350 Algorithms Change, Humans Don't + Other Modern Marketing Truths You NEED To Understand
Johnathan Goodman
Founder The Personal Trainer Development Center
Today, we are delving into the crucial topic of building trust and becoming a better marketing strategist in your own business.
There is nobody more qualified to chat about this topic than Jonathan Goodman, founder of the Personal Trainer Development Center.
In this episode, Jonathan sheds light on everything that is WRONG with modern marketing right now.
In particular, we chat about...
avoiding the pitfalls of over-reliance on social media
creative marketing strategies designed to engage and build trust within your local community
the high-risk route of chasing internet fame
the “Triangle of Trust” model from Jonathan's book
philosophies regarding friendship dynamics in business
why offline word-of-mouth referrals surpass social media success
the importance of quality over quantity in client acquisition
If you love this episode, you should grab a copy of Jonathan's Book called The Obvious Choice.
No matter your goals, The Obvious Choice offers 15 essential lessons on profit and success that are timeless because they prioritize the humans who buy from you and not erratic and temperamental algorithms.
Jonathan Goodman—one of the world's leading experts on helping people simplify their business—reveals proven frameworks for increasing efficiency, praying to the social media gods less, and mastering the art of finding your customers.
Some of the trends discussed include:
Why memberships are slowly dying off
A return to supporting our local community and boost in IRL events
Having friends who are entrepreneurs is vital
Should you worry about scaling if you're not even making money?
And so much more
Episode Time Stamps:
[06:56] How having a Christmas baby shifted my life and business perspective.
[10:24] Balancing personal and professional content on social media
[21:06] Morning routine, work time and family bonding
[35:10] Community Is Crucial. Our mastermind is changing lives every Wednesday, and we've got exclusive seats for you at kelseyridal.com/mastermind
To connect with John:
Twitter: @itscoachgoodman
Instagram: @itscoachgoodman
YouTube: Jonathan Goodman
LinkedIn: Jon Goodman
Podcast: The Obvious Choice
Weekly Newsletter: 5 Reps on Friday
To connect with Kelsey:
Access the transcript for this episode:
-
Jonathan Goodman, welcome back to the Visionary Life podcast. We were just chatting before pressing record that you were actually here almost four years ago to the date. You shared a lot of your origin story, how you started the personal trainer development center. It's actually an episode that I encourage a lot of my clients go back and listen to because you shared a golden nugget that nobody wants to hear, but everyone needs, which is need to sit down and do hundreds of market research calls. And you said you talked to so many personal trainers and you asked them, what do you guys want? What are your biggest challenges? And when I tell people, like, hey, would you even get on the phone with 10 of your potential clients? They're like, oh, Kels, I don't know if I have time. So I always refer them to that story because I'm like, you're an entrepreneur who's willing to do the work and be connected to the person that you're trying to solve a problem for. Why don't people want to do this? Like, it's almost like I'm talking a foreign language when I ask my clients to get in the weeds with who they want to sell to. But you're a great example of someone who took the time and it obviously paid off because look where you are today.
That's so. That's so cool that that was the point from the story that jumped out, because I think that is one of the most important points of my story is that. And it's interesting because I talk about it. I don't tell that story story in this new book, but I talk about what I call human avoidance marketing, which, of course, I gave the acronym HAM to kind of tongue in cheek. But human avoidance marketing simply doesn't work. I mean, we all know this posting to the anonymous masses trying to impress people we've never met and wouldn't care about even if we did on the Internet in a vain attempt to try to build a business. Simply doesn't work. I mean, we have enough evidence now to show that you would have a hard time arguing with me on that.
But still, why don't more people just, like, get on the phone chat? I think a lot of it is our lizard brains need immediate feedback, right, Kelsey? We don't get that immediate feedback when we're having a conversation with somebody. I mean, the. The esteemed philosopher that goes by the name Pitbull once said in one of the songs, ask for money, get advice, ask for advice, get money twice. And so the way to actually have conversations with people that are actually really sales conversations is to ask people for advice on your thing, to ask people to help contribute to your thing or to learn about them so that you can make a better thing. And then of course, you're kind of making the thing for them by definition. But it doesn't feel like it's doing anything in the moment. A lot of the things that really matter in business don't feel like we're doing anything in the moment. When we are posting on Instagram, let's say, and we get 500 likes instead of the normal 150 on a post, it feels like we've won that day.
But has that actually led to an increase in increase for what you do or better yet, actual tangible sales? Whatever you measure that metric. Jonah Berger, the Wharton professor, said, metrics are spotlight. They shine on what. Whatever you shine them on is what you reinforce. And so there's a law that we've always encouraged our people to follow or, or to, to keep in mind, which is good Heart's law, which is when the measure becomes the, the goal, it ceases to become a good measure. It's very, very important to figure out how to measure the success of what you're doing based off of the game that you're playing and not the game that, for example, the social media company wants you to play. You know, is engage our engagement metrics a good measure for your success? If your goal is to. If the game you're playing is to try to be an influencer full time and trying to become famous as a dancer or actor, 100%, that's a very good measure.
