Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Get ready for a lively and insightful conversation on this episode of Count Me In! Host Adam Larson welcomes author, strategist, and founder of FractionalCMO.com and Redfern Media, Draye Redfern, as he shares his bold approach to staying resilient and thriving in uncertain times. Drawing on advice from his "Recession Survival Guide" and giving a sneak peek into his upcoming "Anchor Marketing" framework, Draye Redfern delivers practical strategies for teams and individuals who want to future-proof their businesses and careers.
Whether you’re running your own company or leading a department, you’ll come away with ready-to-implement tips for attracting new leads, nurturing relationships, and building a solid foundation for growth—even during a downturn. Draye Redfern's real talk on marketing, team dynamics, and building lasting customer relationships will keep you hooked from start to finish. Tune in for high-energy ideas, personal stories, and a toolkit to help you turn challenges into your next big opportunity!
Creators and Guests
What is Count Me In®?
IMA® (Institute of Management Accountants) brings you the latest perspectives and learnings on all things affecting the accounting and finance world, as told by the experts working in the field and the thought leaders shaping the profession. Listen in to gain valuable insight and be included in the future of accounting and finance!
Welcome back to Count Me In. I'm Adam Larsen, and today, I'm joined by Draye Redfern, the founder of fractionalcmo.com and Redfern Media. We're diving into strategies for thriving through turbulent economic times as outlined in Draye's book, the recession survival guide. In our conversation, Draye shares practical actionable tips and walks us through his anchor framework from attracting leads to nurturing relationships to optimizing operations and maximizing retention. We'll discuss how teams outside the sales and marketing, especially in finance, can use these principles to break down silos and add more value across the company.
Adam Larson:So if you're looking for fresh, effective ways to repair your business for whatever comes next, you're in the right place. Let's get started.
Adam Larson:Well, Draye, I'm really excited to have you on the podcast today. We're gonna be talking a lot about your book, The Recession Survival Guide. And there's a lot of uncertain times right now, and I think people are really kind of wary about what's happening with the markets going all over the place with uncertainty, especially in The US markets and even the worldwide markets with everything that's happening. And in your in your book, you kinda stress the importance of focusing on the bigger picture during terrible turbulent times. So maybe can you kinda share that approach, for teams and what that looks like?
Draye Redfern:Yeah. I'm certain certainly happy to do it. And thank you for having me, Adam. I think that no matter where we're at right now, people feel that times are turbulent. They've said this five years ago.
Draye Redfern:They said this twenty years ago. They said this a hundred years ago. So there's always uncertainty in any market no matter what you're facing. So if you lead with that, then it sort of takes the conversation in a in a, I think, a more interesting dynamic. And what I mean by that is, on average, depressions typically in Western countries happen oftentimes about every 100 years on average.
Draye Redfern:Recessions, you can argue, like, we were in a one month recession during the times during COVID in early twenty twenty, whatever. On average, recessions typically happen about every eleven years. So if you take that as a baseline, we're more or less due for both. Cool. Maybe that happens, maybe it doesn't, but it's probably worth preparing for it either way, like having your financials figured out, having good risk management practices, having a good way to consistently generate leads, having an offer for your services that is, you know, recession agnostic.
Draye Redfern:It doesn't matter whether a recession's gonna go on or not. Like, there's a reason why, you know, Warren Buffett invests in companies like Gillette because men are always gonna need to shave their faces. Like, this is just a reality. And so if you're selling one off tchotchkes that are cheap European import or Chinese imports, then, like, yeah, if times get tough, that's gonna be the first thing that, like, people are not gonna buy. And so the your offer structure, what are you actually doing to serve the market?
Draye Redfern:What does your team or structure and financials look like? Are you way over leveraged? Like, fixed cost versus variable cost inside of your business. There's so many different sort of avenues I think a business owner should just get like, do it now because if a recession happens, like, no. You don't have a crystal ball.
Draye Redfern:I don't have a crystal ball. But if a recession were to ever happen, which it will without with absolute certainty, it will. It's a matter of when. Then you're much more geared up to take advantage of it. Like, a perfect example of this is a lot of the businesses who were not ready for COVID, what they did was the first expense they cut, like, oh, markets are going down.
Draye Redfern:Everyone's freaking out. Stop the marketing. Stop this. Stop that. That's what many did.
