Partnerships can be a key factor in the growth and success of your agency. Building profitable agency partnerships involves identifying the right partners, establishing clear expectations, and maintaining open communication. By carefully selecting partners and fostering strong relationships, your agency can reap the benefits of increased revenue, expanded services, and enhanced reputation.
How do world-class agencies continue to grow profitably and hit their goals, even through the choppy waters and challenges of agency life?
How do leaders like Tiffany Sauder, Marcus Sheridan, Jay Acunzo, Shama Hyder, David C. Baker, Nikole Rose, and Zeb Evans think?
Join Agency Journey host Jakub Grajcar as he interviews agency operators and leaders to share insights, actionable tips, and hilarious stories from the builders who live in the agency trenches.
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All right. Welcome back to Agency Journey.
My name is Gray MacKenzie from ZenPilot
This week
I've got the pleasure of bringing on
Charlie Gaudet from Predictable Profits
He's the CEO there.
We'll talk about what it is,
what it looks like, how he's working
and serving agencies and
and among his overall mix of clients.
But Charlie, thanks for being here.
Welcome back. Yes.
It's a pleasure, my man.
Thank you for having me.
Can you give us kind of a quick summary?
I love the name Predictable Profits,
and yet you got the dcoms.
So you were in early.
What is predictable profits.
So, you know, it's a
that's a great question.
I think for many agencies
and many entrepreneurs,
this idea of growth is just
really appealing and sexy.
And, you
know, as you may already know,
we've taken many companies over saying
5000 fastest growing companies first,
and that's what a lot of people want.
But what they don't realize
is that's only step one.
The INC,
the Kauffman Foundation, ran a study
and they found that 66% of companies
within 5 to 8 years
of getting listed on the INC 5000 fastest
growing companies list
either
shrunk in size, went out of business,
or disadvantaged as the disadvantages
they sold.
And ultimately they realized that.
And and I realized that
growth isn't the ultimate goal
that is sustainable growth.
And that's really
what predictable profits is about.
It's not only
how do you get all that growth products,
but how do you maintain that year after
year, month after month and so forth.
And that's really
what predictable profits is all about.
Yeah, you talked a little bit.
I think the model that you have
in terms of coaches working with client,
like how does
how does the actual working relationship
play out
with predictable profits clients.
So another really great question.
We work with some of the smartest, hardest
working entrepreneurs on the planet.
We specialize in seven and eight
figure companies,
so it requires a totally different
skill set than when you're working
with either startup
or even very early seven figures.
And there's
a number of different frameworks
that we use to to create those,
you know, predictable profits
and sustainable growth.
But ultimately,
we're focused on three core areas.
We call it the OCI method,
you know, how do we optimize
what you're currently doing So you do
more of what's already working
well and less of what's not.
And then we can systematize it
and we systematize it so that you
you're getting
things done with a lot less effort it
and with consistency
and limiting variation.
And then we go to innovation
and create new firsts.
Now that's sort of like that's the
the underbelly and the foundation behind
why we've been able to achieve
so many extraordinary results.
But for the average listener,
they're saying, know, that's
not really all that sexy
and I totally get it.
And the framework that really tends
to excite a lot more people is
what we it comes in three steps.
It's set up sales and then scale.
And when you look at setup
and you look at sales setup is all about
how do you create capture and nurture
demand sales is how do you qualify,
convert and then continue to sell people.
Again, if you have those two things,
but you don't have the scale,
which is about, you know, having the right
team, the right systems,
the right KPIs and so forth,
the right data to make decisions.
You have a company
that's far too dependent on you
are far too dependent on certain people.
If you have the setup
and you got really, really good setup,
you're really, really strong marketing
and you have really good scale,
but your sales is a little bit off.
What you tend to notice
is that you've got a lot
more cycles of feast and famine.
If you've got
sales that are really dialed in and scale,
but you know you don't have your set up
dialed, then, you know,
then you know you're your companies,
you know, it's
just not growing fast enough and so forth.