If your goal is to build a business, it's really not. And so not that it doesn't matter, but it's up to you then to figure out what you're going to measure. Like, we measure the success of our content across social media based off of the amount of inbound DM inquiries that we get for our services. Yes, simple as that. And what I found is that the posts that get the least amount of likes often are the most successful.
So, oh, it's so good. And I just need to double tap there because you're right, like, so often when someone is starting into this whole realm of tracking their metrics, they're like, okay, so I'm on Instagram, so I'll measure likes, followers and shares. They're on email, so they measure number of subscribers and open rate. And when we go a layer deeper, it's like, wait, what game are you playing? Is exactly what you said. And we're Missing out on the qualitative metrics or the metric that tells us that our content is resonating and not just contributing to the noise. Right. So on Instagram, for example, I love what you just shared. It's like, yes, I'm sure you have someone or you yourself are tracking, hey, did we grow our number of followers month over month? I had 20,000 in June and 25,000 in July.
Jonathan Goodman00:05:49 - 00:05:49
I don't care.
You don't care? But then.
But I have enough followers, right? I have enough followers. Yeah, but I don't, I don't care. Like, I've had 260,000 followers for the last month. Yeah, it's very easy to increase that number, but I haven't increased them. And so an outsider might look at me and be like, oh, he's not growing. Meanwhile, we've had the best cash collected month ever.
Exactly.
So, like, what are we doing here? You know?
And I don't know if you follow the marketer Jay Akunzo, but he always talks about, you don't have a reach problem, you have a resonance problem problem. Like, you're reaching 260,000 people. But if your content isn't resonating, I Bet you get zero DMS and zero comments and zero conversions, whatever that means for you. If you have 10 followers, but the resonance is so deep that you get 10 dms off of that. Holy. You might be making more money than a person who has been working on growing an audience on social media for, for 10 years. So it's like, what's the problem here? And are we diagnosing it right? You don't need more followers. You need to better serve the community that you already have and make sure your content hits.
Or, you know, look at a different metric of like, do I feel like I'm exercising my thought leadership when I post? And if so, I don't give a shit about anything else that I'm on social media for. Right.
I, I call it, I call it as, you know. Right. Fix what's inside of your fence first.
Yep.
And that might be an online community that exists within social media. That might also be people who literally live within a five mile radius of you. Yeah, it's far easier, simple, profitable, and leads in almost every case to a higher quality of life for you and your family. To become famous to the family than it is to become famous on the Internet. And so what does famous to the family mean? Famous to the family might mean that in your local community, you're the obvious choice. It might mean that your Local community is within a five mile radius of where you live. It might mean that your local community is scattered throughout the world, but exists within a very small bubble, even though they're disconnected physically. Like I give the example of Greg Finch, who's a mental and performance coach for surfers.
And surfers are kind of by definition in like remote areas scattered throughout the world, you know what I'm saying? Like, they're not going to be in one place even if you're in California or Hawaii. They're going to be on surf breaks, wherever the heck they are. And, and they move around as well, of course, as the swells move, like some surfers chase does. I've lived in a lot of surf towns, I know these things. I'm living in a surf town right now in Mexico. And so what Greg has done then is he quite rightly identified that you can't compete on the quality of your media if you're serving surfers. Like, talk about the misconception that a lot of people have is that when they're creating content, they're competing with other people who do business like them also creating content. You're not.
What you're actually doing is you're competing with full time influencers and full time content creators whose job is quite literally to create content. Yeah, that's who you're competing for, for attention. And so who's Greg competing for? If he tried to do what everybody else does, which is tried to create content about surfing, about surfing performance on, let's say, Instagram or TikTok or wherever, he's competing with surf photography, surf videography. You're talking about the most beautiful people wearing the least amount of clothing in the most beautiful locations with the best cameras and videography and drones in the world. Yep, you don't stand a chance for attention, dude. And, and, and even if he did stand out, he wouldn't stand out for what he sold. He would stand out and people be like, hey, can I hire you to do videography for me if he was? And so like, how do you do that? Right. What Greg did is he created a podcast.
And again, I mean, the book, this book, the obvious choice is ostensibly about figuring out that there are different games that you get to choose to play, understanding what game you want to play, learning the rules out of it, and really just kind of manipulating the tools that exist to best help you play your game. And so the game of trying to become a famous podcaster is very different than the game of using a podcast to become famous to the Family. You don't measure it based off of the number of downloads. So Greg created this podcast called the Sophstrong podcast on Canva. He created a little image that said surf strong podcast. Like that was it. And then he reached out to people, some he knew, some he didn't in that world and interview and asked to interview them on his podcast. This is Dale Carnegie 101.Imagine that you walk around and every single person that you meet every single day has a big sign on their forehead that says, please, please, please make me feel like I'm important today.
Yeah.
