This week I'm talking with long time I Love Marketing listener & seafood legend Jeff Moore but rather than focus on what Jeffs doing we're looking at his wife Doreen's business.
This is a fantastic episode diving deep into the difference between convincing & compelling.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 003
Hi, this is Dean Jackson. Welcome back to another episode of More Cheese, Less Whiskers. I'm excited today. We're going to be talking with Jeff Moore in California. Jeff has been helping his wife Doreen with a business that helps college kids and their parents navigate through the system of choosing the right college and making sure they make the right decision and helping them, guiding them through that. Lots of great things that we're going to talk about in this episode. Now he didn't notice that the thing that really comes up here is they've got such a great process in the during unit that I'm quite confident that if presented with people who want help navigating through college that Doreen's able to achieve excellent results with them. Where the real pivotal thing for us in this episode is, how do we get people to raise their hand? You'll see that one of the recurring themes that you'll hear is this idea of separating the compelling from the convincing, and that's about Profit Activator 2.You'll hear as we brainstorm through maybe a unique or different way to get your ideal audience to raise their hand without it having to be about convincing them to do business with you. It's a key distinction. I think it's going to come up again and again in episodes of More Cheese, Less Whiskers as we start looking at more and more businesses.Had a great conversation. Jeff's been a I Love Marketing listener from the very beginning and he's been to all of our events and he's been part of our Platinum Program. The book that we're talking about in the episode here is something that we were able to help him and Doreen with through our 90 Minute Book program. If you want to find out about that, you can go to 90minutebook.com and download a copy of the 90 Minute Book.Anyway, enjoy this episode, and I will talk to you next time.
Dean: Jeff Moore, I presume?
Jeff: You presume correctly.
Dean: Perfect. I'm excited. Have you heard the first couple of episodes of More Cheese, Less Whiskers?
Jeff: I heard the first one, and I loved it. I looked into it as I was walking yesterday morning, and then I started listening to you and Dan talk, and you guys crack me up.
Dean: I did an episode of More Cheese, Less Whiskers with Dan, but that was the last episode that we were brainstorming, yes.
Jeff: Yeah, that was the one I was...
Dean: Okay. Cool. This episode is all about Jeff Moore. It's cool because we've got a lot of history. You've been around from the very beginning. Maybe catch me up on what's been happening and what kind of evil schemes we're going to hatch today.
Jeff: I'm really lucky because, I was early on in what you do and I was able to see the evolution of how you do it and have been a student obviously of yours for a while, and so it really did help me flip my perspective because it set the framework of, where are we in the 8 Profit Activators? I really do frameworks with really everything now and I'm able to see where we are in the process. IPS, my seafood company, was sold in January. Our main investor bought us out ...
Dean: Nice.
Jeff: ... essentially. I guess it's better, that's for sure. My dad's finally home, retired, which needed to happen six years ago. Now I've got a father again instead of that asshole that I've got to see everyday. It was pretty rough.
Dean: Old Man Moore busting your home.
Jeff: It wasn't even that. I was carrying a lot of water for a lot of people. When we sold the company, my dad was retired and I got rid of my two other sales guys. I'm literally driving by myself 25 million in business and growing it ...
Dean: Good for you.
Jeff: ... at a higher margin than ever and everything. We closed Wild Things down because the combined company, the meat company that you had there, West Coast Prime Meat, the owner, he also owns West Coast Prime, and so he's like, "Jeff, between our two companies, we do $2.5 million a week in sales. We're spending time on Wild Things that does about $25,000 a month. It would take a lifetime for you to get that business, and you'd have to dedicate all your time to it to get it where you are with the other thing." I was just like, "You're right," so he goes, "Let's shutter it." We shut that down. I'm focused on that.Doreen's business, and that's where I want to spend some time talking about today, Doreen's business is more about getting Doreen ... Doreen is the greatest counselor on the planet. The way she connects, the way she delivers, her content in this consumable and caring fashion and the way that people have the level of confidence that they have after talking to her, it's literally, I get to watch that firsthand and it's just so fun. You've met her before. It's just ...
Dean: I have.
Jeff: ... such a natural thing for her. She's just sweet, but she's smart as hell, but she doesn't know that. Very few people I guess ever really grasp that. So we're doing that.Then lastly, and we won't talk about it today, I am actually a special adviser and one of the lead copywriters for our friend and mentor Jay Abraham ...
Dean: Oh, nice. Way to go.
Jeff: ... so doing projects for him. You've seen Jay's operations. There's no such thing as a deadline. It's an interesting flow. He's just such a force of nature that things just seem to flow his way from so many different ...
Dean: Exactly.
Jeff: ... avenues, but it's a lot of fun working with him, being in meetings where he's doing these high-end consults and then I'm taking on the voice of the client and start writing things for them, and then going in and working with his company, not Jay. I don't advise Jay, obviously, not directly, but his company, and help them with personnel moves or help them with some of their own current personnel and helping guide them a little bit.
Dean: Oh, cool.
