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Welcome to the Pretty Okay Podcast, a chill (but sometimes spicy) small business podcast for people who are crazy enough to have one. Hosted by the Founder of Enji, Tayler Cusick Hollman, we cover everything from basic business practices to small business marketing. We sit down with some of our favorite small business owners and experts who share their stories, real-life experiences, and advice, all while keeping it (very) real and honest.
Tayler - 00:00:05:
Welcome, welcome everyone to the newest episode of the Pretty Okay Podcast. I am your host, Tayler Hollman. And today I have got the person who's going to unfuck us all, Braden Drake with us. And we're actually not going to talk about law so much today. Which I think I'm hoping is a refreshing thing for you, Braden. But I wanted to talk about irresistible offers. And the reason that I wanted to have this be kind of the focus of our conversation is. Marketing is hard. Most of us are operating in really saturated markets where it's so hard to stand out, even when you have a cool brand or your messaging is really tailored to your ideal clients. Sometimes it just comes down to what are you putting in front of people and asking for money in return for? And I think a lot of people get really stuck in this space of offering the same thing that everybody else is putting out there. And that just, again, feeds into this whole vicious cycle of why shit is really hard all the time. So I'm excited to talk to you about your irresistible offer, as fucking cheesy as that sounds. But I know that you've got one because I've been getting served all the ads for it over the past couple of weeks. So in case someone who's joining us today has not met you before, will you take just a moment to introduce yourself?
Braden - 00:01:36:
Sure. Well, hello, everyone. Super excited to be here. My name is Braden. I am a small business attorney. I am licensed in the state of California, and I also have a Master's degree in Tax Law. So I'm the owner and CEO of the Not-Your-Average Law Firm, where we provide legal, tax, and bookkeeping services for not your average clients and business owners.
Tayler - 00:01:59:
Yes. You know, I love, I really like the rebrand that you did, I think it was already over a year ago, right?
Braden - 00:02:08:
Yeah, about a year and a half ago.
Tayler - 00:02:10:
Yeah. I really like your little happy little man and his Birkenstocks. This is your logo. Because if you've ever met Braden in real life, he's probably rocking Birkenstocks. He's not at the cross-fit gym. Currently, boom. See? On-brand outfits all the time. Yeah. Okay. So that irresistible offer that I had mentioned as we were welcoming everyone in, what's the offer that you've put out there with the intention of it being like, the thing that people would be stupid not to buy?
Braden - 00:02:47:
Yeah, so the offer is called The Contract Club. And we have many offers, but this is our one no-brainer offer. It's the one thing that sells like... I would say literally every day, but there are a few days we don't get sales, but we do sell more than one on average per day. The tagline for it, it's kind of a long tagline, but it's all the contracts you need all in one place, all for one price. Just pay the cover and you're in for life. We try to make it kind of like party fun themed, but it's essentially a bank of dozens of contract templates. We add new templates to it every month. A lot of people think it's a membership. It's actually not a membership. It's kind of like a course because we do have training videos, but it's really just a template hub for a one time payment. At the time of recording this, it's $30. But on June 1st, after two and a half years of having a Contract Club, we will be doing our first price increase to $50.
Tayler - 00:03:47:
I mean, still $50 for dozens of contract templates, it is a you're stupid not to buy this kind of deal.
Braden - 00:03:55:
That's how I feel about it.
Tayler - 00:03:56:
Yeah. You know, which... I'm so curious, how did you end up coming up with the Contract Club? And why did you think that it was like the right thing for you to try?
Braden - 00:04:11:
Well, it was a little bit of an evolution. So I started out just doing like the contract template store situation that I think is a lot more popular with my competitors really. And I just basically didn't have the time or the energy to like market it appropriately. Because I think a lot of the people who are successful with that. They treat it more of a... What's the word I'm looking for here? It's like almost more of like a product-based business that lives on the side of their services. And we would sell maybe one template a month on average, but then we included all the templates like in our group programs. Cause I've always had courses in group programs and we would include them in that. And I had a pretty good year in 2020. And then 2021, we had a big dip in revenue. So then coming out of 2021, I was like, all right, we need to experiment. We need to try some new stuff. And I just got a lot of energy and like January of 2022 to experiment. And I got this idea of, okay, well, instead of selling individual templates, what if we just sold them all together? And when I talk about the value of the program being thousands of dollars, it's not an exaggeration. When I thought about what the price point should be. I literally went to my business mastermind and I was like, should we make it $500 or should we make it $30? Like that's kind of the extremes you were on because even at $500, I thought it would be a really great value. But we decided to make it a low ticket offer because I was like, this, if it works well, could essentially replace the role that freebies play in our business, but in a way that's actually going to make us money. And it's worked pretty well because the offer is so great that people just organically share it without us. So we do have an affiliate program, but a lot of people share it without even billing being affiliates, which is great.
