traveling around and
delivering individually one at a time.
Zeke: Yeah, and I was, I remember, like, in Argentina paying online with a
credit card is not very, well, now I think it’s more popular but back then
nobody did this. So I had to actually mail all the courses and get checks
and I would go to the post office and the lady there hated me because you
had to write so many checks. She couldn’t write a check for the whole
amount. She had to write a check for every sale so basically her, I used to
go there every Friday and she had to work only on my account every Friday.
Andrew: So, you delivered roughly 4,000 orders?
Zeke: A month. Yes.
Andrew: A month.
Zeke: Yeah.
Andrew: Argentina’s pretty big. I guess you’re doing just Buenos Aires?
Zeke: No. I was shipping all over the country.
Andrew: Oh, but you don’t go to see everybody door to door. You’re saying,
if they were available nearby, you’d go door to door to see them.
Zeke: For deliveries in…
Andrew: …doors to see them.
Zeke: For deliveries in the Buenos Aires city. I did some of those myself.
Andrew: I see. OK. I thought you were saying that you did every one of
them.
Zeke: No, no.
Andrew: OK. All right. I thought maybe, I’m being fed some kind of a story
here. I better check this out. All right. Let’s continue then. Then you
sold the business. Why and how did you sell it?
Zeke: You know, I was never very money driven. I was making good money but
I was bored, to be honest. That’s the truth. I just wanted to move on, do
something else, something more fun.
So I told a friend of mine that I was getting really bored and he said
“Well, you know, are you making $20 grand a month. It’s a lot of money,
especially because you’re 18 years old, in Argentina, where you can go out
to a restaurant and eat for a few bucks. So it’s a lot of money and I
think, you know you shouldn’t just kill the company. I can take over, if
you want.” We worked out an arrangement where he basically gave me all the
profits for the first 12 months and then he kept all the money after that.
I already had like more money than I could spend and I always lead a very
simple lifestyle. I didn’t need more stuff. I wanted to travel but when I
travel I do love camping and I still love hostels so it’s not very
expensive.
Andrew: What’s the best thing that you got yourself? The most luxurious or
more extravagant thing you got?
Zeke: You know, I don’t own a lot of stuff, to be honest. I have a really
nice computer but I like spending my money on experiences. I’ve been to all
continents on Earth. Normally, I work from January until August and then I
travel from September until December.
This year for example, my wife and I are driving all the way from the U.S.
to Argentina. And that’s a four month trip. And we’re going to hit 15 or 20
different countries. So, that’s the kind of thing we’re into. Not buying
stuff, but really spending our money on experiences.
Andrew: Who’s going to run your marketing agency while you’re away?
Zeke: Well, partially me. I’m not going to be completely disconnected. I
check my email everyday. I take a couple of phone calls but I have an
amazing team. A campaign manager, we have a really good sales person. We
have an amazing team, a web designer, a developer, a copy writer, a video
producer. So they’re really, really good at what they do. Even when I’m at
the office every day, I don’t have to micromanage them at all. They know
exactly what to do. They’re all really invested in the company. They’re all
interested in the company being very successful and servicing our clients
the best way they can so I just trust them a lot.
Andrew: All right. Here’s what I have in my notes. Soon after, you ended up
with $100,000 in debt. How? How do you go from running a business where
you’re selling CDs for $5 a pop, bringing in $20,000 a month to suddenly
$100,000 in debt?
Zeke: I think I got a little bit cocky. I thought I had all the answers and
I felt that because I did it once, I could do it again. So, I didn’t do any
market research and I started this company importing leather goods from
Argentina into the U.S. So, we created this really beautiful online store
selling handbags, jackets, and in the first three months, the website only
got one sale. And we were just spending a lot of money getting that off the
ground.
Andrew: Where did you spend the money? Was it advertising, inventory?
Zeke: You know, looking back at it, I feel like we built our business the
opposite way it should have been built. We should have tested the market
first and then grow it from there once we’ve proven the business model. But
what we did is we just hired the best photographer we could find. We got
the best products that. The thing is, I’m all for providing quality
products but we started with 300 when maybe having 20 or 30 just to test
the business model would have been more than enough.
And the other thing is I was such a perfectionist back then that everything
had to be the way I wanted it to be so for example we weren’t getting any
sales online but I was completely obsessed with the logo. I wanted it to be
perfect, like it didn’t make sense to me so I spent like, I don’t know,
maybe three or four weeks working on the logo because I wasn’t happy with
it and I couldn’t see the big picture. I mean we weren’t getting any sales
so that cost us a lot of money just being in business not selling anything
for so long.
Andrew: I’ve got tell you, I’m so glad that you’re willing to be this open.
