Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast, we're talking with Jeremy Salem from right here in Florida, up in Jacksonville.
Jeremy owns an agency that helps business owners with eCommerce and improves both their capabilities and the marketing of their businesses.
We had a great conversation about the distinction between the two ways of approaching the business. Between being a service provider to someone, improving their capability by doing work for them, and the possibility of thinking about delivering a result for people, which is always the next level of what you could provide for people.
It was a really fun conversation. The time went fast & there are a lot of ideas you can take to think about the way you see your business.
Show Links:
ProfitActivatorScore.com
BreakthroughDNA.com
EmailMastery.com
Want to be a guest on the show? Simply follow the 'Be a Guest' link on the left & I'll be in touch.
Download a free copy of the Breakthrough DNA book all about the 8 Profit Activators we talk about here on More Cheese, Less Whiskers...
Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 189
Dean: Jeremy.
Jeremy: Yes. Hey Dean.
Dean: There he is. How are you?
Jeremy: I'm doing well. How about yourself?
Dean: I am fantastic. Quarantine week nine coming to a close. Where are you?
Jeremy: I'm in Florida, Jacksonville, Florida.
Dean: You are? Me too. I'm in Winter Haven.
Jeremy: Oh yeah. I used to come to Winter Haven very often when I was younger when the Cleveland Indians had their spring training home there before they moved to Arizona.
Dean: Yeah. Everybody moved to Arizona.
Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. We're big Indians fans, so we would come every year. And then of course they moved, which sucked. Yeah, so very familiar, not in the last 10, 15 years, but familiar with the area.
Dean: That's funny. Well, welcome. Super excited that you're here. I'm looking forward to hatching some evil schemes with you here. Tell me the whole story and what we're going to focus on today.
Jeremy: We've been in business for coming up shortly on 10 years. We do some different things, started out doing some agency stuff. But our main program right now, our flagship program, is we work with business professionals who are starting or growing their online stores.
Dean: Okay.
Jeremy: So I filled out the profit scorecard, so yeah, always looking for ideas on growth, always enjoy your content and things like that. Quick question, Dean.
Dean: Yes.
Jeremy: This is actually the call, correct?
Dean: This is it. We got a whole hour here for us, yeah.
Jeremy: Cool, cool, cool, cool. Just making sure. Yeah. We've been running this specific program for about five years. We've got a team of coaches from the tech side to the ad side to the product selection side, helping connect with suppliers. So yeah, that's the main focus and what I wanted to discuss on today's call.
Dean: Okay. So when you did your profit activator scorecard, when you went through, what was the insight that you had from that? What was the thing that stood out as where you shine and where your opportunity is?
Jeremy: I think single target market, it's tough in the sense of we say business professionals. We do know we have, yeah, there's people that we tend to work better with. But ideally they're people that they either have a store that they need help growing or they're in the process of many times there's somebody who's working a corporate job and they've been trying to do this on the side and transition. So we focus on that versus, I don't know. We don't go after the whole Internet. We're not going after the beginner that says, "What's this about," and we have to explain e-commerce to them.
So I think we're pretty good there, compelling. We do some unique stuff by using ... We don't use automated webinars or anything. We use blog posts that have really great content that really bring people into our world and get them to schedule a consultation. Motivating, educating, feel pretty good. Irresistible offers, I definitely am intrigued to hear your ideas there. After sale service, we've gotten better on. We recently launched a higher tier for people that are already doing well. They're doing somewhere in the high four to five-figure a month range and looking to scale.
We can offer a higher level of support that would involve things beyond when you're starting out. Things more geared towards outsourcing systems, expanding which ad platforms they're using, things like that. That kind of goes into the lifetime relationships. And then referrals, we get referrals here and there but we don't have a system to where we're consistently getting referrals.
Dean: Not an orchestrated system, right. You know what? It's very similar to what a lot of people find. Everybody sort of struggles with selecting a single target market. That's the first thing, especially when you can help so many people. You make up terms, like business professional because that is the one single thing that can encompass so many people technically that a lot of people fit under that. But one of the clues, one of the things that I always have people start with when you're starting to explore who the target audience is, is to think.
I ask a clarifying question is what I call it of what would you do if you only got paid if your client gets a result? What would that look like for you? What can you do that you would feel so confident in? I say that just to have a discussion about it. I'm not saying that you need to switch your offer to only getting paid on results or performance. But I'm asking it as a guiding discussion that if you were to only get paid on the results, what would be the thing that you're that confident about, that you know that you could do?