Tayler - 00:06:13:
Yeah, you know, that actually was going to be my next question to you is, how do you look at this low ticket offer? And how is it different? Or is it different from how you previously looked at lead magnets? So I love the fact that you're kind of just like, replacing your free offer with this. And I mean, $30 for what would be probably 10s and 10s of 1000s of dollars worth of like legal time, right? If you're paying someone to actually create contracts for you. It's a super no-brainer. So with how you treat the Contract Club, is there an intention? Did you create an intentional workflow or kind of like customer journey that feeds people into your more ongoing memberships and courses and bigger ticket services and products that you have?
Braden - 00:07:10:
Not at first, but since we have. Like originally, it was just when I put it kind of up for sale, I don't think that when I released it to the world in January 2022, I had no idea if it would take off. I was like, surely we'll get at least like 50 sales because my data told me that that was reasonable. But we ended up selling like 200 that first month, which was really big for me and my list size. And so over the months after that, we tried to, I experimented with some things. And we finally now a couple of years later, have it fitted into our offer structure. So the way our funnel works is that after people buy the Contract Club or any of our low ticket, other low ticket offers, we have a few, then they go into a nurture sequence. And the goal of our nurture sequence is actually to get them to take our quiz. And then the quiz is essentially like, what's your next best step and how we can help you. And then after they take the quiz, they get put into one of three funnels based on their quiz result to sell them either a different course or a one-on-one service or ongoing monthly maintenance, like monthly bookkeeping or legal services.
Tayler - 00:08:26:
Yeah. So when it comes to how you're marketing it. Yeah. Like, I'm always... Because to me in my head, where this fits in in your business is it's not supposed to be a thing that takes up a lot of oxygen in the room, right? Or a lot of brain space on an ongoing basis. So when it comes to how you're keeping it visible and top of mind for people and putting it in front of new folks, what's the mix of marketing activities that you are doing around the Contract Club?
Braden - 00:09:04:
Well, I would say most months we're doing nothing, really. And I actually, as you were talking, it kind of reminded me that I needed to pull up, I should pull up my Enji account because one of the things we actually track every month is the number of Contract Club sales we have, which is actually, that's really easy for me to see in my bookkeeping, but we do track it in Enji as well, just so we can see a graph. But over the past year, on average, we have about 35 to 45 sales of the club in months where we're doing no additional marketing activities. So those are almost all just coming from like word of mouth or people who are just buying it off of our website. But right now, this month, we're actually doing an affiliate promotion and contest. So we're paying out 100% affiliate commissions for the Contract Club, which means if you get one sale, you get $30, which is, I don't think I've ever heard of anyone else ever doing that in an affiliate promotion, doing 100% commissions. But I got that idea because I was really, even though it's such a great offer that sells organically, I've been having a hard time getting Facebook ads that will actually convert, but our affiliates always have great conversion. So it's like, well, my goal is to spend $1,000 on Facebook ads and make $1,000 in Contract Club sales. And I'm not able to do that. But I can do that with affiliates. Like, why wouldn't I just do that? And then my friends are making money instead of like Meta the corporation, win, win, win all the way around.
Tayler - 00:10:37:
Yeah, totally. I mean, that's one of the things that I know that you're a pretty data-driven business owner, which I love, because most people are just totally like, oh, I'll continue to give Meta $1,000 a month even though I'm not making my money back. And it's like, please fucking don't do that. But that brings up kind of this interesting piece of all this that we haven't talked about yet, but. Like if you're willing to already have a low ticket offer that has super high value and is literally a no brainer buy. And then give a hundred percent affiliate commission to someone that refers a Contract Club purchaser. Then to me, what that's telling me is that your potential lifetime value of a Contract Club buyer is way more than the $30, right? Like, because you've created all these other pathways for them to give you more money. And I think that's one of the things that people forget. Just like fundamentally forget to think about and try to implement, right? And then it, but it puts you in this really cool spot where you're like, yeah, I could spend $30 to acquire a customer, which is so low and then make money off of this person by upselling, reselling, all that kind of stuff in the future. Do you track numbers or what was it that sort of made you think like, yeah, duh, I'm going to give away even in addition to the fact that no one else is giving 100% affiliate commission most of the time. But like, what was the other, like, what were the other thoughts that you had that for you made that a no brainer marketing strategy?