Usually I have to spend time with guests, if you see them open at all, it’s
because I spend time with them before hand, going over things like I did
with you. I don’t know if you noticed but I was just testing the water to
see before the interview started, are you going to be OK with me bringing
up crying. I don’t know if I specifically said crying but I was testing to
see it. Usually the response I get from people is no so I feel like, you
know, ease him in to it, tell him a story of mine, get them a little bit
more comfortable and then we can go into personal stuff.
With you, you’re just going right into it and nobody wants a Zeke: who
talks about how life is great, he’s making millions of dollars, he
consistently getting customers, and he’s got five women at home who his
wife totally approves of. It’s just not an interesting story. What we want
is the reality of it, that’s why I was so obsessed with what was going on
in your head because I relate to it, I want that, I want to hear about how
you dealt with it.
So I get the idea of spending a lot of time and a lot of money on this,
spending a lot of time on even the logo, I’m looking at my notes here and
one thing that you did that did work for you was, you ended up going door
to door, that’s how desperate you were?
Zeke: So, what happened is my wife and I went to the grocery store once and
our card got rejected so we went back to the house, we checked out our
online banking and we only had $32 in the bank account and all our credit
cards were maxed out so we freaked out, like, we were, like, we had about
$50,000 worth of stock in our house, like all these handbags and jackets so
we were really desperate so it’s not like we had a choice. We just grabbed
five or six products each and back then we were living in Aspen, Colorado
and there are a lot of fashion stores so we actually sold everything. We
sold like $30,000 worth of products in a day.
So we came back home, my wife and I talked and we were like, “OK this is
where the business is.” We had to go to stores, sell directly to stores
because they have the customers. Unfortunately we were both very scared of
selling and it was kind of a last resort thing and we decided not to do it
anymore. It was very stressful for us, it wasn’t fulfilling, and my wife
kept working two jobs and I kept working on building the agency that [??].
It’s my main business now so everything happened for a reason but I feel
like as a business owner sometimes we have to say, “Look, I hate doing this
but I have to do it.” It has to be done. The same thing happened with me
when it comes to sales. I used to hate selling but now you have to do it
and…
Andrew: I was going to say you sound like you’re a great sales person but
when you and I first talked, I don’t know how long ago, I asked you what
courses did you like and what interviews did you like? You told me the
interview is the one with Fred Bliss, who I’m looking at my notes down
here…
Zeke: Yes.
Andrew: … on the screen, who used to sell RVs and the course that you,
the first course that you mentioned was Nicholas Holland, about how to
sell. I’m listening to you, you seem like you’re a natural sales person, I
mean, everything from selling CDs as a kid, to then going door to door.
None of this came naturally to you?
Zeke: No, I’ve always been really afraid of rejection and I even remember
back in the high school with the girls, like, I remember my friends were
basically talking to every girl and if 10 of them turned them down but the
11th said yes they were happy. To me that was like I couldn’t process
rejection so I couldn’t talk to girls and it was very painful and the same
thing happened with me when I started doing sales. I took it very personal
and it was like I didn’t know if they would like me, if they would like
what I had to offer and it was really, really nerve wrecking for me.
I was telling Jeremy, your producer, yesterday that we go to [??] through
the Website a couple of years ago, I called this guy, he heard my accent,
and he’s like, “I hate Indian telemarketers.”, and it was the most racists
comment ever. I just didn’t know what to do with that, I’m like, “Well I
have …” I told him, “Look I have a lot of friends who are Indian who are
great. I’m not even Indian and I’m not a telemarketer. I’m just [??] and I
started thinking that, you know, every, like, not every time you walk into
a store you end up buying something. Sometimes, you’re just looking around
seeing what’s out that and not every parts a right fit. So I started, like,
understanding this and not taking it, like, as a personal rejection. They
were just not interested in what I had to offer and that’s fine. So it was
kind of like a shift in mentality for me.
Andrew: Nicholas Holland did his Mixergy Premium course says you want to
turn people away. That feels like a liberating experience to not to try to
go for them but to turn them away and maybe even turn the tables and have
them want you. Is that what drew you in?
Zeke: You know, something he said is you want to go for the no and he said
the ideal outcome is a yes; the second best outcome is a no. What you
should have avoid at all costs is a maybe or, you know, if they tell you,
like, for example, like yeah I need more time to think about it. I would
say great, how much time to you need. When would you like me to follow up
with you again? Give you two weeks, four weeks? That’s fine if they need
more time to think about it but, you know, if someone says something like
you know, I have to think about it and I have this sense that their not
really interested I would just tell them look, I mean, you can tell me the
truth. If this is not something you want I don’t want to waste your time.
You know, if you want me to follow up with you in a couple of weeks, I can
definitely do that but if you’re not interested, you can let me know. I’m
not going to get upset.
Andrew: And then not getting upset is a real challenge. To not feel
deflated because of it. To not walk around wishing all kinds of things on
that person like, he’s got to get comeuppance because he said no to me.