So that tends to resonate
with a lot more people,
especially if they're asking themselves,
Why is my company not growing any faster?
Or some months are feast or famine,
how do we bring more predictability
on the revenue?
The third one is just the companies
to dependent on me how do we scale?
And that's we're 19 out of 20
agencies will look back and be like, man,
and you know what?
All three of those
are pretty much relevant to me.
Right? Right.
I think both framers, I think it was a
in the setup, sales and scale,
both frameworks are helpful.
I think what's cool about your business
is you get to see just
I mean, similar to our business,
I get to see a lot of agencies
you don't exclusively or because they
didn't see so you getting a wider bucket
out there.
But when you think of the agencies
who you're working with and obviously
we've got
at least one shared
client service and success
working with,
not that there's other agencies know.
One agency that I know for sure
is worked with them, made it sound like
we've got a whole pilot in season
one, has had success.
But what is
what what are the commonalities
in terms of
what are the growth opportunities
agencies are leaving on the table
and need to get right?
Or is there a commonality that you see
between the folks who you're looking at
and talking to
inside of that framework?
What's like, hey, here's the
you know, here's kind of a quick
wins, the low hanging fruit.
If if you had a guess right now,
what how would you say the vast
majority of agencies
are getting all their business right now
from watch out.
It's all referral and word of mouth.
Word of mouth and referrals.
And it's very would you agree
that it's a very, very difficult
to scale word of mouth and referrals?
100%. Yeah.
And so right off the bat, when we talked,
when we talked about that model
that set up the scale and sales,
when we talked about that model,
the setup is oftentimes a huge opportunity
because there
their entire agency is dependent
on word of mouth and referrals.
And then when we look at
what about the sales side,
more often than not,
you find out that the CEO or the founder
is responsible
for the vast majority of the sales.
That means that
if the founder wants to go off on vacation
sales are going to come
to a screeching halt
because the founder is
the only one that can close.
And then, you know, on the skill side,
they tend to be doing fairly
well for the most part on the scale side
in that
they have a team, a team is doing really,
really well and so forth.
But there's sometimes
challenges in terms of as a company
and the agency grows larger,
they lose the line of sight,
meaning that the CEO suddenly you bring in
so many clients you don't know
all your clients on a first name basis.
You don't know all your clients problems.
You're not able to see
what the deliverability is like.
And so you begin to see different
fires pop up and that there's various
shine and deliverability
and so forth, and it causes other issues.
So skill or
you don't hold your team to a certain KPI
and within agencies
we notice
that there is a massive imbalance
in utilization rate,
especially in remote agencies
where people are coming
as part of the team and they just think
that, you know, as long as I'm busy,
my job's safe.
And so they were required
a lot of busy time.
But they're not operating as efficiently
as they otherwise should,
and there's waste all over the place.
So, I mean, there's so many opportunities,
but I would say
the biggest starts
with word of mouth and referrals.
You just can't fill a pipeline alone
with scale on that.
So when you're talking to that agency,
this isn't the problem
that we solve at all.
We're we're solving a flipside.
But I have those conversations a lot
with agency owners
is the approach,
Hey, figure out what will come.
Neil, you're in a CEO agency,
maybe CEOs, the CEOs challenging agencies
because there are a lot of agencies
who are focused on a CEO, but
there's still plenty of opportunity.
You know, if you're a paying social shop
now, you should run
your own ads like is it look at your
look at the combination of your skill set
and the market that you're serving
where they live
and that's your growth strategy,
Or is it like even simpler than that?
And you think, hey, you have pulled out.
There's a there's one specific platform
or a couple of specific platforms
that most agencies should probably try.
First is are transitioning out of being
reliant on word of mouth or referrals.
Okay.
Great question.
So one of the first places
that will go is actually to figure out
what's your niche
and your unique advantage.
And I say that because.