Braden - 00:12:33:
Yeah, so I mean, it's all about the conversions on the back end. So I actually don't have great data on lifetime value of customer. That's something that's alluded me as far as how I'm able to track that. But what we do have is we launched an upsell earlier this year. And we can talk a little bit more about that. But it's a $70 upsell. So the Contract Club's $30, the upsell is $70. And right now we're averaging about a 15% conversion rate on that. So so far, just in this month, with our affiliate contest, we've brought in, we've had about 130 sales of the Contract Club, and about 20 sales of our upsell, which then means that we're actually even after we pay out the affiliate commissions, that's leaving us with enough extra money because of the upsells to pay the bank processing fees, which otherwise would make it like a net negative, like profit offer, and to pay my admin cost and my marketing manager who's running the affiliate contest, and then leaving us a little bit in the positive as well. But then all like 120 plus of those buyers are then going to go into our funnel. And the thing is, is I have a $5,000 signature offer. And I would expect that at least one to two of those people will buy that. But then a lot more will stick around and buy some of our other low ticket offers, maybe hire us to do their tax returns next year. Or if none of them buy anything else from me, I know that probably 20 to 30 of them are probably going to tell at least one other friend to buy the Contract Club because they're going to log in, they're going to use it, and they're going to love it.
Tayler - 00:14:16:
Totally. Yeah. I love that. I mean, figuring out your lifetime value of a customer is really hard when you have multiple products offers you know like streams of income it is hard to really like aggregate that and figure it out. So I mean, it's something that we're with software it's easier to do because we have one system tracking all of our every transaction that's happening and doing the math for us, but.-
Braden - 00:14:45:
But then, I mean isn't that I was with the SaaS company isn't it just basically your monthly, the monthly cost of the program times the average number of months they stick around.
Tayler - 00:14:57:
Yeah. So it's like a much cleaner formula than, you know, like, cause we don't have, we don't have seven ways that we can make money off of someone. It's like, are you giving us $29 a month for the software? Yes or no. You know, and that's, that's the deal there. But yeah, for digital product-based businesses that, you know, and for you, you also have the services on top of it. That is not a, that is not a straightforward equation to figure out. So maybe we'll.
Braden - 00:15:25:
No, I wouldn't even. I wouldn't even really know how to start because it's like, well, we could take our annual revenue and then divide it by our number of customers. But then that's not even lifetime revenue. That's just for the year, like annual. And then it's also... and we still don't, you know, we have a $500 a month offer for like bookkeeping and legal services. And I guest it's really hard to project what our average retention is going to be on that because we have people that joined when we launched it that still have it canceled. So it's like, if we calculated our retention right now, would that even be accurate? It's like so many variables.
Tayler - 00:16:05:
So many variables to everything. Oh, my God. Well, okay. Definitely want to ask this question and it's the time that we can get into the controversy of these low ticket offers, right? Because sometimes creating an irresistible offer means that you're deeply discounting something of high value. And when it comes to your area of expertise in the law, right? Like people clearly, lawyers invest so much time and so much money in their own education into becoming a lawyer. That I can only imagine that there are other, you know, independent lawyers out there selling contracts that are like, what the fuck, man? Like, why are you giving all of these contracts away? And have you had any pushback from other people in the market? Because, I mean, it is one of those things where, if someone's not feeling super confident in their own business, that the human emotional reaction is to get upset at someone who's doing something different really well. So that's kind of where this whole thing is coming from.
Braden - 00:17:24:
Yeah, I have a lot to say on this topic. A lot to say. So have I had any pushback? Not really. The only person, the only kind of colleague person in the industry I've had reach out to me about anything regarding the Contract Club was when I posted on Instagram saying how much of a racket I thought $500 contract templates was, were, and I was told that I didn't need to bring the rest of the industry down in order to promote my business. And at first I was a little taken aback, but then I was like, I don't know. I think it's a really interesting discussion to be had about, you know, like large corporations, they market against each other all the time, right? But then us smaller businesses, it's supposed to always be community over competition all the time. But then where do you draw the line of like calling out? What you think is an unreasonable price point on a certain product versus being unfair. Just my thought on the whole thing is, especially now as someone who provides legal services is a lot of attorneys will draft a custom contract for you for $500 to $1,000. So like, why are we buying templates for $500? If people want to, if they have perceived value in that, great. I have reviewed a lot of templates that were purchased from other template shops. And I don't think that they're necessarily any more valuable or thorough than what we're providing in the Contract Club. So there's kind of my thoughts on the price differential there. And then, I don't know. I could go down some other rabbit holes too, but there's a starting point for you.