That’s the stuff that goes on in my head.
Zeke: One of the things where you can read 1,000 books but, you know, you
have to do it a lot and it just becomes easier and easier.
Andrew: Yeah, you really do. You know I don’t want to keep tagging onto
everything you say so I’ll go onto the next question but I’m loving this
interview. Alright, the idea to do online marketing came to you when you
want to take a vacation with a couple of your friends. Can you pick up the
story from there and tell people about that?
Zeke: Yeah, definitely. So, back then I was promoting my, you know, CD-rom
company. All the courses we’re selling and two of my friends and I had been
talking about going to Brazil for a month for a summer vacation but a month
before that or two months before that they told me they were broke, they
couldn’t afford it and they wouldn’t go. So, I really, really wanted to go
with them. I had, like, a really rough year. I really needed to get out of
town. So, I’m like what if I can help you make the revenue you need to go
on the trip? They were like, OK, sure. So I, those were my two, like, first
two clients but not really. They were my friends. So, I helped them out.
They made a little bit of money and we all went to Brazil.
Andrew: But you felt confidents enough in your skills and your marketing
skills to say to these two friends I’m going to make sure that you earn
enough money from my marketing skills so that you can take this vacation?
How did you get to that confidence at that point? This is 2001.
Zeke: You know, I wasn’t really confident that I could success but they
weren’t paying me. They were my friends and I was just giving it a shot. It
worked out really well but it could have not worked out.
Andrew: What kind of things did you do for them?
Zeke: Basically I helped them communicate with their existing clients
because one of my friends was a tennis instructor and he would like, you
know, take on a new client for a couple of months then they would be gone.
He would never follow up. So we talked a little bit about how to do that.
Working on some specials and some things he could do to get people to come
back to him. The other friend was a landscaper. So I basically, I mentioned
that I felt like I always had real popular writing skills so we just, you
know, created a one page sign that he posted all over town and that got him
enough business. It was really basic stuff, you know, but they weren’t
doing it.
Andrew: Signs over all over town with the right copy write and boom, sales
come in. Not huge sales, just enough for you guys to take a little trip.
Zeke: Yeah.
Andrew: All right, then you created, you wanted to become, by the way, I
feel like I’m leading you. I should tell the audience, I’m leading because
I know where I want to go with this interview. I’m not looking for the side
conversations. I’m not looking for the what did you have for breakfast, not
that anyone talks about that. I’m not looking to be gee whiz I didn’t know
that and just, if I could do research ahead of time and know what my
audience wants, I want to go right for it. So, if it seems like it’s
scripted it’s not scripted.
What we’ve got is a good process here to make sure that by the time the
audience gets this interview, it’s all the stuff that I know that they
want. All the stuff that I know that they need. You can tell. I put no
attention into my look here. I put no attention into my mic. There are
children at home with better microphones than me. I have no interest in
getting better looking or getting better mics yet. All I want to do is
obsess on just getting the notes right, to get the right information in
this interviews for my audience. That’s why sometimes I don’t look at you
directly because I’m looking right down on my notes. Where do I want to go.
What’s key here. So, then, you had this skill and you were going to develop
it, but every time you promoted it, people accused you or called you out
for doing what? Spam.
Zeke: Yeah, so, fast forward three or four years. I realized that I could
help other companies. It was very fulfilling for me. The reward I felt from
helping my friends and their friends was really, really good. So, I decided
to build a business out of this and something I started doing is I found a
lot of business forums online and I just started posting comments.
Basically hey, this is what I do. This is what I can help you with. I’m
[??] get a really good response because I know what I’m doing and I’ve done
this before. It’s going to work really well. I did this for two or three
weeks and 90% of the emails I would get were people calling me, telling me
you’re a spammer. You’re posing this for forums and I didn’t even know that
was something I was not supposed to do. I felt they were out there. I can
use them for marketing. That’s just fine.
So, what I did is I started thinking about how can I produce value and at
the same time get my name out there and make sure the companies know what I
do so they can hire me. So, what I started doing was to create really good
content. So, I started teaching people how to do SEO, how to do social
media, how to have a comprehensive online marketing strategy, how to make
sure that your Web site converts visitors into leads or sales. I just
started giving away everything I knew and I was always on top of what was
going on and the response was phenomenal. I started landing clients, and
those were my first clients that didn’t come through referrals. So, for me
that was a huge win. It was counter intuitive because the less I tried to
sell, the more I sold.
Andrew: That is interesting. That’s actually an evolution that I’ve seen a
lot in my interviews, where people will be aggressive and aggressive and it
will work at first and then they teach and it works massively for a much
longer period of time. I’m going to come back to this concept of teaching.
The logo for this business. How long did it take you to create this logo?
You said the last one took you forever for the leather company. How about
this one.