Gray The moment we start
looking at building and scalable
marketing and sales strategies,
you know,
we're reaching out to a larger audience.
And even if we're doing outbound
and we're sending out
one communication at a time,
if I'm too generic,
it's going to fall on deaf ears
because your inbox my bet.
I mean, you're busy popular guy.
You probably get over 100 solicitation
emails in your inbox every single day
and out of 195 of them
are all saying the same thing.
And so it's like going to a baseball game.
If you're in a baseball game, you know,
every thing that you hear
sounds like just a dull roar.
It's all the same thing.
Everybody's
yelling something slightly different,
but it just sounds like the same thing,
right?
Is just, you know, everything
sounds the same.
But now imagine I'm ten rows behind you.
Now, Craig, do you hear that?
If you do hear that right,
I just cut through all the noise
speaking specifically to you.
And so the first step is
what's your niche then?
We work with an agency several years ago,
about six years ago, thereabouts.
They're doing, you know,
just under a million, about a million
a year or thereabouts.
They worked with all sorts of people
that work with Coca-Cola, that work
with Redbull, and they just happened
to work with a whole bunch of attorneys.
So we said, Look, let's you're
you're reaching out to everybody here.
Let's look at some of your best clients.
Where does 80% of your revenue come from?
What about 80% of your profits?
Where do they come from?
Where do you get the best results became
the fact that they work with attorneys.
Attorneys deliver the best.
So it's like,
okay, you were never in the business
specifically of what it is
that you deliver.
So you never really in the business
of SEO, you're
never really in the business of video
marketing,
you're never in the business of PPC,
what are you in the business of?
And he's like, Well,
looking at the testimonials
and the case studies and whatnot, really
in the business of helping our clients
increase case study case values, awesome.
And so we can quantify that.
So we said, Hey, you know what,
let's position this as you're the company
that helps attorneys increase case values
somewhere around 2 to 10 times
and then using that as the nucleus
behind the operation
that created a foundation
that allowed for massive scale.
And he took his company then,
I think it was within three years from
just around that 1 million mark to 20,
just over 24, it was 24.1 million.
And now he's over double that,
you know, six years later.
So all of that started
with creating that niche.
Now, if I may kind of jump in
to one thing,
just to answer another question,
when we talk about creating scalable
marketing and sales strategies,
you may end up talking to another coach
that just so happens to be an expert in
and paid or an expert in webinars
or an expert and all this stuff.
And you know, it's like,
you know, let's go ahead and do this.
But when we actually looked at it and we
said, what is the best, most efficient way
to help an agency owner scale, we realized
that there's a sequence of events.
Paid media
actually comes towards the latter.
We want to do outbound first,
because when look,
when you look at paid media, for example,
the paid media, we've got to you know,
we got to create the ads that are going to
you know, we've got to understand
the audience that we're refining
the the keywords, a landing page
that's going to convert.
So we have to make sure we test
and get the right offer.
Then once they fill
the information,
the sequences that are actually
going to get people on the phone
and so forth.
So there's so many different parts.
Your cost of acquisition
initially for that is going to be massive
in the time for you
to open up that funnel and get a flowing
quickly is a lot.
But if we're going to do
an open campaign in one week,
you can start driving those calls.
But outbound has changed too
dramatically over the years.
As I mentioned earlier,
we're hired to work
with some of the smartest,
brightest people on the planet.
They expect us to have all the answers.
And then 2018, outbound,
the way everybody knew it stopped working.
You just can't go to Zoom info,
download thousands of names, download them
an email software program,
close your eyes,
cross their fingers and be like,
Come on, please.
And it works. That doesn't work.
You just can't go to LinkedIn, buy a bot,
hit, you know, start, and all of a sudden
get all these appointments like that
worked, you know, several years ago.
It's not working right now.
So outbound has taken
a totally different structure
and a totally different animal
to get it working.
But you dial it in and you do it right.
You should be setting about 1
to 3 appointments every single day,
which might not sound like a lot,
but if you even if you did one
appointment a day and you average
that over week, that's five appointments,
five appointments.
