Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
As the CEO of Kit, Nathan Barry has a front row seat to what’s working in the most successful creator businesses.
On The Nathan Barry Show, he interviews top creators and dives into the inner workings of their businesses in his live coaching sessions.
You get unique insight into how creator businesses work and what you can do to increase results in your own business.
One of the things Nathan is passionate about is helping you create leverage.
Creator Flywheels let you create many copies of yourself so you don’t get bogged down with the little things in your business. Flywheels will help you reach a place where you can focus on revenue instead of busywork.
Tune in weekly for new episodes with ideas and tips for growing your business. You’ll hear discussions around building an audience, earning a living as a creator, and Nathan’s insights on scaling a software company to $100M.
Learn how to get more results with less effort and:
Grow faster over time.
Work less hard over time.
Make more money over time.
Grant: Pick your hard. Like being a solopreneur is hard and having employees is hard. So it doesn't mean that you shouldn't do either of them. Like you still have to do something. You have to choose which kind of hard you want to compete in.
Billion Dollar Creator is a show teaching creators how to capture attention and turn it into real wealth. We will deep dive into brands, celebrities, and entrepreneurs who have done it before and show you how you can apply it to your business as an everyday creator.
Nathan: Sometimes you get to listen in on a conversation that is just behind the scenes. The sort of thing that actually happens in business that normally you wouldn't get to see. So this episode is with my friends, Grant Baldwin and Bryan Harris. We've been friends for 10 plus years at this point. They've both built creator, audience focused businesses that started with eBooks and courses and gone from there. Then scaled them into many million dollars a year revenue with good sized teams.
We talk about what it actually takes to build a team as a creator, why some creators fail and others succeed and do really well. Like how to build a sales funnel, all these different aspects of what actually makes you successful building a team as a creator.
Then at the end, we dive into just talking about, like some of the creators that we admire. So definitely listen all the way to the end because we talked about some of these creators that we admire, and we want to learn from. I think it's a good episode. So we're definitely going to have Bryan and Grant back on the show. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Let me know what you think. Thanks.
Nathan: Grant and Bryan, welcome to the show.
Grant: I mean, it's an honor to be here. Who knows where this is going to go. We've been hobnobbing for the last several minutes before we hit record. So excited about what's going to happen at this point.
Bryan: I'm just honored to be here amongst two aviation pros.
Nathan: Yeah, so, for context, Grant and I both have an obsession with flying. We own basically the exact same airplane just in different colors. Grant is a little further along in his aviation journey than I am. So I text him for advice and all of that. Bryan just gives us a hard time about how much we love aviation and how, honestly, we'd rather talk about airplanes than anything related to business.
Grant: I've taken him flying. He's a great passenger, a great copilot, and maybe one day I'll convince him. We'll get him to come to our side.
Bryan: Here's the thing about people with airplanes that just get airplanes. They're like CrossFitters that just joined CrossFit or OMED people. It's just all they talk about. But I came to join you all because I will wear my aviation looking jacket today. So I look more like a pilot than either one of y'all right now.
Grant: You look the part. This is true.
Nathan: At least we're not like vegans and pilots and CrossFitters because that would be, like the intersection of those threes is you just can't stop talking about it. As much as I'd say that's an unfair characterization of us, we did start the episode by talking about the fact that we're - So we just played right into your hand.
Grant: Stereotypes exist for a reason. Anyway, all right, moving on.
Nathan: So we've all been friends for, is it 11 years now? Something like that.
Grant: Been a minute. What is your age currently?
Nathan: What is my age?
Grant: How old are you?
Nathan: I don’t think you want to know that.
Grant: I do.
Nathan: I'm 33.
Grant: Oh, yes. Okay. That's better than I thought. All right. For a long time I was like, man, I'm pretty sure he's still 22. Yeah, all right. 33 is close enough.
Bryan: That means we would have met when you were 23 or something because you stayed at a house one day. You helped me change the tire on my Jeep.
Nathan: I did. Yeah. So it was 2014, maybe? Early days of ConvertKit. I'd gone to New York in order to meet with Ramit Sethi and like a few other ConvertKit meetings I was trying to make happen. Then I jumped over to Nashville. I booked this on points - I'd spent most of my money on ConvertKit - because I didn't have a lot of money. I was coming to Nashville. I was like I don't have a place to stay. Did I post on Twitter?
Bryan: Maybe, probably.
Nathan: One of those things. Had we met at a conference before? We met for the very first time.
Bryan: I don’t think we'd ever met.
Nathan: So just if it wants to know what kind of guy Bryan is. Like we met for the first time, and he was like sure, come stay in my guest room.
Grant: DM Bryan. He'll let you come stay at his house. Open invite to the public.
Bryan: Decently often.
Grant: I remember, Bryan, I think you were too. Like we were some of the first users of ConvertKit. I remember the first 100 customers. Here's what I remember. Here's a fun ConvertKit story. I don't know if you remember this.
Bryan: I love this story.
Grant: But I remember like we switched everything over. We drafted up an email, and we go to send it, and the only option was send now. It was just, there was nothing. It was now or nothing. So I remember texting you just like hey man, I need to schedule an email, which seems like a pretty basic feature, but I didn't see it listed in the feature set. You're like yeah, you can't do that. I was like wait a second. We just moved everything over. It's just like broadcast now or nothing. So those are the early days of ConvertKit. You've come a long way.
Nathan: Yeah, a three digit account ID in the first 100.
Grant: Pretty good days.
Nathan: Grant, you and I met probably at Pioneer Nation, Chris Guillebeau.
Grant: I think so. That was like 2014 or so I was thinking.
Nathan: Yeah, I think it was super early. A couple of these events were, I was talking to James Clear about this actually, over the weekend, where we were like wait, what are the events that people are hanging out at now? Like World Domination, Summit Finder Nation, MicroConf back in the day. Some of those, like a lot of people came together, came out of those events. I like to think, Craft and Commerce, our event is where a lot of people are, which is interesting. I don't know. Now, we're probably the old guys in the industry so we don't know.
Grant: Well, I’d also say, and I know this isn't the point of our conversation. But I would say like those in person events where we each met - you and I - are at Guillebeau’s event, Bryan and I met, well, we met briefly at Noah Kagan’s office.
Bryan: Yeah.
Grant: Super random, but really actually connected in person several months later when we met up here in Nashville, I believe. All three of us, Bryan and I live here in the Nashville area. You're in the Boise area. But the in person time changes the dynamic of relationships.
So anybody watching or listening, you can tell like okay, these guys genuinely know each other, like each other, get along, have history. We've only ever spent like the three of us in the same room together no more than a few hours cumulatively, ever. But that in person time that we all have had together just completely changes relationships. So in an online creator economy, like how important that is to like actually get out from behind your screen and be with people.
Nathan: Yep, absolutely. Let's give a quick breakdown of each of your businesses. Because the thing that I want to talk about is the business model and how you scale with teams because you've both built substantial businesses, well into the many millions of dollars, in an industry where a lot of people either cap out at a certain level, or they start to scale and then stall out.
You guys have built audiences focused businesses that, don't take this in the wrong way, they feel like traditional, scalable. Like they just feel stable. So many creators, I said don't take that in the wrong way. That's actually a compliment.
Grant: I was like when’s the issue going to drop here?
Nathan: But I feel like so many creators are riding some hype wave of growth. They are saying that this number is going up like crazy. So we're scaling the team and revenue and profit like everything else. It feels hectic. Spending a bunch of time with both of you, it's like you just brought all of the traditional business best practices to a creator focused business.
It's weird to say that is odd and unique, but it actually is. We were all watching this video from Matt D’Avella about how he went from scaling a team to going back solo. I feel like that's more of a common experience. So rambling intro, but where are you guys? Maybe Grant, we'll go with you first. Talk for just a minute about what your business is and the structure of it so that people can understand where you're coming from.
Grant: Yeah, so maybe for some quick background. So I used to be a full time speaker. I was a full time speaker for eight, nine years or so. I was going to about 60/70 gigs a year. Really enjoyed it. I got to a point though.
I had a friend tell me early on like speaking is a high paying manual labor job. In that you get paid really well to stand on stage and run your mouth. But the nature of speaking is you have to get on a plane, you have to leave your family, you have to go somewhere. You collect a good check for the song and dance that you do, but you’ve got to go do the thing. It's like a surgeon. A surgeon makes good money for doing surgery, but you’ve got to go do surgery.
So I kind of just had my own epiphany of like I don't really have a business. I have a job. It’s a fun job. I like the job. I get paid well, but at the end of the day, it is a job. If something happens to me or if I want to take a week off, like the money stops flowing. There is no business there.
I think that's just a really important distinction to make for people is that there's nothing wrong with you being a solo creator. That video that you alluded to. If you're like all I want to do is make videos or all I want to do is create content, like that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that at all.