Zeke: Ten minutes.
Andrew: Ten minutes to get your logo together.
Zeke: Yes, because I know it was going to change so if you go to the Web
site now, that’s not the one I designed. The one that we have on the Web
site looks really good. The one I put together it took me somewhere between
10 and 20 minutes.
Andrew: What about this need that here in the service business, more than
in the product business, you’re design matters. The way that you
communicate your design, your brand, tells people how much care you’re
going to put in the work you’re doing for them. Why didn’t that spook you?
Why didn’t that make you say hey, we’ve got to spend a little bit more than
ten minutes here? Maybe even ten weeks, if that’s how long it takes.
Zeke: Well, I like to think that I learn from my previous mistakes. I knew
that just being obsessive and perfectionist wasn’t going to take me
anywhere. I just had to get something out there and I understood by then a
Web site is always a work in progress. You never finish a Web site. I have
ideas to improve my Web site every single week, so you just change the
paradigm. It’s not a thing you just do once. It’s something that you have
to constantly be working on.
Andrew: All right. So, next, oh here’s the other question that came to
my mind. When you’re selling product the way that you were at 18, you just
knocked that stuff off the shelf, your business scales quickly, you not
obligated to show up at the office at the office at a certain time, life is
good. Very rarely do you see entrepreneurs going from that kind of a life
to a life where they’re in a service business where they have to do SEO
work for people, where they have to perform, where they have to deliver
result. Didn’t that bother you that you were going go into a service
business? Why weren’t you looking for a product?
Zeke: I think I did have a little bit of luck in my first couple of years
in business. I was really on, I was [??] inexperienced, I didn’t know what
I was doing. I got really lucky, I mean, I’m not going to deny that and I
spent the last, the following five years trying to replicate that with my
leather goods store and I just couldn’t pull it off. It’s not that I; I
didn’t have the knowledge I have now. I think that I, there’s no doubt that
if I started the leather goods company now it will be [??] successful.
But back then I just didn’t know how to do and I didn’t have enough money
to keep the business running but there’s this stigma about service
businesses that they’re not as good as product business but I don’t feel
that way at all. I’m a very sociable person, I love meeting with my clients
to talk about what their goals are, how we’re going to get there, their
strategies, so I mean I love what we do and I enjoy it as much as I did
selling products.
Andrew: How do you find you customers paying points now, you said that was
critical for you when you were in the CD business?
Zeke: Are you talking about existing clients and how to help them to market
themselves better to their customers or how we market to our clients?
Andrew: How you market and how you satisfy your clients? So you told me,
let’s talk about marketing first, and we’ll get to this next big leap that
you took in 2009 in a moment that’s important to talk about in this
interview but I want to understand how … one thing that worked for you
before was to say, “I’m going to talk to my customer’s, understand why they
want to learn a language, what’s so painful that they’re risking money to
an, on an Internet company at a time when people weren’t doing it and in a
culture that’s not trained to do it. I want to understand where their pain
is so that I can then talk about their pain to future customers, to talk
about pain to future customers.”
How did you do that here, or do you do that at the Outsourcing Company?
Zeke: Well, we know that most people have the same issues with their
Websites. They either not converting, they can’t be found on Google or they
don’t have a social, like a strong social media presence so those are the
three things that we help our clients with. So putting together the
marketing message for that kind of audience it wasn’t really hard because
that’s what we’ve been doing for the last six years.
Andrew: OK. So there was no research in the same way, there were no
customer conversations that way?
Zeke: Oh yes, there’s been a lot of customer conversations and we’ve
redesigned our Website at least seven times in the last seven years and
every time we try to make it better and better so yes we’re always
improving it.
Andrew: All right, back to 2009, what happened there?
Zeke: For the first eight years of my business I, I was just helping people
and our fees were fairly low and I was doing this kind of like a side thing
to pay the bills and I wasn’t really looking to grow. I was very happy with
where I was and I felt like money was never too important for me. I mean,
I’m a very competitive person don’t take me wrong but I care about other
things and I just started feeling that I can do much better than this.
I’ve done it before and I think I have the knowledge and the skills
required to grow this business so I hired my … well first I hired a
couple of freelancers to do the work because first I was doing sales and
fulfillment and then I realized I only want to be doing sales and client
management so I hired different people to do their work and finally in 2009
I hired my first time employee so we went from one and now we have eight.
So I had a conscious desire to grow two and half years ago.
Andrew: And you’ve had, and we’ll talk about the numbers there, you also
took on a big client. One that couldn’t handle its own customers.
Zeke: Yes. So we started working, isn’t it a little ironic that an SEO
agency hired us to do their SEO and the SEO for other of their clients? But
it didn’t work out really well because the kind of plans they had were too
small for us and we just, I don’t know. This guy brought this SEO agency
and they hired us to do their clients but what happened was that they had
packages for $150 a month, $200 a month and that was, because SEO back in
2005 was really easy. All you had to do was put a lot of keywords in your
pages and you’d be number 1 for everything.