Jeremy: Yeah. That's a great question. I've seen your content on that. I would say, so for example, we have some people who come in, and I just was speaking with somebody who came in yesterday. They're like, "I've been paying for a Shopify subscription for several months. I am driving myself crazy with the tech side, getting a store up, the right ads," so they couldn't even get to the point where they're asking running a functional store and running ads and making sales. So for me, the answer to that question would be the result would be there's probably a high percentage of people that get sucked into courses and stuff, but they actually never make a single sale with an online store.
So just getting a store up and making a sale would be the only pay for that result because we do so much one-to-one implementation with each of our clients that that's an easy win for us. But not everybody falls into that category. Some already have sales.
Dean: I got it. Because there's two different things, right? There's the technical ability to make sales online and the psychology, the marketing, and the sales of driving sales online. They're two different things. Is your primary focus on the technical capability of making sales online or the psychological ability to drive sales online?
Jeremy: Can you quickly explain the difference to me again?
Dean: Okay. The technical capability is that you've got your e-commerce site up. You've got your credit card processing. You've got the website. You've got the Buy buttons. You've got the coding right. You've got all of the infrastructure set up that you can make sales online. You have the capability to make a sale online if somebody came and pushed the Buy button. Everything technically works. You can accept credit cards, show what you have for sale, put up the shopping cart, do all of that stuff technically. That's one side of it.
But then the other side of it is the ability to actually attract someone to your store to buy what it is that you're selling. That's two separate things. Do you see the difference in that?
Jeremy: Absolutely. Yep. That clarifies it. Yeah. So actually, Dean, through our service and our program, we actually do both. For somebody who comes in and they're newer, even if they have a store, they're going to hop on a call with one of our members of our tech team for about two hours, two and a half hours, and we're going to completely revamp and optimize the store for conversions. And then we're also going to help them with the advertising piece on what is ad copy targeting, getting people actually clicking by.
Dean: Yeah. I think that probably the number one thing that blocks people from making beyond their first sale in terms of the capability to make that sale is the ongoing marketing and way of driving sales to their e-commerce site, driving buyers to their e-commerce site. So getting somebody up and functional is a big win. Now do you teach people how to do that or do you have a black box service do that for them? By black box I mean you just set it up in the background and then, ta da, here you go. It's all done for you.
Jeremy: More towards that option, yeah. They're going to get on, in our flagship program, they're going to get on a call with a coach and tech on our team and, yeah, we're going to basically spend about two and a half hours setting up the whole store with me and for them.
Dean: Okay. That process, when you look at this, do you charge for that?
Jeremy: It's included as part of the service, the program, not separate.
Dean: Right. Okay. So tell me what you charge for now and how you kind of work with people. What is your service offerings? Do you have a lot of different ways or do you have one program or how do you work with people now?
Jeremy: As you know, in the online world and in entrepreneurship it's always kind of adapting. So there may be something different, but at the time as of right now, specific to online stores, e-commerce, we have more of a starter program which is more based around print-on-demand at the lower tier, generally in the $1500 range. We have our flagship which is the intensive, the one-on-one and things like that. We play around with that, but we have incentives and different pay options and things like that. But let's just say it's in the 6000 range. Let's pick a happy medium.
And then we have a higher tier, more of like a mastermind that we recently introduced, like an enterprise level that's going to be in your mastermind range, closer to 25K and above. But the main is the middle. That's been the main focus for the last five years or so.
Dean: About the $6000 range is what you said?
Jeremy: Yep.
Dean: Yeah. Okay. What do I get for the 6000?
Jeremy: You come in. We've, again, adapted, expanded things. But basically for eight weeks we have what we call our implementation phase. So Dean, you come in. You're like, "Hey, I have a store or I'm starting a store." We're going to do your kickoff call. We're going to get you basically hand you how we find products and suppliers. Most people are going to start out ... Some people have their own products, but most people are going to start out more of a dropshipping model. And then the goal is you get a product selling well and then want to get into more of the wholesale or private labeling.
So then you're going to get on a ... You're going to go through some action items, then you're going to get on what we call a store setup and optimization call where, again, if you're a store starting from scratch, we're going to set it up or if you already have one, we're going to "tear it apart," optimize it. From there, we're going to send you to one of our ad experts. You're going to get on an ad setup call, set up ads for an initial product or two so you can see how we do it, how we look at data, how we set up the copy, the images, all that. We get your ad live. And then about a week later-
Dean: So the idea is you're showing them how to do it, how to do the ads?
Jeremy: Yeah. Doing it actually screen share with them as well. And then a week later they're going to-
Dean: But the idea is that they're watching over your shoulder. They're learning how to do it for themselves essentially is what-
Jeremy: 100%. Yeah, we've got a members area as well, but the one-on-one calls are invaluable. And then from there, they'll do a couple what we call ad review calls where basically we'll get on and we'll help them read the data, say, "Okay, you're getting add to carts here, but they're not buying. Let's look at maybe some different shipping options, pricing." And then from there we provide an additional, after those eight weeks, additional 10 months of group support where each month we're covering different themes. We have more content around outsourcing, around automating some things.
Some people will then go into our ... The goal is to get into a higher tier, people that are doing really well. For others, they're supporting with group calls, group training, group support. That's pretty much how the program is structured. We've got content from start to finish.
Dean: And then they're done in one year. Then that's it.
Jeremy: Exactly.
Dean: Excuse me.
Jeremy: If they don't upgrade or anything like that. Some will come back and things like that. Some will upgrade. But yes, yeah. 12 months.
Dean: Okay. Awesome. Right now what's your best way of finding people to go through this?
Jeremy: Yeah. That's where I love marketing. We have a lot of e-commerce. That's kind of what our main program is. But prior, I was kind of the Facebook ads guy. That's where I built my following. Got a lot of big marketers who found me and I consulted with. We do other stuff besides e-commerce, but basically for this, what we do is it's unique. I've never liked, not that there's anything wrong with it, the automated webinar model. I don't know. For me, what we mainly do, I've done some different things, is I have what I call an epic blog post. I've also called it a bloginar.
Basically we run ads to about a 7500-word piece of content. It's pretty much a webinar in a blog post. It basically gives away the farm. And then within that post, we can call to action of basically, hey, if you want to explore our one-to-one done with you service program, click here. They go to a page that talks more about our program and then they schedule a consultation. We run ads to that content. Of course, we do some retargeting and fun stuff like that, giving away more content. We also build our email list through some different lead magnets.
I enjoy writing, so I'll email my list pretty frequently, usually five to six days a week, and all that combined to kind of bring people into our world and keep our calendars pretty full.
Dean: That's awesome. What's the result that people end up getting when you take people through this course? How do you measure their success?
Jeremy: Sure. What we like to tell people is at minimum, because I'm the anti-hype guy. But at minimum, what we want to do with you is we want to build a foundation of a successful online store. A store up, running, and making sales is our minimum goal. And then from there, it can go a variety of directions. But what we looked at, which was really cool, Dean, is we looked at that the majority of people if you look at courses, a very small percentage actually get in and actually achieve any type of measurable result, maybe they want some content and they're impressed with the information.
With us when we looked at it, virtually 100% of people that come and actually, as long as they don't ghost us, they actually get on their coaching calls and all that. I mean pretty much 100% are going to have a store that's at least making sales, and then from there-
Dean: That's what I mean by that. That's what I mean. They've got the capability to make the sale. That's one thing, that the store is ready.
Jeremy: Actually inspired by you and a couple others, we did something kind of fun a while back. We don't promote it as much, but we called the 21-day guarantee. It was like, hey, look, if you've never made a sale and you're kind of sick of all the courses and the hype type thing, we guarantee if we work with you within 21 days of flipping your first advertising campaign on, you'll have a store that brings in sales or we'll refund your ad spend and we'll send you 1000 bucks for wasting your time. Of course, they got to come in and attend their coaching calls. That's an easy win for us. That attracted a lot of attention at the time.
Dean: And they've got to pay you upfront, it sounds like.
Jeremy: Yes, they would pay upfront.
Dean: Yeah, right. Okay, gotcha. Yes, okay.
Jeremy: But I've always been intrigued by I've listened to all your content on irresistible offers and just unique ways to bring people into our world different than what we're doing or maybe different structures, the pay result type thing. That stuff I'm always open to hear more about. But that is how we currently fill our program and stuff. That's the result that, at the minimum, that foundation's built.
Dean: I often wonder what it is about why people do what they do. If I'm thinking about a guy like you and your team and your knowledge and I think about why would you choose to find people to show how to do this and get them excited about selling online products versus creating something like wayfair.com where I mean the thing that's most inspiring about Wayfair is ... Do you know much about the Wayfair story, about how they started?
Jeremy: Beyond knowing that they started and they do primarily with a dropshipping model-
Dean: Home goods.
Jeremy: I don't know beyond that. Okay, go ahead.
Dean: They sell home goods, like all things for the house. But they started out before they were wayfair.com, they started out and they built 270 individual e-commerce brands that were all single target markets. I use them as a great example of selective single target markets. For instance, the first site that they did was something called allbarstool.com. Every single thing that they sold was bar stools. So they built out an e-commerce site that found all the bar stools that are available to dropship or to sell online and then they started optimizing all of their traffic and promoting that site to make it the most profitable bar stool selling site on the Internet.
And then they moved on to grandfather clocks, everygrandfatherclock.com. It was all about grandfather clocks. And then they went through all of these categories, speaker racks and ottomans and every individual attribute, every category that you could imagine, all with its own individual brand completely optimized to dominate that market. And then once they had 270 of them, then they got venture funding, bundled them all up, and came out as wayfair.com, this amalgamated e-commerce juggernaut with this huge footprint because they'd already built out all the SEO and footprint for all of the individual brands.
So I wonder about when you've got a technical capability like that and there's no real need to involve other people in that, what's your motivation for doing that route as opposed to doing it?
Jeremy: Well, the short answer is we do both. We do some unique things ourselves. But also when I built a following in the Facebook ads world, e-commerce was getting really hot, print-on-demand and Shopify. We saw a marketing concept as a whole. But basically, I always joke because that's a common question. I like it. I'm never going to be one of these people that says, "Oh man, Dean, it's about giving back to the world." It's a service we provide. It's a need. People are out there doing this and they want support. We can provide support. It's a revenue stream to our business.
That's what I tell people. I'm like, "I'm not going to BS you into this as some giving back or it's all about ..." When I was young, and you're in Winter Haven so, Tiger Woods, I think he lives close there. When I was young, like a teenager, I never understood why Tiger Woods had a golf coach. I think was it Butch Harmon?
I remember I used to tell my dad. I'm like, "Why does Tiger Woods have somebody coaching him? He's the best." It didn't make sense to me. I'm like, "If this guy's so good, good enough to coach Tiger, why isn't he winning the Masters?"
Dean: Right, right.
Jeremy: That's kind of what I tell people sometimes is it's a service that we provide. The motivation is it's a business to us. We enjoy it. We love seeing people succeed and we also do our own stuff as well in and outside of e-commerce. So I'm very upfront about that.
Dean: Yeah. I get it. There is a distinction between Butch Harmon teaching Tiger Woods, that Tiger Woods and any top professional is a unique talent that the coach can't do. Butch Harmon can't do what Tiger Woods can do, but he can certainly show him and advise him.
Jeremy: Sure.
Dean: Yeah. So it's an interesting thing. When you start looking at the outcomes that people get as a result of going through your program, what kind of outcomes are they getting in terms of how big are the stores that they're building? How are they measuring that $6000 that I gave you or this 1000 or $1500 that I gave you was a good investment? How are they measuring that?
Jeremy: Yeah. It's interesting. For some people, it's pretty amazing because ... Let me decline this call. For some people, it's pretty amazing because their breakthrough is when we talk about the tech side, it's actually getting a functional store up. They'll post some posts about, "Wow, been trying to actually get a store up and running with a customer for 18 months and a two-and-a-half hour call and here I am." That's a breakthrough for them. And then for others, if they already have success, like currently I can think of one example. An entrepreneur, a female we're working with in Australia, she has her own products.
She's been stuck around the $5000 a month mark with her store. In about 45 days, she's now about to hit a $25,000 month just because she needed some insight on ads and basically how to scale and retargeting. To her, that's a huge win. She doesn't care about getting a store up. She has a store. And then for others, they go on and they've built multiple seven-figure stores and they get into private labeling and the branding and all that stuff. And then for others, a year later they may be focused on something else. I was actually talking to a girl who went through our program. Now she runs ads for e-commerce stores. She likes the advertising side.
Dean: Right. That's what they do, figure out the thing that you really like from it. Right.
Jeremy: The breakthrough is different, I think, for each person as far as what they consider success. I think ideally the people when they initially come in they want to grow a successful store that gives them the freedom they want, the passion they want, whatever it is. And then what those breakthroughs are, what the milestones are along the way I think kind of vary per person.
Dean: Yeah. I look at it that the mechanics are going to be the same no matter what physical good people are selling online. You're talking about the actual stuff, I mean websites, showing the pictures. It's the technical requirements of it are going to be largely the same. It's that insight of picking the right thing. It's one of these things where I really believe that e-commerce is certainly one of the areas where ideas are more valuable than execution. What I mean by that is I don't know whether you've heard me talk about this idea, but often people say in the argument of idea versus execution that execution is the most important thing because ideas that aren't executed are worthless. There's no value to them.
So execution is the winner. You have to point out that you can't execute nothing. So you have to say that whenever you're executing, you are executing an idea. They're inseparable. You can't execute nothing, so you're executing an idea. So they always go together. Now, if you're executing something, you can also flawlessly execute something without any hiccups. You're executing at the highest level what the technical delivery of something is. The only thing that improves flawless execution is executing a better idea. The difference between one product or another product online is that the better idea for a product ... An idea means something that's desirable that somebody wants.
It's a better idea to sell zoom.com right now than it is to sell airline tickets. That's really just a sign of what the right thing to sell right now is, even if you had the same flawless execution of both that you could buy these things together. So I wonder how much of what you do is involved in discerning and helping people pick a better idea. First of all, have you seen that to be true in the things that you've ... What would be the difference between somebody who goes through the same program doing $25,000 a month versus someone who's struggling to do $2500 a month? What's the difference if they're running on the same platform?
Jeremy: Yeah. I always talk about this in our community. What's strange, Dean, is you could have a store and a product. I could have the same store, same product. We could set up the same ads, same image, same targeting with Facebook, and because of the variance of an ad platform, you could see 10 sales come in in the first day or two and I could see five add to carts and no sales. Now you're on your way to basically expanding on that success, whereas I'm like, "Well, this product's a dud and I'm moving on." That's one aspect of it.
Beyond the obvious things like the implementation of, okay, are people actually going through and testing a variety of products and assessing the data right and things like that, the things we help them with and doing it on their own as well. But beyond that, it's just capitalizing when something is doing well. I think of a story of a couple we worked with probably a couple years ago. They actually had a product selling well that was profitable, but they didn't know it because they didn't know how to read their ad data properly. A member of our team pointed it out to them and that actually became the backbone of a seven-figure store.
Once they realized, they expanded on that, started setting up new ad campaigns. I wonder how many of those are out there not working with us, just in general, people that there's these little nuances about how to read ad data and things like that that they don't even realize. That's a difference in the execution. But overall, like I said, besides the obvious of the implementation and the speed of it and persistence and things like that, I would definitely say some of the variance in ad platforms and just how people approach the business, the people that approach it with more focus.
I had one client I was talking to yesterday. I don't want to give her idea, her product and what she's selling very well. She had a passion that she went into. She created a whole brand and products around that. It's taken off. There's something to that with executing on something she was passionate about. Any ideas you have in that area, why you think that may be the case, would be helpful too because it is unique how you go through a process. Yes, there's the human element of variability, but yeah, beyond that it'd be good to know.
Dean: Yeah. Fundamentally, you were just describing the very beginning of something. But I think that even if something started out quick and somebody had add to carts and didn't get the thing, that over 100 sales or 100 iterations somebody's going to ... It's going to stable out, that you'll see the same result, so kind of misinterpreting initial data is an issue, just like you were describing. If somebody has the same things on it, misinterpreting that that's a problem with the product as opposed to giving that a chance.
What I'm curious about, the way I'm looking at everything is through an opportunity filter that I've been really fascinated by this whole migration that we're making to cloudlandia, which this whole e-commerce outperforming everything. That's really where we're going, everything online. Now when you start to look at things like all the components of it, I was coming up with the three things that it's all a factor of. I've been calling it the VCR formula. VCR is for vision, capabilities, and reach. All three of those are important elements of this.
You've got to have a vision for what it is you're going to do. That's the idea sort of thing. The capabilities are all of the technical things, all the things that you are masterful at, the things that you can help somebody get straightened, to get set up. And then reach is the ability to get that opportunity in front of the right people, the opportunity to buy whatever it is you're selling at the e-commerce site. It's the formula that made Kylie Jenner a billionaire. The interesting thing about it is that she doesn't have any of the capabilities to be an e-commerce billionaire, which she is, but she had the vision that she wants to create lip kits and she wants to create a cosmetic line.
She had the reach in that she's got 150 million people on social media that all she needs to do is tell them, "Hey, buy my lip kit," and as long as she has the capability to make that happen, she has all the pieces in place. So rather than her learning how to do all of this stuff, in the capabilities department she partners with Shopify for all the e-commerce stuff. She partners with seed labs to make and distribute and package and customer service all of the clients that she sells to. Her mom's company does all the business administration of it. So all she has to do is spend her time on the vision side coming up with the ideas, the colors, the names of the colors, the style, making decisions on what her vision is for this, and then on the reach side, letting people know that it's out there and promoting it.
All that capability stuff is done by her partners. So when I look at people like you who have incredible capabilities on there, my immediate thought is what would be, if you think about selecting a single target audience, what would be the best opportunity for you is to find Kylie Jenners, to find somebody who's got tremendous reach and start to look at what could we do to help that person? Do they have a vision for doing something? Would they like to sell something online? You see that the whole Kardashian clan is that way. I mean Kim Kardashian sells her KKW cosmetics, that even Kanye with his Yeezy deal. He's got the vision and the reach, but adidas had the capability for it to make all of the stuff and to distribute it and to get it into stores and all of the technical capability side of things.
All of that stuff is in this new world commoditized and I mean that not in the demeaning way, but in a way that it's already figured out, that it's commoditized and, in the just basic sense of the word, available for sale. When you look at all of the software as a service or as a service, things that are available to everybody, now there's not a single marketing problem or technical thing that's not available to buy as a solution. I started in 1998 when I did my first e-book online. It was difficult to get a merchant account to sell stuff online. It was difficult to get those things.
It wasn't even a norm, so you had to go through a service that had a credit card merchant account and they would charge you a fee for all of the sales. They'd keep a reserve and all that stuff. But now, anybody can get a Square account or get a merchant account to sell stuff. That's a no-brainer. Even building a website was a problem in 1998. You had special software. You had to have your own hosting and all that stuff. Now anybody can go to Wix or Squarespace or even Shopify if you're doing an e-commerce site is exactly all of that as a service.
There's no real enduring future in the technical skills arena where the real money and opportunity is in the idea of what to put through that engine.
Jeremy: Let me run this by you then because that, what you said about going after the Kylie Jenner, obviously on that level. So one client we recently started working with is unique in the sense that they started out with information products and then they expanded to a physical product line off of the audience that they built, the customer base that they built on the ... So would you say that would kind of be along the same lines of a target market of what you're saying by going after the information market or helping them create a physical product line?
Dean: That's great. I mean you look at, let's say, Michael Hyatt as an example of a guy who's done lots of online products and now he comes out with a planner, that now he's got an e-commerce planner that is a real popular seller. There's an example of something. When you look at who else has things like that where they've got an audience and then they've created things that are physical that people can buy. So certainly that's one thing. I mean you look at all these YouTubers that end up creating merch, that that's part of the monetizing playbook of a vlogger or anybody who's building an audience that, "Check out our merch."
They've got T-shirts and hoodies and bags and mugs and all the stuff that become physical that people can buy.
Jeremy: Dean, there's also one market that we've had success is we have, and I'll run two of them by you. You can tell me how they compare to what you're saying. One is Amazon sellers who want to expand off of a third party platform to their own store to diversify. That's one. And then two are Etsy sellers who want to expand their reach through an online store and social media advertising.
Dean: Yeah. So you look at that, the Etsy sellers, people who are creatives that have created or invented or made a product, a unique thing in the world that they need. They've got the vision or they create the product or whatever the thing is. And then what they don't have is the capability to get that from their ... I would put inventors in that same vein. It's the infomercial model. If you go back, look at I'll use Kevin Harrington as an example. He's a friend I play golf with, but he lives here in Florida, the guy that invented the infomercial basically.
How he invented it was he was watching TV one night and this is when cable was just getting started. Before cable, there were only 13 channels. And then cable started coming on and there's all these channels. The Discovery Channel had come on and it was 1:00 in the morning. Kevin was flipping through the channels and he realized there's nothing on the Discovery Channel. They were just showing a test pattern. He called up and found out, "Oh yeah. We stop broadcasting at 1:00 or midnight. We don't program content after midnight." He started thinking they've got the channel there. They've got what you would consider to be excess capacity.
They don't have enough content to put on for the whole thing. So he started asking them, "Can I put ..." Because he'd already been thinking. He sold physical products, but they were through people selling them at fairs and home shows and stuff, doing all the demonstration. So he had the guy with the Ginsu knives and started realizing if I could get that guy in front of more people, the reach of this, I bet we could sell knives. So he got them to agree to let him buy some time on the network and started showing after they already finished with their broadcast day, 30-minute infomercials, shows, that was the beginning of it, for the Ginsu knives.
It started selling all of these things because it turns out there's a lot of people who still watch TV at 1:00 in the morning. That became the beginning of it and he started buying up all this inventory and turned that into a business and formed the whole As Seen On TV industry. But that's a thing of having a vision for something, seeing a capability that had excess capacity available to it, and seeing that as a reach vehicle and putting those three together. So now that you've got the capabilities for stuff, it's really what's going to make the biggest difference is looking for people with a vision with no reach or capabilities.
Jeremy: Yeah. So instead of we help business professionals grow online stores, it's ... I love this, how you always say picking a single target market doesn't mean that's the only market.
Dean: No.
Jeremy: But instead, it's we help Etsy sellers expand by creating their own online stores and using the power of social media advertising. We help Amazon sellers get off, not being so reliant on a third party platform and expanding to their own online store. We help influencers create their own product line. That's along the lines of what you think would be better.
Dean: But you look at it that I think that the biggest shift that is like the rocket fuel in your growth is the moment that you decide that you're going to do the selecting, not positioning yourself so you are selected. I'm saying you seek out Etsy sellers who have something that you see a vision that they have got something that if they had your ability to put that online, to put it through your programs, to do all of these things, that that would be able to be a big business. It's almost like you become a venture collaborist is a term that I've been using.
You start taking your capabilities and you look for the best opportunities to invest your capabilities as an equity participant in the outcome. Maybe you don't do it all the time, but maybe you do it with 20% of your time to start with, that 20% of the things that you're doing are allocated to you taking the risk of selecting the right product, something that you in all of the exposure that you've had, all the knowledge that you have, all the experience that you have, that you're picking and seeking out the best people with a vision, inventors, creators, all of those things, and bringing them through your capability engine to the world.
Reach can be bought, by the way. That's part of the thing that you can buy reach with through Facebook ads. But if you can find somebody who's already got the reach and you can partner with them to bring their vision into your capability engine so that you make and put everything or facilitate for them the getting into the physical products business, that that's a win for you. That's mogul thinking. That's the thing where if that's in your world kind of thing, that's where you get the opportunity to think like an investor and build something that you can exit from in a way. It's harder to exit from a service business.
Jeremy: Yeah. That's actually something I've explored, but not what you're saying. We've explored, okay, students we work with, clients we work with, their stores take off and basically, okay, I want to be a partner. So then I want to ask you these last few questions. I know we're up against it. Number one, in that sense, with your idea, would the irresistible offer be we're going to basically do all this for you at no cost and all I'm going to do is take a percentage of what we generate?
Dean: Yeah. Absolutely. That's the thing. That would be an irresistible offer, wouldn't it?
Jeremy: Yeah, because there's no upfront. I mean it's all whatever you make, you're only getting paid from that.
Dean: Yeah. But I would frame it in a way that, "Listen, we're going to pay you a royalty," not that we're not going to charge you, not that they're the major thing in this. But you start to think about what's the maximum, that you're looking at it that it's the fundamental part of the business and all they have to do is keep being them. So you either find somebody who's got the reach, meaning they're an influencer or they've got an audience or they've got subscribers or they're a publication or they've got distribution. You start to look at things like that that when you put on your VCR goggles here and you're looking through that lens of vision and capabilities and reach and you're hunting for those things all the time, I just discovered this.
There's a Grubhub here in Winter Haven. This just happened last week. I found there's one of the options is a store called The Ice Cream Shop. I realized there's nothing called The Ice Cream Shop in Winter Haven. You know Winter Haven's a pretty small town. I would know if there was a physical location like that. But all they were selling was Ben & Jerry's pints of ice cream delivered through Grubhub. So I started just looking into it because I knew about ghost restaurants. Have you heard that term or cloud kitchens where there's no ... They only exist on Grubhub and Seamless where they don't-
Jeremy: I didn't know that. No.
Dean: They don't have a dining room. There's a whole thing, a whole industry around it. Travis Kalanick is all in on this idea where these restaurants only exist on Grubhub for delivery or Uber Eats. You can't go to the dining room there. So I knew about that movement. So I started looking into it and it turns out that The Ice Cream Shop is the brainchild of a Unilever executive who created a project called Ice Cream Now all based around the vision and the question of how could we deliver ice cream to people at home on Uber Eats or on Postmates or any of these things?
They realized that they don't have physical locations for that, but there are tons of service stations, convenience stores, restaurants, local stores, places that have freezers, excess capacity in their freezer to set up a small inventory that they could keep stocked and that set up this whole network of these so that they could deliver these ... You're never more than five minutes away from one of these outposts. So you can order ice cream on the website and have it delivered and the Uber delivery guy is dispatched from the closest one. So you're never more than five minutes away. That's kind of a really interesting thing.