Jeff: That's the other thing, but really the IPS thing, just really quickly on IPS, I do this thing that I'm launching out called the Deep Dive Report that literally goes in the seafood world, and in related news, if you will, what is going on, what does this mean to you, and what should you do about it.I do that as well as really have an internal promotional calendar with our sales agents that are out there, the brokers that we hire. It's just so fun because that is, I get an opportunity to do my version of the most interesting coast guard in the world, and depending on who that, I have two target audience-
Dean: You get to do some commentary, too, right?
Jeff: Yes
Dean: There is a great model that I've been using now for people who are doing curation or commentary models in an email. Are you familiar with nextdraft.com?
Jeff: No.
Dean: This guy Dave Pell, it's the most elegant, entertaining, useful email newsletter that I have ever seen. Every single day, he does it. He's basically curation with a personality. If I were going to transfer that as a direct correlation to what you're doing, he basically, in a world of algorithmic aggregators that's great for the internet and find related articles kind of thing, he prides himself even on the website of saying, "I am the algorithm."
Jeff: Oh, that's cool.
Dean: He says, "Everyday I wake up and I go to 75 different news sites and scour the internet for the 10 most fascinating articles of the day, and I deliver those to you with just a little bit of a context setting and introduction and a link to the article." He may find an article and then a follow-up article that amplifies it or adds value to it.I'll tell you what, just everything about the way this is delivered from the website, from the app which you can download and the email that he sends, the consistency of it, the look and feel of it, it comes everyday at 3:00, it's fascinating. It's really well done. I aspire to be like that if I were going to do an aggregation type of site.Where it fits, it's the model I'm definitely encouraging people to follow. If that sounds like what you're ...
Jeff: It is.
Dean: ... doing, that may be an excellent model for you.
Jeff: It's funny because, it is. What I did back in 2013, I was starting this thing very similarly like we're talking about right now, but the wheels started to come off. As the cash flow became strangling and just the whole thing just shut, this was ugly.I stopped it, but all of a sudden my son turns me on to a newsletter called Finimize that was a newsletter like you're talking about, an aggregate, but it's only the financial world and it's taking the top one or two articles of the day, or Skimm, the other one, S-K-I-M-M, that's really hip.My daughter's turned me onto that one, which literally like, what's going on, why should you care, and what can you do? I'm like, "Holy crap, this is the same stuff that I was doing!" That self-flogging that goes on for a while when you see stuff working, you had the idea, but ... It's not they stole my idea. I just didn't take action on it.
Dean: That's awesome.
Jeff: That's great. The Doreen thing is the one we-
Dean: Let's start from the beginning with Doreen so we can get the context and what she's been doing, and then where we can hatch a new evil scheme here.
Jeff: Perfect. A couple years ago, back in 2010, I had the idea for, but I knew she wasn't ready, and about three years ago now, she finally said, "I want to do some private counseling." I said, "What's the business model? Let's start by moving the free line. Let's have these workshops that you give your framework of how you counsel people for college and guide them to their college path."The target audience is going to be parents of students that are what we call rising seniors, so literally end-of-spring junior year through May of senior year is really where this whole thing goes down. That's the most urgent because they figure, that's the moment when they're like, "Oh, my God, what are we going to do? College is coming up. Have we done anything?" I've already written this whole soliloquy of the urgency and the visceral nature of that. That was really the target audience.I literally taught Doreen and had her go through, before she did any of these, we put the program together, she was selling this counseling program for 995 bucks, which we found was very inexpensive for what she was doing, and taught her Lisa Sasevich's Speak to Sell and went through that.
Dean: I'll read that.
Jeff: Since I'm a friend of Lisa's, I was able to, hell, get Lisa to intervene every once in a while and do that. Doreen goes out her first night and does this room of 12 people and closes 100% of the room.
Dean: Of course.