If you can't convert,
you know, 30% of those, you know,
then you've got another opportunity.
And on the sales side.
Are you got to jump
ahead in the industry like the second
half of the question or the second half
of that answer around the channels
and he's super helpful.
One of the common,
I think, justifications or reasons
for outbound
first justification
sounds like it's a it's not true.
And the truth is you get a lot of rapid
feedback on your messaging.
Find out pretty quickly are people hitting
reply or are they just sending back
I hate you, never email me again.
Everything like the messaging
is just not doing it somehow.
Some component of that,
regardless of volume or regardless
of how good the messaging is.
But if that's, you know, 60% of replies
you're getting, then
the messaging is that right?
The audiences are.
And there's some some mismatch
in how you're sharing what you do.
Go back to the positioning piece
that you started with.
The thing is, is
if you want to succeed in outbound today,
you can look at yourself as,
you know, the,
you know, the front line person
and in the army
that's just kind of blasting away out
in the woods, helping to eventually,
you know, kill an enemy combatant.
You have to look at yourself
as a special forces sniper.
And so, you know, be really specific.
It's about,
you know, quality, not quantity.
And, you know,
while that sounds really cliche,
you know, especially
if you're a seven, eight figure agency,
you have more opportunity available to you
right now than you already know.
The people who are visiting your high end
ten pages, your services
pages, your testimonials, pages,
as an example,
there are tools and resources available
that even if they don't submit
their information,
you can capture that information.
I can say, You know what?
Gray McKenzie from Zen
Pilot was visiting my services page.
He spent 3 minutes and 30 seconds
reading all the content.
I'm going to reach out to him right
now. Right.
You know, so
there's an opportunity that I can go ahead
and and I can reach out to you.
There's opportunities
where you could do market research
reports and deliver,
you know, real value to people.
And so engage in a conversation
differently in so many other ways.
Outbound is not a strategy up.
And as a category,
just like inbound is a category
and there's a whole bunch of strategies.
So outbound as a category to you hear
people say
outbound doesn't work well, yeah,
if you're doing a LinkedIn bot
or the way you've done in the past,
of course it doesn't work.
It's only a category.
There's so many different strategies
and when they dig down into it,
they realize, okay, maybe it does work.
There's a lot of opportunity there.
I want to talk a little more
about your growth, a predictable profits.
You've to be curious to like that.
So what I've seen from you
so far is a really dialed
in pretty sophisticated approach
to partnerships.
Yeah, and I assume that drives
a big chunk of the business.
I assume there is an element as well
that is inbound and through the podcast
and the marketing materials
and all this stuff
that you guys put out in the book
and all that, all the different pieces
and marketing assets
that you have out there,
Why or where did this?
I feel like on the other side of it,
it feels like there's a hard partnerships.
But where did the approach that
you've taken to partnerships come from?
So believe it or not, actually started
when I was 23, 24 years old.
So I was at the time building
a real estate development company,
and I found myself in over
$1,000,000 in debt
and I was paying double digit
interest rates on that debt.
And I really didn't know
what I was doing at the time.
Believe it or not,
I bought this track of lands.
I knew I had to build a road
and neighborhoods
and the whole deal
and I didn't know what I was doing.
So I went to Barnes
and Noble to read like, how do you like
what am I supposed to do? What's
the first step? What's the second step?
And and I built an entire development
from one book that I got at Barnes Noble's
now at B,
but along with that,
I didn't know what I didn't know.
And because it was I was in a situation
where I needed to make money.
I looked at
how people would buy a house for me
and then they would all of a sudden,
by so many other things,
they would buy furniture, thereby
fans, plumbing, subseries,
you know, like high end fixtures and alarm
services and whatnot.
And I stopped
and I thought about it and I was like,
Why can't I have all these buyers?