Jeremy: Yeah. I've not heard of that. That's definitely unique.
Dean: Right. So now they're taking the vision of this guy. What can we do to deliver ice cream to people? They've got the capability is there with Grub Hub, with tapping into these freezers that are in convenient stores, in service station locations, and then the reach of Uber Eats and Grub Hub and they've got it right there. They're native in the app. So now as people are going, they can scroll through and, "Ice cream? Wow, yeah. I would love some ice cream right now." It turns in hundreds of millions of dollars. Look it up online, just Unilever Ice Cream Now. It's a fascinating story.
Jeremy: I'll do that.
Dean: But that's the kind of thing. Yeah. What other questions did you have? This is a whole different philosophical direction, but I think it's a potential breakthrough for you. You know?
Jeremy: Absolutely. The breakthrough is of whether it's the existing person that's on Amazon or Etsy that's already selling well and they just need help expanding or, like you said, the existing influencer that we're basically taking into a market that they're not in. I get the irresistible offer there. The only other thing I was going to ask you is with currently what we're doing, the worst thing I see is I hate when somebody comes to us and they say something like they dropped some exorbitant amount of money on a turnkey store or ... I would love to be able to reach people with some kind of offer before they go down that route and then come to us.
For currently what we do, what would you consider? If I was like, "Hey, Dean, what would you consider an irresistible offer for what we do at this stage?" That may be a loaded question at the end, but I'm just curious.
Dean: Yeah, no. No, I think that when you look at it that, very similar, I ran a program with our moneymaking websites was you don't pay until you make your first sale or until you've made so much money. That's a risk reversal as opposed to a risk reduction, which is what your focus of we'll give you your money back and the $1000. You're trying to make it so much more, but you're saying to them, "Go ahead and give us the money first." You're just trying to convince them to give you the money, where the zero friction would be if you qualify when you've got to be selective of who you bring into a program like that, that you choose the rules for it.
But if they meet these requirements, then there's no charge to get going. I always look at it that the big discovery that I had was that sometimes, most times, it's less expensive to get somebody the result than it is to convince them to give you money to get the result. Some of your $6000 that you make has to be spent on convincing people to give you the $6000. Your cost of acquisition is ... I didn't ask you what that was, but it's got to be some amount of that 6000, right?
Jeremy: Sure. Okay. So in that model, you just do a very intensive, like you said, screening process on the front end?
Dean: Yeah. Right. As you should be doing anyway. But you're screening most people. Your screening thing is that they give you the money. You're screening for people who will give you $6000. You're not screening for people who should be doing this, that maybe don't have the $6000 right now, but could. I mean there's probably a lot of people that are better candidates for you to be successful than the people who have the $6000 without the right product or personality or desire or whatever it is.
Jeremy: Sure. Yeah, we definitely screen to ensure it's somebody that we want to work with. But I definitely see the difference in asking in the other way. That's something that I'm going to take away from this. Yeah, no. Lots to think about. I love that first idea, the VCR. That's my breakthrough on this, Dean.
Dean: Yeah. Awesome. Well, what do you think is going to be your first action item here now, just to kind of put it all together?
Jeremy: Yeah. I think my first action will be to test some marketing going for a more single target market and whether that's making it specific to the Etsy or the Amazon sellers. The influencers though I would need to think through a bit more. That's a bit more complex than somebody already having a product they're selling on another platform. But I think that would be my first action to test something like that. Secondly, maybe a small, as you may call it, pilot thing would be we'll work with you for free and you pay when you get ... something like that.
Dean: Yeah. I think that's great. Even just thinking that way is going to open up a lot of possibilities for you.
Jeremy: Awesome. Well, I appreciate the insights. This was great.
Dean: I love it. That's great. Well, thanks for playing along. That went fast.
Jeremy: It did. Yeah. Thanks so much for all the insight, Dean. I'll be keeping you posted, man. I appreciate it.
Dean: Thanks. I'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Jeremy.
Jeremy: All right. Bye.
Dean: Bye. And there we have it, another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation and 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 eight profit activators are part of the Breakthrough DNA process.
You can download a book and a scorecard and watch a video all about the eight profit activators at breakthroughdna.com. 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 Breakthrough DNA 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'll be back next time with another episode of More Cheese Less Whiskers.