Jeff: I'm like, "Holy f-, oh my God!" As you start to extrapolate the numbers and all that kind of stuff, I'm like, "Oh! One million dollars!" the whole deal.We do that, and 12 people, she's busting her hump for these people. Every one of them gets into the school that they find is their choice and she helps them guide through that and helps them go through what is even more stressful was these kids were getting accepted to four and five schools, and now they had to make that choice and they were like, "Oh, my God. I can't-"It's not about making the right choice, it's about not making the wrong choices, because for a parent, if you make the wrong choice and they have to leave or transfer, you're literally adding a year of tuition onto your expenses for college, because lots of things, they'll transfer, the whole deal.We went through that where we raised the price to $1,995 and then J.J. Virgin had her son Bryce go through it with her and she helped him get to where he wanted to go, because John and J.J. had this kid going to MIT or Caltech, and by the way, completely has the chops for it.Doreen was able to help get him, Bryce, to do what, two big personalities there, obviously J.J. is about as big a personality as you can get, to get Bryce to make his own decision. He's going to actually Cal Poly Pomona, which is a fantastic school for what he wants to do. Lesley Bohm, who's J.J.'s photographer, helped her daughter go, and her choice was between UCLA and Cal, and helped her through, work her through, guide her through all that stuff.She raised to $1,995. Now she's at $2,995. Fewer and fewer people are doing it. What we found was that you were going to do a membership program and really leverage it, but Doreen, that connection with Doreen was really important with these people. They needed to have that. What we started to do was this $297 navigation session, 90 minutes via Skype, Doreen follows up with this full-blown blueprint for these kids and really connects with these people. Sometimes if they're in-area, they'll do it direct.We were like, we're doing this, we're putting this together. Vince Reed, who's a very good friend of mine, and he's one of the prolific traffic and lead generation guys, he's pulling down about 350 grand a month out of his house up the street, young, in his 30s and just killing it. Internet Traffic Factory is his company. We're talking about this business model and he goes, "Jeff, if you want me to turn the switch on, she will die. You've got to go back to leveraging this thing. That $297 thing is ridiculous based on what she's doing."Just on Saturday, he said, "I want you to take your 42-point exclusive College Prep Roadmap checklist and I want you to create a product out of that and literally guide people through each one of the checkpoints. We'll do a video, we'll do this," blah blah blah, so we started doing that. Then he goes, as far as this book, Doreen was trying to work with Susan and all the things that I do, and freshmen, sophomore, junior, senior, and I'm like, "Doreen, stop."This is two weeks ago. I said, "Doreen, what are you most comfortable doing right now?" She goes, "I'm most comfortable meeting with these kids." I said, "What do you do when you meet with these families?" She goes, "This is what I do." I said, "Do you go through the checklist?" "Yeah." I said, "There's your book. Talk to Susan about what you do in that session." That's it. Then at the very end, the call to action is, "Hey, if you'd like to do this, it's not 297, it's now 497. You get a checklist, you get a meeting on Skype, and you get two follow-up Q&A phone calls for 497 bucks."
Dean: Wow!
Jeff: Then the last program she offers is a what we call the Surrogate Program, and that's the thing that J.J. did and all these people that have the money to do, she's still super reasonable. For $3,000, she literally takes over. Her thing is that the kid, that the student has Doreen's cellphone number, she's got her private email. Everything, they have her as if she is that surrogate parent/counselor, and she handles everything. I've watched this, Dean, and it's awesome, where parents will call her with the child on the phone saying, "We have a family crisis." You could tell ...
Dean: Uh-oh.
Jeff: ... these parents and these kids have been rocking on each other for probably the last few hours, and they called Doreen, and within 10 minutes, Doreen's guiding them through, telling what they're facing right now, telling what their options are, showing them what they have to do next, totally empathizing with how they feel.By the time they hang up, and I'm watching her do this, it's in her house, I'm watching her do this, when she hangs up, I'm like, "Doreen, do you have any idea what they're saying right now?" She's like, "No." "They're saying thank God for Doreen."
Dean: Yeah. Right.
Jeff: Dean, what I see when I'm out there walking, she's been a counselor for 26 years, and even this Vince Reed that I was just telling you about, he was an All-American running back at Servite with the shittiest grades and wasn't applying himself, he went into her as his junior in high school, because she was his counselor, and she literally took him from having to go to junior college was his only option to getting a full ride scholarship to University of Colorado at Boulder.
Dean: Wow, that's great.
Jeff: He's just totally like will do anything for her for nothing.
Dean: Sure.
Jeff: I have parents come up to me and are just like, "You're Doreen's husband?" and I was like, "Yeah." They literally go off, "Can I record that? Can I take a picture and put you up on our website?" It's amazing what she does, Dean, andit's just trying to encapsulate all this stuff and guide these people through make it easy for them to buy that low barrier of entry, and then make it almost obvious that next step.By the way, the $297 thing, 60% of the people that do the $297 thing hire her to do the $3,000 thing.
Dean: How many of those can she do? Because whenever you're doing anything personally, the thing that you run into of course is constraint of your own time. How many can she do?
Jeff: She can physically handle probably 15 of them a year of the $3,000 thing, but she's got these counselors out there, but I don't want to get into that right now, but just because, we are going to be able to do that, but we have to have our process down before we bring anybody else in.
Dean: How many does she do right now? Is she doing 15 or-
Jeff: She's doing four right now.
Dean: She's got room for 11 more, is that what you're saying?
Jeff: She has room for 11 more. The $297-
Dean: Does it all happen at the same-
Jeff: No.
Dean: Does it all happen at the same time kind of thing or-
Jeff: Nope. She meets with these kids individually. She meets with these kids individually.
Dean: No, no, no, but I mean is it all happening in the same time of year? I'm imagining that the cycle is, she's got to take these 15 kids through this process during this time period. If she's coming into senior year, does she pick up from where, from they've already done their SATs and all of that?
Jeff: They're still doing SATs in the fall of their senior- Remember, Dean, she's been doing this exact same thing for 26 years. Her caseload at Servite, last year she had 140 seniors that not only she did this process for, she had to write letters of recommendation for every single one. A private counselor can't write letters of recommendation because they're not in the school. She wrote 141 letters of recommendation.This year she writes 67. She just lucked out on the alphabetical draw this year, but she knows exactly every step that needs to go through, and so just as if she's meeting with these kids at Servite, she's meeting with these kids privately. She's just doing it after work or on the weekend, and so there's ...
Dean: I got you.
Jeff: ... only so much energy somebody has than what she's doing. The $297, soon to be $497 thing, she could do five of those a week every week and not have a problem, but the $67 thing obviously is limitless.She can do that, and then there's going to be an OTO, later on a 30-minute follow-up Q&A call, just a phone call. She can handle all of that stuff. By the way, 30-minute Q&A phone call, once we have the questions down and we help people with that process and the checklist that they're going through, we've got five counselors that we can hire and pay $50 a phone call type thing.
Dean: Perfect. Have you read the book Built to Sell?
Jeff: No, but I know, after obviously listening to what you were talking about with, what's the guy's name, the attorney that you were talking with on the first episode, you guys were talking about it as well.
Dean: The process, it sounds like she's definitely got a high skill level for and she's got a high EQ on this and emotional intelligence about, not just an IQ of what to do but the actual skill of being the counselor, but when you look at it is, how many kids are going into college each year? How big is that class of people?
Jeff: Great question. Graduating seniors in the 2013-2014 year, we had done the consensus on it, was 421,626, give or take. No, I'm just kidding. Actually, the-
Dean: Okay, Rain Man. Definitely 421,000. That's funny. So there's 400,000, of which she can help 15 of them. Part of the thing about the outcome that she's able to get for people, there's a qualitative element to the outcome, but there's also a subjective outcome, like what is the outcome that people are looking for? What's the end result ...
Jeff: They want to be able to-
Dean: ... that they're getting for $3,000?
Jeff: They gain acceptance to the school that fits, that it's focus, that feel, financial and future. It's a fit for where they want to go, what they want to focus on in their studies, what they want to major on. It's a school that feels the way they want to feel. That's important, and it's a question that she says, "What does your Saturday look like in the fall?"If these kids aren't saying, "Hey, I can't wait to tailgate," she knows that they have no interest in a big Division I, rock-'em-sock-'em school, which is fine, because the kids that are looking for a specific major and are not interested in that popularity contest school, those kids are going to have a higher chance of getting more aid just helping paying for school.All the colleges in the country are not being filled up. Their enrollment is not 100%, and so there are a lot of schools that will give you a lot of money to go to their school, depending on how it is. If your grades are there, your test scores are there, you've proven to be this model citizen, the next-door neighbor's kid went and did a tour at George Washington, the most expensive school in the freaking country, more than Harvard, more than anything, and walked into the admissions office on his own and said, "Here are my transcripts. Here's my résumé. I can't afford to go here. How can you help me?" They said, "100% we'll pay your tuition."
Dean: Wow. That's great.
Jeff: There's a competition for those kids. Now, he ended up going to Cal. It's not like he's sloughing off or anything, but it was just because it was closer to home and that type of thing, but got totally everything paid for at Cal, too!Doreen helps them through understanding it. She's not a financial expert. She doesn't go into that. There's plenty of people that do that, and she knows some that she can refer. Hell, there's probably five of them in the boardroom. She can guide people with that. She does help them through that.Going back, though, to the built-to-sell thing, you have to know, knowing me, you have to know that Doreen has a college prep roadmap, but just more as counselor services group.
Dean: There you go.
Jeff: Because that's piranha marketing, right? That is getting these counselors that are being downsized because of cuts in the budgets and things like that, these counselors that are super qualified counselors that are working at these schools, credentialed counselors that have all of the jobs in the world getting cut back because they don't have the seniority. Counselor services
Dean: That's the thing. There's lots of people who could do the job and follow the checklist, if they have some coaching and training on how to do it, could do a better job than what they could do right now. Arguable whether they could do as good a job as Doreen in the experience situation ...
Jeff: It's the exact same as your real estate business, right?
Dean: Yes. That was where I was going to go with that. Part of it is that, with 15 people, I'm sure that in your zip code, you could find the 15 people of just the graduating seniors right there in your own backyard that could ...
Jeff: Absolutely, absolutely.
Dean: ... be in that situation.
Jeff: Absolutely.
Dean: Most of these counselors would be thrilled to have that level of caseload or whatever, too, because they probably have jobs as well. It's interesting. They way I would look at this, I immediately go to that this is a syndication, and I say syndication as like a franchise type of situation where the…
Jeff: Yeah, like ‘Getting Listings’ that type of thing.
Dean: Yes. That's exactly right. Part of that would be the scalable, I call it now the scale-ready algorithm. It's figuring out how can we, Activator 1, identify just the graduating seniors or the rising seniors, as we call them, in a particular zip code-
Jeff: Junior to senior.
Dean: Exactly. How to get those ones to raise their hand. That's where the book would be a really good idea. I might think about the way that you do the book. Part of the way we do the Getting Listings program is we have a book called How to Sell Your House for Top Dollar Fast, and we customize the book for the real estate agent. They are the author of the book, so it's their information on the cover, their information on the inside of the book, and all the back cover, next steps are for that real estate agent. That may change the way that you structure the book.
Jeff: Got you.
Dean: Now, I don't know, Jeff, has Doreen already done her 90-minute book or ...
Jeff: No.
Dean: ... is this what are you talking about four of that?
Jeff: This is what we're talking about right now. There's obviously going to be another 90-minute book, but Doreen has been literally going around the mulberry bush on this, and work with Susan, Susan's like, "I don't get the roadmap. I want to see more roadmap in this thing. I want to see the session. "That one was two weeks ago, Dean. I said, "Doreen, you need to just do what comes easy to you and you need to use this book called The College Prep Roadmap Navigation. Here it is, or navigating your way from your junior year to college, the end of your junior to college," and literally, that's the book right now. Once we have refined this process, then we can do something else, but I go right now, even when we were talking about her writing those letters of recommendation, she wasn't doing a bunch of letters of recommendation over the last several years because she had very much grade-level counseling she was doing. Dean, for three months, I watched her procrastinate on this because she wasn't confident about her ability to write these letters. I went to Fancy Hands and I said, "Please give me an example of a college letter of recommendation, a great and outstanding one, a mediocre one, and a crappy one." They sent me five different letters. I go, "Read those, Doreen. What would you do differently? What do you like and what would you do differently?" All of a sudden she was like, shit, she was like a letter-writing fool! It was just…
Dean: It was just a point in the right direction.
Jeff: That's it. I've got some private, some guys that I don't talk about, but I have some private clients that it's literally hidden in plain sight type stuff that you just show them and they're going, "Oh, I got this." It's a lot of fun. It's fun to do that with her. I just want this thing to start leveraging. I was talking to my buddy Aaron Fletcher. He goes, "The second Doreen starts to see money coming in that she didn't have to make a phone call for or do anything for, it'll be like a freaking drug. She will figure out how to do it."
Dean: That's the thing. While you're doing this, part of the thing that is going to set this all into motion is having the protocol outlined and being able to do it for one other person. I learned a really great concept at Abundance with Peter Diamandis. I met Craig Venter. When he was decoding the human genome, I learned this phrase of an "N-of-1 study," which means you're doing just one thing. What I would look at as the N-of-1 study for Doreen is to find one person, one counselor somewhere else, somewhere even remote, because that's really what you're going to be looking for here, and to see, on a blueprint here, how are we going to fill out the 8 Profit Activators here for this? If we've got Profit Activator 1 is the rising seniors in this town or this zip code or whatever it is, because I definitely think that people are going to feel that there's counselors in every city in the country. You can definitely have this be a local thing, but it doesn't have to be. It could be remote as well. It could be that they're doing it by Skype or over the phone. How often does Doreen meet with people in person versus Skype, and how does that affect the way people feel about it?
Jeff: She met with Bryce once, and then met with him on Skype, Bryce, and, talk about a pretty introverted kid, he's not the most embracing guy in the world because all the attention's been on Grant, obviously, for the last few years. This one parent that saw Doreen's testimony for Lisa Sasevich hired her out of Minnesota. He's connected with her. He really likes her. That works out well. The local ones, the ones that are local that she's able to go see, I think they get a lot out of it. I'm not sure how much it's a difference, if the difference is there. She has this kind of connection, and really I was telling her as I was trying to frame it, I'm like, "Doreen, it's about connection, consumption and confidence is what you're doing. You connect so quickly with these kids and their parents that it really doesn't matter the medium that you're on," because I've seen her do it, I film them, I've seen her do it live and I've seen her do it on Skype. I don't detect any difference.
Dean: That's the 2995 level?
Jeff: The $3,000 deal, it's 2995, I just call it 3,000, predominantly it's been live, but recently, in the last year or two, she's gone to Skype with these as well.
Dean: All right. If we were to map out the benchmarks along the way of creating the unique process for getting somebody accepted in the school that fits for their focus and feels the way that they want to feel, when you look at that process, if you were to break down the checklist, how many points did you say are in the checklist that you have?
Jeff: I think it's 42, and it breaks it down by spring, summer, fall and then winter.
Dean: So it's a calendar.
Jeff: Yeah, yeah.
Dean: It's a roadmap, that whole thing. Somebody could take somebody through that. That's where I was going with this is that sometimes helping to documenting it as if you're going to help one person go through it, that makes a difference. Some may say that people, if they're trying to get them out of face-to-face stuff, it's to imagine that they're stranded on a deserted island, but they've got really good WiFi, just to get them out of the physical proximity issue, that you can electronically communicate with the best technologies available. You can do a Skype call or Google Hangout or whatever it is. Just on this island you can't leave. That opens up a whole geographic freedom for you.
Jeff: Exactly.
Dean: If the higher end thing is dependent on an experience, too, it might be that doing the live events where not only are the counselors doing the $3,000 level stuff but they're also doing the 497 level or the 297 level and the free workshops, all of those things, on a per-county basis or on however would make sense to have the right student count for somebody. That's really where there's a great scalable, duplicatable model ...
Jeff: Absolutely.
Dean: ... available.
Jeff: Every time I'm going through this, I'm like, how do we do this so then we can bring other counselors on? How do we do this where we actually have an event for counselors saying, "Look, how to make extra income without spending your entire life doing something," or I don't know, I'm just throwing, obviously like you talked about the other day, the title don't just come to you out of thin air.
Dean: Right, exactly. Even though it's not, that's what we want it to. We want it to sell like it's out of thin air.
Jeff: I'm always thinking. I'm helping her guide her through the college prep roadmap always with an eye on counselor services group, like how are we going to turn around and onboard a counselor to do this with us, and then how do we onboard two more and then four more? Now all of a sudden because things have different…
Dean: That's the whole thing. Once you get done with one, then you could jump to a group of 10, where you could have that process now in place. That level, I think, is the place to start. Is there somebody who wants to do this, somebody that you want to work with as a counselor? Yeah? Okay.
Jeff: Yes, there is. We have a choice of one of three, but it's one, and I've told Doreen the same thing. It's one. It's funny, we're talking about her, that Vince Reed came over and talked to her about the other day, I had to leave the room for fear of me going, "I was telling you about this two years ago." I just want her to, like, hey, I was talking to Dean and obviously listening to this episode when we do it will be, "Hey, listen to this episode and tell me what you think about it," because it'll be coming from you, not from me. You know how that is.
Dean: I get it.
Jeff: I keep forgetting the thing that even Jesus was just a guy in his town type thing. He's ...
Dean: Mary's boy?
Jeff: Yeah, yeah. My kids are the same way. Austin maybe listens to me, but nobody else.
Dean: The good news is we've got Profit Activator 1, our visible prospects, the people who are rising seniors. That's all visible.
Jeff: The parents. Dean, I've got the parents and absolutely the anxiety they face. I've gone through a lot of this with Kevin Rogers. We actually wrote some stuff, too, where the parents are like, "That's me. Oh, my God."
Dean: Perfect. There's the thing. The parents of rising seniors, that's Profit Activator 1. Now Profit Activator 2 then is to get those parents who are interested to raise their hand. That's all we're looking for. When we look at it, what's the title of the book that they would definitely ...
Jeff: The book is College Prep Roadmap-
Dean: ... have in their hands?
Jeff: College Prep Roadmap. It's navigating the road from the end of your junior year to, I don't know, college acceptance. Unfortunately, I screwed up on the College Prep Roadmap. I used to do the Navigating the Waters in a Sea of Uncertainty, but that's too broad. At the navigation session, this thing is a full navigation, navigating the journey from the end of the junior year through your senior year on your way to college. Something in there, for sure.
Dean: Have you done any sort of advertising or postcards or marketing or anything to get people like that to raise their hand? You haven't done that yet?
Jeff: No. We've just done some of the free sessions. What's funny is she killed it on the first one, she's gotten a few sessions on the other ones. Doing the testimony for Lisa Sasevich, she got one. J.J. would call and just say, "Hey, I want your wife." I'm like, "Ooh, cool!”. The last session she did, she didn't get anybody, and they were people that she's known for a long time, so all she's doing is fixating on how she hates those people.
Dean: Oh, boy.
Jeff: We've got to get out of that now. We've got to get out of that. Let's get to the people we don't know and do that. What we're doing is taking a VSL, we're going to create a VSL for her talking about the pain points that the parents are facing, identifying and connecting with them, and helping them understand that they have options and that they don't have to break the bank to be able to help their student get to college. There's programs out there that you can go to every single one of these pages and look at what they're doing, and very few will ever give you a price on their website because, for half of what she's doing, for half of what Doreen's doing, I'm watching people charge $6,000 to $10,000 for it a year.
Dean: Wow.
Jeff: She's like, whoa!
Dean: Is part of what she's doing helping with financial aid or navigating that portion of it or getting-
Jeff: Very little of that. She will help the parent navigate the FAFSA, the student loans type thing. You want to fill out the FAFSA because the FAFSA will be what the school uses also when they're determining what kind of support or aid that they'll give. She helps navigate through the FAFSA for sure, but when she's talking about saving for college or those different things, the 501(b) or whatever it is, that's not her profession. That's not what she does. She's like, "Look, there's plenty of people. Here are some people that I know that do a very good job. That's not what this is."A lot of those guys, by the way, will offer counseling services, and you'll think that it's like a counselor, but it's not. It has nothing to do with that. All they're trying to do is tap into doing financial planning for the parents, and she has gotten a lot of parents that she's dealing with that have signed up for something like that and paid thousands of dollars for something like that, and then not getting any guidance for the student. It's 90% the money part for the parent and the 10% that they are offering, you can Google all of it.
Dean: Exactly. Part of the thing is I'm sure there's an element that that's a strong emotional desire on the part of parents. It's how we're going to pay for college is part of the drive. The reason I was asking that is because, I'm often looking at how to just get somebody to raise their hand to start the conversation. We mentioned how the Getting Listings program is very similar to this.I mentioned to you that have a book called How to Sell Your House for Top Dollar Fast because we syndicate, but what we do is we don't offer the book as the lead generator. We send a postcard offering the free July 2016 report on Winter Haven from house prices. That gets people to raise their hand.We send them the report, and in addition to that, the book How to Sell Your Top Dollar Fast, and the letter that offers the next steps. We know that they're eager to know, want to know how much their house is worth. Tthey're going to want to know what to do to fix up their house to get it sold or they're going to want to, if you had a buyer right now, they may sell.What starts it, and this is the news that I think is really a multiplier here (gap) Activators is separating Profit Activator 2 from Profit Activator 3. Separating the compelling from the convincing. Because not every one of the rising seniors is even going to college. We know who they are, but not all of them are interested in that or going to do it, so it's not 100%. Definitely it would help to start the conversation with people who are going down that path.I'm a big fan of market data or directories. The reason I asked about the scholarships or grants or funding or anything like that is to use something like that to maybe start the conversation just to get the people to raise their hand. I've talked about the hockey scholarship directory, where we use that as a way to just get people to raise their hand, and as soon as they get it, then the next question, how do I talk to these coaches? How do I make my kid stand out?Even if it's just a research and formation on the free money or grants or financial aid available for college-bound kids, that would just do the job of work of getting people who are thinking about going to college to raise their hand. The service isn't about helping you get that financial aid or get those grants, it's there for you, but the more important thing about this is that you're not just going to go where the money is. We're going to find the right school, the right fit, the right feel, and that is the more important conversation.Maybe a lot of those things, if you're saying that some of the information, like the way you described it to me is some of these schools are money available, as long as the kids are the right fit and the right focus.
Jeff: Yup. They are.
Dean: I look at it ... Uh-huh.
Jeff: Back in, again, 2010 when I thought of this whole thing for Doreen, I was literally watching Frank Kirby interviewed by Tony in New Money Masters. I knew what the lead gen was going to be, but it's perfect to focus in on these people that are looking in that direction. We had a free report that was College Prep and the High School Experience: 10 things parents wish they would've known before it was too late. All of a sudden it's like, even if you were lukewarm interested in that, as a parent you're like, what are those?
Dean: Right, exactly.
Jeff: It was, obviously, they wish they would've known, it's kind of an NLP play, before it was too late. Just reading that, you've already put yourself in a position of saying, "I might be too late. Oh, my God, I need to know this before I'm too late!" That was a total play on that.Like anything, it's just like, Doreen, what are those 10 things? I can write the title, but you've got to give me the thing. I'm like, that's not nearly as gnarly enough. It needs to be more. We need to go deeper. I don't want to cause total pain for these people. There needs to be stuff. Even if it's not totally painful on every count, at least I want it to be something that they can walk away from and saying, "Hey, here's the first of the checklist that leads to the next checklist," that leads to now that buy.I agree 100% that, hey, where do you go find those people? You can look on Facebook and identify with parents that are part of groups for a high school that now has a page for their varsity sports teams, because you're going to attach juniors and seniors typically in that area.There's places to find that, but what you're talking about is paying for college, if you were going to find them, I'm not sure where they're going to be in the sweet spot at that point. Are those people that are just putting kids into high school? Which, by the way, we can help all of them, but again, what we have to offer and what actually sells-
Dean: No, not putting kids into high school. I'm saying these being the parents of the rising seniors, so-
Jeff: No, they are, but I'm saying they might be looking to save for college as these kids are just getting into high school is my point.
Dean: Oh. No, I'm going with the things almost like, because there are sources of money that most people don't even know about perhaps ...
Jeff: No, I agree.
Dean: ... so making it seem like this is the last thing. There's private grants from industry that are available as well, just certain things that raise that question. I'm always looking for, how can we get as many of those people to raise their hand and move towards us?Because it's always, in this kind of approach, we're looking for five-star prospects. Five-star prospects are people who are willing to engage in a dialogue, friendly and cooperative, they know what they want, they know when they want it, and they'd like us to help them. The first of those is engaged in the dialogue, so everything else is a subset of that.I just want to get, almost like you've heard about the minimum viable product where it talks about the Lean Startup. What I talk about in that level is the minimum viable commitment. What's the outermost ring of something that would make somebody be a candidate for us? If we take all rising seniors, that's the largest group, the next subset down of that that we're looking for are all the rising seniors that have college aspiration, the ones who are going to be going to college.All the people, if you take the bull's eye of going to have a counseling service for $3,000 to help them navigate the process personally, those are a subset of two or three layers out of that.
Jeff: The 8020 of the 8020 of the 8020.
Dean: Yeah. I think when you look at it, that if you had it right now, you could fill a room with parents of rising seniors, that the presentation and the way that that goes, you've proven that you can get people to enroll for a service, so it becomes, now it's like backing out here the Number 1 thing.If we can crack the code of getting those people in Profit Activator 2 to raise their hand, and then in Profit Activator 3, engage in a dialogue with them to get to the point where we can invite them to a workshop locally or invite them to a webinar overall. By the way, part of the thing about that idea is to make it seem like they're the only one that's getting this invitation.