So I started going to all these
other vendors and they said, Hey,
if I could negotiate a preferred deal
for my buyers,
whether you give them a discount
or a bonus and I sent them over to you,
would would you give me
a small percentage of the commission?
And for most of these people, they're
like, Wow, never even heard that before.
So yeah, no problem.
Let's go ahead and let's do it.
So I formed all these relationships
with anybody
and anything from Driveway
Sale coaching company.
So this is back in the day
when plasma TVs were big, like plasma
TVs, home theater, alarm companies,
you know, you name it.
I formed relationships with these people.
And then before long,
I was getting tens of thousands of dollars
every single month that was being
sent to me over and over and over again.
And I didn't think I was doing
anything different until one day
the principal of a big accounting law firm
in Boston showed up
unannounced on my doorstep,
knocking on the door,
and he says, Hey, you know, you know,
they the principal of a big Boston
accounting company
knocked on my door and he says, Charlie,
we need to talk.
And, you know, I'm like, oh, my God, my
my heart's pounding out of my chest.
I let him in.
He sits down at our breakfast table
and he says, What are you doing?
I said, What do you mean?
And he said, You've bought your property
for a fair market value.
You're selling it for fair market value,
but you have one of the highest profit
margins in the entire industry.
And I can't figure out
what the heck you're doing.
And when I told them
about these partnerships,
he's like, Oh my gosh, that is amazing.
And then from there I started
looking at all these other ways
that we can form partnerships.
And then in the business now
with predictable profits,
looking at ways to form partnerships
that are what we call a triple wind.
So be totally different if it was,
hey, great, let's form a partnership
and we'll form a partnership.
You send me all your clients
and I'm going to go ahead
and give you a commission,
because what that does is that means that,
you know, I when I get a client, you
when because you get a commission,
but your client loses because they didn't
get anything special out of the deal.
And then there's questions about
did you only refer them to me
because you have some sort of like,
you know, commission relationship
or whatever that might be.
Yeah.
So instead it's like, well,
how do we do this so that everybody wins?
How do we do this in a way
so that your clients get an advantage
that nobody else gets and your
and so all of that kind of works out.
So it's a triple win
and everybody wins at the end of the day.
And when you form these partnerships
and this is a beautiful thing,
like we've got partnerships
of some of the largest business media
organizations in the world
and they send tons and tons
and tons of deals our way.
And when that happens, you make one sale,
and that one sale predictably brings you
it could be dozens
or even hundreds of opportunities
every single month.
And partnerships are an extraordinary way
to shortcut the buying cycle,
because I'm going to give you a little bit
of verbal format and pardon me for this
because now I'm getting all geeked.
But you know, the average person
today is looking at 27
different sources of information
before making a buying decision.
27 different sources.
You know, we used to think
that the buying funnel was a straight
path from top of funnel
all the way down to bottom funnel.
Yet that that a whole model
was generated in the late 1800s.
The reality is
that it's a lot more messier.
They cycle through this exploration
and evaluation
27 times
before finally making a buying decision.
When you have a partnership
that says, Hey, look,
we've properly vetted these people
so we can align ourselves with them,
we recommend you check them out.
Now know you've built a moat
around yourself and they're like,
You know what?
Hey, if Gray says these guys are good.
I like Gray.
After I saw Gray,
then I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to do
do some business with them.
And when you can form that type
of partnership with other vendors.
Super, super powerful way
to grow and scale your family.
I had no idea about the back story
with all the partnerships.
That's an awesome first first introduction
initiation into the power of partnerships,
but it shows up in
in what you're doing now.
And so I think just to put some kind of
meat on the bones around
what that triple win
looks like for people,
we talked about an example of how,
you know, if it like as a client benefit,
every one of your clients
gets this, you know, consulting session
or a free coaching session or whatever.
What are some ways or
can be real world like your example
I think is a great motto, but I'm thinking
as a listener, thinking about this,
how can I envision that?
Or what are the types of partnerships
that would make sense in an agency space?