But as SEO evolved, it became much more expensive to provide SEO so the
plants they were offering were no [??] competitor.
Andrew: I see, OK. And you do SEO, Search Engine Optimization. You do pay
per click management where you would buy pay per click ads for your clients
and you do social media advertising management for them too?
Zeke: Yes. [??] optimization.
Andrew: And conversion optimization?
Zeke: Yeah.
Andrew: And you have clients, who are some of your clients? You have Burger
King as a client, is that right?
Zeke: Yeah. We have a couple of big clients. We have Burger King. We have
Chevrolet. We have Subaru. But really most of our clients are in the half a
million to $20 million range.
Andrew: OK. They do half a million dollars in sales or higher and they come
to you to help them get more sales, more revenue, more customers.
Zeke: Yeah. Basically, when a company has a website that is not working for
them and is not generating enough sales or leads, that’s where we come in.
And we help our clients rank their websites [??], create a really strong
social media presence, engage their audience in a conversation that is
valuable and make sure that once we drive a lot of traffic to the website,
that that traffic converts into big customers or clients.
Andrew: OK. If those aren’t typical clients, who is a typical client?
Without mentioning the name, if you’re not comfortable. Just give me a
sense of the kind of client that’s typical.
Zeke: So, for example, I’ll give you an example of a B2B client and a B2C.
In B2B we have a pharmacy [??] consultant, back in the East Coast. He has a
staff, I think he has like 4 or 5 employees. Relatively small company. And
then we have another guy here in Colorado but sells a product that helps
with back pain. So yeah, our clients are really all over the board as far
as what kind of products and services they offer.
Andrew: All right. Two and a half years ago you lost a bunch of clients
over a six month period. It’s one of the lowest points for you in this
business, maybe even in all business. What happened there?
Zeke: What happened is we had lost, I think, it was like five or six
clients within like a two week period, two or three weeks and I was
driving, i got a phone call from our [??] but then and they cancelled
their account. And that was just too much for me to take so I had to pull
over. I just burst in tears. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. I had this
plan of the company growing, growing, growing, growing and I never took
into consideration that sometimes it takes one step back, two steps
forward, one step back. I had this idea of the company always growing and
just having those really unreleased the expectations were just killing me.
So I had a meltdown.
Andrew: Were you at the same time, was it tapping into something bigger?
Did it make you feel like ‘Oh, no. I’m back to the person who I thought,
who I used to think I was? Am I never going to make it? Was it tapping into
something beyond this?
Zeke: No. I think this last thing when it happened, I was much more mature
and I had a much stronger personality. My self-confidence levels are much,
much higher.
So, no, I didn’t feel like this is it, this is the end, I can’t pull it off
but I did feel like “Damn. I’ve been working so hard. Now we have to start
pretty much all over again” and that’s kind of the feeling I had.
Andrew: That sucks about entrepreneurship. It’s not just about work. I feel
like in so many other, like even in high school, I worked in a basement
separating hangers so someone else could put clothes on those hangers and
put them back upstairs, I don’t know, the floor, so people could by and
then, you know, those hangers end up in clutter downstairs for me to undo
it again. But, at least, I felt a sense of progress there. If I just undid
the hangers, my job was OK, I was doing alright. Here you can’t. You could
work all day and not get any progress. In fact, you can fall back. What was
I going to say about that? Why is your confidence, even as your telling me
this, you’re not sad, you’re not uncomfortable saying you cried, I’d be
uncomfortable saying I cried. You’re not uncomfortable. Where does this
confidence come from?
Zeke: You know, I don’t know if it’s so much confidence but I, you know, I
wish somebody had told me when I was like 22 years old, 23 years old; this
was going to be a lot harder. You know, when you read books, it’s like oh,
it’s all dreamy. You make all this money, you get to do what you want, you
make a lot of friends but, you know, I never read or heard about the other
part where, you know, it’s really hard, you know, it takes a lot more time
than having a regular job and, you know, sometimes you’re alone and
sometimes you have to, you know, for example, if you have employees, you
have, you can’t do this in front of them.
You have to show that you’re strong and you know what you’re doing and so
sometimes you have to, you know, cry alone or if it’s not crying, that was
the last time I cried, like two and a half years ago but even if I don’t
cry I get upset now. Like last Friday we lost a client, a big one, and that
was too much for me but I knew I had to walk away from the office, go back
home and just do a post mortem annualize what went wrong, make sure it
doesn’t happen again. So, today, well actually yesterday, I went back to
the office and I’m like OK, we’re fine, our numbers are looking really
good. Don’t worry about this. It’s just one client we lost and this is why
we lost him and let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Andrew: Why, what’d you do to lose him?
