The Work From Anywhere Podcast

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The Work from Anywhere Accelerator funnel has done over a million dollars in top-line revenue, which is awesome. I want to break down how to actually make a million dollars because when we break it down, it becomes very simple.

It’s just about numbers. You don’t need to have some supernatural ability to generate a million dollars. Once you understand how this works, all you do is go to work every day and hit your number.

Here’s an example. Let’s say I move to a new town and want to make five new friends. Not everyone will want to be my friend, but let’s say that one in ten people I talk to do. I have to go out and talk to fifty people to get my five new friends. Easy, right? We’ve taken a goal from being outcome driven (“I want five new friends”) to being process driven (“I have to talk to fifty people”).

Results are the product of a process. Money is a by-product of providing value to a certain amount of people at a certain scale and magnitude. So, how do you make a million dollars? For starters, you need a business. Having a business means that you solve a specific problem for a specific group of people, and they pay you to do it.

If you have a digital marketing business that isn’t making a million dollars, the business can stay the same; you just have to do much higher volume. Whether you sell three packages a month, or thirty, or three hundred, it’s really about the volume of leads coming in the door once you have an offer that converts for your market.

You have to have systems in place to fulfill for those clients. You can’t service a million dollars worth of clients on your own without systems. You don’t have to manually have to go talk to, for example, fifty people a day. Your systems have to talk to fifty people a day.

To learn more about growing your business to a million dollars in revenue, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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“Your business is broken, and it always will be.” These are words that Alex Charfen said that hit me like a ton of bricks in a good way. It’s reassuring because I feel like if I could just get things to run perfectly in my business, then I would be okay. The thing is, business never evens out and there’s always something to push for.

Some of my friends that have been in business longer are much more laid back and have less urgency around their business than I do. I’m always pushing hard to get to the next level, which is fine, but in the long-term we need to pull back sometimes. If you’re new to business and you’re frustrated because things feel broken, understand that that’s normal. The more you can accept that, the more peaceful you’ll be with your business.

There are three things that you’re always going to be working on when you run a business. These functions are continuously occurring, and they break over and over again:

1. Generating leads. Your business depends on how many new leads you can generate each day. Ideally, you constantly have new leads coming in. I’m always working on how I can get better and cheaper leads. You’re always going to be getting better at reaching out to your market and when you do find something that works, you’re going to run it until it doesn’t work anymore and then have to change it.

2. Improving your product. Whether you sell a product or service, you will still always be looking to improve it. It’s never going to be perfect and the market will always be shifting.

3. Building and improving your systems. This could be your funnels or automating different things. The bigger your business gets, the more repetitive tasks you’ll have. My funnels break pretty much on a weekly basis.

Don’t feel like you need to be perfect. Things will always feel broken. Just be consistent with never-ending improvement.

To learn more about improving your business, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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John Davie, founder of The Sales Gorilla, joins me in this episode. He teaches people how to get clients without being “salesy” by building relationships with clients. A lot of the people that resonate with The Sales Gorilla’s messaging don’t like the old-school type of closing; they prefer to niche down and find people who they want to work with.

John provides us with his three sales tactics that can get people to buy anything:

1. Building rapid rapport. Through asking questions and listening to the answers, you can build authority and rapid rapport at the same time. If someone doesn’t feel like they are an expert, they will try to sell their product or service more because they feel like they need to prove something.

2. Positive indifference. This is a stance you take in your sales conversation in that you are not attached to the outcome of the conversation. When people feel that you have positive indifference, they automatically become more attracted to you and the product. In general, people are repulsed by neediness. If you’re needy, you will push your prospects away very fast. In a situation where there is more demand than supply for your product, there is automatically positive indifference. Be aware that in the sales conversation you are actually diagnosing, not trying to sell.

3. Value-based pricing. This will help you show the value of your service and make it easy to make an offer. A lot of people can do the sales conversation well and ask questions, but get tripped up when transitioning into the offer. Find out what a new client lead is worth to your client, figure out what their closing ratio is, then determine how many leads or new clients you think you can bring them. It’s ideal if you can give them a 10x ROI, but it depends on the industry. It completely re-frames you as coming in and helping their business rather than just being another expense.

If you are niche-specific and you are the expert in that niche, all of these can be done in a simple fifteen-minute conversation.

To learn more about getting clients to buy, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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A couple of years ago, I could never have imaged that my thirty-day revenue would hit $220k in one month. For the longest time, I had a dream to get to $100k and it took a lot of work to get there. I had so much frustration in feeling like I was working so hard for something, but it wasn’t happening. I just had to keep pushing and have faith that it was going to pay off. Momentum is a very powerful thing.

Let’s look back at what made this happen:

1. Plant and harvest. There is a season for sowing and there is a season for reaping. Most people understand this but in the age of social media, we are forgetting this more and more. When it comes to building something meaningful, planting and harvesting is the key. The hard work comes before the rewards. The results of today are from the work that I did months ago.

2. Order matters. There are different phases of business, and the most successful people are the most visible. Beginners come in, look at what the professionals are doing, and think they should do the same thing. That’s completely wrong, because there are certain foundations that need to be in place before you do what the most successful people do.