Draye Redfern:For the businesses that actually kept advertising, it was the law of supply and demand. You had a lot less people in the market wanting to advertise because they all cut their spend. And so their dollars went way, way further. So we have some clients that were getting three and four x the amount of reach on the same dollar spend that they did six months previously because the market dried up. People pulled out of it.
Draye Redfern:They were no longer advertising. But it's the people who, like, have, like, confidence in a plan that know the financials and know the team, know fixed and variable costs in the business, know what it takes to acquire a customer, all of these sorts of things have a really solid foundation. So if and when something happens, they can capitalize on it. So for those clients of ours that were really, like, push the gas pedal during, you know, early COVID times, they crushed. They absolutely smoked it, made so much money that you couldn't do you can't do now for the same amount of spend because people are all advertising again.
Draye Redfern:So there's a lot of ways to sort of, like, take that. We can, you know, dissect this any way you would like, but I think that it's really a matter of much like if you've ever sold a business. I'm fortunate enough to have ever, you know, I said, sold two businesses at this point, one of which was to a Berkshire Hathaway company. No matter what you're doing, if you ever wanna sell the business, whether it's in six months or six years from now, get it ready to sell today. And that's essentially my philosophy when it comes to running a business is, like, get the business in order today because, like I said earlier, it's not an if, it's a when on when some recession or black swan event will happen for most businesses.
Draye Redfern:And so we can certainly use that as a as a jumping off point, I guess.
Adam Larson:Yeah. That is a good jumping off point because, like, a lot of questions come to mind. Like, what does it look like when you, like, when you wanna get your business ready to sell right now? And and and then and then the the like, a follow-up question is what if you work for a place that's not looking to sell anything, but you wanna hey. Hey.
Adam Larson:Like, I wanna raise the red flag and say, hey, guys. We need to be we need to get ready.
Draye Redfern:So I think that when it comes to getting ready, I I write about this in the recession survival guide. I also write about it in a new book that's coming out called Anchor Marketing. What what essentially it is, it's a framework on how to market way, way more effectively in your business. So your offer, your structure, your baseline foundation is really, really solid. And what I mean by that is if you were gonna build a house, you're gonna erect all the scaffolding, and you're gonna take the time, and you're put the trusses on there and put the roof on there and do the facade, but you built the dang thing on a foundation of sand, you're kinda like you're you're stuck up creek, and you're not it's not gonna be very long until that thing comes crashing down, even though the dang thing is beautiful.
Draye Redfern:But a lot and that's how a lot of people run businesses. That's how they run departments. They do all of that sort of stuff. They don't take the time to build a really solid foundation. And anchor can be that for a lot of people, so I'll run people through it.
Draye Redfern:Anchor stands for attract. So how are you attracting new leads, new, you know, interest, awareness, eyeballs? Every business tracks something different. What does that look like? What is that awareness factor?
Draye Redfern:So how do you attracting people in? I typically recommend businesses have at least three. Because if you're only relying on word-of-mouth referrals, then, oh, man, John Smith went out of business because times are tough, and he's like, well, I'm 65 anyway. I'm just gonna shut the doors to my practice. I'm not gonna like, I'm done.
Draye Redfern:Well, there's your primary referral source that went up in smoke, and you had no control over it. Enjoy those referrals, but you should you should then have at least two more options. Maybe that's paid traffic. Maybe that's direct mail, which I absolutely love. Maybe that is some sort of outbound or cold email or whatever it is that you're doing.
Draye Redfern:There's a thousand different ways you can skin that cat. Do three. That's attract. The second part is nurture. Most businesses operate in a sense of, hey.
Draye Redfern:We gotta lead in. They didn't buy immediately. They're dead to us. And, like, that's it. They have a whole like, you you look at their HubSpot or their Salesforce or their high level or whatever it is that they're using, and there's you know, if not hundreds, if not tens of thousands of emails of people that, like, have not been contacted.
Draye Redfern:And so the second part is nurture. And the easiest thing that I recommend a lot of businesses to do is take the 52 most asked questions in your business. What is that? Like, is it about pricing? Is it about how you serve them?
Draye Redfern:And then build some sort of collateral off of that so that you could more or less write and address all of the objections that someone would have in working with your service, and you turned it into a year long email sequence. One email per week. You can nurture those people over the course of a year, but here's the magic little sauce that most people miss. At the end of that first year, you tag them to begin back at the beginning because do you remember an email that you got a year ago?
Adam Larson:No. I can barely remember emails I got today.