Zeke: Well, he said, you know, we didn’t communicate enough. So, the
mistake we made was to assume that once a week was enough and he wanted us
to communicate, you know, like every other day or so. So now, we have a
questionnaire that we fill out every time we start a new campaign. So now
one of the questions we have is how often do you want us to send you a
status update? You know, it’s solved and there was no need to, you know,
get emotional about it and the way it seems is I just paid $10,000 to make
my company better.
Andrew: I see, that’s a great way to look at it. Let’s see, what else? You
know what? Let me talk a little bit about Mixergy Premium or ask you about
it and then we’ll get to a couple of other questions maybe about two more
including one that you thought that we should have asked you that we didn’t
ask you and one of the parts of our premium interview process is to say
what are we missing? So, Mixergy Premium actually, you’ve been a Mixergy
Premium member now, I looked before we started, for a long time, over a
year. You’re one of our best members. Why are you subscribed? Maybe that
will help the audience understand. Maybe instead of me promoting it we can
just hear why you’re a member, what you get out of it. What do you think
others can get out of it?
Zeke: Sure, sure. So, I basically, I think like Google, like entrepreneurs
interviews, yeah, interviews with entrepreneurs, something like that and
then I found you and I’m like, well, this looks really cool and you have
some, you know, you had Ranch Fish King, you had a couple of big guys up
and there and so I’m like oh, I really admire who this guy is. I’ll check
it out. I mean, it’s not [?] so if I don’t like it I can always cancel it
and what I did was I basically downloaded a lot of the interviews to my
iPhone and downloaded some courses to and I mentioned before how I work for
eight months and then I travel for four months.
So, last year I backpacked around Europe for four months so I loaded my
iPhone with like, all these interviews, courses and everything and man, I
mean I got so many great ideas. I was like working around Europe and taking
notes with my iPhone all the time and, yeah, I just, I mean, I think that
if more entrepreneurs placed more value into, you know, always learning new
things and always learning from mentors and other successful entrepreneurs,
like, everybody would be doing much better. Would have to [?] ourselves,
you know, I highly suggest that we all get mentors and people who can help
us.
Andrew: Thank you. I’m now just not going to screw it up. All I’ll say is
go to MixergyPremium.com and you get all those courses and interviews. And
if you’re not as happy, I’ give you a 100% of your money back. I want you
to be as happy and get as many results as possible. And if you don’t, I’ll
give you a full refund. MixergyPremium.com. Why don’t we start with what we
didn’t ask you? So, let me take a look actually here. You know what? Yes,
screw it. I was actually going to come back to something else. When we
didn’t, I’m getting a little nervous.
You know what? Here’s what I’ll say. I hear Frank Grubber, not Frank
Grubber, John Grubber of Daring Fireball, just rip on anyone he likes.
Android he feels like, he’ll take strong positions, about Apple he’ll be
really bold and aggressive. But when it comes time to talk about his own
products on camera or on a microphone, he just reads like there’s about
promoting your own stuff on your own program with a microphone that brings
out insecurities. There, and I just screwed it up. Edit that out, Joe. No,
we can’t edit it out. I got to leave it in there. What did we miss? We
missed a question here about the journey from zero to $250,000.
Zeke: Yeah. Up to $250,000 basically happened organically. I mentioned that
I started doing a little bit of social media, posting to different forums,
LinkedIn groups, I started blogging so between that and all the referrals
we were getting from happy clients, we got to 250. Now, we always place a
lot of importance in servicing our clients the best way possible. So I was
taking calls pretty much 24/7 because we had some international clients and
we were always on top of what we were doing. So we got a lot of clients
that way and I feel like some agencies and so many businesses in general
place so much more value in acquiring new businesses than they do on
servicing their existing clients. So, I think we’ve done a very good job
there with all social media. We got to about $250,000 in revenue.
Andrew: I see. I guess I didn’t understand this part right. You though it
was important to break down for the audience how some of the lessons that
you learned along the way like taking bigger risks and getting comfortable
with that, right? Can you talk about that a little?
Zeke: Yeah, yeah. So, we were at $250 in 2010. We did half a million last
year and we are right on target to hit $1.4 million this year. So. Some of
the things I did differently was, one of those was what you just said. Just
feeling more comfortable with taking risks. I was very, very risk adverse.
I was playing a game not to lose instead of to win so I finally decided to
start investing more in marketing, hire more full time employees. Because
it’s scary when you hire a new employee because you have this extra expense
and you don’t have the revenue right away. It takes a couple of months for
them to be profitable if you think of them as an investment.
I just knew that if I wanted to be where I wanted to be, I had to grow with
things. And we also started creating more partnerships with other agencies
like web design agencies that don’t do SEO or social media or traditional
marketing agencies that do radio and TV ads. And the good thing about
partnering was that all these other agencies already had really great
relationships with their clients and they were looking for someone to help
in all these different areas but they just couldn’t do themselves and they
weren’t going to ruin their reputation by doing something they didn’t know
how to do. So, it was a perfect fit and we also referred a lot of clients
to them for the things we didn’t do.
Andrew: When you have these partnerships, does money change hands or is it
just “Trust me, I’ll take good care of your customers and I’ll trust you
with my customers.” Is it that kind of relationship?
Zeke: You know, it’s about a 50-50. Some people just contact me because
they find social media under like “Hey, we need someone for SEO or social
media clients. I ain’t taking your clients.” And those people just send me
clients but then, normally when we approach someone, we have to make the
offer better so we do offer a bonus of 5% residual commission from the
clients [??].
Andrew: Five percent. How much does that add up to? If I send you a typical
client?
Zeke: Normally the average account that we service is between $2000 and
$3000 a month. If it’s $2000, it would be $100 a month and normally only
people are clients an average of two and a half years. It could be up to
$3000 in revenue for every customer.
Andrew: What’s working for you especially well right now as far as online
marketing?
Zeke: A lot of different things, really. It depends on what kind of
business you have. We have a tool set of 50 different [??] and then, what
we do is, every time we get a new prospect, we do sales very differently
than most [??] do sales. We don’t have a sales person specifically. The
sales person’s part of our whole world strategy so he comes to us, he’s
like, “Hey, I have this opportunity. What [??] would we take?” Then [??],
who’s our senior strategist and me just get together and we talk about what
would be the best way to promote that specific company and we put together
a proposal based on their needs.
Andrew: How is Facebook working for you?
Zeke: Working really well. Facebook has an amazing platform. The thing with
Facebook is once people like your page, they’re basically giving you
permission to market to them down the road. There are a lot of really cool
things that you can do to engage your audience on Facebook. It’s also
really viral, so every time someone likes you, all their friends see that,
so it spreads like wildfire. The other thing about Facebook, it has a
really amazing [??] platform that allows you to target people by how old
they are, whether they’re men or women, where they’re located, what kind of
things they like, where they work, even sexual preferences, where’d they go
to school, when they’re going to graduate, what kind of major.
Andrew: And you’re getting a good return on investment from buying those
ads?
Zeke: Amazing. Yeah.
Andrew: Amazing. Are you building the landing pages for your customers or
are they building it themselves?
Zeke: We build them, their landing pages. Unless they have one, but most
people just don’t have one and the worst thing you can do is just send
people to your homepage.
Andrew: So if I were working with you, you would help build my landing
page, you would buy my ads for me, we would talk about strategy, but you
would do most of the implementation?
Zeke: Yeah. We would define your customer personas, the kind of people that
you want to target and for each audience, we create a landing page with a
specific marketing message and then use their Facebook platform to target
the right audience in each case.
Andrew: I got two more questions. I’ve got a note here from earlier in the
interview that I forgot to come back and follow up on where you said, “I’m
a smart guy. Why is this not working for me?” Going back, why wasn’t it
working for you?
Zeke: I wasn’t trying really hard. I think I wasn’t [??] everything in my
power. I was being very passive about getting new business and there were a
lot of things I knew that I had to do, but I just wasn’t willing to do it.
Andrew: Why not?
Zeke: As an entrepreneur, you do a lot of things that are uncomfortable.
You have to constantly live out of your comfort zone. Sometimes I felt
like, for example, let’s say I had to make ten phone calls. I’ll make maybe
one and end up being so nervous that I just want to go back and watch TV or
do something else, or when I had to prioritize all the tasks that I had to
do, I always put the ones that were easy at the top instead of the most
important ones. Just because I was feeling good about getting stuff done,
but I was getting the wrong things done.
Andrew: That makes so much freakin’ sense. Final question is this. You and
I talked about having you come on to teach something on Mixergy. What do
you think the audience needs? What would you want to teach?
Zeke: What I want to teach is about link building. To give you a little
background, I think that we can all agree that getting found in Google,
being the number one company on Google for your industry is really
important. When you do search engine optimization, there are basically two
different sides to that. You have the [??] page organization, which is
where you optimize the content, the code and the meta tags on your website,
but the other part, and that’s really easy and anybody can do that, but the
other part is getting links and Facebook shares, and WeTweets. Let me
explain to you why these things are important.
Andrew: OK.
Zeke: Google does things as votes. The more votes you get the better you’re
going to rank. The more links you have from other websites linking to your
site, the more Facebook share you have and the more WeTweets you have, the
better you’re going to rank on Google. Most people have no idea how to do
this. The top SU experts in the world all agreed that getting the right
kind of links pointed to your site is the number one ranking factor.
Meaning that if you have everything else in order but if you don’t have
enough links, you’re not going to rank at the top of Google for anything.
Andrew: Link building is one of the top, most requested courses. I think I
might have told you, that I haven’t found the right person to teach it
because it’s important and it’s got to be done right. I’d love to have you
come on and teach it. Let me as you this concern, a lot of times I hear is
just so much work that it then becomes a whole other job for someone who’s
trying to do this. If we’re running a business we can’t also run the
business of getting links. Can we? How do we do that?
Zeke: Link building is time consuming.
Andrew: Very.
Zeke: Right. It’s time consuming. That’s a fact. Now, what you have ask
yourself is what’s the value of being number one in Google because your
phone is going to start ringing, you’re going to start getting a lot more
clients, so that makes sense to spend two or four a week getting links. In
the course I’m going to show you a lot of really good tools that without
these tools it could easily be a full time job just to build tools. But,
with all the right tools and the right techniques most websites can get
away with two to three hours a week of link building. That would be enough
to get into the top of Google.
Andrew: All right. We’re going to go through this process again, a process
similar to the one that you took to set up this interview except more
intense, and we’ll put together a course with you. I’m glad that you’re
willing to do that. First we’ll post this interview and I’ll say this, the
website is theoutsourcingcompany.com. Is that the best place for people to
go?
Zeke: Yes.
Andrew: OK. Theoutsourcingcompany.com and I think that’s pretty much it.
Anything else that they can do if they want to connect with you? I’m
looking to see in my notes if there’s some way for them to connect with you
directly. I actually see your email address, your phone number, your Skype,
but none of those are good. What’s a good way for people to connect with
you to maybe say thank you for doing this interview?
Zeke: Well, I can give everybody my cell phone number.
Andrew: You’re going to give them the cell phone number in this interview?
Zeke: Yeah.
Andrew: OK. Did you just call me out of the blue by the way? That is how it
happened, right?
Zeke: Yeah. I searched Mixergy contact information and I found your phone
number.
Andrew: And you just called me, and you ended up on my cell phone. But
you’re willing to give your cell phone and just have people call you out of
the blue. All right.
Zeke: Yeah. If they want to talk about their online marketing strategies
and how to use websites to get more traffic and business. That’s what we
do.
Andrew: But you know what’s going to happen, you’re going to end up with, I
don’t know that you should this, you’re going to end up with people who
aren’t the typical client. Who aren’t the guys who have half a million in
revenue, who are your ideal customer. I think you should have another way
for people to contact you but it’s up to you.
Zeke: OK. I’ll give both my email address and phone number. Every months,
this is something that I decided five years ago, every month I spend ten
hours a month doing free work for companies that can’t afford us. I do this
because I think that when I was getting started I wanted someone to help me
but nobody was willing to. So I’ll talk to whoever contacts me about but
yeah, if you ask me simple questions I’ll be more than happy to help.
Andrew: All right.
A: So, my email address, and that’s really the best way to get a hold of
me, it’s Zeke, and that’s Z-E-K-E, @theoutsourcingcompany.com.
Andrew: All right. Let me say this before you say your phone number, let me
suggest this. Let me put it on the website instead of in the interview. I
can delete it off the website if you change your mind but I can’t remove it
from the interview. Does that sound good?
Zeke: Yeah, and if you go to the website you can find it there.
Andrew: OK. And they can fin it. Even better, go to
theoutsourcingcompany.com and you can get Zeke’s phone number. Zeke is a
great guy. I hope you get to talk to him and I’m glad that he’s open to it.
I just also want to give you a way out if it doesn’t work out.
Zeke: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. Well I’m glad that you and I got to meet. I’m so proud
to have you in my audience. When I do this it’s really easy to go for the
cheap audience, the ones that are easy to get with either slamming
competitors or by offering riches overnight. There are ways to get a big
audience. We’re putting a lot of cat photos up on the site and that just
never appealed to me. What does appeal to me is the idea that the people in
my audience are people who I care about, are people who I’m fascinated
about. That when you call me if you say you’re in my audience I feel like,
all right, we’ve got something in common.
I’m going to be interested frankly, especially premium members because it
feels like you’re really taking your business a little bit more seriously
than the average person. Anyway. I end up not doing especially well at
communicating when I’m especially proud. I’ve got to work on that. I’ve
struggled a little bit, maybe talked a little bit too much in this
interview because I’m proud to have had you in my audience, and proud to
now call you a friend and Zeke: Thanks for doing this interview.
Zeke: Yeah. You’re very welcome and I think you shouldn’t be ashamed of
talking about Mixergy. It’s a great website with a lot of really good
content that has helped and will help more entrepreneurs, so I think you
should be very proud of what you built.
Andrew: Thank you. Yeah, I am. And increasingly more so. All right. Thanks,
bud. Thank you all for watching. Bye.