Have you seen anybody
do that? Really well?
And then the ideas that seem like it's
a no brainer, why,
you know, this email marketing agency
not have a direct relationship with this?
Facebook has agency and
and have some kind of benefit like that.
Are there any examples or ideas either.
Yeah, we have a
we have a client extraordinary
website developer
does real high end type projects
and he aligns himself with other companies
like branding agencies.
And the branding agency is like,
look, you know, we can go ahead
and we can build an awesome brands,
but now you have to go ahead
and you've got to revamp your website.
But if you've ever noticed, if you
if you've ever built a house before,
you have the architect
that creates these wonderful plans
and you hand them to the builder,
but then the architect and the in
the client have shared a vision,
the builder and the client,
he they're trying to convey the vision,
but there's always little hiccups
and things that come in the way.
And so in this particular case,
he's like, look, we have a relationship.
The website guy was like,
We have a relationship
with the branding agency.
And so we'll work behind the scenes
at no additional cost to you
to make sure everything is seamless,
that you get the website
exactly as it's laid out
that the branding agency signs off on it.
It's perfect and blah blah.
And so it's a very efficient, easy,
seamless,
headache free type of experience ongoing.
And then you can have SEO agencies
that partner with PR agencies,
you know, where the PR agency
goes, the SEO agency, and says, look,
you know,
you can only get so far with the backlinks
that you get on these different blogs,
but what if I could get you backlinks
on CNN, New York Times and so forth?
How much more powerful
would that help you get?
Better rankings. Wow, that's awesome.
Let's go ahead and do this.
Or you look at,
you know, paper click companies, paper
companies, oftentimes SEO and pay
paper click, they're the same one.
But let's say the different for a minute,
SEO and paper click companies,
they're both in the business of traffic
and the SEO company can share data
with the paper click company
that can then make sure the pay per click
company is more efficient and vice versa.
Or you have a lot of web companies,
small Weber
web agencies that get these opportunities
to build, you know,
websites that might
have 2 million SKUs
and one example with another client.
But they're not set up to handle a company
with two, you know, an opportunity.
So in the past, they just let them go.
But what if they found a partnership
with an other agency
that is set up to do these 2 million SKUs?
And then all they are is the project
manager and in that relationship.
And so make it seamless.
There's so many opportunities
that agencies can have to partner
with each other and other companies
visit. Great examples.
I'm going to give you one interesting
part, though. Me
where where a problem often exists
when you try to form
a partnership is to say, Hey,
great, here's a deal.
Why don't you refer people to me?
And that would be awesome.
I'll give you a commission and
who will high five and we'll celebrate.
We'll dance Kumbaya around the fire
and everything will be great. But
those relationships don't last too long.
Initially.
And because you're busy
building your business
and there's always these concerns about,
you know, it's
not that the commission is nice,
but it's more important to me
that my clients get a good experience
and so forth.
But if you change it around a little bit
and you go, you know what?
If I want to partner with you, Gray
as an example, I say,
What are the KPIs
that are most important to you?
And you might say something
like, Retention is really important to me.
It's really important to me
that my clients are,
you know, that they feel like
they're they're growing.
And so forth or whatever
that might be or the NPS score.
So if you want to partner
with another company, find out what KPIs
are most important to them
and then see how you can make
a meaningful difference into those KPIs.
Now that's how you go from I'm
just an affiliate
to now I'm a pillar
within their organization.
There's a lot
there's a lot to dig into there.
I think figuring out how you find
the partnerships,
there's so many partnership opportunities.
How do you find a prioritize the ones that
are most impactful, the business?
I mean, there's a lot of different.
So I think your point is super well taken
that the short term now to me,
10% of this client's revenue
for one of them, like that's kind of
as far as it goes, but there's no real
business integration or impact beyond it.
Those are easy to set up.
But, you know, maybe 2% of those actually
do any meaningful traffic for any.
And there's every activity happening there
six months later.
And I've experienced
that firsthand for sure.