Draye Redfern:Exactly. And that's the reality of it. So you could essentially, for a singular action, do something today and maybe it takes you today and tomorrow, whatever it is, and then you have it locked down to nurture these people indefinitely until the time is right where they're like, I'm finally ready to change providers. I'm ready to, like, do this thing. I've been pushing it off.
Draye Redfern:I got the email today. I'm finally ready to make that decision. Some like, typically, only between 13% of any market, whether you're buying a car, buying marketing services, buying financial services, are ready to make the decision today or in the next two weeks. Most people don't don't pay any attention to that. So by adding a simple nurture sequence like that, it can go a long, long way.
Draye Redfern:The third part of anchor is convert. What is the conversion elements that you're using? And most people are only like, well, we're only looking at leads, like, or, you know, amount of calls on the books. Cool. What other conversion elements have to occur with that prospect before they become a client?
Draye Redfern:So that could be, what is the amount of leads or opt ins that we've gotten on our white paper or PDF or e whatever. How many of those converted to booked calls or demos, sales calls, whatever the jargon would be depending on how the business operates. How many sales calls? How many conversions off of those sales calls? What conversion elements are you looking at?
Draye Redfern:Because it's never just one conversion. Someone just doesn't, like, raise their hand today and immediately buy. Sign up. Sign a retainer. Whatever it's gonna end up being.
Draye Redfern:But knowing what that is and then optimizing that, you know, conversion journey, really, really simple thing. Put dashboards on it, track it weekly or, to bare minimum, monthly because it then also acts as a leading indicator to the business of, hey. If, you know, awareness is going down, leads are going down, call books are going down, closes are going down, you're gonna know one to three months ahead of time so you can really put some gas on that so you're not, like, looking up and, like, ah, well, there's more months than money this month. We gotta, like, figure something out, and it becomes, you know, 911 emergency. That is the c.
Draye Redfern:Kind of also relates to the o of Anchor, which is optimize. What are you trying to optimize for? Every department will throw, especially if it's like a bigger company, they'll throw all of their metrics to the c suite and say, here's how great we are. But in the reality is, are they the right metrics to be tracked? And a lot of businesses do not take enough time on this.
Draye Redfern:That could be, like I said, second. It could be visits per month. That could be calls booked, whatever else. What are you trying to optimize for? Usually, most businesses should optimize for about five things.
Draye Redfern:It's gonna be different on every business, but I'll give you an example for us. I wanna know eyeballs or impressions per month because we drive traffic, etcetera. I wanna know what total impressions are per month. After that, I wanna know what actual opt ins or new leads are per month. Like, you know, what if they're under nurture sequences or something like that.
Draye Redfern:I wanna know amount of calls that are booked per month. I wanna know the close rate off of that call or, like, the close percentage off of that, meaning we got x amount of you know, we we had 10 calls. We sold three people. It's a 30% close rate. And then finally, at least for me, I wanna know LTV, lifetime value.
Draye Redfern:For us, on average, a client stays with us for seventeen months. So I know that if it costs me, I'll just use round numbers, a thousand dollars a month we were to to, you know, sell a service for, and and someone pay stays for seventeen months, that's $17,000. Most businesses do not know that, which if you did, it allows you to treat your marketing really, really differently. How much would you spend to get $17,000 in the door? Now if you know your operating costs and whatever else and call it you know, maybe it's a $5,000 to serve that client, I'd spend another $5,000.
Draye Redfern:I'd spend $10,000 sometimes to get the right go get in front of the right people to get those people in the door because I know my numbers way better than most other people. Now, profit margins are gonna be different, like, amount of time to serve as a client. Like, there's a thousand other variables there that are gonna be different on every business. But knowing that, huge, huge catalyst to create more leverage in a business. So that's attract, nurture, convert.
Draye Redfern:Oh, optimize. I skipped h of anchor. H is humanize because I can't spell today, I guess.
Adam Larson:I was gonna call you on that. Was like, what about the h? Because you just jumped to the o.
Draye Redfern:Yeah. The humanize side of things. Everything is right now AI, AI, AI, AI, which is cool, and I love it. And we use Replxity, Claude, Gemini. We use them all.
Draye Redfern:We use and, like, a ton of other secondary ones. But the reality is, you know, if you send emails out that are simply just like, hello, contact first name, you know, ampersand ampersand, and that's what you're using to quote unquote personalize your marketing via your email autoresponder, it ain't cutting it. Like, with the humanized side of things, we're no longer in a b to b world or a b to c world. We are in an h to h world, human to human. So you are we we have a connection right now.