And so his goal was not to interview influencers. Who were his first guests? A physiotherapist on the island of Kauai who serves surfers, who treat surfers. The outreach, the community outreach director for the Maui AOI foundation, which is a foundation that helps people with special needs pick up surfing and, and so on. And so basically all of these people that are deeply entwined in this international sof community, he's never going to be a top 100 podcast. He's never going to get more than a couple hundred downloads. Y But what he's doing is he's building this relationship behind the scenes through his podcast with all of these people one off. And then these people might send their episode around to their communities, whatever. Maybe not.
But if somebody comes to them asking for something similar to what Greg does, Greg gets the referral. I mean that's how Greg is adding one to two fifteen hundred dollar a month clients every single month.
Why do you think the new generation of let's call them online business owners, coaches, consultants, freelancers. Why are they so resistant to human optimized marketing? And why are they so attracted to ham human avoidant marketing? Like, where have we gotten so skewed? Why do you think there's such a pull to focus so much energy on something that just has you looking down at your phone trying to play the dancing monkey game as you'd call it. Like, why is it so attractive to not go out and build real relationships?
Do you? Okay, so you're from Canada. I'm going to give a really comical Canadian example. Your hockey team is down by a goal. You might know the answer if you've gotten this far in the book. Your hockey team's down by a goal. How long left in the game should you pull your goalie in order to improve your chances of winning the game? Like every red blooded Canadian knows that the answer is about a minute and a half to a minute and 45 seconds. You pull Your goalie, that's actually wrong. Statistically, the best time to pull your goalie if your team is down by one goal is with about six minutes left in the game.
And if you're down by two goals, it's worth about 11 minutes left in the game. If you're down by three or more goals, you should actually pull your goalie somewhere near the end of the second period.Yep.
And the reason for this is quite simple, is because goals don't matter, standing points matter. And so if you pull your goalie, there's a four times increase in chances that you're going to get scored on and only a 0.5 times increase that you're going to score. But it doesn't matter whether you lose a game by six or by one, you still get zero points. If you score a goal and tie the game, you go to overtime, you get one point, you might win the game, you get two points. And so at the end of the year, a team that practices optimal goalie pulling statistically will earn an extra about 4.18 standing points at the end of the season, which is meaningful. It could be the difference between making the playoffs, missing the playoffs, home ice advantage, not home ice advantage. And so why don't we see this more often? Is because there is a difference between what makes a good coach and what people generally perceive to be a good coach. They're similar, but they're not the same.
You see a coach that pulls their goalie with a minute and a half left and loses a game by one goal or maybe by two goals, can stand up in front of the press and they can say, hey, a guy's played good today, the puck rolled the wrong way, but we'll get him tomorrow. We're going to come back out and go home and sleep well at night. A coach that posed a goalie with six minutes left and gets blown out now not by one goal, but loses the game by four, is going to get blasted by the media, is going to get blasted by the fan base, even though. Because what they did is they did not give their team a better chance to win that game. What they did is they gave their team a better chance to place as high as possible at the end of the season, which is exactly what a coach should do. But in the short term, you see where I'm going with this.Yep.
In the short term, what they did was disagreeable. There's a lot of good information that becomes bad advice. The difference between how you wrap up and sell and communicate information in our world that is by definition, very short term, very superficial, very quick hit. The type of information that's easy to communicate is very different than the type of advice often that we really need in order to do well long term. For example, nobody would argue with me in business that referrals are the single best way to get a new customer. They are the easiest to convert, the most profitable, and they've come in as a result of referral. And so referrals are natural to them and so they will actually refer more people. So why don't we see really good advice on how to get referrals all over the place? It's quite simple.
It's because referrals are a social or a psychological trade, not an economic one. It's harder to explain how you build a referral culture in your business than it is to teach somebody how to a B test a thumbnail on a YouTube video. As a result, you get way too much information on things that are easier to communicate than you do on things that really matter. That's the difference. And so we, we, we become addicted to immediacy. It's. It comes down to ego. Right? What's, what's good for ego is often bad for a wallet.
We're rich with likes, we're poor with dollars.
Yep.
Because we jump into all these things that give us this immediate feedback. Trying to win every single game, every single day, not realizing that actually what we're doing is giving us a worse chance to place as high at the end of the season as possible.
Yep. The game that I see so many people trying to play right now, and I'd be so curious to hear your perspective, is I want to launch my business to entire world and hide from the family. So it's like, I want to start a coaching business where I help parents who don't sleep get their baby to sleep. But they'll say, I don't really want my immediate friends and family to know I'm not well connected in my community. I just want to launch to what they're saying is the world and hide from the family. And you actually share an opposite approach. In the book, I think you call it the founding client challenge. And it's more of like a grassroots approach where it's like, no, you need to ask the people you already know when you're launching your business and start there and see if you can get into conversation.
