Today, we're talking with Burke Jones. Burke has a brand new company helping people have greener lawns and get rid of all their weeds in some of the nice neighborhoods of Kansas. He started with some door hangers that offered a discounted price and he’s had some success already, starting to build a base of customers.

We spent this whole conversation talking about taking advantage of the structure of a business with recurring revenue. The value he has is a business that every six weeks he's going to come out, do a treatment, and that will happen year after year after year.

It's very back end, very after unit loaded. He's building his business up to where he'll have people in the after unit that are just recurring year after year after year, but, you have to start with the before unit, you have to start with where you are.

We talked about the possibility of offering a free treatment at the end of the season as opposed to at the beginning of next season, when everybody else will be lined up, competing, trying to get new clients.

Burke's very excited about the possibility and understood the logic, because we talked all the way through the investment model and the ROI on the greatest asset he has, access to his treatments at cost.

For any recurring business where there is long term value in each client, being able to use this asset and treat the work you do to get clients as an investment rather than a cost is great way to look the return.

We had a great conversation, I've had a lot of experience in this kind of a business and you’ll get a lot out of this episode.

Welcome to this week’s episode of the MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com podcast.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Toronto and attended an amazing event called the Archangels Summit. The gentlemen that puts it on every year is Giovanni Marsico. I’ve been able to spend a little time with Giovanni and gotten to know him, and the mission they have for the event. 

It was held in the Sony Center in Toronto, which has capacity of 3,000 people. He had over 2,500 people in the room. It had a fantastic vibe and energy to it. The year before, he had 1,500, so he's almost doubled the size. He has some amazing speakers. This year, Simon Sinek, Damon John and Dr. Shefali Tsabary. Last year, Gary Vaynerchuk and Seth Godin. This year, he had Akon do a performance which had everybody on their feet. I was watching this thinking, "The energy of this is just so incredible, he really puts on an amazing show."

What he's essentially doing is creating a community of people who are taking moonshots, who are building tribes and communities that he calls superheroes.

I had a wonderful idea while I was at the event that I shared with him a few days later when we had breakfast, just to see if he was interested in the idea.

He was, and we decided that rather than discuss it further then, we’d explore the depth of the idea here on this podcast.

I can't wait for you to hear it.

Welcome to the MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com podcast.  Today, we're talking with Hal Cranmer from Phoenix, Arizona. Hal owns five boutique assisted living homes with just 10 rooms in each.

We started out the conversation getting a sense of how that business works, how he finds people, and then talk about how we can differentiate what he has to identify people who are looking for that particular type of facility.

The ‘smaller boutique’ is actually a word that we came up with on the podcast here. You'll see how we talk about using market data to compel people to raise their hand, and separating his before unit from his during unit.

He was very excited by the end of the call and I think we have a real viable plan here. I can't wait to see him put it into action.

Today, we're talking with Victor Pacini. I've known Victor for several years and we've been working together on his program that helps schools fulfill the Erin's Law mandate. A law that mandates schools educate their students about sexual abuse. Victor has an amazing story, and an amazing program that provides a solution for schools fulfilling that requirement.

Over the years he's perfected the way he delivers his presentation. He's written a book that helps schools understand their responsibilities and introduces them to his services, delivering presentations for them. It's been a great journey to see happen, and one that's been really successful for Victor in that he's completely booked across all of his programs.

What we're talking about in this episode is specifically the opportunity he now has to expand beyond just ‘Victor’ and use the book and the system he's created, to keep himself fully booked and then help others to expand this opportunity and really help fulfill the Erin's Law mandate all over the country.

This is a great story of starting out with one guy, with one presentation, with one opportunity to get in front of schools and to fully systemize that opportunity so he's fully booked and now looking to expand beyond just himself to deliver the presentations.

You're going to really enjoy this episode.

Today we have Janice Berthold with us, an insurance specialist in California, where she works with large companies, companies with 200 plus employees, who have large workers' comp insurance premiums.

She helps them not only lower the cost of their premiums, but to change the way they approach worker's comp, from safety and risk assessment, through to creating a great environment. She’s had great success, and this year, a 100% close rate with the people she’s spoken with.

As you'll hear, she really knows her stuff. She knows how to help people and she gets amazing results.

This is a great bonus when you’re looking at a new marketing campaign. Knowing with 100% confidence that you're able to get an outstanding result for someone, really gives you the confidence to turn up the volume in the before unit.

We talked about ways to amplify what she's doing today and take it from a one-to-one approach, going out to people individually, to a strategy where we can pick a pool of 1000 of her ideal CFOs and create a marketing campaign to get the ones that are in the market to raise their hand.

This is a great episode and really highlights the different jobs done by Profit Activator 2 and 3.

Today we are talking with Scott Tonges from Pagosa Springs, Colorado, close to Durango, where my good buddy, Jeff Walker, lives.

Scott is in a situation that a lot of people find themselves in. He has lot of specialized knowledge over a lifetime of helping people in real estate as an investor and as a broker with commercial and investment real estate. He has the heart of a teacher and he really wants to share that information with people.

He just didn't know where to start, where to focus his attention, because he COULD do so many things in so many different ways to help people.

We had a great conversation about where to start, how to think through the process, and I think that you're going to find this very valuable if you're trying to narrow your focus to a single target market.

I started by asking Scott, what would be a dream come true for him.

Listen in as the conversation unfolds.

Today we're talking with Ben Frank from the hockey hotbed of Orange County, California!

You don't really think about Orange County, California as a hockey hotbed, but he's a fellow Canadian and is very involved in junior hockey development in California where they have a really great program.

We talked a little about where the people who join the programs come from and how, if they start early, people might stick with them for 10 years.

We discussed ways of stoking the fire, the front end of this, by exposing skating, (really the gateway to hockey) to the parents of three and four-year-old kids. That’s one of the biggest opportunities because the more those kids are exposed to hockey, skating, the hockey rink and the environment as a whole, the more it would be a natural progression for them to take an interest in hockey.

We talked about it as one of the ‘dig your well before you're thirsty’, strategies to know that today's three and four-year-olds are next year's five and six-year-olds. By going a little bit upstream and widening the pool of people that could be interested, we get more potential clients to choose from.

We had a lot of great conversation around this and some other strategies, breaking down his before, during, and after units.

You'll really enjoy this episode.

Welcome back to the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast.

Today we’re talking with John Blake all the way from Perth, Australia. The city that has the lucky distinction of being the most populated, isolated, city in the world.

The good news is, that hasn’t stopped Blake from building a really nice business helping other businesses crack their marketing codes. We had a great conversation about the opportunity he now has to, instead of doing original work all the time; finding new clients, starting a new project, continuing to grow and raising the income by either doing more work or raising prices and finding a higher and higher value clients, we talked about the idea of getting leverage from the work he's already done by doing work one time that he can syndicate to other businesses all over Australia.

This is a subject that's near and dear to my heart. Something I’ve built a lot of my career on is creating what I call scale ready algorithms; to crack a code, and then roll it out across the country to local businesses that can use that same strategy again and again.

I really enjoyed this conversation and I think you'll get a lot out of it. Especially, if you're someone who’s doing a lot of original work that could have value to other businesses.

If that sounds like you, head over to the Be a Guest form, tell me a little about what you’re doing & it would be great to have a ‘syndication series’ of episode to go deeper on this idea.

Today I’m talking with Wendy Gardner, a skincare specialist in the UK. She has a line of skincare products that she lovingly creates by hand, with all the finest natural ingredients. She offers a really individualized approach to skincare.

We had a conversation talking about how to differentiate the skincare line itself, but in the second half of the conversation we dialed it in and talked more along the line of creating an experience for customers. Completely repositioning the way she looks at the relationship with them.

As you know, when you listening to these shows, I don't have any foreknowledge of what kind of business people have or a specific plan of where I want the call to go, but I think by exploring who your target audience is and who are your ideal clients and the result you could create for someone, it reveals the biggest opportunities.

We settled on the idea of creating a 90-day experience for people where they get to go full immersion and bundled her products with an educational process. That does a lot of different things. It shifts the attention away from the commoditized pricing of your products, and it focuses 100% on the result at the end of the 90 days, of which, the products are sort of incidental to that or just one part of the journey of it.

It has a lot of potential for anyone who can create journey that focuses on the outcome and I can't wait to see how Wendy takes this to the next level.

Today we are talking with Shawn Yergler. Based in Indiana, Shawn does something that helps home owners who have concrete driveways, pathways, walkways, decks, extend the life of their concrete make it look better and protect it from the elements. Essentially, a cleaning and sealing situation with the concrete.
Shawn's had some success with every door direct mail - EDDM, (you can see a copy of the postcard he's using on the show page), and we started by talking about how the awareness of this, the desire for this, a service that is not really a necessity, there's not a lot of utility value.

It’s not a transformational service and people don't have to do it so we talked a lot about the right audience, and how to communicate in a way that lets the right people know it’s available.

Right now he has a postcard using a $50 off offer. We talked about a different way to frame the offer that would encourage people who are not ready to get their driveway re-sealed right now, but would like to do this a little later to identify themselves so we get that chance to communicate with those people too. We then talked about how to take it online.

It was a really great conversation. You're going to enjoy it and f you're doing something similar, I think you'll especially get a lot out of the conversation about desire, and where we fall on that matrix.