3. Growth is about thinking properly about problems and relentless focus. You really need to look at what your most important tasks are that will move the needle. There are an infinite number of things you can do in your business, but most don’t matter at all. On the other hand, there are a few things that are usually uncomfortable to do but are going to make a difference for you.

4. Protect the asset. As business owners, it’s easy to just obsess over getting results, but if you burn out, you’re done. I have to make sure that I take care of myself physically and mentally by doing things that are good for me. I also have to have a life outside of work.

5. It’s all about volume. The people who are doing ten or a hundred times what you’re doing right now are likely getting the same conversion rate. They just have a lot more volume.

To learn more about how to grow this amount of revenue, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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I just got back from a two-week trip to Australia. I spent the second week in Port Douglas, and it’s one of the most treacherous places I have ever been. There are crocodiles in the ocean, so you’re not supposed to go near it at dawn or dusk because you could get eaten.

Port Douglas is at the Great Barrier Reef, so me and my sister decided to go scuba diving. Our guide taught us all the skills we needed, so we jumped in the water and used a breathing apparatus for the first time. We first had to demonstrate the skills we were taught, but the very first time I went under, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t used to it and got kind of panicked. I worried if I’d be able to go any deeper, but after slowly adjusting, I was fine. It was magical down there. Those skills that were very difficult the first time I had done them became totally natural to me.

The first time we practice skills, they seem really difficult and they can even be panic-inducing. That’s just because they’re new. If we learn these skills, they can give us entry to a whole new world. If you want to go into business, you need to develop these skills.

The first skill is copywriting. It’s not about being a good writer; it’s about speaking conversationally and understanding your market. You have to speak your customer’s language.

Skill number two is sales. That word scares some people off, but whether you know it or not, everything in life is about sales. Contrary to what some people think, this does not mean forcing someone to buy from you.

The third skill is funnels. They are a series of steps we take someone through that converts them from a stranger into a paying client. It’s about finding one thing that works for a specific group of people and doing that thing over and over again until you become the best in the world at it.

If you master these skills, you’re going to open up a whole new world and it’s going to be completely worth it.

To learn more about the skills you need to get clients, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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I’m currently in Byron Bay, Australia. It’s a really nice tourist town, but it wasn’t always like this. It started out as an industrial port town and was pretty dangerous a hundred years ago. It went through a transformation in a couple of different phases.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because when we set out to do something in our professional lives, the transformation that is ahead of us is something that we don’t yet understand. A lot of people get stuck when they try to understand the transformation before getting started. People want to know exactly what is going to happen, and that’s called analysis paralysis.

The path to success is stepping bravely into the unknown and accepting that you don’t know what’s going to happen. This is really hard for people because the schooling system that we’ve been brought up in taught us to think that getting the right answer was the path to success, which it’s not. It also taught us that making mistakes is bad, which it’s not.

We have all these bad habits to overcome in order to be successful in life. Whatever it is you’re doing, you have to overcome your bad habits through transformation.

In the 1960s, hippies started coming to Byron Bay because there is really good surfing here. They began to surf, hold music festivals, and so on, which caused the vibe of the town to change. At the time, I’m sure the town resisted this change; it couldn’t have been comfortable. The residents probably didn’t like the hippies at first, but as time went on, the residents got used to them and continued to evolve.

This is how transformation happens personally. When you start to change, you’re going to want to go back to the old you because you don’t want that old version of yourself to go away. The thing is, the influence of your old self will never disappear, just like the influence of the industrial town will never disappear.

You can only resist change for so long. In order to step into the next version of yourself, you’ve got to accept whatever it is you’re so resistant towards and just go for it.

To learn more about overcoming bad habits to influence change, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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Sticky ideas are the key to building empires. Marie Kondo is an example of someone who used the principles of S.U.C.C.E.S. in her sticky idea to create her brand. She is a Japanese woman who teaches people to de-clutter their homes and has millions of followers. The surprising part about this to me is that she doesn’t even speak English, yet she has a show on American television. That says something about what she is doing.

The S.U.C.C.E.S. acronym is taken from the book Made to Stick. When I create an ad campaign, I look at this acronym and I try to figure out if my idea fits with all these principles:

· Simple. Marie Kondo picks up clutter and asks her clients if it sparks joy. This is a very simple idea, and it operates on emotion. If it does, the client keeps it. If it doesn’t, they throw it out. I use the same idea in an ad campaign.

· Unexpected. We see so many ads every day that we just tune them out. In order to get people’s attention, you need to give them something out of the ordinary.

· Concrete. Instead of describing sparking joy as a chemical release in the brain, Marie compares it to holding a puppy. Every one of us can understand what this feels like.

· Credible. If you can get a referral from one extremely reliable source, then your company becomes very credible.

· Emotional. As much as we like to think we are rational beings, humans operate on primal emotion. Marie appeals to emotion because she knows that logic is not enough for us to take action. You can do this in your company instead of just talking about features.

· Stories. They’re one of the best ways to appeal to emotions. You have to express previous pain in your life to customers who are experiencing that pain right now.