Not ask them for money per se, but get into conversation like, hey, friend, over at the coffee shop that I'm sitting beside, you're A busy mom. Can I talk to you about your kids sleep schedule? But there's such a resistance to that that I think, and I get it, like if you're an introvert, you want to say, no, I just want to start the LinkedIn account. I want to start the TikTok. Do not make me launch this within my immediate circle or my, my founding family or famous to the family as you would call it. So what advice would you give that person? I mean you share tons of stories in the book and kind of a step by step process, but only because I know this is a common thought process when starting a business. What advice do you give that person? Because the last thing they want to do is text 10 of their friends and say, hey, can we get on a quick call? Can I talk to you? I'll buy you a coffee. That's a hard no for them. Does that mean they shouldn't be an entrepreneur?
Well, the first thing, the first thing to think is if somebody, if one of your friends called you and asked you that, would you be happy to get on the phone with them and the answer is yes. So you want to be on. Totally. It feels good to help other people. It feels good to have somebody else ask for your advice or ask about you. Now if they were to call you and say, hey, I'm selling this thing, can I talk to you about it? You might not be because I mean it's, it's funny because I'm like almost done. I actually just finished the second last chapter of the next book and the chapter that I just finished the first draft on, I still need to do some editing, is on friendship. Yeah.
And in fact what the studies show is that the highest quality of life is one spouse and one true friend. You actually don't need more than that. Now of course, if you have more true friends, fine, but you really only have time as an adult to have like one or a few really true friends. And there's different levels of friendship. And Aristotle has this ladder of friendship. But basically you've got. Aristotle was before the Internet. So I added one more lung to the ladder.
But basically you've got true friends at the top. Then you've got, call it like, like friends of convenience. I think is acquaintances, you know, people who you cross paths with, people who you know, you're in a church group with or they're people who you live close to or there are people who you share a hobby or an interest with. Right. Or you know, I live in Mexico for half the year, so friends of mine in Mexico. Below that you've got deal friends. So basically colleagues, friends that you really only friends with because you feel like they will help you achieve something professionally or socially or vice versa, which is fine. And then at the bottom of that you have what's called parasocial friends.
And a parasocial friendship is basically a one sided friendship, basically a relationship that we have usually with some sort of celebrity, thought leader, influencer, where they don't know who we are, but we consider them a friend. And, and all these levels of friendship have their benefits. You know, we can make fun of some of them more than others, but they all have their benefits. And I think it's very important to categorize friends. But the only reason that I bring this up, Kelsey, is actually the single greatest proxy for a true friend is uselessness. The more useful a friend is to you, the less of a true friend they are. And what can happen is that friends can move up and down your ladder. And a way to actually skew a true friendship is to try to make them useful.
Yep.
And so you, you, you do have to be a bit careful of that. But you could absolutely go to your friends for advice, for insight, and they do want to help you. Right. And they will absolutely support you.
Yep.
But I'm of the opinion that you probably shouldn't take them on as clients. You should refer them to somebody else you love. But you can absolutely go to them for research. So anyway, I mean, I bring all of that up just to say that, like, think about what would happen if somebody else were to call you asking you for advice.
Yeah.
You would be very happy to take that call. Look, I mean, over 90% of all business in all industries still happens through mostly offline word of mouth. Look around you right now. Look around you right now. Look around your room. I've got headphones, a water bottle, I've got a wallet, I've got my phone, my computer, a microphone, whatever, my clothing, anything around you in your room right now. Look at it all now. Think about the people that you've hired, maybe services in the last while.
Yep.
How many of those like, like, do you even know if any of those companies have a social media account? Let alone, are you following them? Let alone do you admire them? Maybe if you've hired like a coach, maybe. But like, probably you didn't discover them originally because of the three things you need to know about life coaching. Pointing to words in space, match to trending music. Probably somebody who you know, who you already trust in your life Said, yo, you should check this out. And then, you know, maybe you weren't quite ready. And so maybe then you went to their account and you liked what you saw and you watched quietly for a while and then you acted on a call to action or you reached out to them. Most everything, though, if you actually look around you and pay attention to this, most everything you buy, most everybody you hire, you don't even know whether they have a social media account, let alone what they talk about. It was certainly not influential in your purchase.
And so I don't. This is not me saying that you should not post to social media, but I think unless your goal, like there's two ways that you can go about it. There's two games that you can play. You can play the try to get famous on the Internet game or you can try to play the build the business game. And both games have different rules of engagement, time horizons, odds of success, and reward mechanisms to try to get famous on the Internet game. If you're trying to be. I think these terms are all synonymous with one another. An influencer, a creator, an entertainer.
Yep.
Is no different from the going to Hollywood and waiting tables on nights and weekends, going to auditions, knowing that you're going to be taken advantage of for a long time, knowing that the odds that you're going to win is very, very small. But if you do win, if you do get chosen, there's outsized rewards for a chosen few. And if you knowingly sign up for that, if you knowingly sign up for that, I think that that's wonderful. But the other game that you get to choose to play is the win in business game. The win in business game might leverage social media, but you look at social media then as a way to convert attention generated elsewhere as a way to nurture, as a way to retain existing customers. You don't look at it as a way to generate attention, and that's for a very simple reason, is that trust is what's going to let people buy you. Trust is going to. What's going to let people buy you.