Tayler - 00:19:02:
Yeah. I have purchased contract templates in the past, and I'm not going to lie, when I see one that's well over $400. I'm like, that's a fucking hard, that's a big purchase for something that I might only use once. Because I have had this need for one-off contracts. And it's like, well, I'm not looking for... Well, sometimes I haven't been looking for that ongoing contract that I'm going to use to book clients, right? That one, you're... What like however many times you're going to use the product for the price point. Like the math is like, oh, well, when I amortize it over, how many times, like how many hundreds of times I'm going to use it. Yeah, it's totally worth it. But when you're looking for a contract template and it's pushing $500 and you think you're going to use it twice, you're like, oh, fuck, that's like really expensive. And that's just probably one thing that I'm going to need over the course of however long. So, I mean, I've had definitely emotional reactions to templates being really highly priced before. And it's like, I get it that some people through money, that's how they define the value of their knowledge that they've put down on paper. But I think that with anyone who's creating a digital product, a lot of people, I do see a lot of templates in general being priced really high. And it's like, are people really going to spend that much money over and over again, when maybe you would sell more volume if you dropped the price down?
Braden - 00:20:43:
Yeah, I mean, I have had a business friend asked me before if I feel guilty undercutting the market. And I had to like really sit with that one. And the conclusion I eventually came to was no, like, no, I don't. Because I would if I was undercutting, like the legal, like the market for legal services. That's a different thing, right? I'm sitting on a pile of student loan debt, legal services are really valuable. We're trained to do all of this stuff. But I don't feel bad if I am disrupting someone's dream of making hundreds of thousands of dollars in passive income, selling templates that they drafted like four years ago, and then are selling for like $500 per template. And now they're mad because they can't sell as many other templates, and they're going to have to like actually do work on a daily basis drafting, like actually like drafting custom stuff for their clients. I don't really feel bad about that. Because that also I mean, we can really get into it, Tayler, because then that feeds into some of my issues about people charging super high ticket for bullshit online programs that deliver very, very little. This is a whole like a whole can of worms. We're opening. And I'm kind of in the middle of this because I think that there's a time and a place for 10 and $20,000 programs. There's a time and a place for $500 templates. But there also is this whole like charge what you're worth and people thinking that if they charge a low ticket, it means that they don't value themselves or their knowledge. And that's not really true. We need to start stop getting our self-worth from the amount of money that we bring in and the amount that we charge for things. They're like two separate things, often.
Tayler - 00:22:28:
Yeah, totally. I was worried when we launched Enji that I was going to get pushback from marketing consultants. Because, you know, we're enabling people to create a marketing strategy fewer than 10 minutes, right? And, you know, pay us $29 a month for the rest of the tools. And I was like, oh fuck, like everyone's going to think that I'm just like coming after consultants and, and the, all of the expertise that's locked up in people's brains. When push comes to shove, there's a market. And then there are levels of customers that have different needs and different financial means, and they're looking for solutions at different levels. So the folks who are selling the higher ticket items, they just need to focus on finding the folks that are going to pay for that higher ticket item. And for those of us who have a lower ticket offer, we can play in that space. And like you said, competition is super healthy, but every human characteristic, there's two sides to it where something can play really great for you and in your favor. And then the other side of it, it's like kind of a toxic trait. And I mean, like you already mentioned, to say the hard thing, like sometimes community over competition, there is a side to this where it's like, well, some competition is normal and needed to actually have a healthy business. So, you know?
Braden - 00:24:12:
I think the thing for me is like, you can always be collegial with your competition. You can be friends and you can be supportive and you can even be helpful and collaborative. But sometimes in order to get sales, it does make sense to set yourself apart from your competition and actually show why your offer is better. And I think various people are comfortable with various levels of how explicit you are with distinguishing yourself in that manner. All kind of relative. Also I mean, we can always, I feel like it's maybe obvious but needs to be stated you can have a high ticket offer that's also irresistible as well. I don't want people to think that I only the thing that I think it has to be super low ticket to be irresistible it's not. I also was reading some threads this morning, Tayler. So I think I just came into this podcast a little hot, but one thing I realized a while ago. And I was guilty of this too is in the like online education course creation coach can like coach kind of space is I think a lot of people get talked into creating high ticket programs. Because someone is selling them on their high ticket program to teach them how to create a high ticket program, right? And now what we're all being coached to do is to basically fit everyone into that one program, as opposed to having different offers, like you mentioned, that fit different people based on their individual needs. Because the high ticket program is going to be the perfect solution for one person. And for another person, that investment just might not be affordable or even make sense.