Draye Redfern:We've talked before this podcast. We're talking now. There's an actual connection. We're looking at each other, albeit on a screen. There is a connection that exists.
Draye Redfern:There's a humanized element to it. For most other people, there's some level of that in business, whether you're talking from, you know, CEO to CEO to negotiate a deal or business owner to financial services provider to do x, y, and z, whether it's CPA work or bookkeeping or some sort of financial services. Whatever the thing is, there's conversations that go in. You need to have some level of rapport. And so if you're marketing, manufacturing that rapport really, really goes a long way.
Draye Redfern:So you can do things, mass produce handwritten notes with a, you know, robotic handwriting printer that's not like a you like an inkjet that's just like, you know, whatever else. It's a robotic hand where you can insert your Uni ball or your Mont Blanc or your whatever it is you're gonna write with, and it literally sets, draws, lifts, sets, draws, lifts where the ink bleeds actually exist. So I could send Adam a handwritten note that says, hey, Adam. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast today. Really enjoyed talking about x, y, and z.
Draye Redfern:You know? All the best. Whatever else. And never lift a finger. This technology has been around for about a decade.
Draye Redfern:Like, we bought one of these machines about ten years ago in the former company that we sold. And we every time someone would become a client, they would get a handwritten note from us, but we would never sit there and write it. But the the the the message is back and the rapport that was created was huge because, wow, like, no one writes these things anymore, and it creates a human to human element. That's an example. I'm giving, like, high level strategy and tactics at the same time.
Draye Redfern:So, hopefully Yeah. Everybody's tracking. Something else you can do is not new. It's from a book, basically a 100 years old, how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie, one of the top selling books of all time. The sweetest sound to someone's ears is the sound of their own name.
Draye Redfern:So I try to use it all the freaking time. And so as an example, if we were sending, like, an email sequence out, I could send out 10,000 videos, maybe not today because it's towards the end of the day. I could send 10,000 videos out tomorrow, however long the process is. Maybe take a day or two to generate all of them. They would say, hey, Adam.
Draye Redfern:Draye Redford here. Hey, Bill, Draye Redfern here. Hey, Susan, Draye Redfern here. Hey, Veronica, Draye Redfern here, along with the rest of my video, and use AI and voice over matching to basically swap Adam for Veronica, Veronica to Susan, Susan, and it will move my lips. It'll sync up my audio, do all of these sorts of things.
Draye Redfern:So I could send hyper personalized videos, humanized videos to prospects or clients wishing them happy birthday. Wishing them, like, hey. I enjoyed our conversation on our sales call. Looking forward to following up again. These sorts of things that allow people to feel like, dang.
Draye Redfern:They really go the extra mile. And I feel like that's the world that we're in. Like, yes, AI is great. It is still a tool. You gotta use these things to your advantage and do it in a way that is not sleazy or unethical.
Draye Redfern:So that's attract, nurture, convert, humanize, which we had to backtrack on, optimize, and then finally, r is retention and recurring revenue. For a lot of businesses, especially, like, in in in your market, recurring revenue is gonna be built in in some form or fashion. That's the nature of the business, which is great. That's amazing. But what is retention?
Draye Redfern:And so if recurring revenue is built into it, what is the retention level? For some, it'll be 60%. For some, it'll be 95 or 98%. It depends on sort of the structure of their offer, how they're doing things, etcetera. So if businesses don't have either of those, make a freaking offer that has some level of recurring revenue because there's gardeners and there's hunters.
Draye Redfern:I'm a Texas boy. I like to play in both ends of that field. Like, the hunting side of things, let's go, you know, let's go land a whale of a client and have a, you know, like, the hunt, the excitement of it. But now we've done that. Now we've gotta go do the whole dang thing again.
Draye Redfern:Whereas a gardener mentality, like, you do the work today, you could plant the stuff today, and you could keep reaping the rewards of what you've planted, not today, but in three, six months from now, and it can keep reaping all of those rewards. That is like retention and recurring revenue. Go attracts. Go do all that sort of stuff. Go hunt the big game or the whales or the client, whatever you wanna use.
Draye Redfern:But all like, the retention recurring revenue part is an underpinning of a business that brings so much additional certainty and clarity to how, like, you have to make decisions on a day to day basis where you know what? Like, if you're having to go hunt every single client and it's a one off, that's a bad place to be. So if you have the the recurring revenue, then optimize the retention. And, it's gonna be different depending on every niche and sub niche, but you can use actually a lot of the humanized tactics to then improve your retention and your recurring revenue side of things. So that could be on your birthday because I know your birthday because you're a client, that I call you on your birthday to say, hey, just wanted to wish you a happy birthday.
Draye Redfern:It's Draye Redfern with fractionalcmo.com. Just wanted to, like, let you know I'm thinking about you today. Love that you're a client. Really appreciate you, and hope you have an amazing day. All the best.
Draye Redfern:Take care. If you never need anything, just let us know. Bye bye. Now what I did not do there is use your name, but I could drop a voicemail onto your phone, bifurcate the ringer so that your phone never even rings. You look down.
Draye Redfern:There's a missed call from me at our company line, whatever else, wishing you a happy birthday. Entirely automated. So it's things like that that you can do that can man, my insurance agent, my financial adviser, my freaking plumber calls me every single year on my birthday to wish me a happy birthday. Who do you think I'm gonna call the next time I need plumbing work? Or you know what?
Draye Redfern:John Smith, my friend at our barbecue, is complaining about his financial adviser insurance agent or CPA or whoever else. Dude, you gotta go see my guy. He calls me all the time. They don't drop a beat. Like, he wishes me happy birthday every like, it allows so many more natural word-of-mouth, like, referrals to come about of that from existing clientele by simply dropping a few of those nuggets into an existing process.
Draye Redfern:So that is the anchor framework. I think of a lot of businesses like, I could talk for ten hours on this stuff, but I think a lot of businesses implement like, most businesses typically are lacking very poorly in at least two of those elements. But if you have a really solid anchor framework sort of implemented, the amount of confidence that you have in running a business is like tenfold because you know where the leads are. You know how they're coming from. You're diversified on your lead gen.
Draye Redfern:You know how to nurture them because not everybody buys today. You're optimizing the conversions and really tracking that. You create human to human interactions because I don't wanna leave a friend if I'm doing business with a friend. Whereas if you're a number, I can leave you much easier. I know the numbers that I need to optimize for, so I have my leading indicators and my lagging indicators, and my offers dialed in with my retention and current recurring revenue, and those are continually going up into the right.
Draye Redfern:If you have that, holy smokes, like the business that you're then running is a dramatically different beast, and that becomes way, way more fun.
Adam Larson:Yeah, it does. And as you were talking about that, I couldn't help but think about people who are part of internal teams who might not be dealing with the marketing side, who might not be dealing with the external customer. Can you apply this framework as an internal team to help break down silos, to help to help the organization become a better culture and and all around?
Draye Redfern:A thousand percent. In fact, most of the people who end up, like, reading my stuff or, like, finding out about me is via stuff like this, and then they, hey. I got this idea. Let me go implement it. And, like, it starts with one.
Draye Redfern:Like, one person can, like, make a profound impact in a company. So let's just say it's somebody in a department. Well, that somebody in a department could realize after this, like, you know what? Let's just say like, give me an example of department. Let's just let's pick something on the fly.
Adam Larson:We'll say the the finance and accounting department because that's what that's who the listeners of this podcast are.
Draye Redfern:Yep. So the finance and accounting department of a company. Well, typically overlooked. They're typically kind of the dry people. They're like, oh, there's just the pencil pushers over there in accounting.
Draye Redfern:That is the stigma that is out there whether you like it or not. So easy to combat that. So if someone is in the finance or accounting department, you could do something on the human to human side of things. So let's just say that let's just use, like, like, like, an accounts receivable person. Someone like bills are getting paid.
Draye Redfern:Let's reach out. Well, instead of just, like, you know, sending an email, you could drop a voice mail onto their phone, bifurcate the ringer, and be like, hey. This is Draye from accounts receivable at x y z financial. I just wanted to reach out because we're delayed on x, y, or z, and I just wanted this to be the first touch. I'll try you again later, but I wanted you actually hear from me instead of just getting a phone number, like, or a an email or whatever else.
Draye Redfern:Done. I could record that once and send that out to every single person that was ever delayed on their payment without ever having to open my mouth again. That is a variation of that. Finance and accounting. God, there's so many ways that you could slice and dice this.
Draye Redfern:I would say, like, the let's just let's play like, give me a sec. We'll we'll we'll play this out. So what is let's go a subset of finance and accounting. What is a role of someone in finance and accounting, and what are they doing on a day to day basis?