That's a weird sentence. Trust is going to lead people to buy from you. It's very hard to generate trust in the noisiest ocean that exists ever in the history of the world. How can you possibly stand out in a way where there is inevitably people that are going to be better looking than you, more wealthy, spoken than you, that have more money and more resources to spend than you. How can you possibly believe that you're going to be able to stand out in that world, but somewhere where you already have a connection, like somebody that you've already met or trust. I communicated as a triangle in the book.
Yep.
Right. You've got familiarity, specificity, and community. Right. Any combination of those three things. If you can connect with somebody based off of one of those three things, and I give countless examples and obviously describe them a little bit more, if you can connect with people in any of those three things, they have reason to trust you immediately more than somebody who they've never met and have no connection to on the Internet.
Mm.
And trust is actually what leads to sales. Trust is always what's led to you buying things. It will always be what's led. It's not your credentials. It's the trust that somebody has you. Your credentials might help you do a good job.
Yep.
They don't help you get hired to enable you to do that job in the first place. And so you talked about, like, starting in the small available market.
Yep.
The smaller your market is, the faster you can build that trust. And this is not whether your ambitions are to make enough to feed your family and have a good life or whether you have bigger ambitions to build a billion dollar unicorn. It's actually the same, the same philosophy. It's actually the same approach. Peter Thiel, the first investor in Facebook, one of the most famous silicon investors in the world, wrote a book called Zero to One. His main underlying philosophy is in order to build a great business, the goal is very simple. You must build a monopoly as soon as possible, as quickly as possible. The fastest way to build a monopoly is to identify the smallest available market that you can monopolize.
Yes.
Monopolize that and then expand to adjacent markets.
Yeah.
PayPal started with 30,000 eBay sellers. Facebook started on Harvard campus. Nike started with Phil Knight selling running shoes out of the back of his Plymouth Valley and at local track meets.
Yes.
It does not matter whether you have ambitions to be big or small. Where you start is still where you can build that trust. Where larger players can't compete with you. That's, that's, that's the difference.
And for the listener, too, you have a lot of stories and practical examples in the book. Whether you're a tutoring company and you're like, I don't know, I don't want to do bus advertisements. What can I do instead? You have these really step by step systems in the book. So I would encourage people to buy the obvious choice to get that. It's like, wait, who is my client if I'm a Tutoring company. Oh, it's the wealthy parent. Where does a wealthy parent hang out? Well, they're probably not on TikTok, so stop that strategy or keep it going for fun. But they hang out at the banquet.
So for anyone who's kind of like, well, how do I build that trust? And how do I identify where to put my precious time, my precious energy? I would say that, you know, the obvious choice is chock full of that.
Like. Like, if your goal. If your goal is a tutorial is to build a tutoring company, you're right. If your goal as a tutor is to educate and build businesses around serving other tutors.
Yep.
Then TikTok and social media is a fantastic place to plant your flower.
Totally. Yeah. But it's different games. Right. And so you really have to go back to the foundation of what am I trying to do here.
Yeah.
I think one of the things you illustrate so well inside of the book is the you encourage your reader to think outside of the box, and I'll skew us to one of the stories that you share.
Like. Like, why, like, do I.
Like. Okay, so that's the wrong phrase.
You're right. No. But you're not the first person to say this outside of looking at this. This is the most obvious ever. How can you possibly be sitting here and you've made 4, 000 posts on Instagram and your page is beautifully branded and you have 3700 followers and you still can't pay your rent? How do you possibly think that the secret success is doing what you're already doing, but a little bit more and a little bit better with prettier pictures? Like, how is that even what we're thinking? But anyway, yeah, go on.Okay, but let me illustrate what I mean by that, because you're right. Like, it's actually backwards that I said that, because you're actually going back to the foundational principles of human relationships. But here's one of the things that I think is so clever, and I want to get your take on how we can encourage our listeners to actually think more like Jonathan Goodman. So you kind of say this story about a real estate agent. It's like you could put up ads in the bus shelter. You know, I'm sure there are many programs like, hey, real estate agents, you need to post this prompt and this hook on Instagram. And I've worked with some who are thinking that. And you talk about, hey, if I were a real estate agent, I would host a nosy neighbor open house night.
Somebody did that. In my neighborhood.
And I was like, that was so clever. But here's the thing. A lot of service providers, business owners, whoever is listening right now, they're very used to just copycatting what they're seeing online, which we've talked about. But they don't really have a daily practice for thinking of these more lucrative ideas that actually build relationships with the family around us. Like, so for somebody who doesn't identify as a marketer, who doesn't feel like they're creative, who's like, I just need to have an email list and be on social media, how do they come to these ideas? Like hosting a nosy neighbor open house, which eventually leads to more clients, because what a cool idea. If you don't have a practice around that. Do you have any thinking frameworks or even just like a sit down for five minutes on your next vacation and think of how you can better connect? What would you say to that person who just feels uncreative?