Tayler - 00:25:50:
Yeah, you know... We all can't be sheep, man. Like we gotta, I think, like we can't, we can't all be sheep. We can't all be following the same folks and implementing the same things that we're being taught. It just, that's where like the resistance to any sort of competition gets compounded, right? Because there just becomes less and less space for it. And this kind of plays into one of the soapboxes, I like to get on is, hey, man, it's okay to have a bold point of view on something and to go against the grain a little bit. And I think that as, not that I want everyone to be obnoxious all of the time and just like spew unfounded opinions.
Braden - 00:26:39:
There also is that flip side of people who's like entire brand is being a disruptor. And at a certain point it's like, okay, but what are you, what are you actually contributing to the industry other than just complaining about other people?
Tayler - 00:26:52:
Exactly. Exactly. But like, it is really important for all of us to find some sort of soapbox that we can stand on. And, you know, you stand on it, you say the thing, you get off of it, and you live your life. And then every once in a while, you get back on it. And that can really become a core part of your messaging and your marketing and your brand around all the different ways that you're available to help people. But yeah, like living in a, living in it, I think it's so easy for all of us to end up in an echo chamber. Which is not good for a whole host of reasons.
Braden - 00:27:32:
I had some folks who were trying for a while to get me to turn what was my Unfuck Your Biz course into a $10,000 group coaching program. And since it's kind of funny because we've actually made it a $5,000 program, but now it's a $5,000 signature service. We provide essentially $5,000 worth of like tax and legal setup services to get your business all set up. And for the longest time, I was like, well, why would someone pay $10,000 for a group program when they could get all of this for probably $5,000, but then not even have to do it themselves. So I don't know, I'm sure some coaches out there would still just tell me that I have like mindset issues, and I need to sell like sell the transformation more, like how your business is going to be transformed by this program, rather than comparing myself to other traditional legal and tax business owners. But at a certain point, I'm like, well, I don't understand why people would pay that much money for that kind of a thing. Unless I am really doing some manipulative, like NLP bullshit in order to get them to buy it. And am I going to feel good about that? I don't know. But then I made it feel like it's a me problem. I don't know. This could be a whole different podcast episode, Tayler.
Tayler - 00:28:48:
No, I mean, these are the kinds of like real, I mean, I am. I mean, these thoughts, everyone has these kinds of thoughts, right? And, you know, we're... I'm not a sales driven person and you know, my approach to sales is very relationship driven. And I'm like, if you don't want it, you don't want it. Like, it's fine. I don't need to, like I'll walk away right now. And we all as business owners need to figure out where we're comfortable playing because you have to be confident through and through about your products and services. And if you're not, then it totally comes out in your marketing and how you're out there trying to sling it. Like you become less effective at all these things when you don't have the right mindset. But just because you don't have this certain mindset, doesn't mean that you can't find tons of success where you are, right?
Braden - 00:29:53:
I mean, just come up with a great product, a great service, price it appropriately, like deliver excellent results and make sure that you have really, really good margins. If your margins aren't great, then you probably are priced too low. Which is a lesson I've learned because the service that I was talking about was $3,000 and we were just breaking even. So I've had to raise the price a couple of times because that's just how much payroll I'm paying, my team. But we could always circle back to data because if people aren't tracking their numbers, this shit is they also like they're not going to be able to figure their pricing strategy out.
Tayler - 00:30:29:
Yeah, totally. Totally. Well, I have loved the windy road that this conversation ended up on. I mean, those are always the most fun for me. It's like, let's just talk shop and see where we end up. But okay, so we've already talked about the contract template or the Contract Club a lot. But Braden, where can people find you to go snag your deal that is stupid for them not to buy?
Braden - 00:30:54:
Sure. So our website is, so the business is the Not-Your-Average Law Firm, and the website is notavglaw.com. So short for average, notavglaw.com. Same URL, nope, same, the username is the same on Instagram, notavglaw. I've been doing a lot on threads so people can follow there. And then, of course, if you're a podcast listener, most importantly, go tune in to the Unf*ck Your Biz with Braden podcast. Make sure to put the asterisk for the U in that first word, and you'll find it just fine.
Tayler - 00:31:29:
And then go pick up the Unf*ck Your Biz book.
Braden - 00:31:32:
Yeah, grab a copy of the book while you're at it. Might as well, right?
Tayler - 00:31:38:
You just got to get all the things, right? So thank you so much, Braden, for taking the, yeah, get all the things, get all the things. Thank you so much for taking the time to have this super fun conversation with me. I love the honesty and you and I will have to go down the rabbit holes again another time. But thanks everyone for tuning in to this episode of the Pretty Okay Podcast. Show notes will be up on the website and you can scope out some shenanigans on Instagram. So prettyokaypodcast.com and @prettyokaypodcast. We will be back next month with another episode. And until then, I'll see you all around on the internet.