So for me personally, I kind of got to a point where I felt a little bit stuck. I knew in order to increase my revenue, increase my impact, I either had to do more gigs or had to charge more. Neither of those sounded really appealing.
So one big epiphany for me was, I remember I was talking with a friend of mine, kind of a mentor. I told him I just kind of felt restless and stuck. He said, he gave me some great advice. He said, “Grant, some people are born to be speakers.” He was one of these guys. He absolutely loves speaking. He's like in his 60s today, still does a ton of speaking gigs. He'll do his own eulogy at his funeral. The guy's a phenomenal speaker.
But for me, I was just kind of like speaking, and it's fine. But he said, “Grant, I think you are an entrepreneur who happens to be a good speaker.” That really resonated with me. That really clicked with me. So fast forward today, and I do a little bit of speaking but not nearly as much of it.
So the core of our business. I run a training company called The Speaker Lab where we teach people the business of speaking. How do you actually find and book paid speaking engagements. So at this point, we've built up, we have a team of about 40/45 people or so, completely virtual company. I learned a lot from you, Nathan, and ConvertKit in terms of building a virtual company.
But we are solving a specific problem that people have. There's a lot of people, creators specifically, who say I want to be a speaker. How do I do that? Speaking is one of these like mysterious black boxes where a lot of people are like how does this work? I've done some speaking gigs before. Maybe I've been paid a time or two. I would love to do more. But do I just sit and wait for the phone to ring? Or do I have to cure cancer? Or do I have to climb Mount Everest? Or how does this work?
So demystifying it and teaching a specific process and system and even, like you said, speaking is a long term industry. It's been around longer than any of us have been alive. It's survived recessions, depressions, wars, pandemics, 9/11. It's not going anywhere. So regardless of what happens with technology or AI or whatever, people still want to gather together to learn from and hear from a speaker.
So it's an industry that has a lot of longevity. It's an industry that has a lot of interest. It's a very aspirational career. A lot of people are interested in it, but aren't really sure how to get into it. So that's the core of what we do. That was a long answer.
Bryan: Oh man. That was.
Nathan: For anyone just listening, Bryan gave a watch wrist tapping motion to be like wrap it up, buddy.
Grant: I knew I had a lot to cover there. We had a lot to get through.
Bryan: That was really good though. I need to transcribe that and work my story in that.
Nathan: You're going to do a find and replace.
Bryan: GPT making.
Nathan: With your business. So Bryan, a little shorter than that.
Bryan: We help coaches get more clients by helping them install marketing channels in their business that actually work. So people come to us, they get clients, but they're all sporadic. They get three one month and two one month. A bunch from referrals. They're like hey, we need consistent clients to grow.
So we evaluate their business, we make a plan for them. What it boils down to is like all right, here's the channel suite we're going to install. Here's what the marketing system is going to be. Let's tackle it one channel at a time. Somewhere in the three to nine months after they hire us, they have one channel that's crushing it, and we go install the second channel and the third channel and the fourth channel.
Because one of the biggest problems that coaches and teachers have is not helping people, they're really good at that. But it is revenue because they don't know how to actually do marketing. They want to spend all their time in marketing and very little time actually iterating their coaching to make it more successful. So our job is to take marketing and sales off the table, thought process off the table. Hire us. We help you install those things, and they actually work.
Nathan: So are you like the sales and marketing?
Grant: Sticks the landing. That was beautiful. Butter.
Nathan: So you guys are like the marketing and sales team for…
Bryan: We're a coaching company. So we don't do it for you. We coach you how to do it. That might be, like typically, the arc of the channel, like if somebody comes in early on, one of the first channels we’ll probably install for them as some version of partnerships. Like doing lead magnet swaps or something like a podcast or whatever.
So we'll start with usually the owner, if it's an early stage coach, owning the channel, but nine months from then that channel is going to be mature. It's going to be bringing in five to 10 new clients a month. These are typically clients that are $5,000 or more a month. Then they hire a channel owner to take it over so they can either go just do coaching full time, or start the second channel depending on whatever their goals are. So they run the first one, they get it to maturity, and then hire a replacement, and they go to the next one. That's the typical flow that works well.
Nathan: I like it. What's the price point that you charge on your service? What's kind of the different packages that you offer?
Bryan: Yeah, so it's around a $5,000 to $10,000 setup fee depending on the stage of the business and $1,000 a month. So setup fee plus monthly.
Nathan: Okay, that's a lower price point than I was expecting.
Bryan: The higher the revenue of the company, the higher the setup fee and in the coaching. But like the core part of what we work on our main program is people in the zero to million dollar a year range. If somebody comes at us at $5, $10, $20 million, which we have a handful of those, then it'll be significantly more because there's just a lot of team dynamics to work through and a lot of products to work through. But that's the exception. But for the core product is $5 to $10K setup, $1,000 a month.
Nathan: Okay, nice. How big of a team do you have behind the scenes?
Bryan: 20.
Nathan: You said 20? Nice. Grant, what's the price point and kind of the packaging on what you're offering?
Grant: Yeah, so all of our programs are six month programs. I'm trying to keep this so concise so I don't hear from the peanut gallery. Yeah, we have six month programs, and they're anywhere from $5,000 to 25,000. We typically do like small group cohorts. So usually groups of about 15 people. So a mix of small groups, some one on one coaching, and then some done with you, done for you component.
So helping them with their finding speaking leads, their website, their demo video to try to make it is dead simple as possible. There's still a lot of work they’ve got to get done. But if you want to be a speaker, here's the steps you need to take. We're going to do some of it. You got to do some of it. Let's work together and get you some gigs though.
Nathan: I like it. Okay, so for both of you, we all watched Matt D’Avella’s video. We’ll link to in the show notes. The short version is wildly successful. YouTuber, amazing creator, scales up to a bunch of revenue with that. Finds it quite stressful, and then ultimately finds it that doesn't drive growth, and then scales back down to just him and builds profit up again.
I think we've seen a lot of creators do this. I've seen it time and again in the industry. Give me your hot takes. What do you guys think when you see either friends of ours or people in the industry scaling teams and then ultimately scaling back to just them or just freelancers?
Bryan: Well, I'll go first. First off, if you are, it is totally fine to just make things yourself. Like nothing wrong with that at all. People should do that. Also, at the same time, most every version of that story I've heard hasn't come from a place of strength and a core part of their identity. That they're Leonardo da Vinci in the garage painting. That's just what they're supposed to do.
It usually comes from fear, usually is a fear based decision, in my personal observation. That doesn't mean there's people out there that shouldn't do it. Usually those people pump up to the masses how being a solo creator is awesome. Hey, God bless it if that's your thing, but do it because that's who you are, not because leading was difficult. Like do the same thing with leading that you did with the core art. Like learn how to do it. Like you don't have to be a super stressed out leader. Like you don't have to. Those are not mutually exclusive things.
You can have a team that's healthy with awesome people. It can exponentially grow what you can do. You can have way more impact. I'm not talking about revenue. Like you have more revenue if you want. I don't really care what your thing is. But I don't know. Most of the stories I hear, they did it. They hired poorly. They lead poorly. So all the people didn't like them. They cost a lot, and they quit. Some version of that.
Which is fine. Like I can walk through many mistakes and hire. It took me four marketing directors to find the right one. There's one common element that it was me. It wasn't even past marketing directors. That’s just a Bryan problem.
So I had multiple choices. I can be like I could do what a lot of people do, which is I could just take back over marketing. Or I could say hey, I'm not touching marketing. I stalled the company out for three years of growth because I refused to take marketing back over. It's like no, we either crack that problem, or we die. But we're not going to keep this limiting belief that like there's no good marketers out there or any of that crap, which is what you hear from most people that talk about it.
So I don't know. It's like half the time, I want to tell them what you said Ramit told you in that meeting 10 years ago when you told him what your plans were. He looked at you and said some version of those goals suck. Like most of these creators, I don't know Matt. I don't know Matt at all. I've watched his videos, and they're really good.
There is a version of leading a team that Matt can do that would make better videos, more of them that are more impactful. He has to decide if that's a thing he wants, but there is a path for Matt to have a peaceful, high production team that makes him enjoy what he does even more. That's for sure there.
So I don't know his particular path. But what I don't love is these creators who do it, suck at it, stop, and then talk about how being a solopreneur is like the best route while they also have 20 contractors. Let me tell you, having three full time employees is infinitely easier than 20 contractors. That's hell. That's hard to actually do that well. So I don't know. I don't buy it most of the time. I think it's mostly limiting beliefs from people who quit.
Nathan: Strong words. I largely agree with it. There are a lot of creators that I talk to, like Josh Kaufman, who I believe has built his ideal business in every way where he is a solo creator. He has just the freelancers that he wants to work with. He's built up to many millions in revenue. He has like fine-tuned that business so that it has as little overhead as possible. There's a lot of creators who know what they want to pursue that.