In the marketing department, the nosy neighbors was. I mean, that kind of stuff comes about by just looking up, away from your damn phone for two goddamn minutes and watching what's around you and trying to recognize, like, the brilliance of what's around you. I mean, that's of course not my industry, but it worked on me. So, you know, there was a listing down the street of our house, and there was a listing down the street, and there's lots of listings in my neighborhood. I mean, houses sell, whatever. And then Toronto, lots of houses sell. And they sent around flyers a couple days before. These were just, you know, printed pieces of paper in our mailboxes.
And they said, hey, I'm so and so realtor, whatever. I'm doing a, you know, we're selling this house down the street. You might have seen my sign up. I know sometimes other neighbors are curious when a house goes up for market. And so I'm hosting a nosy neighbor open house the night beforehand. And I just invite you to join from this time to this time. And that was it. And so I, I saw that and I was like, that is brilliant.
Because if you live in any neighborhood, anytime there's a house goes up for sale, what are the conversation of what. What's it selling for? You know, you're curious what it means for your own house. It's a way to gossip. It's
You judge it. It's like, did you see the kitchen? It's horrible.
Whatever it is, you want to see the other houses in your neighborhood. So I thought that that was brilliant. I Was like, oh, how could she have done this better? Because she invited us in and she met us and she shook her hand and she gave us some overpriced water and fancy, you know, glass bottles and that was fine. And then we left and that was it. I was like, well, she could have made an offer to retain our information, for example. So I think, I think I write this in the book and maybe it got edited out. I can never remember. I've been through that thing 100 times.
I can't remember what made it and then what got left on the cutting room floor. But you know, what if she. What if she had a sign up sheet there or said to us in person when we walked in, you know, I know that sometimes people who live in the neighborhood are interested when another house goes up for market, what it sells for, what went into the thought process and what this means for other houses. And so what I do is every time that a house goes up for sale in this neighborhood, I'll send you an email that says what it's listed for, what it means for other houses in the neighborhood. If you're interested in that, you know, whether it's my listing or not. Right. If you're interested in that, put your email down here. What a great way to collect information.
And then every time you have a listing, you just host a nosy neighbor. And. And very quickly you would become the go to realtor in that neighborhood. You know, because especially with something like selling a house, there are these businesses that I call avocado businesses. And real estate is one of them. And an avocado business, you know the old joke, it's like, not yet, not yet, not yet. Eat me now. Oh, too late.
It's like avocado businesses are the types of businesses that nobody needs, nobody's ever looking for, nobody's going to respond, respond to any advertisement. And then they need somebody this second. And if you're not there, it's too late.
Yep.
And so real estate is like an avocado business. Right. You kind of have to be there and be in the back of somebody's mind and building trust with them some way. So that when you're there, when they're ready, when they want to list their house, you're the person that they call. You're the obvious choice for them there. So with that, it was just keeping my head up and like noticing something that was brilliant.
Yeah.
So study.
There's a lot of patterns, right. Like as an entrepreneur looking for creative strategies or just something that is more Effective. Almost like studying our own buyer behavior can probably be. Or even just where our attention gets spent. Like, I'm not watching tv, so I shouldn't think about a TV ad. But I did take my recent restaurant recommendation from, you know, the local butcher who said he went out on Friday night and enjoyed his experience.
And I give examples all over the course of the book that are, like, embarrassing examples for me. You know, we won't get into them because I want to answer your question about how somebody who's like a coach particularly can work backwards. Like, how we work with other people. But I give examples in the book that are, like, pretty, to be honest, embarrassing examples. How I hired. How we found the doctor to treat my wife's cancer. Yeah. How we hired a financial advisor who's the most important coach I'll ever hire in my life.
Where. How I bought $550 of meat from a dude with a van who showed up on my street one day even though I was not thinking about meat two minutes beforehand. Like, so you start to notice these things and look back and reflect on. You're right, Kelsey. I think it's such a pointed way to say it, what you said of what? What are times? Here's a way that I think about it. It's like, what are times when I act on something or I think about something or I feel like a pull towards doing something that I don't actually think that I care about that much or was not thinking about previously. But for whatever reason, the way that this was done to me makes me immediately bypasses everything else in my life and increases its importance. Pay attention to that kind of stuff and try to look backwards, perhaps how.
But here's how I do it with our coaches that we work with. Like, if I'm doing, like, hot seat calls and stuff is. Yeah, I just ask him. I want you to tell me about the best person you've ever worked with. Completely subjective. Your favorite client you've ever worked with. They're probably also going to be the person who spent the most or close to the most amount of money with you. There's just a lot of parallels there.
But. And. And they're always like, oh, you know, I love all the people. It's like, don't give me that, like, I get it that you love your people. I get it that you're a good person. I get it. Like, I get all those things. Like, give me a name.