Adam Larson:Okay. We could go a number of different ways. So let's say somebody from the FP and A team, and they're part of the strategic plan. They're helping build the strategic plan for the organization.
Draye Redfern:Okay. Great. If they're starting to build the strategic plan for the organization, that one's way too easy, but we'll do it anyway. What what are the numbers that need to be optimized for? So not just are we profitable, profit margins, like, you know, our A and R and, like, all the other sort of stuff, managing the p and l's, etcetera.
Draye Redfern:A lot of like, we work with a lot of fractional CFOs across a lot of businesses that we Okay. We we work with. The ones who really crush it, whether they're in a big fractional CFO company or they're a CFO in another company, are the ones that then know the numbers of other aspects of the business. Because most businesses typically sales hates marketing, marketing hates sales. Because marketing I give you the good leads and you can't sell them.
Draye Redfern:You're like crappy salespeople. And the salespeople hate marketing people because you give me all the leads and they're all garbage. I can't sell any of these. So if there was someone out there that knew these numbers and was putting together all the structure of things, then they could know, hey. Looking at our p and l, looking at, you know, where we're profitable here, etcetera, we did this thing and this thing in marketing that resulted in those things in sales and ultimately this amount on the bottom line.
Draye Redfern:But the problem is most of them are all too siloed to say, hey. Our p and l is great this quarter. Keep doing what you're doing. Or we suck. Ah, the house is on fire.
Draye Redfern:Market more. But if you integrate more of those things and you actually have dashboards that can optimize your marketing, top of funnel, your sales middle funnel, and obviously the bottom of funnel after the fact, the p and l's, etcetera, of organizational planning and things, now all of a sudden, you're playing with a full deck. But most financial professionals, they put the blinders on, they stay in their lane, and that's all they choose to do. So simply, if you just did the O side of things and optimize and look at more of the numbers from across the business where you may think like, oh, cost per lead is totally irrelevant to me. You may be I think you may be pleasantly surprised.
Adam Larson:Well, that's I think that's what I was kinda pushing on because the CFO should be doing those things, and their team should be doing those things. And so maybe we can talk about some ways that you've seen see it the CFO work with the marketing, work with work with the sales folks, and bring everybody together because the CFO is kind of the glue because they hold the numbers. They hold the strategic plan. They're that business partner that you need in these situations.
Draye Redfern:The problem we see though is most of those people are not actually integrating as many things as as they should be, is how we'll probably say it.
Adam Larson:So one thing you and I spoke about when we first chatted, you had mentioned, you know, Jay Abrams' concept of playing in other people's sandboxes. And I wanted to push on that, you know, because obviously, you know, you you do a lot of things in the marketing, helping people in marketing, but other people from other sandboxes tend to listen to you. And so I wanna encourage our listeners, you know, how can they start playing in other people's sandboxes to learn those things, to bring them into the finance and accounting team to make things better?
Draye Redfern:So, yeah, Jay Abraham is he is the marketing godfather is how I'll probably say it. So for those of, you know, the listeners who don't know who Jay Abraham is, Jay is a marketing legend. He is the highest paid marketing consultant on planet Earth. When I last checked, which was, I don't know, six or eight months ago, if you wanna work with Jay, it's a $180,000 a day.
Adam Larson:My goodness.
Draye Redfern:A day.
Adam Larson:A day.
Draye Redfern:So it's not cheap, but he has an incredible way of looking at things that most people will never like, cannot replicate. And I was fortunate enough to spend about a half a day every month for about a year with Jay a few years ago, and he completely shifted my paradigm in so many different ways. And one of them is what you just you just mentioned, and that is playing in other people's sandboxes. And so the problem is if you only go to industry events, you only regurgitate the same industry stuff. Okay.
Draye Redfern:That's cool. Like, we're making incremental steps upwards. Like, oh, we'll do this next little thing tactic, and, oh, that's not working anymore, but I'll go to another event. We'll try this other little tactic, and, like, we are we're stacking tactics. Whatever.
Draye Redfern:Every business is different. But Jay's philosophy on many of these things is, okay. You're some sort of financial professional. What if you went to a, a marketing conference with only marketers, people who run marketing agencies? Or if you're a financial professional and you went to, some sort of, let's just some other like, a plumbing conference, whatever, you're gonna be here.
Draye Redfern:I don't know why I keep talking about plumbers today, but you're gonna hear you're gonna hear different things that are working in different industries. Now much of that jargon will be completely irrelevant to you, and that's okay. You don't care about Teflon, PVC, PEX, plumbing, whatever else because you are in the financial space. But how they're thinking about problems or what they're doing in their market to market differently than everyone else's in your market allows you to take a nugget from over here and take that back to your sandbox and do something that no one else in your industry is actually doing. So an example of this, like we've got I've got dozens and dozens.
Draye Redfern:I've had 8,700 law firms as clients until we sold a business previously. Lawyers are very unique individuals. Some of the most successful lawyers that are out there don't go to ABA conferences, American Bar Association conferences. They go to real estate conferences, or they go to CPA conferences, or they're going to, like, you know, other things like that of industry professionals that are not in their industry because well, for a few reasons. Number one, the whole Jay Abraham sort of idea or theory where I could take a nugget from a real estate agent conference and back to my legal practice.
Draye Redfern:Great. What it also allows them to do is like, hey. I'm a real estate attorney where I do some amount of real estate in my practice. Going to law events, maybe I can, you know, increase my knowledge of the legal field. I'm gonna go to the, like, the people who are gonna be the best possible referrers of me, and I'm gonna go to those events.
Draye Redfern:Now most other people in the space do not do that. And so it's simply like taking an existing paradigm of how everyone else thinks and just making a slight tweak on it, and it could be, like, dramatically profound. So I've gone to ABA meetings. In fact, I went to every ABA meeting for nearly and, like, real estate events. I go to CPA conferences.
Draye Redfern:Those are a bit more dry. I'll be honest. Like, you name a professional service segment, I've been to many, many, many of those events, which has allowed me to take a lot of those nuggets and aggregate them or amalgamate them into something that is hyper unique that no one else is talking about. And so I love the Jay Abraham sort of philosophy there. And the other side of things, one of Jay's great thoughts, is the Amazon School of Marketing, where if you offer a service of any kind, find the books of people like you that are written on Amazon and go read the reviews or, like, the testimonials that are done on Amazon.
Draye Redfern:You're gonna learn what people like about that book. You're gonna learn what issues, like questions that people have that were not addressed in the book. You're gonna see the questions that were addressed in the book. So for marketing purposes for your own stuff, you just had your copy, your website copy, your marketing copy, your collateral generated for you by simply doing and finding what other people are doing in the space and reading the reviews other people are using off of similar books, etcetera. So those are two of, like, 5,000 Jay Abraham things.
Draye Redfern:But it's just like like I said, you know, small hinges swing big doors, and there's so many small hinges that you could do in any business, whether you're like an entrepreneur, operating like an, you know, entrepreneur but in the confines of a existing business, or you're the entrepreneur, or you're working in sort of like a a stacked sort of silo of people in your in your team. Any one of these things you could use to, like, operate more effectively in your job, bring more ideas to the table so that, man, all of a sudden, where did Adam get all these great ideas from that we could use for x, y, and z project that's coming up? Like, well, he's just listening to the podcast. Like, count me in. Like, let's rock and roll.
Adam Larson:Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And I encourage everybody to check out Draye's books. You know, he's got a new book coming out.
Adam Larson:He's got a book that, you know, so we'll have links to that. Connect with him on LinkedIn. You know, get learn more here because, we're kinda coming to an end here of our conversation here, Draye. But I really appreciate you sharing your insights and just going through those things, and I hope that everybody got some nuggets for you, and then they they kinda dig to to learn more as they go along.
Draye Redfern:Yeah. It's my pleasure. I enjoyed it. Like, I could talk about this stuff all day. If the anchor concept resonated, we have a new book coming out.
Draye Redfern:It is called Anchor Marketing. You go to anchorbook.com. Download it. We're gonna have a free version of the book and, like, a $3 version of the book largely just to get it in as many hands as possible just to try and help as many business as possible. So it's not a revenue generator for us, but purely a way to sort of give back and spread the word of, like, really helping businesses dial these things in.
Draye Redfern:So we include more of the links to the recession survival guide and other stuff later, but I think that's, if that resonated with people today, that's an easiest, next next place to start.
Announcer:This has been Count Me In, IMA's podcast, providing you with the latest perspectives of thought leaders from the accounting and finance profession. If you like what you heard and you'd like to be counted in for more relevant accounting and finance education, visit IMA's website at www.imanet.org.