But I largely agree that a lot of times building a team gets written off as a creator because you just did it poorly to begin with. Grant, what's your take?
Grant: Yeah, I would totally agree with that actually.
Nathan: Dang it. We needed someone in here who could disagree. No, I'm just kidding.
Grant: We both kind of touched on it that there's kind of this line between on one end of the spectrum, you have an entrepreneur, on the other end of the spectrum, you have an artist. It's really hard to be both because most of us are like we're just drawn to, I just want to do the art. I just want to do the craft. I don't really care about the business. But you have to have both.
Like as a speaker, I noticed that was often the case of speakers who were like they were so freaking good on stage, but they just sucked at running the business. That's the part where you have to care about. You have to fall in love with the process of what that takes and what is involved in that.
So I would say like for me at this point, I would have probably believed the same thing that Matt was talking about in that video several years ago that in order to grow a business, you have to hire people. If you hire people, that’s stressful, and that seems miserable. Why would you want to do that? Let's just all default back to zero and square one.
But I would say like on this side of it, fast forward to where I'm at today. I'd say okay, we've got 40/45 team members. Which, again, I would have thought like that sounds miserable. That sounds awful. I would say at this point, my life is better. My stress level’s lower. I make more money. I have more freedom. I have more flexibility. I have more time with my family. I'm happier. Check, check, check.
Now, that doesn't mean that it's perfect. Like there's still 40/45 people that are dependent on decisions that I make and the ramifications on their families and yada, yada. So there is like that weight there. So Bryan and I live like 10 minutes away from Dave Ramsey's headquarters, and Ramsey has an office of like 1,100 people there. So when I drive by that, I'm just like, man, that seems awful. That is a creator who built a 1,100 person business, right, and like a huge headquarters. We've been there. It's like a legit place.
But I go by there and just think that seems miserable. That seems awful. However, I've never had a business with 1,100 employees. You may ask him, and he may be like actually 1,100 is way better than 40. Like 40 probably sucks, but 1,100 is amazing. I don't know, right? Because none of us have this idea other than what we have built in our mind to think that like hiring people sucks, managing people sucks. Therefore you shouldn’t do it.
When the reality is, it's just like pick your hard. Like being a solopreneur is hard and having employees is hard. So it doesn't mean that you shouldn't do either of them. You still have to do something. You just have to choose which kind of hard you want to compete in.
Nathan: I like that. Choose your hard. For me, I remember the time that ConvertKit being about 15 or 20 employees is when we got to the point where for just about every problem in the business, there was someone more capable than me to solve it. Before that point, I was bringing my laptop with me everywhere. This is part of selling software in that it doesn't always go perfectly. Sometimes it goes down, or there's an issue, and you need to be able to solve it.
But probably about that 20 employee mark, I realized like oh. When I'd go to jump on a problem that came up, someone else who was more qualified was jumping on that first. That's when I started to relax a little bit like oh, this is easier. Was there an inflection point for each of you where as you built your team to a certain point, I don't know. Maybe it was a tough grind from five to 15, or from three to 10 employees. But then beyond that, you actually started to figure out the staffing or the team structure, or did it go smoothly all the way?
Bryan: I remember one meeting, specifically. We were in Sedona at this team retreat. There were maybe five of us in the room. That's everybody at the time. I remember looking around, and I just hired our first full time engineer. He was awesome. In fact, in retrospect, he was the first like perfect fit person at the company.
I remember in the discussions, we’re doing planning and whatnot, looking around the room. I'm like oh, like all of you have to go. It was just super clear. That's happened at least twice. That time, I remember another time vividly. There might have been a third time. I think those two times where I'm like man, like the team has reached a level where there's just like a different kind of human here now.
Like to me, man, there's some kind of limitation of imagination that, I mean, I see this in myself, but we also coach people. We see behind the scenes of lots of businesses from $0 to $25 million-ish is probably one of the bigger companies we've worked with. It's like it's the same stuff. It's the same exact thing.
One of the biggest things in team building for me has been expanding the imagination to what's possible in that role. The world's a big place. Working with a customer right now, they have an outsourced agency doing their ad buy. Through our discovery, we’re like all right you need to replace that with a full time person. Your actually paying the agency more than you would a full time person, and they're doing 1/10 of the work. But they're freaked out about it.
So when you see, there's something magical that happens when you have them on the team. But even before that, when you put out a job ad and have an A plus fit apply, and you can see it on paper, it's like what? The world quite literally opens up in a new way.
Now you have to be able to lead them. I prove to us - my leadership of our marketing sucked so bad, four of them left. I'm like okay. Well, I've got to improve on that thing. So there's been moments where I've looked around the team and like oh, there's a new benchmark that now we have to hire to and grow to.
Man, I'll just encourage anybody who's thinking about a team. Go try it. It's not for everybody. So if you decide through a place of identity and strength that you are a solo person, don't go trick yourself and saying you're solo and have 20 contractors, by the way. That's actually more work than having a full time team. Which is what you find if you dig under the hood of most of these businesses that say they're solopreneurs. They get a bunch of contractors. Like there literally is no different than these things practically
It's fun. I'll say, in my experience, having a legit team is extremely gratifying. Like we are built to be in community. You're not built to be a hermit in the woods. That is an exception to the rule. To be by yourself all day, every day, only doing stuff in isolation, like that's very abnormal and strange. So we're built to be community, whether it's at work or home or whatever. So I don't, yeah.
There are great people out there that can make work so much more fun, so much more impactful, and can grow the business. I don't own all the, I own very few problems in the business. That's way better than owning all of them.
Grant: There's a lot of big popular adages in the business space of like hire good people and get out of the way, and work yourself out of a job and be the dumbest person in the room. Actually, all those things have a lot of truth to them. I think for all of us, we have good leadership teams that were oftentimes we're like wow, you are way smarter at all of these things than I am. I would be screwed and lost without you.
Now, the challenge comes in making that initial hire beyond just the contractors. I know, for me, when you're asking about the kind of inflection points, that was a big one for us was we had a team of contractors. We got to like probably one to 2 million in revenue early on with no employees. I was kind of probably wearing that same hat of just like I'm a solopreneur, and I'm doing it. When in reality, like no, you’ve got a lot of people like working on it who are kind of half and half out.
So the marketing contractor that we had, who was awesome, was leaving to go do his own thing. So I knew like okay, we probably are at a point where we need to hire a full time marketing director. Sidenote, Bryan sent us a great referral that worked out, and he's still with us today four plus years later.
But what ended up happening was here's a guy who had great experience in the marketing space. I know he was what we were looking for. He was lightyears ahead of everybody else we'd interviewed. But I knew he's a full time hire. That was going to be a six figure role with like some profit share and eventually he's looking for benefits. All of just like the businessy stuff that you're like can we even afford this? Can we justify this?
We hired him in January 2020. Like 60 days later, the world implodes. Again, let's go back to the nature of our business. Like we teach people how to find and book speaking gigs. All of a sudden, the world's like we're closed. We're not hiring speakers anymore, right. So there's massive stress and panic. But I can also look back and say that was a huge year, and each subsequent year has been huge years of growth.
He has been a huge part of that. One, like he's very talented and great at what he does, way better than I would be. Two, I would say this is something that we could dig into, but the way he's incentivized, and specifically his comp plan, is massively incentivized where I don't have to babysit him. I don't have to micromanage him. He is massively incentivized to grow the company.
Even though he doesn't necessarily have equity. But he's heavily incentivized on profit share. Like more than 50% of his comp comes from profit share. So he's paying super close attention to it because it affects what his take home is. His comp has gone up significantly year after year after year. So that's been a big thing as well is, again, continuing to add like great people, but also incentivize them the right way.
Bryan: Okay, we've got to tell the Chris story. So I've had to hire four directors of marketing. Again, that's a me problem, not a them problem. They're all great dudes. The first person I hired, Grant started hiring a director of marketing just after I think I'd hired him or maybe within a month or so. Our processes were overlapping.
Towards the end, he didn't really have any good candidates at all. This is December 2019 or so. I like to do my phone interviews in person. So I brought three people in person. Chris, the guy I hired, and I don't remember who the third person was. I wound up hiring my guy. Grant’s like hey, do you have anybody else in the hiring process you would like? I was like oh, yeah. You should definitely talk to Curtis. He's a great dude. Personality, whatever. I think maybe Drew will work out a little better.
So anyways, he goes and hires Chris. Chris has been at Speaker Lab for four years. Chris is an absolute baller. Chris has, like COVID hits, and Chris pivots to virtual speaking that absolutely crushed it. That would be an inflection point between the two businesses.
There's multiple things Grant’s done extremely well because I'll contrast us quite a bit. Think about all right well, what is the Grant do well that I don't do well? There's several things he does really well. One of the primary things has been stability, hiring really good people, and keeping them. His leadership team has had zero turnover in the four years it's existed.
We've been a rotating door of directors of marketing. Hopefully that’s stopped. I've changed enough to know how to lead that really well. But that whole time, Chris has been there.
So like in the worst frame possible, our leftover job applicant, went to Grant's businesses, and absolutely cleaned up and has done a fantastic job. We and Chris are friends and hang out, go to conferences and stuff. But anyway, good dude. But also, I get to stare in the face of the person that I didn't hire at the time and know they were an amazing fit for the role. So hey, if you're not up for that kind of stuff, just don't even play because that's going to happen. Some version of that's going to happen. I just get the super visceral version on a daily basis.
Nathan: That is a good story that's worked out.
Grant: It’s worked out how it was supposed to work.
Bryan: It's been great.
Nathan: So you regularly pay Bryan his recurring referral commission on that as the executive recruiter that he is, right?
Bryan: I get 1%.
Grant: I mean, I can think of at least two more hires that like we've come to blows over which, again, this isn't the topic of the conversation. However, I would also say it has been incredibly valuable. I can speak for myself, and I feel fairly confident speaking for both of you that like the relationships that the three of us have individually or collectively, the relationships we have outside of this call with other people.
Where being an entrepreneur, whether it's just you, or you got 20 people, or 100 people, or 1,000 people or whatever. Like it's difficult. It's challenging. There're days where you're just like man, this is awesome. I just want someone to high five and celebrate with me. Or days where you're like this sucks, and I don't really know what I'm doing. I feel way under qualified and over my head, and I'm completely lost. I just need someone to like beat me upside the head.
I know we're all like in different group chats with other entrepreneurs just like comparing war stories. Like hey, I'm completely at a loss here. Oh, you are too, great. None of us know what we're doing. Bryan, you even kind of alluded to this. Some of the consulting clients that you work with that are big names that everybody would recognize, but sometimes you start to look under the hood and like oh, they're clueless too. Like they don't know what they're doing either.
Like okay. Just the reassurance that gives us as entrepreneurs that we're all doing our best. We're all figuring it out. We're all putting our best foot forward. But at the end of the day, like none of us really know what we're doing at our gig.
Bryan: Hey, the ones I love the most are the ones who are very well known and popular. Nathan, I actually talked about you a lot. I don't think I've ever said this to your face. But one of the things, I think that you've done exceptionally well because you had success really early in life. ConvertKit took off in your mid-20s.
I think one of the most impressive things about you, at least outside looking in and talking to you occasionally, is you get advice and mentoring the whole time. I have a question for you about this.
But even people that are further along and older in different spots, like a common characteristic isn't having all your crap together because no one does by the way. No one. Not even kind of close. Companies that do amazingly well do two things really well, and they do 50 other things terribly. But what they do is get outside coaching and mentoring and advice of various sorts.
So like if you're a solopreneur who's tried to build a business, you're Matt or somebody in that kind of vein, and it's kind of crashed and burned or sucked the life out of you. Like don't just write it off completely. Go talk to people who have done it well, and learn from it. See like all right, what can I do differently?
Because like Grant has a team of 40. He works less than he's ever worked and has made more than he's ever made. Like what's the difference there? Because there are, for sure, learnings from Grant that you can apply. So like they learn, and they don't let their limiting beliefs actually stop them. I think that's something you've done really well on Nathan.
That's something Grant, for sure, has done a good job on. He has more mentors than I can keep up with. It helps him. It helps him a ton because he gets to learn stuff. I tend to not do that honestly. I tend to want to figure it all out myself. That's not a positive, I don't think. I don't think it's a net positive.
Nathan: Well, I love getting coaching. I think that's something that is easy to suggest for other people and not like take yourself. I've hired an executive coach for the last four years now, I think. Then I'm always running ideas by friends. Actually, I've noticed this habit in people often who are coaches themselves who they won't like wrestle with a problem solo for very long before they want to call you and just chat through it.
I even got this from Dan Martell maybe a couple of weeks ago. We were hanging out in Charleston, talked about an idea. Then maybe a week or two later, he just texted. He's like, “Hey, can you jump on a call with me and two people on my exec team?” They're like, “We're a little stuck. We want to riff on something.”
We had a great time, talked for half an hour, I think got some really good conclusions. I just noticed that pattern where people will pull in someone with a different perspective or an expert in that one space, and just use their network. The number of times where it's like wait, you know these people really well, and you're not willing to ask for their help? Like oh, they probably don't have time for that. I just, I love it.
Like I was on the call today with a woman named Gretchen Leslie who is like this amazing behind-the-scenes marketer for a lot of big creators. We just had a call scheduled to catch up. She's like, “Hey, your positioning is wrong with ConvertKit. Here's why.” I'm like can this be a Zoom call instead of a phone call because I need to record this. I'm taking as many notes as possible, getting all of this great unsolicited feedback from her.
So I think it makes two things that I'd recommend. One is set a stance in public that you are open to unsolicited feedback. Just tell people that. Make it known. In your friend groups when someone gives you feedback, don't be like “Grant you don't know anything about my business. Get out of here.” Instead go “Okay, tell me more. What makes you think that?” Like dig in and be curious.
Because people, if you make it known that you're open to unsolicited feedback, then people say like “Oh hey, Nathan, that offer that you sent out, that didn't really land. I would do this next time instead.”
Then the second thing is deliberately seek out help. If you're about to send your biggest marketing emails for the season, or whatever it is, run them by three of your friends who are in a similar space. They'll happily spend 15 minutes and record a voice memo for you saying “Hey, here's what I think. I think this will actually work. I think it won't.” But if you do those two things, you'll have a huge impact.
Grant: To that end, Nathan, if you ever decide to change the name of ConvertKit again, if you could run it by me and Bryan, we could help you with that one.
Nathan: Bryan, you said you had a question for me in there. Was there something you were wondering about?
Bryan: Oh.
Grant: I’ll buy him time for a second.
Bryan: Just calm down there hotshot. Here we go. All right. Here's the question. I wrote it down ahead of time. This is for both of y'all. How have you made sure your pride or ego hasn't gotten out of control as your business has grown?
Nathan: I mean, the first thing is, in the nicest possible way, my wife does not - I care about the business. She cares a lot about the business, loves the people. She comes to - she's been to a couple of our team retreats over the last seven years that we've been having them. But when I'm saying hey, we just hit 20 million a year in revenue. We just hit this. We hit 50,000 customers. She's like that's awesome. Let's go to dinner to celebrate. She's supportive in every way.
Bryan: That’s cute, honey.
Nathan: Like I'm so happy for you. There's none of that when I'm oh, but how are we going to hit this? She's like do we need to hit that milestone? Just very grounded. So I think that definitely helps. I don't know. I'll start with that one. Grant, what do you got?
Grant: Two things come to mind. One is yes, all of us started the thing that we do. But also, when you zoom out on a day to day basis, we have very little to do with the ongoing. At some point, it has to be bigger than you. Right. So that's also part of the point of this podcast and the show is that creating something that's bigger than any single one of us.
So I realized when people are like Grant, you’ve built an awesome company. I was like well, I'm not doing any of the coaching. I'm not doing the marketing. I'm not doing any of the sales calls. Like I'm not doing the customer service. I'm not keeping track of this or that. There's people that do all those things. So Grant you, yeah, but Grant’s not actually doing things. They're moving the needle in a meaningful way.
Now, again, none of this is, I think for all three of us, none of this is a false humility. This is also just the reality of business. Like our roles, yes, they're important. But also, we want to build something that exists and is bigger than us. So that'd be one thing. I had something else that I'm drawing a blank on.
Nathan: While you're thinking that, I'm going to take it the other way because I, oh man. Is this one of the things you shouldn’t say on a podcast? Let’s see.
Bryan: Now you need to say it. Come on.
Nathan: So I had a realization that I think I need to bring more ego into my business.
Bryan: Okay.
Nathan: Probably when I think about it, maybe it's not ego, maybe it's something else. But there is some more probably an actual humility, not a false humility, where I want to lead from the front. I don't want to be telling anyone to do a job that I wouldn't be willing to do myself. Any of those things. I'm going to dive in. I'm going to work right alongside you in all this.
I've had more and more times recently where I realized that I'm making poor prioritization decisions and not valuing my own time because I'm not willing to say I'm the CEO. That is not a good use of the CEOs time. So it's not necessarily an ego thing. But I think that humility in business can take you too far. Or you could end up, the same ideal could get you off the other side of the path where you're saying oh, that's actually not good.
So what I'm realizing is that in order to serve the business the best, to serve the team and the customers the best, there's a line that I need to hold where I say no, I won't do that. If I were to take that on, yes, that would serve you as an individual. Right? Maybe jumping on a call for an hour with someone on our support team, right, or doing this other thing. That would absolutely serve that individual, and it would be a disservice to what I need to do overall for the business and the community.
So I'm trying to find that balance right now where I've actually, even though it makes me cringe internally. Someone says hey, can you do this? I've actually said back “Is that the good use of the CEO’s time?” Even saying that I'm like ooh, that's. Yeah but I think that's what's necessary for the business to grow.
Bryan: That makes sense. I don't think that's a humility, pride thing, though. This is a different categorization of thing that's very healthy. Because well, you could do that out of a place of pride. I'm big and important, and you want me to send an email to customer support? No, I hired you to send emails to customer support.
You could also do it at a place of strength and humility in that hey, let me walk you back through what your role is. Let me empower you to actually crush the thing and not need me as your codependent relationship kind of deal. So maybe the same thing could exhibit itself. Or maybe the reason behind it is the differentiator between those two. Because what you just described as a hit me at all is Nathan is full of pride and thinks he's the crap over there. Thus, don't ask me a question. Like that's not the heart of what you described.
Grant: One other things, so withing The Speaker Lab, one of our core values is ownership. So we always tell people whether you've been here for several years or you just started, I always say this isn't the Grant show. So my name may be on the cover of the book. I may do the podcast, whatever. But just because you just walked in the door doesn't mean that you're any less valuable than anybody else here. So we want your feedback. We want your input so.
So often if someone were to come to me and ask Grant, what should I do in this situation? Or what would you do? A lot of times it’s well, turning it back on, then what would you do? 99 times out of 100 said that sounds good. I think we do that. Even though maybe there may be a few little tweaks, I would do that, but maybe do it this way.
But the more you just let people feel empowered, rather than even just feeling empowered, but they actually are empowered, the more confident that they're going to be of like okay. I know that Grant actually has confidence in me, and he believes in me and that the team supports me.
Even if I get it wrong, it's coming from a place of trying and making an effort and not feeling oh my gosh. If I get it wrong Grant or whoever is going to be pissed at me or disappointed me. No, that's not the attitude at all. So I think just building that muscle within people and that confidence in people. Like no, the reason you're here is to help make decisions. The more decisions I have to make, the more of a bottleneck I become.
Nathan: I use that question all the time. Just simply, what do you think we should do? It gets me out of so much work. It's fantastic. But more importantly, it builds the system for the work to happen without me. That's really important.
Grant: There's this idea. I don't know if I heard about it, or if we were talking about or something. But the idea of strategic laziness where yes, I care about my business, but certain things I just don't care about. It's just in the scheme of things. Not that it doesn't matter, but my involvement in it isn't going to move the needle and isn't going to make a huge difference. That's why we have great people to do those things.
If the cover art for the podcast should be Option A or Option B, my decision probably isn't going to make a huge impact. So a strategic laziness of going I just don't care. Now, again, you're thinking about how you're phrasing this, and thinking about how you're communicating all this. But the strategic laziness of going, again, is this the best use of the CEO’s time? I'm not saying that, but that's the thought process that's running through my head of what is the best way?
Because the other thing is we're all three in new positions that we haven't been in. So prior to getting into speaking, I was a youth pastor at a small church. There's maybe 10 people on staff. Then I became a speaker, and then we started The Speaker Lab. So I'm 42. So I've had a career for 20 something years, and this is the largest company I've ever been at.
So I tell the team regularly, this is all new to me. So I'm still figuring it out myself. So it's not like oh, yeah. I've worked at a company of this many people, or a company of much, much bigger. Nope, no experience there whatsoever. So also just giving ourselves some grace to go if the CEO shouldn't be doing this, what should the CEO be doing? Because this is new to me. I'm not totally sure.
Bryan: One question I'm having real time is I wonder if part of the difficult part of creators building a team is caring about everything. Being a hyper perfectionist, so much so that you accidentally disempower the people you work with to the point where everything's got to be done Bryan’s way. So I don't even know why I'm here. You kind of just accidentally strip.
Because they didn't get into this to build a team. So it's an abnormal path. They're the face of the thing, typically, and they didn't get into it to grow a company. They kind of found their self in that opportunity spot. But leadership training or actually how to lead people, that's just not there.
That's maybe one of the more impressive things about Mr. Beast. He started out as the dude, his face. Now he has what seems to be a super legit operation lead really well producing high quality stuff all the time. Like that's incredible. The videos are cool. The organization and the growth of him that has to happen to make that happen consistently over time, that's by far more impressive and rare, this seems to be.
Nathan: Yeah because you have to figure out what's the thing that you're good at, and then where can you hire people who will carry that so much for you. Right? Like even for me, design is something that, like that is my core skill. I was going to say I went to school for design. I dropped out of design school to go try to be a better designer. That was where I started.
I don't design things for ConvertKit very often anymore, right? I hired Charlie, oh seven/eight years ago now, who's our creative director, and she is a way better designer than I will ever be. So I actually delegated and hired someone better for my core skill. I think as you do that then that really frees you up to amplify all these other things. Hiring people for sales, for marketing. At some point, you've been replaced yourself in the very core skill that you used probably to build the first million plus in revenue.
Grant: Well, to that end, most businesses start as a personal brand, to some degree. Whether we’re teaching or training or recruiting somebody, a lot of it's centered around us. So over time when you're trying to transition away from it's not about me, it's about something that's bigger than me and this company and this identity that's more than just this individual personal brand. But still so much of our personal brand is carried into it.
Then it feels well everything has to be perfect because it's a reflection on me and my personal brand. It’s like if it's going to be bigger than you have to start to disconnect yourself from the business and make intentional decisions.
So, for example, we have other people who host the podcast, and we have most of the emails are written by other people and come from other people and are from other people. Real quick realizing okay, whatever the area of the business is that depends on you the most, how do you pull yourself out of that the quickest? What does that process look like?
I think we've all done that of finding and hiring people that pull ourselves out of maybe whatever that role is, whether it's sales, or whether it's marketing, or whether it's fulfillment or customer support, or whatever it may be. So that we can focus in on the thing that we know ultimately helps the business grow.
Nathan: I like that. One thing that I think has helped both of your businesses grow a lot is having recurring revenue. Now, Bryan, I think, is everything in your business besides the setup fee recurring revenue?
Bryan: Yes.
Nathan: Grant, what about you? What percentage of your product? The book is not, nothing is recurring.
Grant: Nothing's recurring, which is zero.
Nathan: Oh my God, what are we going to do?
Grant: Oh, deep breath, everything's going to be okay big boy.
Bryan: Oh God, he just opened up Pandora’s box over here.
Grant: So I mean, it's a real challenge. There's pros and cons to it. Especially the nature of the business Bryan and I specifically are in is around coaching. Coaching, typically, it's going to be different in various genres. But as an industry as a whole, most people don't stick around for a long period of time.
You happen to be in a space, Nathan, where it has massive stickiness. Where people, once they get in, probably going to be with you for several years most likely. That's typically not the case in the coaching space. So we also recognize with what we do with speakers that speaking is a very aspirational career.
A lot of people get into it, realize oh, this is hard, or this is challenging, or oh shiny object. I said I want to be a speaker, but also I want to write a book, and I want to do a podcast, and I want to do a course, and I want to do coaching and consulting. I want to duh, duh, duh, duh, duh.
So what we found was doing some type of recurring product was really difficult given kind of the nature of our audience. So we were focused much more on the six month program, selling the six month program. There's pros and cons with that means each month, we're recording this early January. So January 1 rolls around, and we start over. We're starting at zero, and we've got to climb that hill again.
So on one hand, I'm just like ah, man. It'd be nice to have some recurring. We have a lot of people on payment plans. So it's not we don't have anything. So we get, if I had to guess, probably 15/20% of our revenue is some form of recurring-ish. It's different but same idea.
But at the same time, our COO, for example, he used to work at Stanley Black and Decker. Stanley Black and Decker is a multibillion dollar company. They sell a crapload of power tools. So we were talking about this idea at one point.
He said, he’s like, “Yeah, recurring revenue is nice. But at the same time, a lot of businesses, they start from scratch every single month. At Stanley Black and Decker, we had to get Lowe's and Home Depot to buy a billion dollar’s worth of power tools every month.” You're like whoa, that's true. Most people aren't buying a power saw every single month.
Or Coca Cola, nobody's on a recurring subscription. People buy Coke repeatedly, but they start over. People selling at a car dealership. People buy a car, and then it's like I'll see you again in several years, or if you're a realtor, or whatever the thing is. Most businesses operate off of selling to new customers on some type of regular cadence there.
Now, I think one thing that Bryan's always been really good about, he and I were texting with a mutual friend of all of ours the other day, is just the ability to find those new customers on a recurring basis. Because from a lot of creators, maybe they switch from the personal brand to selling some type of product or service, whatever it may be. They can kind of skim the cream off the top of the loyalists who will buy anything and everything they say.
But fast forward six months, and you need to sell to someone who's never heard of you, or just subscribed to the email list, or just stumbled across the thing that you do. How can you do that and do it in a sustainable way for the next several weeks, months, years? That's a business.
But just saying I sold to my fans, and now what's the next thing I can sell to my fans? What's the next thing that I can sell to my fans? You continue to just pawn them off for the next thing that you're shilling. Like that's not a business.
Nathan: Well, I think the thing that that makes me curious about is I see so many people ramp up revenue, ramp up the team, revenue then flatlines at some high number. Say it's a million a year or 5 million a year, something that. They're making way less money in profit than they were before because now they have this giant team to support. Then they usually ramp down the other side. That's the bell curve that we go through.
I haven't seen many creators get through that unless they have recurring revenue. So what I want to know about your business is how you're able to build to that scale and then maintain it really well without selling a whole bunch more to the same customers. Are you just really dialed in with new lead generation and that deal flow?
Grant: Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think that there's a few factors. One is going to be the that industry, meaning people who are interested in the speaking industry, it's a big pond. There's a lot of people that are interested in that, right. There's always going to be new people that are interested in that.
So it's kind of similar to aspirational authors. People who want to write a book typically also want to speak or some combination. It’s just an aspirational thing. A lot of people would to do that. So it's a big pond of people that's always going to be growing and never going to be necessarily dying to nothing. So sure, that's a factor.
I think the other factor is yes, from a marketing perspective, we have an email list that we utilize and we lean on. We're very dependent on. But we also say okay if the email list goes away, we still have to be able to find and sell customers on a daily basis. So what is that formula? We do a lot with online advertising through Facebook and Google and YouTube and the various platforms, but also just trying to build up our SEO presence and organic presence.
One of the things that we haven't really touched on, but let's say for all three of us is we've been doing the same thing for an extended period of time. How many creators just chase the flavor of the week thing of what are they up to these days? I mean, there are people that are coming to mind right now. Man, give it a year, and they're going to be doing something totally different.
But nobody's sitting around talking like what's Nathan up to these days? Do you think he's still screwing around with that? Nope, he's still doing ConvertKit. Still at it, plugging away. What's Bryan, still working with entrepreneur. He's still doing the marketing thing. Still doing the thing for an extended period of time also gives you some confidence in the marketplace and gives you some just word of mouth.
People are like actually, they've been at it for a long time. So they can't be shady. They can't be that sketchy. Like they probably know what they're doing. Actually, I know a couple of people who have used them or recommended them. Or you just start to build some track record within the industry. But it's just hard to stick with the same thing for a long period of time because there's so many other shiny objects that are easy to chase.
Bryan: What I see people do, Nathan, is they burn their list out. They burn the audience out by overselling to it. They never mastered cold, profitable lead generation. So two things cause the downsize. More so than that even is they almost always map the attention span of the owner. Like every year courses are going out of style. It's like no, they're not. Dave Ramsey's building is a mile from my place, and that place is really big. It's built on courses. People are still buying courses, and they are not going to stop. But you just got bored of it.
So revenue will match the attention and creativity span of the owner, unless you get a team and a real leadership team that actually lead the company. Then your attention span is risk mitigated in the business. So I think conceptually, that's one of the biggest factors in that. I've seen it personally up close and in person many times.
They're like it's going out of business. I'm like no, our business is doing great right now. A lady that we're helping, she just had her best launch ever. You're meanwhile in the same industry saying people aren’t buying courses. No, you never actually got a solid business in place. Like conceptually, that's one thing.
The other thing is they just burn out the audience because they sell to it. They don't fill it up as fast as they churn. It just comes down to math at the end of the day. If you don't have new people coming in, your revenue will go down. If you're kind of bored and don't like the thing you're doing anyway, well, you're not going to put the intention in needed to solve the problem of lead generation.
So those are the two things I see that are the biggest factors in creator style businesses plateauing and falling. Never master leadership, thus, their attention span is the growth span of the company. Then they never actually get lead generation in place. They don’t the math of their business. They don't know how many leads they need in. They don't know what their close rates are. Thus, all client production is a mystery. It's not math. You can't solve mysteries, but you can solve math problems.
So when you get the math in place of oh, I need 100 calls at a 10% close rate to get 10 clients, that math works every time. If I didn't get 10 clients this month, what number was off? Calls or close rate? It was close rate. Great. Let's go coach the sales team. What sub number of that was off? Oh, it's pickup rate. Pickup rate should be 60%, but it was 30%. Are we sending the reminders out? Do we have the calendar thing hooked up? That's pretty much it. You fix those, and close rates get back up.
So getting what you do and client acquisition down to just a simple math formula solves a good bit of that, especially if you put a good team on it that knows what they're doing. Because then if you get bored of it, and that's not your skill set, it can actually grow beyond it. I've never seen a company, in my decade, I'm not saying they don't exist. I've never seen a company in my decade who has a real team and real math behind client acquisition that went out of business, ever. It's one of those two things typically.
Nathan: I think what you're talking about is probably some creators are yeah, absolutely. I think a bunch of others listening are probably going hold on, what? A sales team. This is a creator business. Like if you can't buy it in one click on the website, we don't want to go down that path.
Bryan: But turn buying one click off a website into a math formula. It’s visits to a website and conversion rate of the page that they're on. If you only have 1,000 people a month coming to that page and you have a 1% conversion rate, what's the math on that? 10 people. That's the max you can get.
So you can do lots of things to sell more people. You could sell to the list, or you could just increase traffic. So every sales conversion comes down to a couple of numbers, and you can game. Not game it, but be intentional with your math formula to grow the business.
Nathan: Yeah, I want to dive in on the inside sales part of it because I think this is something that actually holds creators back because in their math formula, they might be relying on a 1% lead ultimately to sale conversion rate. They're looking to, they're like okay, how do I get that to 3%? So they're all right. If I send a whole bunch more emails, maybe I'll do that. Then you ultimately burn out the list. But I think what both of you do, Grant, you have an inside sales team as well, right?
Grant: Yep.
Nathan: So what both of you are doing is increasing the lead or visitor or lead to sale conversion rate by having an actual human for people to talk to, and for it to be a really good experience as lead qualifying and all that. So, talk through that. How do you go about adding an inside sales team, and when would you think about making that switch as a creator?
Grant: I think Bryan and I did this pretty much concurrently because we both started selling courses. At the time, again, this was, again, we were talking about 2014, ’15, ‘16 or so, this is a popular thing. Again, fast forward eight, nine, 10 years, still a popular thing. But at the time, thinking that like okay, I could see myself creating some type of course. I have a lot of people were asking me about speaking. Let's create a course about speaking.
So we created a course called Booked and Paid to Speak that we sold for $297 and then eventually raised it to $497 and $997. So did that for a couple of years of just selling the course primarily through webinars, automated webinars, live webinars, and just did that over and over ad nauseam.
Then had a lot of people who were asking hey, do you do any coaching? I didn't have any interest in doing coaching. So it was like okay, I've been hearing about group coaching high ticket sales programs. So then we kind of created an iteration of that. Which knowing okay, I'm going to do some of the sales calls.
So we had a small cohort of 10 people. I sold the first 10 over the phone but I quickly realized, okay, again, this is not the CEO’s best use of time long term. I can do it to kind of figure it out, but then who do we need to hire?
So for a little while, Bryan and I both shared a guy who was kind of a pseudo sales director. So we had each had a part time salesperson and then another part time salesperson. Some of it's just a numbers game. Like okay, we have 10 bookings this week. 10 leads who want to talk to someone. Who should do that? Let’s find someone. Okay. Now we have enough bookings where we need another person.
Well, at this point, I know we have over 1,000 bookings a month. Some of it, again, is just a numbers game of going okay. If the average salesperson can take this many calls per week and the average close rate is X, and we can get this many bookings. If we get this many more bookings, can we add another sales rep, right?
If we can, again, like Bryan said. Which again, we all glossed over that. That was a great line. You can't solve a mystery, but you can solve math. That's gold. Let's put that as the title of the episode right there. That's a good one. I mean so much of that is true.
When it comes to a salesperson, if you just know, okay, it takes this many people to get to this page, and this many people actually book a call. this many people actually show up to the call. Therefore we need this. So that's kind of how we have trickled up to the point where I think we have 10 sales reps today. All we do is one on one sale.
You go to our website, there's nothing to buy. You have the podcast, you have the book, but in terms of our coaching programs, there's nothing you can buy on the site yet. You have to actually talk to a person. Again, that's a sales mechanism that has worked well for us. Whereas my guess is with ConvertKit, you don't necessarily have to talk to anyone. You can go sign up for whatever plan today on the website, and that's totally acceptable. That's totally fine.
Nathan: Yeah, Bryan, what would you add?
Bryan: I mean if you're selling courses, you don't need a sales team. I think when your price point gets generally over $4,000, your conversion rates on emails and sales pages, typically almost all the time actually, go down so low that they need to talk to a human. And what you can charge then goes up.
The difference in $4,000 offer and an $8,000 offer, a lot of times, is actually a higher conversion rate on the $8,000 for the same exact audience. We've seen that over and over again. You double the price when you get to that price point, and nothing changes except your profit.
So it's mainly price point driven when you need a sales team and when you don’t. There's lots of challenges to that approach. But, for us, the driving thing for us in the whole business is the fundamental problem we're trying to solve is making it almost impossible for people to fail to grow in their coaching business.
To do that, courses will not do that. The success rate on courses is somewhere between 5% and 0%. Our goal is to have a 90% success rate with our clients. Right now we’re at a 45% success rate measured on the first 90 days.
So it's a very strict measurement, and I know fundamentally a book will never get us there. A group coaching program will never get us there. But one on one coaching is the most likely path to success, and I'm almost completely confident we can get there with that. So that just dictates that the price point is higher, and that we have a phone sales team. So that's where it comes from for us.
We had some good people luck early on in finding Sam, a guy we shared and then Grant stole a few years later. I'm kidding. That was one of our disagreements there. That was a fun one. That’s the next podcast episode. Without Sam, I would not be doing phone sales because I do not want to do phone sales.
So that's also something you can, that's one of the easiest roles to hire out because it's almost either very low salary, like $1,000 or $2,000 a month and commission or just straight commission. So I've helped quite a few clients this year hire their first salesperson that becomes a sales director and hires the sales team under them.
The main thing is just your leadership, but the role is fairly easy to hire. I would say a good rule of thumb is when you're bringing in, on average over the previous three months, if you brought in between five and 10 clients, you're totally can hire a sales team. A first salesperson that's part time and then let them go full time.
So if you're at four to five a month, get that off your plate because that means you’ve got to take somewhere between 20 and 30 sales calls. That's 20 and 30 hours of time in a month. 20% of your time in the month is talking to people on a sales call. So get that off your plate. That's just sucking up an inordinate amount of time. So that's our general rule of thumb with it, and it works well. Like you can totally do that.
Grant: I would say at this point with our sales team, they're all still straight commission. You only eat what you kill. So, again, people assume oh in order to have a team, you're going to have a ton of overhead. No, we have our sales team. Within payroll, payroll is our biggest line item within the business. Within payroll, our sales team is the biggest line item of that. They're all straight commission. So if we don't have sales, we don't have anything to pay you because you didn't generate anything.
So it reduces the risk significantly for the business versus having some big overhead thing. The other thing I was going to mention was in the creator economy, courses are really easy to whip up and spin up. So it becomes a really crowded market. When you're doing something high ticket that's done well and delivered well, it creates a higher barrier to entry, similar to software. Not anyone can just whip up oh, I'm going to make my email software over the weekend. No, not anything, that's good.
Nathan: Yeah, and it won't be on the scheduled email.
Grant: This is true. If you just want to send a broadcast out, apparently that can be spun up real quick, and you'll get people me to pay for it. But to do something like high ticket sales, to do something like software, to Bryan's point, it can arguably produce a better result. But also, it's just harder for people to get into and harder for people to knock off versus anybody can just spin up a course over the weekend. We see a lot of people that do that.
Bryan: If you're selling a $5,000 or more coach course type product, I mean, you can have a full time marketer and a full time sales team that's producing over a million dollars a year for under $10,000 a month of payroll. It is not expensive. Now you have to lead them well. You can be like me and go through four of them because you just suck as a leader in that particular role. That could be the case. But you don't have to pay a lot for marketing and sales engine for a high ticket coaching business.
Now, you'll pay that out in commissions and whatnot. You can budget around 20% of top line sales going out in commissions between the sales manager and the sales team, or if you just have one salesperson about 15%. But you don't have to pay a lot for it. Those people, if they don't produce, they leave.
So the way we think about it in a phone sales driven business, the marketing department puts calls on the calendar, the sales team closes the calls. If you're not hitting your revenue goal, one of those two people aren't doing their jobs. So they either bring you a plan, and they execute it to improve those things, or they leave and you found somebody else.
So if you have a 10% close rate, which is good average, if you put 100 calls in a calendar, your sales guy is going to close 10% of those, and you're going to get 10 customers at 5,000 each or 10,000 each, and you have whatever that revenue is.
So it doesn't have to be something crazy complicated. That framework, I mean it took us six years of doing this to even think in those simple of terms, but that is what it is. Marketing is going to use some channel. Partnerships or ads or referrals or email marketing, those are kind of owned audience, like warm things, but you’ve got to have a cold channel. Something has to put calls on calendars. Those calls have to be closed by a sales team.
Whatever that's putting calls on the calendars, ideally, in the best system is fueling the list and the audience at the same time. So, for us, our primary cold channel is running Facebook ads to a training. So we get calls booked for $150, but we get people opting into the funnel for around $20. That number should be way lower, but it's 20 bucks. So we get, on average, I don't know, 2,000 or 3,000 new leads via that channel to the list every month. 98% of those people don't buy. They join the list. They get nurtured, they hear podcasts, they get emails, and then at some point in the future, that channel converts them into an owner.
But if you didn't have that and all you have is this email list of that kind of grows by magic, you're going to burn the thing out. It's not going to last because you'll reach the sales capacity at which it churns at the same amount that you build it by and then sales will go down. We did that too. Like we killed the list after three or four years of hitting it hard. So we've done all the bad versions.
But the hardest thing in marketing. Also it's not that complicated. It’s a cold channel that produces clients profitably and grows the list. If you have that and you have a director of marketing and director of sales, the thing will grow. Just lead it well. So it's not crazy complicated. Those two roles are the fundamental discipline to doing it right. Book calls, close calls.
Nathan: I like it. Okay, that's a good place to leave the team structure and all that. You guys think about this in a much more systematic way than most creators, and I want to have this conversation so that people can see inside that and be like oh, that conversation is not happening in my mastermind. That's not the type of entrepreneurs and creators that I'm hanging out around. So hopefully that was a good little insight.
As we wrap up, I want to maybe just dive into a couple examples. Who's someone that you follow that has an audience that's applying the audience in a unique way to build a business that has a lot more longevity, right? I think we've all seen the eBooks and the courses, great way to generate cash short term. But what's someone that you saw that audience come together, and you're like that is a smart audience product fit? Something that I really admire.
Grant: I got two that come to mind in the speaking space. One is a guy I think you guys are both familiar with, Phil Jones. Phil is a very successful speaker, but also has written and published multiple books. Exactly What To Say, Exactly How To Sell. He's got kind of a series of these Exactly What To. He's really carved out this niche with that to the point that he's incredibly good with it, has sold a crapload of these books. I believe they're all self-published or hybrid published.
But one of the things he started doing recently is doing some certifications around these Exactly What To certified. Using these kind of a similar way to almost what Donald Miller did was StoryBrand and kind of certifying people to teach the content and to go out and use the content, which, again, Don would be another good example here. So Phil would be a good example.
Another guy you guys may not be familiar with is a speaker up in Canada named Ron Tite, T-I-T-E. Ron is a very good speaker, one of the best speakers I've seen. Hilarious, incredibly talented, but Ron is also a partner and, I believe, he founded a major advertising agency in Canada. So part of Ron's gig is he goes out, and he speaks. He's kind of partly a rainmaker of then clients where he's talking about what's working, what he sees in the industry. They're like hey, can we hire your agency?
So Ron is not the CEO of the agency. He's not running the day to day, but his job is to go out and speak. Then he drives business back to the primary breadwinner which, again, kind of similar to what you touched on earlier with Mr. Beast. He's not sitting around creating chocolate. He's like I'm going to do the thing I really enjoy, which is making videos, but I'm going to tell you about this other thing.
Ron has done the same thing of I'm going to do the thing I really enjoy, speaking, but I'm going to tell you about this other business, and kind of linking the two together. So Phil and Ron would be two good examples on my radar.
Nathan: I think that's interesting is seeing what the back end of someone's funnel is. I think we've all run into this when you're running ads for cold traffic, and you're like how is someone, especially in search ads. How is that person spending that much money? I can figure out what you're paying per click for the search term. It's way more than I'm spending. Like one assumption is oh, you're burning money. But the more logical assumption is your back end funnel is way better than mine.
Grant: Yeah.
Nathan: So in Ron's case, let's say he's getting paid a made up number but $20,000 for a keynote. He's thinking oh, is it worth it to go here? Most speakers are like okay, there's that. Plus, I might sell these books, or get this email list growth. So maybe the net value to me is $25,000. I get 20 from the speaking, five here. Ron, in this case, is probably going let's see. If I get eight solid leads for the marketing agency then that's going to turn into all this. Those could be $100,000 a year each. Absolutely, I'm going to go speak at that.
Grant: Yeah, I'll give you one other quick example. There's a lady that we worked with in one of our programs who was, she worked with high end, high net worth families helping with identity theft protection. So she was wanting to get into speaking. She was looking at it primarily through the lens of how much am I getting paid per speaking gig?
We’re like no, you're looking at it wrong. It's like what's the lifetime value of one of the clients that you work with? For her, it was substantially high. It was tens of thousands of dollars because once someone would start working with her, it was over the course of literally their lifetime and protecting their identity in high net worth families.
So I said, let's focus more on that. So I remember she went and spoke at a gig where she was paid $1,000, a couple thousand dollars. It was very nominal. She said hey, I generated three or four clients out of that. That's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Nathan: Yeah.
Grant: So sometimes looking at the, again, the primary thing that you're doing, and this is the case for a lot of speakers. We're like that's not the primary way that you're going to drive revenue. The revenue is actually driven on the back end with something else, whether that be some type of product or service that you have. So there's a lot of different ways that you can do this.
Bryan: Also, I want to add this because one of my biggest mistakes I've made in 10 years is overcomplicating things. Having a four step funnel where you buy a thing and upgrade and ascend and tripwire and whatever is orders of magnitude more complicated and hard and likely to get screwed up than have one thing and sell that one thing and make really good money off the one thing.
I have a long track record. I diagram out the fancy, crazy, stupid crap that I did that I thought would be great. You just didn't need any of it. That’s one of Grant’s superpowers. He keeps it very simple. Man, you can get nearly any coaching business, you can get nearly any of them to $10 million a year with one product selling it for five or 10K. You don't need more than that.
If you have more than that, it’s decreasing your chances. It might be adding revenue, but it's not increasing your chances exist almost ever. So I have drastically overcomplicated things. Many of the clients I've been up close and in person with have drastically complicated things. So anyway, of note.
Grant: Om that note, years ago Bryan was selling a, I think it was a camping eBook in Nashville, best places to hammock, something like that. Some type of eBook. I was like I'll support my friend on this. So I bought through, what site was that through? Was it?
Bryan: That was a launch challenge, actually. That wasn't a separate thing. It was like we're in the middle of launching. So we did a thing.
Grant: Anyway, whatever the site was that we all used to use.
Bryan: I'm going to have to think.
Nathan: Gumroad?
Grant: Gumroad, yeah. Paid 15 bucks on Gumroad. I don't think I ever got that eBook, but that's fine. That's neither here nor there.
Bryan: Venmoing you right now so I don’t have payment.
Nathan: We're just bringing it up years later on a podcast.
Bryan: That literally was 2015. So I'm glad you.
Grant: 2015?
Bryan: Nine years ago.
Nathan: Oh man. Bryan, who's a creator that you admire along these lines?
Bryan: Actually, I had to think about this for a minute, but there's probably not. I love it because they're actually pure creators, and a nonprofit, but they sell stuff. So they have, and their creativity and level of work and art has just exponentially grown. They started about the same time I did. I think they're about 10 years old or so. It's called The Bible Project.
They started with explainer videos. I mean regardless of genre, they're just the best explainer videos that exist on Earth. They're amazingly well done and happen to be about the Bible. They have a podcast, amazing podcast, amazing explainer videos. Now they have these equivalent of these scholar level classes. All of its free. All of its crowdfunded. It's all driven from the giant YouTube audience, giant podcast audience, and I'm sure significant website traffic.
I think, I went to their website, they have like 45,000 donors or pledges or whatever they call them. Something equivalent to Patreon. Although, I don’t think they use that particular mechanism. I actually downloaded their last year, a nonprofit does typically do there's like end of year annual reports or something. I forget the revenue, but they have at least 30 or 40 full time people on staff. A full blown animation studio, full blown artists crowd, custom develop iOS app where you can, as they go through a podcast, it’s animated.
It's some of the most impressive creative work I've literally ever seen teaching anything. I don't think there's anybody even close on any topic. It's incredibly good. Like if you're into the Bible, Jesus at all, go check it out. If you're not, you're just interested in somebody doing amazing creative work, go check them out. They probably produce more money than any of us. It’s seriously impressive.
Nathan: I like that. I think so much of the success that I've had comes from taking something that works in one industry and cloning it into my industry. Like one example is when I was doing design, everyone's trying to design some unique website and code it up in CSS. So you'd go to these CSS galleries and look at what trend was happening. You could just tell that someone would design a great site, it’d end up in a gallery, and then everyone would copy that, and the trends would follow from there.
One of my favorite things was to go to clothing stores. So Banana Republic or something in the mall, and look at the colors and the fonts and the textures that they were using on their fall collection or the tags on their clothing. I would copy them because that was looking at a different industry in a different space. Then my work seemed original as I brought that to the web.
I think the same thing was true in living in the startup, the design heavy startup world, and one foot in the direct response marketing world. You got to value long form sales pages, great copy, and great design. Neither of those things were original, they just weren't commonly put together.
So I think in what you're talking about, I would go there and be like okay, let's look at the art and craft of how they do it. Okay, let me make that for speaking. Let me make that for Ruby on Rails tutorials. Let me make that for design, whatever topic it is. Then no one's like oh, you're just another me too of the same thing in your industry. It's like no, you came out of nowhere. You're world class. I was actually I'm a clone of this thing in entirely different industry that you've never seen.
Bryan: Yeah, like their app, for instance. It’s the first not B to C, like how do you use Uber? It’s not a service. So the first informational app that I've ever downloaded and actively used because it legitimately enhances the experience. Like I listen to the podcast on the app and not iTunes or YouTube like I prefer because as they reference all these things and mentioned other topics, it's just beautiful, and it's super useful.
So yeah, I mean, that can be pulled into any industry. The level of explainer videos can be pulled into any industry. Yeah, anyways. So, they're fantastic. Not a lot of people in our industry know about them. Definitely worth listening.
Nathan: Yeah, I love it. Those are good examples. Guys, let's leave it there for now. Thanks for hanging out. Where should people go to follow you and check out what you're doing?
Bryan: Growthtools.com/Nathan. I'll put over two bonus trainings that we only give to clients, how to book calls and how to close calls. So if you want to check them out, you're interested in that topic, go there. We'll have a page up where you can grab them.
Nathan: I like it. Grant, how about you?
Grant: I'll give you generic links. I'm not trying to suck up to the host. Geesh. Okay I'm going to go to nathanismyfavorite.com, and there you will find. Everything we do is over at thespeakerlab.com, thespeakerlab.com. We've got a podcast by the same name, The Speaker Lab Podcast. So if you listen to this one, you probably listen to other shows. So check that out. We've had interviews with both these guys, nearly 500 episodes. So thespeakerlab.com.
Bryan: Why do you do The Speaker Lab when you own Speaker Lab? What's the point of that?
Grant: I always think about the Social Network movie. Why the Facebook? Just Facebook or just, at this point, we've just kept it for a long time. So that's another fun story we should tell some time about the time we bought Speaker Lab and then the people got pissed and tried to buy it back from us. So, that was fun.
Nathan: Okay, so what we're going to do is leave this episode here for now so that you guys can, are you going to go play video games after this? What was the thing? No, you're going to go work out. I don’t know.
Bryan: All the things.
Nathan: Go let you do what you're doing. Then we'll do a part two where we come back and jam on more topics. So if anyone's listening and says oh, I have these questions or I want to dive in more, shoot me a note. Just nathan@convertkit.com, and we'll cover it in a future episode.
Bryan: We'll make sure we tell the story of the time Grant stole our sales director that we shared. Use that as the teaser.
Nathan: Wow the amount of employees that... There's a lot of drama here. I'm surprised that you two are as good friends as you are.
Grant: I've seen rage Bryan, hashtag, so we should talk about him one time. We will talk about the time he yelled, not just spoke loudly to, no he yelled over the phone to a - another online. We will leave their name out of it.
Bryan: He wasn’t highly well known, but his name was rising. The dude disappeared. I don't even know where he is now. Like I haven’t seen that guy.
Grant: Ever since Bryan screamed at him, that guy has gone off the map.
Nathan: We're going to leave that there. Good to see you guys. Talk soon.
Bryan: Thanks, buddy.
Rachel: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Billion Dollar Creator. If you enjoyed this episode, please and subscribe, share it with your friends, and leave us a review. We read every single one. If there is a company you want us to profile on Billion Dollar Creator, send us a message on social media and we will consider it. Thank you and we will see you next time.