And then the the more meaningful
relationship is almost always
totally,
you know, a deeper level of integration
between two businesses where, I mean,
I think the most harmful ones
are the ones
where folks have felt the other
the other end of that of the service.
And yeah, there's a lot of opportunities
for that.
We've got a client who's a great,
awesome marketing agency who's been around
for the last 11 years or whatever
and have been were friends for a while.
They became a client and
you know, it's easy
that they know everything that we do.
So when we look at it, we need an agency
to help with a specific project to say,
Hey, you guys already know all the ins
and outs of what tempo it's all about.
It's much easier to go work
with an agency.
You experience that.
That's not for me,
every case in partnerships,
but the cases where it is possible
and the approval, how
I wanted to mention the book
before we wrap up in I know we're
we're telling time so I'll I'll
get you out of here in time, Charlie. But
talk about the book.
What was that process like?
What's the
what's the experience been like potion.
So I wrote a book called The Predictable
Profits Playbook, and
it's funny,
the reason why I wrote the book actually
was way back in the day listening to Dan
Kennedy, who's one of the,
you know, original marketers
and he brought up a good point.
And he said, like, if you think about
the most influential people in the world,
dead or alive,
there are two things you're going to see.
They have in common.
Number one, the public speakers.
And number two, they either
have written a book of themselves
or they have one written about them.
And I thought about that.
Now my power actually, that's true.
You know, even, you know, Jesus Christ
as the Bible and was a public speaker,
you know, And, you know, Richard
Branson speaks onstage all the time
and he's got a book and it doesn't matter.
Warren Buffett, the same thing.
Anybody you can think about all these
people, you know, And so I'm like,
wow. So
I always knew
that it was something that I needed to do.
And so I went ahead and I created a book.
I you know, in the spirit of
of transparency, I hired a ghostwriter
and I hired a ghostwriter
that would interview
me and pull all my content out of me,
then went through the editor
and I ended up publishing on a hybrid.
So even though I did have an agent
that would be willing to publish it
on a on a traditional platform,
the agent actually suggested
it would probably be best for me
to, to control it and do more of a hybrid
self-publishing because the purpose
was not to get rich off the book.
The purpose was to use it as a means of
almost pre-selling, for that matter.
So when somebody reads the book,
they read the book and they they're like,
Oh, I now understand and I'm indoctrinated
in the ways that you think.
And then it helps to convert into clients
or so many times I may talk to somebody
and they go, Oh, you know, I talked to
somebody who did this, this, that.
I go, You know what?
I can't disagree with that.
They're right. In fact,
I wrote the book on it.
Here you go.
And they're like, wait, what?
And and, you know,
then they become a client or, you know,
there was a situation where I got called
by one of a large association
and they said, Hey,
we'd like you to come speak to my group.
And I said, No problem.
Would it be okay if I mentioned my book
like a way that you have a book?
Oh, yeah, I do.
They say, Let me call you right back
and they call me back.
I would like to have you keynote
because now it's different.
Now that I have a book.
And so I keynoted and I shared the stage
with the former CMO of Harley-Davidson,
which is really cool, but only because
I have the book and then the press.
It's so much easier to get press
when you can be promoted as an author
rather than promoted as a CEO.
So there's so many different things.
I do highly recommend it.
It's not only a great Legion
tool, it's a great pre-selling tool.
It's an awesome positioning tool
that opens many doors.
And yeah.
That's amazing.
I mean, selfishly, I'm interested.
I get this outline for a book
called The Profitable Agency operator
that's been sitting in, you know, slowly
getting like hacked
that every every couple of weeks
or whatever, six months.
And I think the ghostwriter approach
just makes a ton of sense
to actually get something out the door.
Yeah.
Do you have any feedback?
And I'm sure I'm not the only person
who would listen to this and think I'm in
and I got to know what works.
It didn't work.
That's at least for me,
the fear of the ghostwriter
is I'm going to give them all this stuff.