If you can apply all six of these principles, your business will stick in peoples minds and you’re going to get a lot more customers because of it.

To learn more about creating and implementing a sticky idea, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

Made to Stick: https://www.amazon.ca/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/1400064287

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If you have recently gone into business for yourself or if you have been an entrepreneur for a while, you might have noticed that it can be really difficult to decide what to work on. It’s not like a job where you go to work in the morning and as long as you complete your duties, the exact financial results that you expect will come. Entrepreneurship is a lot more exciting than that.

Doing the right things is a lot more important than getting things done. Some people are obsessive about getting things done efficiently and checking off their to-do list. In business, 20% of your effort produces 80% of your results. By dialing in on the hyper-effective tasks, actions, and outputs, we can create a power curve in our business and get vastly more output for not a lot more effort.

In the book 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall, we are given a chart of tasks. It starts at $10 per hour tasks and builds up to $10,000 per hour tasks. If you do one of the tasks in the $10,000 per hour column, you’re not going to make $10,000 today unless you already have a business. Most of the time, it’s about focusing on these $10,000 tasks over the long-term.

First, you need to do a time study over a two-week period to see where you are really spending your time. Your results will surprise you. After this, you need to cut out the unimportant tasks and focus on the $10,000 per hour ones. As for me, I do quarterly planning and come up with five big goals I want to accomplish.

Before I go to sleep, I make a very short list of what I’m going to do the next day and I try to focus on revenue-generating activities. I’ve found that I can really only do one $10,000 per hour task each day, and until that one thing is done, I don’t do anything else.

It’s really hard to do in the beginning because it feels like you’re wasting money. If you’re paying someone to bring you groceries because you’re busy working on more important things, you won’t see the payoff right away, but you’ll see the expense. This is why most people stay stuck. They don’t see the payoff from $10,000 per hour tasks instantly.

To learn more about focusing on $10,000 per hour tasks, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

80/20 Sales and Marketing: https://www.amazon.com/80-20-Sales-Marketing-Definitive-ebook/dp/B00CGNRVHE

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Today I’ve got a very special guest with me: Kimberly Rich from The Bold Life Movement Podcast. We just got back from Funnel Hacking Live 2019 and some of the top minds in marketing were there. We learned so much that we wanted to come together and talk about our takeaways. One of the coolest things about live events for me is that they produce a real, physiological change in you.

Here are some of the key takeaways we have come up with:

- You only do things that you feel like doing. So, you have to ask yourself, “how do I make myself feel like doing the things I’m supposed to do?”

- Never stop offering people a way to work with you. Kimberly says that this a huge mistake that she has made, and she thinks a lot of other people are making it too. Every moment is an opportunity to create something of value and to put it out in the marketplace.

- Don’t take the fun out of buying. Sometimes people will think they’re bothering their customers by pitching to them, but if you really think you’re giving them such an amazing experience, it’s going to super fun for them.

- Where is the drama in your marketing? Just look at how humans consume content: they love drama. Things that are a little polarizing or taboo are what catch someone’s eye. As a buyer, you’re looking for a distraction.

- People buy things for status. They aren’t just buying a product or service, they’re buying a new them. For example, I help people stop being a nine-to-five worker.

- Advocate for your people. If you can be the loudest voice against the outside forces, everyone in your movement will see you as their leader.

- Stop saying “time is money.” Time is infinitely more valuable than money. Invest in yourself.

- Most people are too scared. They think that they’re going to fail, so they don’t take chances or risks.

- Do you have marketing stamina? If your ad flops, you have to tweak it and keep testing. If you have the stamina, results will come.

To learn more about getting sales through funnels, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

Check out Kimberly at The Bold Life Movement: http://www.theboldlifemovement.com/

Get tickets for Funnel Hacking Live 2020: https://funnelhackinglive.com/fhl-2020-sales

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There’s this woman that keeps reaching out to me, asking for a job. I very much applaud her persistence. Just from continually being in contact, I finally asked her what her rate is. I don’t have a position for her, but because she keeps reaching out, I know that she would be a hard worker.

She didn’t say that her rate was $45 an hour, but that the investment was $45 an hour. Somebody probably taught her to do this; to position her fee as an investment. At first glance, that’s a really good idea. You want a client’s money to be an investment in their business. However, I don’t want to invest in working with her, because what does that do for me? She didn’t tell me, for example, “here’s five things I can do to grow your business,” she just told me what her skills are.

Here’s something I want to make very clear: business owners invest in results. If you come to a business and you don’t know what you can do for them, they’ll still invest in you if they know what result they can get by putting you to work, but what they’re going to do is buy up your time.

If you come to a business with a strategy and a proven result, like telling them that you just got a very specific result with other businesses and asking this one if they’d like the same result, you’re going to be able to get a lot more money. You’re getting paid for the strategy and to know what to do. The woman who was reaching out to me didn’t know what to do. All she’s saying are “here are my skills, you can buy my time.”

Your job is to be a strategist. If you reach out to business to sell your time, you are a commodity and they can replace you with anyone else in the market. When you start charging by results, you’re going to get better clients and have a lot more fun in business.

To learn more about becoming a strategist, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast