Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast we have a bit of a different show. I'm down in South Beach this week, and one of the things I got to do was spend a little time with my friend Frank Kern, and it reminded me of being on his podcast, ‘Your Next Million’.
We talked about ‘the self milking cow’. I shared the idea that the struggle or limitation, holding back a lot of entrepreneurs back is that they're trying to be ‘self milking’.
They're trying to do it all; trying to make the milk, meaning come up with the ideas, the money and the strategies, and they're also trying to milk themselves, package it, take it to market, and do the billing and clean up around the shop and farm.
The sooner you realize making the milk is the most important thing you can do, and it's the thing that only you can do, the more success you’ll have. Everything else can be done by farmers, and I'm saying that not in a demeaning way to farmers, because there are people who love to be in support roles or love to do things without having to come up with the milk.
I think when you're the person who can make the milk, one of the creative leaders of an entrepreneurial venture, whether it's a real estate agent, or any kind of business, the problem is we kind of take it for granted. We think that everyone can do it and it almost feels like we shouldn't be able to just do that as it seems too easy. It seems like it’s not work.
That's a limiting belief, and you’ll realize not everyone is you, and that some people, in fact most people, really just want to know exactly what to do and feel like they're making a contribution to a bigger picture.
We had a great conversation and I'm going to let you listen in on that entire conversation this week, and then I’ll be back next week and we'll continue with our regularly scheduled programming.
In the meantime, enjoy this one. I think you're really going to get a lot out of it.
Show Links:
Your Next Million podcast
ProfitActivatorScore.com
BreakthroughDNA.com
EmailMastery.com
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 147
Dean: Frank Kern
Frank: You're listening to Your Next Million, the one with Dean Jackson. This is where they play the intro. I bet, that's what's happening. I guess now the intro is played.
Dean: Perfect.
Frank: Look at there, all right. Okay, sound smart, go.
Dean: Ready, go.
Frank: Go, yeah go.
Dean: So what do we got going here. This is Your Next Million.
Frank: All right I'll do the formal thing, you get the pleasure of listening to the lovely and talented Dean Jackson.
Dean: Wow.
Frank: Talk about ways to get to the next million. So you know, Dean, this whole thing is a exclusively for the person who's doing well, and wants to do better. I thought that that would be a nice reprieve from the business and marketing podcast.
Dean: I like it.
Frank: That help you get from zero to momentum.
Dean: So in the real estate world we would call that person a move up buyer.
Frank: A move up buyer?
Dean: It's kind of the thing, right? You got somebody already in a beautiful house-
Frank: You had me at buyer.
Dean: But you want to get a bigger house.
Frank: Yeah, you had me at buyer.
Dean: Your next move.
Frank: The next one.
Dean: Not for startups.
Frank: No, not for startups. Startups are welcome. All right guys, so Dean and I have spent the last day and a half together. We just had a really a bit of a disappointing movie experience. We tried to goof off, but none of that really matters because we have done nothing today, and we've both gotten paid. Which is fantastic.
Dean: I like that part of it.
Frank: Well actually, I made a phone call, you witnessed it, that was a good 15 minutes.
Dean: Yes.
Frank: We got disconnected, so there was about 30 seconds of fiddling with the phone.
Dean: Yeah.
Frank: So that was a lot going on, but I like this idea that you were sharing with me yesterday of the difference between the how and the who. I want to talk to you about that, and then circle back to the fact that today was made possible by the who.
Dean: Yes.
Frank: Yes, not the band, although they-
Dean: Brought to you by The Who.
Frank: Brought to you by Roger Daltrey himself.
Dean: Yes.
Frank: All right, so let's talk about that.
Dean: Well this is very good, this is perfect timing for this. Because what we're looking at right now, is that most of the time, most people, who are looking to grow their business, are reaching a point where they come to some ceiling of complexity as our friend Michael Gerber would call it. Where you're already doing something, you got stuff to get. You've gotten the business to a million dollars, you've gotten it to a point where it's up and running, and you've had to figure out some core process to make that happen. You've been able to connect the dots in a way that brings in money. And what I find is at that level, is often where people, when they think about going to the next level, think that they have to do more, and it absolutely is 100% about doing less.
Frank: It really, and I would have never believed that. I would have been like, okay these two knuckle heads are on this thing, and they're just telling me what I want to hear.
Dean: Yeah.
Frank: You know what I mean? Because I'm in the weeds, and I know these guys are going to eventually ask me for some money in some capacity. And they're just telling me what I want to hear. That's how I would have felt once I'd hit the first seven figure breakthrough. Because I was doing everything personally. I'd have been like, well that's impossible, to get less, and to get more. So elaborate on, defend the position.
Dean: Well this has been something, I mean it's something that's been brewing for a long time. And I just literally came to this articulation of it, probably in the last year or 18 months. Just this whole thought. So I wrote a book called the Self-Milking Cow. To describe this dilemma that most people are in, and that I shared with you that the idea is that mostly people are entrepreneurs, creative entrepreneurs, are stuck inside this idea that they're going to make the milk. And then they're going to milk themselves, and pasteurize it, and package it, and take it to market, and make the cheese, and all the other derivatives that come out of it.
Frank: Sell the cheese to the market.
Dean: And sell the cheese, brand extension, and all that stuff, line extension. And when you really think about it, all of that stuff happens after the core thing happens, which is the making of the milk. And the cow is the only, that's the thing that only the cow can do. So the thing, when we talk about this as in the cash cow world, as opposed to the dairy cow world, we get into a situation where the milk is the ideas of the intellectual property, the content, your strategy.
Frank: The scheme.
Dean: Scheme, yeah that's the whole thing. And so where we run into the challenge is just trying to do more. You get to a point where you really can't.
Frank: You diagrammed it out for me.
Dean: I did it was really-
Frank: Beautifully, ladies and gentleman, I'm delighted to tell you that this entire diagram was done on a paper table cloth at Milton's Deli, where Dean and I were really doing everything we could to fight the rumors that we had both turned anorexia, and were there for eating chicken and waffles.
Dean: Yes.
Frank: Together.
Dean: Delicious.
Frank: And you diagrammed the whole process out, and then it starts with the idea where the entrepreneur thinks okay, I have this idea, now how am I going to do that? And you have a totally different-
Dean: Yeah, so here's the thing, I look at it let's say where do we get ideas? Where do we start out with this context of why are we doing anything in the first place, right? So the why is, is what our business, the context of what we do, and why we're even looking for anything else to do? Might be that we want to make an extra million dollars, or we want to do a new product. Or anything that we come up with as the idea of what we want to do. That sets the context for what we go out and seek. So as we're going out to seek, we're looking for ideas to help us reach this objective. And these ideas present themselves in the form of what? Here's what you could do.
What you could do is, you could do a book funnel, right. You could do a webinar, you could do a live event. You could do Facebook ads, whatever it is, you get presented with something that you think is a what that you could do, to reach your objective. Now, if we think that in terms now, from here, units of time being deployed, constantly, it's always moving forward. So every choice that we make right now is going to consume units of time.
Frank: Of which there is no replenishment.
Dean: There is no replenishment of those. So as soon as we're presented with an idea of what we would like to do, we see that this is a good idea, and I would like this to happen, to be a reality, we're faced with two choices. So we're standing at a fork in the road. And we can go down the fork called how. And what we're doing is we're saying, "Well how do I do that?" And we start to figure out well, how do I learn how to run Facebook ads, or how do I write a book, or how do I do all these things? We're looking for the details of how to execute something, right? And what I look at that, when we're going down that how path, is the equivalent of writing a blank check, in an unknown amount, to payable with the only thing we have that's non replenishable.
Frank: Which is time.
Dean: Our time.
Frank: Yeah.
Dean: So we're writing this blank check, I'm going to go down this how path to figure out how to do this.
Frank: Don't know how much time it's going to cost.
Dean: I don't know how long it's going to take me to get to a point where once I know how to do it, now I still have to do it. And I've got to do it probably poorly, because it's the first time that I'm doing it. And I don't know what's going to be the outcome before I get to done. That's the ultimate outcome, is that we want to get to done.
Frank: Yeah.
Dean: Right? So the how path is this long, kind of winding, circuitous path through a black forest. That maybe, hopefully, leads to done.
Frank: But usually never leads to done.
Dean: Right.
Frank: Unless the how was within the context of something you're already good at, and enjoy doing.
Dean: Right, that's it.
Frank: Yeah.
Dean: So the other alternative, this was the path that I've discovered, is the really great path, is instead of asking how, asking who? Who can do this for me?
Frank: Yeah, that's a good call.
Dean: And that is a path that comes with certainty. Because when you find somebody who's a who, the right who will bring the how with them. They've already figured it out.
Frank: Yeah, they've got buckets of it.
Dean: And they can do what it is that you want to get done. And so you get, as soon as you're done, they tell you how long it's going to take, or what's going to be involved, how much it is, you write the check with the only thing you have that is completely replenishable.
Frank: Which is money.
Dean: Money.
Frank: Yeah.
Dean: In fact the only thing-
Frank: You make all of that you want.
Dean: It's multipliable. Yes, that that whole thing, you write a check with the thing you have that you can always replace.
Frank: Yep.
Dean: And you are essentially done. And you get to continue down the path, looking for, seeking out whats that you want to do, what it is, and identifying the right whos to do things.
Frank: And that's exactly what we enjoy the byproduct of this afternoon.
Dean: Yes.
Frank: Yeah, and yesterday. Because we did nothing yesterday.
Dean: Right.
Frank: That I can recall anyway, nothing of any substance whatsoever. We looked at some stuff, we drove around and looking at something, I signed a lease for a new commercial property.
Dean: See, and I didn't even see it happen.
Frank: Yeah, no it was three copies, I signed my name three times.
Dean: Oh you did that this morning.
Frank: That's right, so we did nothing yesterday, except you diagrammed the what and the who thing out at the chicken and waffles place.
Dean: Yep, that's exactly right.
Frank: So really that was a, I'll tell you what, no one is looking at us anymore saying, "Those guys have the anorexia."
Dean: Nope.
Frank: You know what I mean?
Dean: We beat anorexia.
Frank: Put those rumors to rest. You know what's interesting? So we're out today, and we're goofing off, and I don't want to make the podcast sound like that's all we ever do.
Dean: No, but it is one of our favorite things.
Frank: And there's like, one this especially about you, is you rarely if ever, I don't think I've ever heard you complain about having to do something that you don't enjoy. And when I say that I don't mean, like that you just don't talk about how much you don't enjoy it. It seems to me, that I've known you since 2005, that you really just don't do things, you just don't do it, if you don't want to do it. You just spend all of your time on the what, and then doing the thing, being the cow.
Dean: Yeah, that's my favorite, when I first came up with this thought about the whole the cow idea, that really it was this whole thought that we've got our mind milk is our ideas, and our vision kind of thing, right? And I called Eben Pagan, we were laughing about when I had this first vision, because when you realize it, most analogies kind of fall apart when you kind of go a little bit deeper on them. But this one is just so, the deeper you go with this, the more it absolutely makes sense. Like we were talking about how to have a viable dairy operation, a farmer would have to have 100 cows kind of thing, right? And, but it's the exact opposite in the cash cow world. It's like one cow can support 100 farmers.
Frank: Yeah, definitely.
Dean: And that's the kind of thing, when you look at the idea there, it's kind of a crazy thing.
Frank: You know what's interesting? I wonder what would happen if you took someone, and they're in that stage of where everyone's been there, like you made it, but now you realize, holy crap I've made it and I haven't slept in two weeks, you know what I mean?
Dean: Right.
Frank: And I've got enough money to buy toys and stuff. But I'm kind of psychotic at the moment because I haven't had a good moment of mental clarity of stability in forever. And I wonder what would happen if you said, "Okay," and we'll say the guy’s name is Joe. And Jim has retained you and I, he's like fellas, fix it. And we just go all right Jim. You are personally enjoined, legal term there, you are personally, sir, enjoined from doing any of this stuff yourself, except coming up with ideas.
Dean: Yeah.
Frank: Which means now you have to pay for the who. What that would bring, and I know the listener is probably like, okay don't tell me I have to do this, this is horrible. What that would bring is incredible clarity and purpose in the execution of the ideas. Because one of the things that kill us, is at the earlier stages when you get to your seven figures or whatever and you're trying to grow, is you get all these opportunities. You have all these ideas. It's like your brain sort of wakes up. The next thing you know, your brain's like, oh dude, hitting that seven figure mark that you dreamt about as a kid, you actually did that, you can do anything. Which is true, so now we're brains like, well let me see if I can't do everything.
Dean: Yes.
Frank: I mean which leads to psychosis.
Dean: I got it.
Frank: So then if we made someone adhere to that, where we said, "Look you can do whatever you want, but you got to pay a who to do it." Wouldn't it be amazing the profound effect that it would have on the business in terms of eliminating all of the false start ideas?
Dean: I do this-
Frank: You probably have like 10 of them.
Dean: To have people start this process, I often have them look at their current day, right now, and we do this with all the things that I am involved in. All of the things we literally, when we're looking at the process of what has to happen, we draw what we lovingly call the milk line. And what I mean by the milk line, is what is the part of this that only I could do? That's not possible for anybody else to do this part of it. And you'd be shocked at how much of what you're doing is done by other people, or could be done by other people. So I'll give you a couple of examples. So I do a lot of podcasts. And the thing when you look at doing a podcast, the thing that is the milk of the podcast is capturing your voice on audio, right? That's the thing, it's the words, it's the talking.
Frank: That's interesting, episode number one, I was talking about for our business, and when I say ours, I mean mine specifically, but I run it with my family. The most profitable activity is the thing that people pay me the most for, is talking.
Dean: Of course.
Frank: Yeah.
Dean: So talking, this is why I look at this, the talking is so underrated. But talking right now, I've had this whole kind of really, a new appreciation for it, that talking, and not just talking, but talking and recording what you're saying is the killer app. It's the thing that can have the biggest difference on anything that you do. Okay, so when you look at this, right?
Frank: Someone's going to listen to this, and be like, okay I think you got a guy driving down the road right now. And he's listening to us, because apparently nothing else is on, right?
Dean: Yeah.
Frank: And so, and he's sort of distracted, and he just heard you say, recording yourself talking is the big thing.
Dean: Yeah, well here's-
Frank: It's easy for someone to be like okay, that's shenanigans.
Dean: But here's why, and I'll go down that path, explain that. But then I want to go down the milk line path too.
Frank: Right.
Dean: So right now, we're shifting, and I think everybody would agree, to a digital world, right? This is the thing, that everything, once something's digitized, then you have an asset, that is a core asset that you could do a lot of different things with. So right now, the fastest bandwidth way to get stuff out of your brain, and into a digital format is through your mouth, right?
Frank: Right.
Dean: It's the fastest bandwidth way we have. Faster than typing, faster than writing, until we figure out a way to insert a chip and just extract your thoughts without you having to form them. That's right now, talking is the thing, right? And as soon as you talk, and you capture that on audio, you've got an audio asset, that can be transcribed, and become a written asset, which can then create derivatives of that. You can combine those so I look at the podcast thing, okay? So last year was the first full year of my experiment in what I lovingly call the moo method. Which is multiplied oral outputs.
Frank: Nothing funny about that at all.
Dean: Nothing at all.
Frank: No one's laughing listening to this right now.
Dean: Hey Beavis, he said, "Oral output."
Frank: Trained professionals.
Dean: Yeah, exactly. So when I look at it, the milk of the podcast is me talking, right? And so I've set up the whole, I look at our More Cheese, Less Whiskers podcast. You've been a guest on that, they're just conversations. Because we recorded a conversation that you and I had that I was stuck on a bridge from St. Petersburg.
Frank: Just a couple of well-fed gentleman having a passive conversation.
Dean: Just having a conversation about nine word emails.
Frank: That's it.
Dean: And that, because we recorded it, that became a digital asset, and one of the most popular episodes on More Cheese, Less Whiskers.
Frank: It's our looks.
Dean: Yeah, but here's the thing, so for the entire year, what my what that I set in my mind was, I want to do a new podcast every single week, so we did 52 new podcasts over the course of the year. I want to send three emails a weeks to all of these people. And I don't want to do anything other than dial the phone, and talk, that's all.
Frank: In terms of the actual work involved?
Dean: That's it, exactly. Because when we looked at it that me doing any of the other stuff-
Frank: The writing of the emails, the transcription, the finding of the person.
Dean: Everything, that's exactly it. So we set it all up. So it's this self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating loop that I always on the podcast, inviting people to be part of the podcast. The whole idea is, that there's no preparation for it. I've set it all up, that way, for a reason. That I'm doing the thing that only I can do, which is my interaction with people, applying our 8-Profit Activators to their business. So it's just like a one hour consultation. Just like if you and I were sitting down talking about catching evil schemes for you. So I bring 100% to it, I don't know the people 90% of the time ahead of time. I don't know anything about their business, I haven't done all the research and thought up a plan for them, before we start talking.
So we've set it up so that I dial in, it's automatically recording, and every minute of the conversation that we have is the entire podcast. There's no editing, there's no setting that all up. I hang up the phone, I immediately on my iPhone memos record the intro, saying, "Hey, it's Dean Jackson. Welcome to the More Cheese, Less Whiskers podcast, today we're talking with Frank Kern and whatever we're going to talk about." And I say, "Enjoy this episode." Then I do another memo that does the outro for it, push a button they both go to our Trello board where the whole thing happens. And I'm done.
Now from there-
Frank: Then the whos come in.
Dean: Then the whos, and entire team of whos take over, that will then take that audio, they will send it through, download it from the conference center, they'll send it through Auphonic to sweeten the audio, they'll put on the front and the back, the outro and the intro. They'll put it up on Libsyn and send it to iTunes, and they'll do whatever else needs to be done to process that. They'll set it up on the website, we'll send it to get it transcribed. And when the transcript comes back that gets sent to a writer, we're three different writers now.
But I have a writer specifically for the More Cheese, Less Whiskers. She takes the transcripts, goes in, finds these 300 to 500 word chunks that could be standalone articles of things that I've said, and will just polish them to make them written word instead of speaking. And those get sent up, queued up in our GoGoClients for the auto responders to go out on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday. Those emails go out, and I get sent them ahead of time, just to give it an eyeball. And if I want to change anything about it I can do that. 99% of the time, I don't change a thing. But in some I may have an idea for a subject line that I would want to use.
Frank: They might have misspelled ISIS.
Dean: And they may have misspelled something, exactly. So that's it. Now, all of those, did that for an entire year, and then what we have at the end of the year is I have 265 page book of all of these emails that I send. It's like a Seth Godin style book, where it's just all these compilation of 300 to 500 word philosophical, like our article kind of things.
Frank: All done by someone, so they filtered it, took the best.
Dean: But all from the mind of me.
Frank: Yeah.
Dean: I'm the author, of all of this.
Frank: You were just being the cow.
Dean: Right. And that's the thing, there's a difference between being an author and being a writer. And I'm the author of the idea. It's the idea and the concept and the writer helps form it into the right words. But that-
Frank: You know what's interesting about all of this? Are we talking about your next million, and I was talking to you yesterday about the net effect of the experiment. So we could tie this back to our greedier listeners, like myself. Are more overtly capitalistic listeners. And the net effect was over a million bucks in revenue, trapped through this endeavor.
Dean: Exactly.
Frank: Actually it was, damn it was almost, remember? Because there was like a little bit of Facebook media, you spent like 30 grand.
Dean: Right.
Frank: So we did okay, well if you got two to one-
Dean: But it would have still been over because it was 1,062,000.
Frank: Oh well there you go. So you literally got in the last 365 days your next million from the coming to life of this concept.
Dean: Exactly.
Frank: Of just you doing the thing that brings you the most money, which in this case is the talking.
Dean: It's the talking. Which leads to the only thing, like the things that I do, that create the revenue, I do my breakthrough blueprint events, three days. Just in a board room, talking, about the 8-Profit Activators. Or doing consulting with people, talking, sharing the ideas, doing the calls for our member calls. Like you do for your inner circle group, like doing calls that are just helping out the members. And it's so amazing how the first little while, when you really start embracing your bovinity, as I like to say.
Frank: Embrace the bovinity.
Dean: Embrace your bovinity.
Frank: Okay, we should go get some more chicken and waffles.
Dean: Yeah, right. But when you embrace your bovinity, you start to see that things really get amazingly simple, and relaxing. And you'll reach a point where you almost feel, I should be doing more. I think there's I mean-
Frank: I felt like that when we left my team today. I'm like, I kind of want them to think I'm doing something.
Dean: Right, yeah.
Frank: I was like I don't want these people to think know that we're going to go screw off. I'm going to be serious when I'm leaving and not volunteer the fact that we're going to go watch this terrible movie that we just saw.
Dean: Right, yeah. And then you realize, that's such an amazingly freeing thing, when you realize that I can honestly say that the less that I do, the more that frees up the people around me to take the ball and run with it.
Frank: That's a good point. What stopped me from doing it, from getting the right whos, right? Because I've been hearing about, you should have a team of people and all this for years. I remember first learning about it from Eben, strangely enough, right Eben Pagan when he had is altitude seminars, he's like, well guys the big secret is I have a lot of people doing the stuff for me. And I'm like, oh that's smart, and then seven years it takes before I actually start to build a team or whatever. I'm a slow learner. I'm what Dan Sullivan would love. The slow learner with deep pockets. Your ideal person in this regard.
And what stopped me, and what I think stops a lot of other people are two things. Number one, is the perception of delayed progress. Because in order to get a who, you got to really tell them the right what.
Dean: Well this is the thing.
Frank: And your brain will tell it's a thousand times easier, just oh shit, I'm just going to do it myself, rather than being this detailed and telling this guy the what.
Dean: That is exactly right. You have to master your what craft, as I call it. That you have to be able to clearly articulate what you want. And sometimes people don't even need that clearly. I showed you my, running a new Facebook campaign, remember?
Frank: Oh yeah, that was right.
Dean: So I'm modeling this now, we're doing the same thing for taking that exact More Cheese, Less Whiskers motto, moving it over to my Listing Agent Lifestyle Model, for the real estate agents. And I showed you, I have a who, who runs all of our Facebook campaigns. And I really got to the point where, I try and see how minimal can I be in showing what I want. So I literally said, "Here's my big objective, I want you to get opt ins for the least that we can get. I want as many as you can get, and I want to focus on real estate agents, or real estate brokers, people who are residential license realtors." And I drew on the back of a note, piece of note paper in my hotel, in Miami before I was heading out the door.
Frank: You drew a picture of the picture.
Dean: I drew a picture of what the ad, the idea I had for, here's the words, here's the picture, here's the thing, and I took a picture of that note thing, and texted that to him. And then literally, I showed you yesterday, that that's up and running, and we're getting hundreds of opt ins a day, just from me telling the right who what I want.
Frank: You know a good way to look at it. Because man, and it still aggravates me sometimes, but it is hard for me, even now, like we're switching from Infusion Soft to this new automation tool called Kartra, which I have an exit equity piece in, so brought to you by Kartra. That is an awesome tool though.
Dean: Kartra.
Frank: Yeah, I mean that was something.
Dean: Yeah.
Frank: Yeah, and so I know how to use it, kind of. And now my person who does the automation is a hard horn Infusion Soft person, so I'm like, well you know what, man? I'll just build these campaigns. Because it's going to be easier for me to build them, then to show him how to build. And I caught myself doing it. Because it would have taken me like 12 hours to do these damn things. Well instead, I was like, because I was thinking this is going to be hard for him to figure out, he's going to have some questions. And it took a minute for me to realize, even the guys got questions, I'm going to spend maybe 45 minutes answering them. And if he takes 12 hours having to do it-
Dean: It's a multiplier.
Frank: I don't care. I mean I'd rather it be a pleasant experience for him, of course, but it's irrelevant. And the best way to look at it, is imagine, in terms of exercise if we could show someone how to do sit ups, and we said, "Okay, here's how to do a sit up with proper form."
Dean: I'd like to see you show me how to do a sit up.
Frank: No I can show you how to avoid it, right? And then we did, and then that person actually did the sit ups for us. And we had the results of the sit ups being done, that would incredible. It's really the same thing, though. So it's like, we'll I could just do it myself, it's going to take me twice as long to show the guy.
Dean: Ready player one.
Frank: Yeah, take me twice as long to show the guy then do them, so I just did the 10 sit ups myself, but what we don't realize is, well yeah dude it does, but then you never have to do them again.
Dean: Right.
Frank: So that's thing one. Thing number two is the expense. I go, I don't want to hire somebody. And I take a very different view of all of that. So I came to this conclusion about a year ago, a little more than a year ago, that I don't care what the business is, right? It doesn't matter if we're selling books, or coat hangers, we're not in the book selling or the coat hanger business. And a lot of people say, "Well yeah, you're in the business of marketing the books, or the coat hangers." And I would disagree with that, via mentally. And I would say, "No, we are in the business of multiplying capital, through leveraging assets."
Dean: Yes.
Frank: Which is really all we do as entrepreneurs, because I think there's three ways to get rich. I'd say, "You can invent something, you can inherit something, or you could invest." And I think all business people are ultimately investors. Even the guy who buys and sells used cars, he goes down the car lot, he buys the cars, $10,000, he made the investment, he's hoping to sell it for more. Well he's leveraging his asset the car, along with his knowledge of sales, to multiply the capital which is his initial $10,000 investment. That's all we do. So if you think about that, and you think about the hiring of a who, it's not an expense, but a means to multiply capital.
Dean: More capital, yeah.
Frank: Then free your mind up from this block of, oh I don't want to pay someone, or how am I going to get somebody in the Philippines or whatever, not that there's anything wrong with the Philippines, but never been, I'm sure it's awesome.
Dean: Yeah.
Frank: You know what I mean. How can I get it done as cheaply as possible? I pay my who that does the automation stuff close to 300 grand a year. And people are like, my god, you could get it so much cheaper. And I say, "Well I might could, but assuming I'm getting about a 20% annual return on my investment in a who, would I rather get 20% of 50 grand, or 300?"
Dean: Right, exactly.
Frank: It's just a way to look at it.
Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's such a great way to think about it, that when you look at it, that really is one of the best things to invest in, is execution by somebody else.
Frank: Oh yes, absolutely.
Dean: Freeing yourself up.
Frank: Because you're buying the most valuable thing in the world, which is time. I mean there's literally I don't know maybe there's some other non replenishable thing, but not one that I can think of. It is the most valuable of them all.
Dean: Right, and so there you go. I mean that thinking, and I think people would be shocked if they did a milk test on their daily agenda.
Frank: How does someone do it? Why don't we figure the milk test? This also doesn't sound funny, if taken out of context. I would like to say on recording, test my milk.
Dean: So you start to think, so you look at it, and you start to think, okay, of all the thing that somebody that you're doing, a good portion of the time you're doing things that somebody else could do, right?
Frank: Yeah.
Dean: If you're really, and this is the thing, I want you to kind of look and truly just observe it, from afar. And say, "Okay, that activity-
Frank: Imagine you were the client.
Dean: Yeah. So you look at it, and when you realize how much you're actually doing, it'll astound you, right? We did this, because when we started doing the milk line, seriously, I started looking at things like okay, sending an email broadcast, as an example. Okay, and I know how to do it, I'm an expert user of GoGoClients. I know exactly what to do, and how to go in all the keystrokes needed to do it.
Frank: He can press those buttons like it's nobody's business.
Dean: I can do it just like anybody, right. And so we counted it out, if you just go through, if you're documenting the process of sending a broadcast email, you're going in, and first you've got to type in to get to the thing, or hit your toolbar for the shortcut. You go there, then you've got to log in, then you've got to go to the dashboard, then you've got to go to the email templates, and you've got to write and formate the email that you're going to send. And you save that, set that up. Then you go and you pick the people that you're going to send it to. And then you load it all up, and you get the email, and you send a test email to yourself, and then you got to log in to your email, and see it, and look at everything. I mean, all of those things, there's probably 50 or 60 keystrokes-
Frank: Realistically speaking, you're invested about 45 minutes in that process.
Dean: Into just sending, and it may not be 45 minutes, but it may be some amount of time, that there's a lot of stuff that's going on, right? And all of that is beyond the milk line, the milk of the email, is that the words that you've decided to send to somebody.
Frank: That's all it is.
Dean: Yeah, and so we try, what we did as a rule on that, was try get to a point where I don't use any technical tool more complex than Gmail. So I will write-
Frank: Your personal email.
Dean: Yeah. I'll write an email, as if the broadcast, but I'll send it to one person, on my team, or I'll write a name. I'm writing one email, and I'm sending it to a special, our email broadcast Trello board. So this knows that this email is exactly the way that I want it to go out. So it'll have the subject line that I send is exactly what I want it to be. The hey Frank, it means hey first name, and then the copy of the email is exactly what I want to say. And the link is there where I want somebody to go, all of that stuff, and then at the very end, we have these text expander things like shortcuts to say, who this goes to. And that's it. And I send it, and the whole thing can happen, right? So it cuts the time of sending an email broadcast from just doing all of those steps that you would have to do, to do it yourself, to really recognizing that the one email, writing the email, is the only thing that's the milk line, right? Somebody else could do.
Frank: The ideas are where the money is.
Dean: That is, and so-
Frank: There's two different camps, right? Because you have another podcast, were you'll be like, ideas are a dime a dozen, it's the execution, it's the execution. It's like, well not really. You get someone else to do the execution.
Dean: Well I look at it-
Frank: Because the money isn't coming up with the million dollar ideas that you can multiply the capital of investing in the people, to execute all that.
Dean: Here's my thought, because I say that all the time. And people do say that, well I'm long on ideas. I'm bullish on the idea market, especially as we're moving into the new world here, it's all about the ideas. Execution is what is becoming a commodity.
Frank: It really is.
Dean: So when you look at that, even if people say, well execution is the thing, because ideas that aren't executed are worthless. Well that's true, but execution and ideas go hand in hand. You can't execute nothing. So you have to execute an idea. You're executing something. And I go as far as granting people that that's true ideas that when execution is important and that you can go as far as flawlessly executing something. I'll give somebody that. You can flawlessly execute an idea. Well then the only thing that can improve on flawless execution is executing a better idea.
Frank: That's exactly right.
Dean: I mean when you look at this, we just went to the movies, making a movie, the technical thing of making a movie, there are hundreds of thousands of people who in film schools, and photographers, and cinematographers, and sounds guys, and crew, that can execute the making of a movie, capturing on film the things. Getting the audio just right so you can hear what they said. But the difference that makes a difference is executing a better idea. A better written, the idea for the movie, is what makes it the hit. Not the execution of it.
Frank: Not at all.
Dean: Right.
Frank: No, I mean poorly executed obviously, but it's a general concept. So I think the takeaway, right? Is to make the shift as soon as possible, from the execution of tactics, to the coming up with strategy. To shift yourself from being in the infantry where you won that first battle, right? And you captured million dollar hill, and now you're trying to capture $10 million hill. But you can't capture $10 million dollar hill, and survive if you're the one in the infantry. You got to sort of shift that role there.
So one thing that we have in the program, that helps. I do it literally every single time with every client I've ever had, period, it's crazy. Is that they come in, and they'll say, "Okay, we want to get to the next level." Like, all right, great. And they will come in, and they will have either mentally or physically a mountain of stuff. And like, here's what I want to do, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. And I kid you not, 99% of my job is to get rid of the stuff. And to be like, okay, well let me help you find out and it usually takes two days, every time. Not usually, it's literally every single time takes two days to let the customer or the client go through all the ideas, and all the things they're executing on. And then get clarity on well, really it's these two things. Or maybe even this one thing, that's actually driving 100% of your progress. I mean you could completely kill all of this other stuff.
And that was earlier when I was saying, if we had this power, which would be, I know it's scary to people to think of, so I just want the listener to think of it conceptually, that if you had to pay to execute on every idea, you would immediately get yourself out of the, I've got 10 million out here in some of the fire thing. Because you're paying for it, right? So it's like, well crap, if I'm paying all that-
Dean: Well you are paying for it.
Frank: With your brained idea, so I don't want to do that. And then you would have this force focus, so to speak. Which is, it's helpful, in that regard.
Dean: Yeah, I mean yeah I think if people can just kind of just have that awareness to understand that what is the thing that only you can do, what's the milk?
Frank: That people pay you the most money for.
Dean: Yeah, absolutely. And just imagine, when I was going through, I would tell people to imagine you're going through your day, with cow hooves mittens on, and because you think about it, most of the cow stuff, the highest stuff, doesn't require opposable thumbs. And so I think if you think about it, if you could do it with hooves, that's probably a higher value thing, than anything you're doing that requires opposable thumbs.
Frank: What would you tell someone, so I always like to leave these, give someone one core concept to contemplate, or key question, or something per episode. What would it be with the context of this, if you want the listener to go, and be like okay, here is your tax, or big contemplation for the day?
Dean: So I think when you realize that what you're setting up are flywheels in a way, right? Like you're setting up these intricacies, these machines that can involve with a team of hooves that are going to further your processes, it helps when you realize that what you're working on is getting something that is going to have some legs, that can recur. That's the thing that you're really looking for. Is to get to a point where you got a process that you can set up, and it can continue to run, continue to work not just like an event, that's going to end. Like a lot of the launch model is not really a way to get to-
Frank: It's not a model, it's an emotion.
Dean: That's exactly it. It's a promotion based model, where building something where you're just realizing what you're model is, right? When you're building something that you’re constantly getting new people to buy, is one thing. If you're happening all the time, and there's a huge runway of them, or focusing on something that you're building clients that are customers that are going to repeat, that are going to recur to get to where you have some recurring revenue. That's where the real, that's the leverage.
Frank: It's a recurring process, independent of you, and/or, it's the best if it's the and recurring revenue.
Dean: Right, that's it.
Frank: Is independent of you.
Dean: That's the thing, when you realize you can work on anything, but you're working on something like if you're working on a promotion, it's going to end, yeah. Or when you're working on something that is going to be evergreen that you got a lot of new people that are constantly coming into a moving parade where there's new people that are going to see your offers, that's great. Or building a slowly and consistently growing core base of users.
Frank: That's the folks.
Dean: And that was something, we had John Paul DeJoria on I Love Marketing.
Frank: We're about to watch the movie with him, with the makeup for the band when we saw the set, right.
Dean: One of the things that he's done, is that he picked two business, then we picked the Paul Mitchell hair care products, where people, once you establish somebody as a customer, they continue to buy, they continue to use the hair care. And the same thing with his Tequila, that they're the same, they continue to buy, once you get somebody who's brand loyal to something. So I think really, getting down to realizing, pushing the accelerator pedal of what your model looks like, where it's headed, and then really just realizing what your real, most valuable contribution is.
Frank: Yeah, and facilitate other people to do the other steps.
Dean: And embrace your bovinity.
Frank: Embrace your bovinity, ladies and gentlemen. Well this is a particularly long episode.
Dean: Is it?
Frank: I think so.
Dean: This might be a two parter.
Frank: It could be, you never know. We're not stingy with the goodness here. Well everybody, I hope you enjoyed this. How can they find you, how can they get more, because with the natural expansion of the conversations, the listeners going to think to themself-
Dean: Where are we going to find that?
Frank: How am I going to get more of this Dean Jackson?
Dean: Well the easiest thing is to go deanjackson.com.
Frank: It can't possibly be that easy.
Dean: It could possibly.
Frank: Well you heard it here first ladies and gentlemen. All right, well thanks so much man, thank you guys for listening. We'll see you on the next one.
Dean: Awesome.
And there we have it, another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue that conversation, want to go deeper in how the profit activators can apply to your business, two things you can do. Right now, you can go to MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com, and you can download a copy of the More Cheese, Less Whiskers book, and you can listen to the back episodes of course, if you're just listening here on iTunes.
Secondly, the thing that we talk about in applying all of the 8-Profit Activators are part of the BreakthroughDNA process. And you can download a book, and a score card, and watch a video all about the 8-Profit Activators at BreakThroughDNA.com. And that's a great place to start the journey in applying this scientific approach to growing your business. That's really the way we think about BreakthroughDNA as an operating system that you can overlay on your existing business, and immediately look for insights there.
So that's it for this week, have a great week, and we will be back next time with another episode of More Cheese, Less Whiskers.