It's all about,
you know, it's going to be 90% garbage
or like 10% the gold nuggets.
And I just hope that they put it
in the right order and get it
and get it together the way that I want.
When you look back at the
did it feel like it came out, hey,
this is how I wanted to organize.
This is the the right right thing
or did it any anything
that I should learn from your process
or we should learn your process
and do differently
if we give to the ghostwriter.
Sir. Great question.
The mistake people often make is
they feel like they need to get everything
that they've ever learned all out on paper
and put it out in a book.
But if you look at the bestselling
books out there,
they usually focus on one big idea and
they write the book on that one big idea.
And so you can create
multiple different books, and that's okay.
But focus on one big idea at a time.
Then the ghostwriter is when I hired
the ghostwriter, I actually hired
several at once and I said,
I want you to write the first chapter.
And so, you know, the first few pages,
you can spend a little while, say,
first chapter.
And then from there, I found that
the ghostwriter that I wanted,
because I needed somebody who would
understand my voice and and go that way.
So then we went ahead and move forward.
Now, the book originally
was probably somewhere close
to about 350 pages, but it was the editor
that turned around and said, No,
we're going to take this chapter, put it
here, we're going to do this and do this.
And they kind of ripped it all apart and
made it, you know, all nice and whatnot.
And that was great.
Now, all that being said,
I had a wonderful experience.
We did really, really great.
There's many different resources and tools
that are available.
There's a company out there
called Scribe Media,
and I've had I'm working
on a revision of my book right
now, and I hired a company called Scribe.
And Scribe has done
tremendous, tremendous work
and they've kind of
when we talk about partnerships
and trying to make things easy, well,
they have the editors, ghostwriters,
the publishers,
everything all under one roof.
So they make life a little bit easier.
And just by the way, everything is
is priced in because it's under one roof.
They Do it in a way that's more cost
efficient than the way that I wrote my
my book originally,
hiring all these different pieces.
And we're able to do it faster.
So I'd say scribe Media Javon,
who is a CEO,
I've managed to talk with him a few times.
Brilliant, brilliant dude, great guy.
They do great work, super,
super committed to getting things done.
And you know, if that was ever
something that you were interested in,
you know, I'm happy to provide you
with an introduction over those guys.
Yeah, they they tend to treat our people
really, really well.
This is what I'm talking about.
Partnerships are at the heart.
It's all it's all over the place.
You can't get away from it.
Well, well, here's
the beautiful thing about it, right?
Is it's like,
you know, when you have a partnership
and you bring people to them consistently,
this is another relationship that I had
with somebody else previously,
is that when I bring people to them
in this particular case, that the client
actually it was a bad match
the with the referral partner
and they didn't have a good relationship.
And so at that point
the referral partner said, Oh man,
I have to find a way to make this right,
because if I don't make
this right, Charli's
going to stop referring people to us.
And that's a big problem.
And so they found ways to make it right,
and now everybody's happy.
But you know, there are so many benefits
to when you when you create
a real strong partnership
and that there's going to be wins in there
versus
if it was just, you know, hey,
go work with them
then if it doesn't work out, it's
kind of like, yeah, you know, whatever.
So anyway, a bunch a bunch of verbal
vomit there.
I love it.
What's been great?
We are at time
so on wrap up here book website
what's where should we point
people Charly predictable profit
sitcom will be in the show notes
and we'll link up the book.
But is there anywhere I'll see you
on a point people or something.
You know, I would just say best placed
to check us out as it is predictable
profits dot com or constantly
adding different resources and whatnot.
We've got a podcast
called the Beyond Seven Figures podcast.
That's where you see
gray on the on the podcast there.
So you know the beyond Seven Figures
podcast is, is definitely something
that I would recommend
people do but yeah, predictable profits
dot com is the best place to start.
That's awesome. Must've been great.
Thank you so much for your time
and sharing with us, Charlie.
It's a pleasure. Thank you.