Make up a fake name. I don't care. But, like, I need you to think of a real Person. They're like, oh, well, like this group of people. No, no, no, I don't care that you like to work with busy moms. No busy mom is ever going to respond. No busy mom is going to be like, oh, my God, somebody has helps busy mums. That's me.
Nobody has ever told me that they can help busy moms before. This must be the guy for me. Nobody is ever going to say that. So what's her name? Jennifer. Okay, tell me about Jennifer. And I always start with demographics because it's easier. Even though demographics don't really matter. It's psychographics that do.
But I always start with demographics. They're like, oh, you know, she was whatever, 36 years old, nurse, shift work, two kids, divorced from her first husband, but now was with another man, seems to be in a great relationship. Everything's great, you know, and so she adopted another kid with her. Whatever. Like, give me those details. Some of those might be useful. Some of them. And then I was like, okay, where did Jennifer come from? Where did she come from? Cool.
Okay. Britney referred her. Or you might even ask Jennifer, hey, how did you hear about me? Because you might not even know. And she would say, oh, my friend Brittany told me about you. And you're like, brittany, who the hell's Britney? And so then you go and speak to Brittany, and Britney's never been your client. But Britney knows Chloe. Chloe was somebody you worked with three years ago, whatever that is. You want to work backwards.
And part of this is figuring out where the points of connection are made. The other part of it is, y. What are they sending? How are they communicating to one another? Oh, Chloe. Brittany asked me a question about fitting in a little bit more protein over breakfast. And I had sent Chloe a guide when I was young. Oh, when I was young, I had sent Chloe a guide when we worked together. That was four easy protein breakfast meals. And she passed it along to Brittany, and Brittany didn't hire me.
But then Jennifer was looking for something. Brittany was like, you know, I got this guide from somebody else I know Chloe and Jennifer don't know each other, but I got this guide from somebody else I know. You know, here it is. You might want to give them a shout. And you're like, okay, so there's something there. Then this guide was what was passed along, number one. What do I learn from that? I need to make damn sure that every single current client of mine has this guide. I need to make sure that this guide is optimized and says exactly how to get in Touch with me because they had to find it and then search for me.And that was too many steps. And so maybe I should include an offer on this guide.
Yeah, right.
But also maybe all of my old Chloe's that I've lost touch with, maybe I can send them a message and say, hey, I was just thinking about you.Yep.
And I remember that one of the things that we talked about was trying to fit in a little bit more protein, Whatever the examples, a little bit more protein. And so, you know, I created this guide for my current clients and they said it was really helpful. I thought you might want a copy. Would you like me to send it to you? Yeah, you don't just send it. Say, would you like me to send it to you? Oh, my God. Oh, you know, I've been thinking about getting back started again. Oh, would you, Would you, Would you guess?
What do you know?
Yeah, what do you know? And so it might not be the first thing that you find, but you will get clues when you start working backwards from your best people. Because your goal is not to get more clients. Your goal is to get more of the perfect clients. And the only way that you can do that is you can. Is you have to work backwards. And our brains are really not very good actually at working forwards. Our brains are much better at almost pretending that something that we want to happen has already happened and then working backwards the steps to make it happen and then executing those steps back forwards. And so if something has already happened, that's positive, I.
E. You've already found your Jennifer, your ideal client, work backwards to all of the things that happen to them. Becoming your ideal client. Every single step, no step is too small. Hey, you know, would you mind? I. I'm just, I'm just doing some research, trying to improve, you know, every aspect. Would you mind? And, and one of the things that's really important to me, Jennifer, is that people get started off right. One of the things that I've noticed is that when somebody's introduced to me or introduced to something about me, I actually don't pay very much attention to the beginning of the process.
And I feel like that's important. Would you mind sending me, like, if you feel comfortable? You know, the WhatsApp message that Chloe sent you about me, like, what words are they saying to describe you?
Yes.
To your ideal client? Well, detective work backwards that way. And you basically just replicate that and use that over and over again. I mean, there are different levels in business, as you know, Kelsey, like, call it like 0 to 5. Thousand dollars a month, 5,000 to about 75. Eighty thousand. Eighty thousand to about 250,000. 250,000 to about 2 million. 2 million to about 10 and so on.
They each have different breaking points and they each have different systems and skills that you need to acquire. Well up to about 200,000, $250,000 a month. As a coach, you really only need one marketing channel, one conversion system, and one sales process. You know, if you want to scale beyond that, sure, maybe you might need to build another one, but. But to get there, actually, the best thing that any coach can do is to figure out the best for them. It might not be the best for everybody, right? But that's because everything works. And most things work good enough if you work at them and focus on them, but they don't work if you try to do too many things. And so what are those three things for you? Right? And then how can you just continue to get better and better and better at those instead of trying to go wider and just doing a bad job at a lot of things?