Jeff: Exactly.
Dean: We have this idea that we're trying to speak to a whole group of people and fill a workshop, but we're just getting one person to come to the library on Thursday night.
Jeff: Just like when you're inviting the people that are in apartments, the old story, it began with an exclusive tour of homes, exclusive for first-time buyers and they met at a certain location.
Dean: Yeah. Let's just brainstorm something that we could test in Profit Activator 2, because now is the season. The rising seniors, they're coming right into the fall here. Couldn't be better timing. It's great to start doing some experiments here, test different things.I'm such a fan of direct mail for stuff like this because you can really very specifically target the right people. I might even look at an approach similar to what we've been doing with the Getting Listings program, like the 2016-2017 directory of college grants and scholarships or something ...
Jeff: There you go.
Dean: ... that that would be cheese. It's what we're really looking for. Education is one thing. Navigating your way through this, that's what they need to hear, but it's not compelling.
Jeff: It's completely easy to grab that stuff and create something from it without having to- I could have Fancy Hands do that in a day, find-
Dean: That's the point. It doesn't have to be exhaustive. That way then, "If your senior is planning on attending college in California in 2017, read this."
Jeff: Absolutely. It would be on the financial side, what do you think about that other thing, that 10 things parents wish they would've known before it was too late? Is that a secondary offer?
Dean: Again, I think all of those kind of things, once we get somebody, I don't want to start convincing anybody until I know who I'm convincing.
Jeff: Correct.
Dean: Job 1 is to just get the people who are most interested to raise their hand.
Jeff: Absolutely.
Dean: That sounds like all cheese. All cheese is money. Every single parent with a senior going into college in 2017 is 100% willing and excited to accept free money for college.
Jeff: Exactly.
Dean: They have an unlimited-
Jeff: I won't call it free money because ...
Dean: Budget.
Jeff: I won't call it free money…
Dean: No, I'm just saying, they're willing to accept money coming in or a reduction in their things. There's only some of them that will be willing to spend money to get a guide through the process. There's some education around that. A lot of them don't even know what they don't know.
Jeff: Exactly. Exactly, and it's all cheese at that point.
Dean: It is.
Jeff: Then there's a follow-up engagement. I would think that the people, whether you opted in or it just became something that had a retargeting cookie to it, where they did go back to those 10 things parents wish they would've known, now you're identifying people that have a sense of urgency in that as well.
Dean: Then I think you've got the whole academic year in Profit Activator 3 with the follow-up materials every week or every two weeks or however it flows to educate and motivate and invite people to the workshops, at the library or whatever the cookies are going to be that would get somebody to raise their hand the next time. I think we hit it on the-
Jeff: I think we're almost pushing it back a little bit almost the beginning of the junior year at some point here, because that's really the ultimate academic year for these kids is, when they're rising seniors is when they're like, "Holy shit, we got to do something now." They're not looking for an engagement funnel. They're like, "Give me the thing I got to do right now, because I've waited too long and as a parent, I think I've screwed up and I might've really hurt my kid's chances for getting into school." There's that urgency of that message, and then there's that engagement message that goes a lot longer but really gets people to buy, like you were talking about. The rising seniors, those are the people that are ready to do something. That was J.J. Every number of person that's ever hired Doreen to do it directly is like-
Dean: "We got to get on now." Exactly.
Jeff: Yeah. "We got to get on this now."
Dean: I think that's the thing, then. I think, Jeff, that would be a really good thing to test is maybe two or three different approaches to getting somebody to raise their hand, but I think that you would find that something that's all cheese is going to win on that.
Jeff: All cheese, yeah. I dig that. I dig that a lot. That's the thing. When you look at these counseling sites right now, there's some cheese, but there's a ton of whiskers because it's like, "Oh, if you'd like to work with us privately, send us an email and we'll explain our services to you."
Dean: Now once you've got the person identified, that's the right time to let them know how you can help them overtly and not hide behind it or anything.
Jeff: If it goes 67, that's a completely guided process that helps these people for 67 bucks, and then all of a sudden they want to do something more than that, it's all the same thing, just different levels of engagement. We've gone through a bunch of this like, oh, let's have a monthly membership program. Parents that want this stuff, they're either willing to pay or they're not willing to pay. If the ultimate target is somebody that's doing $3,000, or it can be $3,000, they don't want to talk about a $49-a-month deal.
Dean: Remember from Influence, Robert Cialdini, the idea of I think starting out with assuming that everybody wants the $3,000 program and offering the others as alternatives downward as opposed to starting at $67 and working their way up to $3,000. Very cool.
There we have it, another episode of More Cheese, Less Whiskers. If you want to keep the conversation going, you can download the More Cheese, Less Whiskers book at morecheeselesswhiskers.com. If you'd like to get a book out into the world in the simplest, easiest, fastest way possible, go to 90minutebook.com and download a copy of the 90 Minute Book and we can help you get your book out into the world. That's it for this time. Talk to you next time.