Mm, I love it. And that really boils down to committing to a few key things that, you know, are time honored marketing strategies, really paying attention to what's working and possibly adding in some experimentation. But I think ultimately it comes down to playing the long game. And I know that we are wired for so much instant gratification right now, but sometimes it is the less sexy things like focusing on putting out one blog a month so that you can eventually rank for personal trainer Toronto, or learning a bit more about SEO. And so I appreciate your book for so many of these reminders that social media is not the only game that we need to play. And it's like, are you building a business or are you trying to create, you know, a pile of content to clutter the Internet?
The way, the way I talk about it and the way that's been most useful to a lot of people that I speak to is to look at content creation. However you want to create content, whether it's Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, podcasting, YouTube, whatever. You look at content creation as a savings account and you liken it akin to a savings account. You invest into it with excess time and capital and you hope that it's going to kick off interest in the interim, but you don't build any dependence on any dividends to fulfill your short term needs. Yes, like a savings account, you just sock away over time lots of little bits, reputational capital of content, of whatever. And, and, and you understand that if you keep doing this for long enough, you're going to wake up one day, many years later and you're going to say, how the hell did this grow so big?
Yep.
But you cannot depend on it for your short term needs. You cannot depend on it for your short term needs.
A great reminder to finish on. So, Jonathan, if people want to get their hands on the obvious choice, how can they find it? Who should read this book and then pimp yourself out? Where should we go follow you if we are intrigued and want to learn more about your work. Work?
Oh, I get to promote myself. The obvious choice is a book for anybody in small business. I mean coaches for sure, it's my background, but really anybody in small business. Basically anybody who does not aspire to be a full time influencer or aspire to be a billion dollar unicorn. That's who this book is for. It's published by HarperCollins, so it's in Kindle, Audible, hardcover, it's available anywhere you're going to get books. Doesn't make a difference to me. Wherever you grab the book, I'm happy.
So wherever you feel comfortable. And the deal that I'll make with you is buy the book. I learned a long time ago that books are the best deal around. For 20 or 30 bucks you can get year. I mean, this was three years of my life writing the book in addition to 14 years of my life in business learning these principles. And so there's nowhere else you can get that kind of value for 20 or $30. And what's interesting is that I knee jerk buy books the minute that I hear about them, if they're even a little bit interesting. And I don't necessarily open all of the books that I buy.
Yeah, certainly not right away. But I knee jerk buy the books. And even something as small as a reminder of looking at the spine of the book that I've bought that I have never cracked open, that's on my shelf, might remind me of something that I heard about that author talk about on the podcast that initially made me think about that book is more value than I spent on the book itself. So I've learned to just immediately knee jerk buy books. I had actually bookshelves installed in every empty space, wall space in my house. That's so cool to accommodate them. I'm serious. You know my wife, you can ask her.
Yeah, she'll back it up. So buy the book. Buy the obvious choice book. And if you don't absolutely love it, send me a message. I'm on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at its. Coach Goodman. Send me a message and I'll refund you 100%.
That's amazing. And honestly, I want to add my two cents to this. The obvious choice is literally the only business book that I'm going to read this year because I just want to marinate in these principles over and over and over because I believe they are time honored, they are good for nearly any entrepreneur. And these are the conversations that we're not seeing everywhere. That content is being blasted at us, and I just appreciate the realness to every single story and idea and anecdote that you share. So if you are listening and you are a wannabe entrepreneur, you have started your business and you're looking for a better way. This is the way. So I would encourage everyone to go out and grab a copy.
I've highlighted so much inside of it and.
Awesome.
I'm gonna look at that spine all year and remind myself that it's not about, you know, going viral. It's about getting back to the roots of why I am already successful. And that is in kindness, in relationships, in showing up for a community, and in being a good person and being generous. So thank you so much.
In a world where everything you see, the minute that you go anywhere online or even in person tries to convince you to be somebody you're not, it's. It's. I think. I think you hit the nail on the head. It's very important to constantly have those reminders that actually the path that I'm on is the right path for me.
Absolutely. Yep. And staying true to the reason why you got into business in the first place. So, yeah, I dig it.
We love it. Thank you so much. Best of luck in this book launch process and we will hope to have you back on for the launch of your future book. So thanks again, Jonathan, and we will talk to you soon.
0:03 - 51:48
Got it. Thanks, Kelsey.
Tune into the episode.
Tune into this episode with on your podcast app of choice:
If you’re searching for an Online Business & Marketing Coach for your Business, rest assured that you’re in the right place.
I've helped over 200+ people to launch their business, go full-time, get fully booked, and become #1 with The Visionary Method
Mentioned on the Episode:
Private 1:1 Marketing Coaching: Small tweaks to your Marketing Strategy can skyrocket your business success…. Working with a Business & Marketing Coach will help you identify new income opportunities, optimize your lead generation & sales strategies, and accomplish more than you ever thought possible, in just 4 months. Apply here ➡
Feeling overwhelmed with your Marketing & Online Lead Generation?
Learn about Marketing Coaching |Rank on Page # 1 of Google with Everyday SEO™ |
Email List: Join the Dose of Visionary Weekly Inspiration Roundup!
You Might Also Like:
