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Brands striving to appeal to everyone overlook their ideal customers - a costly mistake. Build a solid foundation to grow and scale by picking a laser-focused micro-niche target market. Serve them relentlessly. They will celebrate and share your brand

The goal is to figure out or find or create a way for the business to differentiate itself. Because there are thousands and thousands or millions of hundreds of thousands of financial advisors. We've got to get our guy or gal to stand out from the crowd.

And one of the easiest ways to do that is with picking a niche, a micro niche target market. Because most business owners and 83% of when I speak in a room, at a conference or at a webinar, the first question I ask them all as a group is, hey, who's your target market? And 83% of them get it wrong and that they don't have it defined tightly enough.

So a financial advisor standard answer is, well, I can help any baby boomer with money, which isn't a real target market. It's way too broad and it's not generic. Or our dentist, one of my most infamous examples is we had a dentist who said, I help anybody with teeth.

And I said, you don't have the marketing budget to reach everybody with teeth in your city. You just don't. And when we asked him a series of questions and analyzed his patient base, we were able to find that his real ideal client was a 40 to 55 year old affluent suburban woman who had gotten divorced in the last six months, was starting to date again, was terrified of competing against younger women, wanted to do something to make herself feel better about her appearance, but didn't want plastic surgery.

That's a laser focused micro niche target market. Now that's all his practice does is $25,000 divorce mile makeovers. They take cash.

They don't take insurance. And he makes four times as much money and works half as many hours. That's the power of when you get this all right, your literal whole life in business transform.

Are you ready to learn expert tips on how to identify your ideal customer, build a connected community and how to explode sales? Let's start the show.

Welcome. You're going to love today's show. Today's show is a masterclass on how to build a connected community by identifying who your ideal customer is.

And then, more importantly, how do you leverage that and build a strategy around it to explode sales? This is everything we've been talking about. And more importantly, we're talking to an expert in this industry that has a proven track record.

In addition, Seth has a free offer for you that you're going to want to stick around to hear all the details about. It's at the end of the show. The focus of today's show is around the foundational things that we talk about throughout this podcast.

Today, we're going to talk about the things that you need to know to have a successful business. And more importantly, how to leverage them to give you the edge that you deserve. Before I go any further, I want to thank you for being here.

Now, here's Seth. Thank you so much for making time for me and for reaching out, and I really appreciate it.

So tell me a little bit about yourself and your journey to where you're at today. I'm anxious to learn a lot about what you do and how you do it, and specifically learning about market domination.

Okay. So how long a version of that story do you want?

Hey, we're here for you. So no, whatever you'd like to share would be great. Thanks.

Okay. So I went to college for musical theater. I wanted to be a Broadway star.

My dad drove me nuts every single semester because of the high cost of Syracuse University many decades ago. By the time I graduated, I didn't want to be a starving actor in New York anymore. I wanted to become a college financial aid planner to help other families reduce the cost of college.

Except when I became a college financial aid planner, my branch manager at the first financial services firm, my workforce said he had gotten me a book where all of my clients were going to come from my entire career, and he handed me the yellow pages. And said, go make 300 cold calls a day, interrupting strangers asking for money. I did that for a few years.

It was terrible. I hated it. And I had the good fortune to find legendary marketing guru, Dan Kennedy.

I bought some books. I bought some courses. And then I begged my wife to let me borrow more than our mortgage, our house, to go to work with Dan.

She said yes after 30 days of relentless nagging. It worked. Within two years, I had become in the top 30 nationwide for opening new accounts.

I got written about in every financial services trade journal. And my phone started ringing with other financial advisors who wanted to do what I had done. So Dan told me 14 years ago, you should start a marketing company and do it for them.

That was marketdominationllc.com. So I started that with myself and one advisor that I was willing to let test the stuff I had created with Dan to see if it would work for him. It did.

It took off. We have branched out to 63 different industries over the last 14 years because the principles of direct response marketing apply no matter what business you're in. And we now have an awesome team of 43 staff members and we have served thousands of different clients all over the planet.

That's fascinating. So tell me, how does that work? If I'm a business, why does it matter?

How does it impact me? And then just a cursory, how do I better understand why this is so important? Because I get it.

I don't know a little bit background around about me. I actually used to work for Standard & Poor's. I understand that side of the business was getting a degree in accounting, etc.

So I understand the benefit and the importance of understanding finance. But I think a lot of people don't. So can you go into that a little bit deeper?

Sure. So in our case, it wasn't about understanding the finance. I mean, obviously, you have to be good at what you do, no matter what business you're in.

But that's just to get a seat at the table, right? It doesn't matter how good you are if you have nobody to be good for. So our job is to grow your business so that you can run it, because the number one reason why businesses fail, the number one reason why business owners don't achieve their own financial goals is they don't have a steady stream of qualified, interested prospects who want to do business with them, and they have no way to generate that.

They're told to rely on word of mouth. They're told to door knock. They're told to be on social media.

But again, if you go to school for financial services, if you go get a degree, they don't teach you a darn thing about marketing. If you go become a chiropractor, you learn how to adjust patients and get them healthy, but you don't learn anything about running a business or getting new patients. So we solve the big problem.

So we do the marketing for the business, generate them that steady flow of prospects or in some cases customers. You know, if you are a professional practice owner, we can fill your calendar and get you people in the door or in the virtual door. Now, if you're e-commerce and you sell online and people punch in a credit card and buy your product, we can drive sales all day long.

So, you literally just have to fulfill orders. So, it just depends on what type of business you are and that informs how the marketing will work to either fill your calendar of qualified prospects or literally drive your sales.

That is so very helpful. Thank you for framing that. One of the things that when...

I'm trying to remember who... Greene, excuse me. I'm sorry.

Anyhow, so when you reach out, when you guys reach out to me and ask me about being on the podcast, one of the things I was thinking about when we were originally talking is exactly this. The challenge is, in this industry, Seth, we spend so much time telling brands how to raise money, and then we teach them how to raise money, and then we teach them how to raise more money, etc. But we don't teach them how to run their business.

And the challenge is, as I agree with you, is not only how do you get clients and customers, etc. to love your brand, but how do you get to the point where you can focus on running your brand rather than effectively handing your keys over to someone else and expecting lackluster results. And I don't mean to throw a shade at others who might run your business for you.

The point is, your passion, your drive, your enthusiasm, is what brought you to build the brand to begin with. So can you talk a little bit about that and that intersection between having the ability to focus on what matters most, your brand, and not having to be overly burdened by raising money and all that other stuff that you hinted at?

Sure. So if you think about it, the person who goes to become a chiropractor probably had an incident. My brother-in-law became a chiropractor because he had severe, severe asthma as a child.

Literally, we go to the emergency room, and the family chiropractor, I won't make any health claims on this podcast, but I was able to literally cure him of his asthma. So, through adjustments, through treatments, without medication, the asthma was gone. So, it changed my brother-in-law's life, and he said, I want to do that.

Like, I want to help other people. And most people in the helping professions, whether you're a civil rights attorney or a financial advisor, had some type of event happen in their life where it inspired them, and they said, that's what I want to go do with my life. That's how I want to help people.

So, they didn't say, I want to become the best marketer of financial services. I want a cold call. I want to do seminars for strangers and buy them dinner in the hopes of getting business.

They said, I want to help people make smart choices with their money. Or in my case, I said, I want to help cut the cost of college in half so that the kids don't have to go through the stress, trauma and drama that I went through. But nowhere in chiropractic school, financial services school, whatever school you went to to learn how to do what you do, most likely were you taught, hey, here's how to grow a client base and here's how to build systems that will automate service delivery to the point where all you're doing is what you love every day.

Because no financial advisor wants to cold call. Nobody wants to learn the latest whiz bang gadget in social media. No chiropractor wants to figure all that out.

They want to do what they do. And that's our purpose is to free them up from the marketing so that all they have to do is focus on doing a great job and helping people in whatever way they help them.

Isn't it amazing that after going through school for so many years, you don't know how to fill out a resume, you don't know how to get a job, you don't know how to keep a job and basic things, how to balance a checkbook, you would think that that would be top of mind in terms of our education, but it's not. So with that frame in mind, I agree with you completely. The challenge is for me, from what I see in this industry, all industries actually, is that people don't understand, don't know what they don't know, and they don't know where to go to get those answers.

And that's where I see you filling that void with what you do. And by the way, really impressive endorsements and testimonials on your intro slide. That's really cool.

So how did you get to that point where you were able to take what you learned and convert it into a business? And where I wanted to go with here, Seth, is that to your point, a lot of the best brands out there were started by a company, started by someone, excuse me, who was trying to solve a specific problem for themselves, i.e. they get it, they understand it, they're passionate about it, that's in their lifeblood.

And then converting what they know to help someone else. For example, you've got Russell Brunson on. And he talks about, in your intro slide, and he talks about how as a potato gun salesman, the challenges that he ran into in terms of building a business and the internet and the changing algorithms, et cetera.

So he solved his own problem and built a very profitable business at the same time. So how do you relate that to what you do? And then how do you communicate that value to a customer that may not even know that they've got that problem?

Does that make sense?

It makes total sense. So I'm going to go backwards. I'm going to go in reverse chronological order of how you act.

So the goal is to figure out or find or create a way for the business to differentiate itself because there are thousands and thousands or millions of hundreds of thousands of financial advisors. We've got to get our guy or gal to stand out from the crowd. And one of the easiest ways to do that is with picking a niche, a micro niche target market because most business owners and 83% of when I speak in a room at a conference or at a webinar, the first question I ask them all as a group is, hey, who's your target market?

And 83% of them get it wrong and that they don't have it defined tightly enough. So a financial advisor standard answer is, well, I can help any baby boomer with money, which isn't a real target market. It's way too broad and it's not generic.

Our dentist, one of my most infamous examples is we had a dentist who said, I help anybody with teeth. And I said, you don't have the marketing budget to reach everybody with teeth in your city. You just don't.

And when we asked him a series of questions and analyzed his patient base, we were able to find that his real ideal client was a 40 to 55 year old affluent suburban woman who had gotten divorced in the last six months, was starting to date again, was terrified of competing against younger women, wanted to do something to make herself feel better about her appearance, but didn't want plastic surgery. That's a laser focused micro niche target market. Now that's all his practice does is $25,000 divorce mile makeovers.

They take cash. They don't take insurance. And he makes four times as much money and works half as many hours.

That's the power of when you get this all right, your literal whole life and business transform.

Is this where we say amen and the music comes on and just kidding?

Sure.

I love it. I love it. This is so great because the challenges in my industry and consumer packaged goods, people go to a focus group and this is exactly what you're talking about.

Who's your ideal customer? Well, they give such a generic answer that it doesn't really help differentiate your brand. It's so frustrating to listen to different brands, people, etc.

Talk about how they appeal to the masses and to your point, if you're trying to appeal to everyone, you're appealing to no one. What I love about your story, and I want to reemphasize this, is that if you're able to understand who your niche market is, not only can you skate to where the puck's going, not only can you help that particular market, but you can also weed out the customers that you don't want to do business with. They're going to be a pain in the butt.

The insurance claims in your example, dealing with the people that are going to want to nickel and dime you for every little bitty anything that you've got to do in terms of a procedure, or if you can get cash for a dental procedure, that's pretty cool. So how do you help? Okay, I come to you, I'm a dentist.

How do you help me do that? We first start by understanding who my avatar or who my ideal customer is, and then how do you do that?

Yes, so 50% what we found, 50% of the success or failure of any business or marketing campaign is based on who their target market is. If they properly identify it, they've got a much greater chance of success. So we start with a very lengthy, detailed interview series of questions.

Some examples would be, who do you like working with the most? Who pays the most? Who refers the most?

Who is your favorite patient or prospector client and why? And if you could start over and wave a magic wand and build a totally new client base from scratch, and there's no limits to who you can attract, you want to work with NFL players, fine, let's define that. And just that thought process alone will change their business because they'll start thinking about what they really want it.

Because most business owners in any type of business, their customers are a hodgepodge. Because when you start, and I was guilty of this, you take anybody who can fog a mirror and write a check at the time because you need it to keep the lights on and you need it to try and pay some bills. And then so you might end up with over the years, a couple hundred or a couple thousand or whatever the size of the business's customers, they're all just randomly acquired.

They weren't acquired on purpose. It was, hey, I need people in the door and I'll take whoever I can get. So when we get our clients, our business owners dreaming about, hey, if you had to start over and do it right this time and do it the way you really always wanted now that you know, if you could go back in time and start over, knowing what you know now, what would you do?

And the wheels start spinning and the smoke comes out of their head. And then they come up with an answer and they're like, but I probably can't do that. And then we say, what if you could?

And then they start spinning. What would their business look like? What would their staff look like?

What would their flow look like? And then when we got that energy in motion, most times we can then figure out, okay, you've got that dream business in your head. Now, let's go make it a reality.

Well, wait a minute, Seth. That's scary. That takes work.

Just kidding. No, I love the way you put that. It is so important, but you're right.

It's getting it right the first time. The challenge that I run into when I work with brands of all different sizes is that the mistakes that they make at the beginning are compounded, and it costs a lot more money to hire someone like me to come in and clean up a mess that should have been avoided in the first place. And what I mean by that great example is that if you've got a customer base and you're trying to appeal to every customer base, but not focus on your ideal customer base, then you're building sales and distribution, etc.

You're building relationships with customers that won't support your brand long-term. They're there to get the money from you, the slotting and all the other fees that some brands have to pay, as opposed to being able to develop a robust community tribe outside of traditional retail. So with that in mind, now that I'm a dentist, I've come to you, I've identified who my ideal avatar is.

Then what do you do next? And by the way, what I'm getting at here is that the way I would put it is that every brand, even your individual brand, you need to have a robust community outside of traditional marketing, traditional retail, etc. The reason for that is they're the ones that are going to be your strongest advocates.

They're the ones that are going to stand up and help guide you to make sure that you stay on track and help you get on store shelves, etc. And I understand that's specific to my industry, but yet that's so relevant in every other industry. So you've worked with me.

I've identified who my avatar is. Now what?

You have to figure out where they are. You have to figure out where they hang out, because you might have the greatest avatar definition in the world, but if you can't affordably reach them, it's not going to do you any good. So we have to find where they might hang out.

So that might be on Facebook. It might be LinkedIn. It might be Twitter.

It might be YouTube. It might be at a physical convention. It might be in an association.

We have to find, hopefully, somebody else has already built you a list of those exact people, where they are congregating, and we can either buy our way in or piggyback our way in into that already existing community, which costs a whole lot less than trying to build it yourself from scratch, but that is possible.

And on that note, let's go a little deeper. One of the benefits of being able to do this, and you hinted at it as cheaper, it's also a lot more effective. If I'm talking to the people that are interested in what I have, what I'm doing, what I'm buying, they will refer to me to their customers, their friends, etc.

This is how you take a convertible and occasional customer into a loyal evangelist. So imagine having someone, regardless of what niche you're in, that's going to sing your praises. Have you ever been, have you ever had anyone recommend their favorite restaurant or whatever?

That endorsement is so very valuable. How do you help people leverage that?

Sure. So I'll give you an example. In my howtofindmoneyforcollege.com business, I figured, you know, we were dealing, we're dealing with affluent suburban parents who were sending their kids to like private college.

And what we figured out was who else had a list of those people, who were they hanging out? Well, all of those parents, all of those kids are high school juniors and seniors. Well, who else connects with them at the high school level?

There's sports coaches, there's clubs, there's teams, there's hobbies. But the people who see every single one of those kids are the high school guidance counselors. They don't call themselves guidance counselors anymore, they call themselves school counselors.

But we were able to go and we've now built a list that we sent. We have an email list of now 15,000 school counselors nationwide where we are dripping on them and adding value every single week. And they send us referrals, they do webinars for their school where they host it and we teach their parents and their kids.

And we literally get business from those school counselors almost every single day. So it's all about who are the centers of influence to your target market. And then can we get them, as you said, so smartly, can we get them referring, can we get them to be evangelists for our brand?

So incredibly important. And one of the things I heard you say that I think a lot of people overlook the traditional way of doing something is you throw a lot of money at a problem without understanding really what the problem is or who really wants that thing. And what I hear you say is that in my world is that big brands tend to talk at us.

We're great. We're number one. You need to buy us because we're so big.

Whereas small brands have that interpersonal relationship. This is why I'm such a big fan of building a thriving community outside of traditional retail, outside of traditional channels. Same with your own personal brand, etc.

It's that thriving community that's going to help you make inroads. To your point, you've developed a relationship with school guidance counselors, which gives you an in and not only understanding what their pain points are, but now you've built their trust. And so without spending a billion dollars trying to reinvent the wheel every time, now you've got a steady flow, I would assume, of students, potential clients coming your way.

Is that correct?

Absolutely correct. You nailed it.

Good. I mean, and that's what this is about. I mean, marketing made simple.

I've got to admit that kind of a shameless plug. I've become a huge fan of what Russell Brunson does, his books and stuff. I'm just really learning about him for the first time.

And what I hear you talk about is what he talks about. Same stuff that Tony Robbins used to talk about years ago. Doug Brown was on a couple of weeks ago.

And same kind of information, but yet it's all distilling it down to how does that impact your specific niche? Again, skating to where the puck's going, not trying to chase the puck around the floor like everyone else does. So when you're talking about what you're doing, your focus, you talked about marketing and you talked about finance, understanding the benefit and understanding the importance of both.

How do you help people stay focused and not go off the rails into whatever side project or chasing rabbits, as it were?

Sure. And Russell's a friend of mine. We've spoken together on stage.

He's in a testimonial for us about what we do. He says one of our strategies is pretty much how he grew ClickFunnels from zero to $100 million in recurring revenue in three years. So how do you keep people from going off the rails from getting what we call shiny object syndrome?

You've got to kind of put blinders on and say, let's pick one target market. Let's pick one form of media. Let's get really good at making one offer on one form of media to one target market and fulfilling on that offer after we sell it.

And let's just keep staying on that straight line until we've mined all of that gold from that combination before we go off into other tangents. You know, you don't need to learn every new social media network. You don't need to go all in on Clubhouse.

And then before that, TikTok and Snapchat, like pick one thing, get really good at it. And you got to, again, you got to put blinders on and keep yourself from getting tempted to go learn how to do 27 other things because then your attention gets splintered and your results get splintered as well.

So very important. And this goes back to what we started, where we started this conversation about strategy. People don't know what they don't know, and they don't take the time to develop the strategy that helps them stay our target.

Point being is that if I'm going down my path, that you know where I want to go, and a shiny object appears, and if I get derailed, that blows my strategy out of the water. And at that point, I actually do more harm than good in terms of helping myself. And again, that gets back to a lot of the insights and a lot of the information, a lot of the resources that we see out there across all markets.

Well, if you do this, you're going to make a billion dollars. If you do this, we're going to get you big sales, et cetera, without thinking about how does it impact your specific business, your specific customer. And then the other thing is conversely, if you try to grow too fast, you may not be able to support that volume.

You may not be able to support that, not only in terms of as a brand, but not having enough resources to be able to grow your staff, to be able to support the cause, to support everything else. Can you talk a little bit about that and your thoughts?

Sure. So we're big believers in the growth should support everything else. So it's I'm paying for whatever it is I need out of the sales and the growth of the business.

So I don't need venture capital. I don't need investors. I just need it's funny when people say, Oh, I want to raise some.

I got pitched. We get pitched all the time because of the Sharkpreneur Podcast of people who want to want us to invest, want Kevin Harrington to and my business partner to invest or want to raise money. And a lot of time, like, why are you raising money?

If you're profitable, if you're making money, just go sell more. And there's your money. And people have this appeal.

They have this preconceived notion that raising money is sexy and getting somebody else to write the check is great. And that's what they should go focus on when it's not necessarily the case. I for a year, for let's say 12 out of 14 years, my only obsession was marketing.

And I just kept getting better and better and better and better and better at marketing. And I realized I was making more and more of a mess because I didn't have the systems and the fulfillment to support the growth. So I started learning systems and management styles and software programs and had to realize, you know what, this has to be about me getting everything in my head, out of my head, so that my staff can run it without me.

Because that's when you have a real business, is when someone can bring in the money, somebody can do the fulfillment, somebody can do the cert, everything happens without you. Because otherwise you don't own a business, you own a job, maybe a high paying one. But if you can't go away for a month and have the business grow while you're gone and not have to check your email every single day and check in with your staff all the time, technically it's not, as Tony Robbins would define it, it's not a real business.

If I buy stock in McDonald's, I don't go in and then try and flip burgers, right? I just let them do their thing and take my dividends and hope the stock price goes up.

And let's go a little bit further there. If you're so busy running your business that you're not actually help growing your business, that can actually be a constraint as well. Point being that if I can focus on the thing that I love, and avoid the things that I don't love, what I have to do, the finance, the accounting, whatever it is for you, that is so critically important.

Allowing that creative to come forward. Backing up to one of the comments you made, love this point. One of the things people overlook is the value of your business.

And if you understand your business completely, understand the finances, understanding the sales, the market, the customer base, etc. your business becomes more valuable. And so you mentioned SharkTank, I mean, Sharkpreneur, we'll get to that in a minute.

But if I were to go into the Shark Tank or any sort of situation where I'm trying to get money from a VC, it's all about risk. And a lot of people don't think about that. And if I can take risk off the table as much as possible, then the value of my company, the value of my offering, the value of my brand, whatever it is, is a lot higher.

So I can ask for better terms. I can negotiate a better situation for myself where you watch companies, at least in my industry, where they give away the farm before they've even done anything. I hate that.

Your thoughts?

I agree 100%. I think a lot of companies are, and I've been a part of Kevin Harringen's Pitch Tank, which is a live version of Shark Tank that used to happen in person. There'd be three events a year culminating with 2,000 investors coming to Vegas to hear pitches on stage live.

I was one of the judges, and we also filled the room. One of the things I learned was a lot of companies were taking money too early. They say, I got an idea or I got a sale.

I'm just starting, and they want to use other people's money to fund the growth and fund the building of the company, which I totally understand, but I'm going to respectfully disagree with. If you can't make money without money, how are you going to make money with money? If you can't generate money before somebody writes you a check, I'm not writing you a check.

So, I think taking money too early or taking it at all, both of which could be, you know, it isn't that 90-something percent of small businesses fail, new businesses fail because of lack of resources. I don't think they fail because of lack of money. I think, as Tony Robbins would say, they fail because of a lack of resourcefulness.

Well said. Well said. But Seth, my mom likes it, therefore everyone else would, right?

Just kidding. I get that argument all the time. Absolutely.

And again, another amen. Now, the point being is that people don't understand that. And again, it goes back to strategy.

You're not thinking about what it is you're trying to achieve. You're not putting yourself in a position where you can negotiate effectively. And by the way, when you're negotiating to sell your products, everything's negotiable.

And I don't think a lot of people realize that. That if you were to try to get your products into a certain store, if you're trying to work with someone specifically, get a job, whatever it is, you can negotiate every single thing. And if you don't have a thorough understanding of what you bring to the table, the strength of the brand, the strength of you as a brand, etc.

then you dilute your ability to ask for what you're worth. And this is a big topic. And I'm so glad you brought this up.

Point being is that most people tend to commoditize. And in fact, actually, this is what Doug and I talked about a lot, Doug Brown, is that most people tend to commoditize themselves, meaning or whatever their offering is, meaning they're just like everyone else. We're all male, we're all female, we're all whatever it is, right?

Instead of thinking about how do you differentiate yourself from someone else. So pick on you, for example, if I came to you and I understand that you've been able to do some of the amazing things you've done, you have more value. Therefore, you should ask more than a beginning analyst, et cetera, at a startup, et cetera.

I actually was going to go into that financial management years ago. I used to work for Standard & Poor's as an analyst. So I understand completely what you're talking about from the other side.

There's a lot to know and the challenges, there's so many people that kind of phone it in. Going back to what you said about understanding your niche and from my standpoint, improving your valuation. How do you help people bring those two things together?

I think that one of the things that from doing hundreds of podcast interviews with Kevin and watching him work and having him as a business partner for years has taught me is it's all about the cost to acquire a customer. It's how much can I buy a customer for, how much money do I make on that, and then how many customers can I buy and how do I scale. I think that valuation is entrepreneurs get this wrong.

I mean, if you watch Shark Tank, you see they get skewered on valuation every single episode. And you'd think people the first season ever, you would think, hey, that makes sense. It's new.

This is a new show. But they've been watching that thing for 10 years. They've seen what happens and they go ask for a ridiculous valuation anyway, because they think theirs is different.

I think getting out of your head and talking to people who aren't emotionally attached to your business. And I think that's getting fresh eyes makes a huge difference. I think if you're pitching for capital, if you're trying to raise money, even if you're trying to get a loan, a business loan, it's got to all be about, hey, are we actually acquiring customers at more than break even hopefully?

And how many more can we acquire? Because if we're a me too business or we're losing money, why would I want to give you money to lose? I can lose it myself.

Well, okay, but Seth, you weren't paying attention. My mom likes it. And if she likes it, then thus everyone else will, right?

I mean, what's the problem?

We literally had somebody. So we had thousands of applications for Pitch Tank every year. And we would review them all and narrow it down to the top 20 who got to come to Vegas.

I literally had somebody pitch me that. I literally, it was this woman, and she wanted to be a lifestyle brand. And that was literally part.

She literally cried during her pitch. And it was literally part of, well, my mom loved it, and now she's dead. And I got to make this succeed for my mom.

And I'm like, I'm so sorry about your mom passing, but I don't see a business. You have a logo on a t-shirt and on some swag that nobody knows about yet. That's not a million dollar brand yet.

You have to get some people who aren't related to you to buy the thing. You know, go online, run some Facebook ads, run a click funnel. If you're selling tens of thousands of these, all of a sudden, you've got my attention.

But if you sold 27 to friends and family, that does not count as a business.

Well, and that goes back to what we're talking about with focus groups. Focus groups lie. And I don't mean that to be too harsh.

That's why he did focus groups. He said they don't know what they want because they don't know. He said if I did focus groups, if Henry Ford did focus groups, he would be riding faster horses.

He said nobody wanted an iPhone. Nobody knew what it was. Nobody wanted an iPad or an iPhone.

And everyone we showed it to said, well, that's ridiculous. Why would I want a thousand songs in my pocket? Why would I want to put a computer on my phone?

Until we made it and then people realized, oh my God, I'm addicted to this thing. I can't live without it.

Love that example. And one of the challenges that you find when you're asking focus groups is that you're getting people that are trying to give you an answer to a question that they think you want to hear. And I can think of a lot of brands that have failed as a result.

Instead of back to the connected community where you've got the ability to talk to your community and say, do you want chocolate? Do you want banana? Do you want whatever it is?

And find out from the people that are your most loyal advantages, what would you buy? And the cool thing about this is that you're future proof your business. And more importantly, you've already created a customer that wants to buy your product

So not only are we trying to get mom excited about it, we're also trying to get everyone else excited about it and get eliminating the risk as much as possible. So when I go under the shark tank or a pitch tank or whatever, then I can go to whoever the VC's are, whoever the investors are, potential investors, and say, here's what I've done. Here's who my customer is.

Here's how I'm going to meet that customer. That is so critically important. And yet so many people miss that.

Instead of focusing on the numbers that don't make, that don't really help them grow the business. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you help brands differentiate between the two? So you're working with a company, one of your pitch things, pitch events, et cetera, or working with a client.

How do you help me understand the difference and why this matters?

Sure. So I think that's one of the fundamental mistakes businesses make in general, is they don't know their numbers. We weren't taught this in school.

When you opened whatever business you were open, no one taught it to you. I think business owners, unless they're in the accounting field, tend to avoid accounting like the plague. And I think it's really, really important.

They don't know what it costs to acquire a customer. They don't know what their cost of goods sold is or their cost to fulfill. They don't know what their profit margin is per customer.

They don't know any of this stuff. So how can they truly grow a business? Because you wouldn't, I would hope.

People do, but I wouldn't buy a stock or McDonald's without knowing what is their earnings per share? What is their profit per share? What are their dividends?

How are they growing the business? How are they reinvesting the money? What's going on?

What are the issues in the marketplace? And what are the trends? And people don't do that for their own business.

They don't look at what the numbers are. So, you know, they wait till the end of the year and then ask their accountant, how did I do? And, you know, my accountant told me I made money.

They told me I made a profit. Where's the money? I don't have any.

There's a really good book called, They Say I Make Money. Why don't I have any about that? Buy an accountant about that specific issue.

And I think that's a fundamental... We don't, as business owners, view the numbers as sexy. If we look at them at all, it's a necessary evil, and we do it once a year, then we only have one chance to have a good year.

If you look every week, you get 52 chances. Or 50 chances. If you look every day, you get hundreds.

So that's why we opt our bookkeeping to like three times a week, because I used to do it once a month, and I would find out at the end of the month, oh my God, we have a gaping hole in our cash flow. What happened? Oh, three credit cards for our customers declined.

Oops, now I got a column three weeks later and go, hey, your card declined. We need that money now. So I think learning what numbers you need to know, and then you can't improve, which you can't measure.

So I think looking at those numbers on a regular basis constantly allows you to kind of have those key performance indicators and say, am I winning the race this week? Am I running forwards? Am I running backwards?

What do I need to do to change to get to where I want to go?

But Seth, I went to college and I got good grades. And I hate those resumes where they say, I showed up every day, I turned on the lights, and I kept my seat warm. But it's kind of what you're talking about, how so many people take for granted that things are so critically important.

If you're going to drive across country, hopefully you check the air in the tires. Hopefully you make sure you got enough gas to make it to the next gas station. Simple things like that.

Hopefully you've got enough food in the kitchen to be able to feed yourself for another hour or two or whatever. The point is, you're right, so many people overlook that. I don't know if it's a matter, I hate to say that it's a matter of being lazy, but that goes back to, I don't think that those things, those skills are being taught in school.

And I don't think that those skills are being celebrated because to your point, they're not fun, they're not sexy. To your point, again, accountants don't like to do, if you're an accountant, you don't want to talk about, how do I want to word that? You don't want to deal with accounting.

You don't want to deal with all those things in your business that you're not good at, that you don't like. And if you don't like it, then you're not going to put that much emphasis and effort into it. Thus, this is why you start hiring people.

So I love your analogy. This is why this is so important. And again, thank you so much for coming on and reaching out to me.

I appreciate it because this is the message that I think we need to get across to everyone, no matter what channel, what niche you're in. So can you talk a little bit about Sharkpreneur or your podcast? What's unique about it?

Because I've been listening to some of the episodes, loving it. You've been talking a little bit about what's unique about it. What is the specific problem that you're trying to solve on it?

Sure. So Sharkpreneur, we interview successful entrepreneurs about what it takes to grow and scale their business and really take it to the next level, whatever that is. We've had entrepreneurs trying to break through to their first million.

And we've had entrepreneurs who had companies that were doing billions of dollars. So it runs the gamut. And I think what makes us different is we're finding it's not just about war stories.

It's about actionable advice. It's about what can I do today? What can I learn from this person today that will have an impact on my business right away?

I just did an interview with the gentleman who's the founder and CEO of Trifecta Nutrition, which is the largest organic healthy meal home delivery service in the country. And he's built it from zero to a hundred million dollars in a very short period of time. And one of the things I said, how do you manage that kind of growth?

And he said, we hire six months in advance for where we think we're going to be. And that was a huge breakthrough for me personally, because we were normally hiring when we had to. And it was, oh, no, we're maxed out and we got more clients.

We need to hire and train someone super fast to take care of them. And I realized I need to think about where are we going to be in six months? How many people are we going to need?

What types of people? And let's hire them now to actually support the growth because magically the business won't come in until we're ready to fulfill it.

Love it. In fact, one of the things I love the fact that the stories that you share are so inspirational. But to your point, being able to take an actionable insight like that home is so very important.

A lot of companies, a lot of entrepreneurs are so busy thinking about what's at the end of their nose. They're not thinking about where their brand is going to be or where their personal brand, etc. is going to be in a month, a week, two weeks, etc.

So conversely, if you're thinking about it, how much ingredients, whatever you're working on, do you need to have available to be able to support your growth? Love the analogy where they're thinking about six months ahead. When I started in this industry, Seth, we used to plan for promotions a month or so in advance.

That was it. Now big companies are starting to plan two or three years out. And yeah, plans change and you do things and you tweak things.

But if you don't have that benchmark, that plan, that idea, something out there, then how do you know whether you're not going to get it? And back to your other point, measuring. So many people fail to measure what's going on on a regular basis.

They don't pay attention to it. They've got blinders on. This is why I'm a firm believer that every brand needs to own their own strategy in house and not effectively hand the keys to someone else.

Like I said, when we started, we spent so much time in this industry, Seth, talking about how brands need to raise money, and then you got to raise more money, and then you got to raise more money. Oh, and then after that, you got to raise more money. And then we want you to hand your keys effectively to someone else who doesn't understand how that solution that you created is unique and different from anything else out there.

So they use cookie cutter strategies, etc. My point being is that this is why you need to have that strategy. You need to have that extra runway, that extra bandwidth to be able to support your growth.

So love the fact that you're talking about this. What kind of companies would you, what kind of people do you want to interview on Sharkpreneur? What kind of brands are you looking for?

What kind of people really excite you and excite your audience?

So I think that we're looking for people, business owners who are doing something really interesting. We're looking for businesses that are adding value and helping people. We're looking for people, business owners doing that in a unique way, who've got a unique story of the adversities they've overcome, the lessons they've learned, the ways that they're marketing and growing that business.

All of those are our bread and butter.

Love it. And the thing is, in this industry, in this niche that I play in, it's those brands that are very disruptive, that are trying to do something different. It's not just another, a better version of something someone else created.

It's something radically different. For me, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to teach a skillset, very similar to what you're saying, that is all about understanding the fundamentals and focusing more on the value that you create or that you offer to your potential and future clients, more so than how much money can you spend to get your product on a shelf, which ties back into what we were talking about before. It's all about how do you create that value so that when you go to a retailer, you're selling your product for a fair price, rather than trying to compete artificially with something else, with another brand on the shelf, and lowering your value, your ability to compete with them effectively because you're giving away all your margin upfront.

Hope that makes sense. But the point is, it's a customer that, in this industry, the core natural customer wants products that they know, like and trust, and they're willing to pay a premium, even a super premium, for products that deliver high value. Same thing I talked to about you.

I can hire another financial analyst. What do I want results? Do I want proven results?

Do I want someone with a track record results? Those little things, differentiators, are so critically important. Back to the dentist, understanding exactly how I can get, develop a business where I'm focused on delivering such exceptional value that people would pay me cash.

That's really cool. Do you have some other stories you want to share?

Sure. So we've done that in niche after niche after niche. So not just dentistry.

Obviously, we've done it all over the place. So for example, we I'll give you, I mean, we have a financial advisor who was again helping every baby boomer with money. And we found out that in his regular life, he was a conservative, a politically conservative hunter.

He was a sportsman. That's what they call themselves. And what one of the questions we ask is, what do you hate about your business?

And he said, I hate wearing a suit and tie. And I hate having to do the work at the office. And I said, OK, give me a dream picture.

And he said, what we came up with was his new client acquisition strategy was we were marketing to other conservative hunters. We were able to get a list of 369 of them in his area with at least a million dollars in investable assets. And all of his marketing changed to appeal to the conservative hunter.

He got to wear camo to work. His new client acquisition strategy was in order to see if they qualified to work with him, he had like 30 acres and hunting blinds in a cabin, and they had to get up and get out there at four in the morning and go hunting with him for four hours. And only the people who wanted to go would he take with him, and he'd take three at a time, so they'd have four people.

And then that literally became, instead of a meeting at the office, it was a meeting in the hunting blind. And he said, if at the end of those four hours, I'm going to know, do I want to keep hanging out with this person, those will be the people I take. And now he doesn't do meetings so much in the office anymore, and he wears a camo polo and jeans, because that's the picture of him on the cover of everything, is wearing a camo polo and jeans, so that's what they expect.

If you don't want to wear a suit and tie, don't put a picture of yourself in a suit and tie on all your marketing, because that's what people think is going to show up. So we were able to change his target market, his marketing, and the way he acquired clients. I mean, we've done it for other advisors who want to do all their business on the golf course.

So it just, you can not only affect who you market to, but how you acquire them and what that relationship looks like, if you really think about, hey, in my dream world, what would I do? I have a real estate, we had a real estate agent who hated doing open houses and hated driving people around to look at houses. So we said, stop selling residential real estate.

We switched him to marketing and investment property to out of state investors. He never gives a tour. His phone doesn't ring at night or on weekends anymore.

He literally emails them an Excel spreadsheet on the cash flow of the property, and they send him back a yes or no and a check.

Which is so important. Again, choosing your customer. My uncle used to say that he would not do business.

He's a lawyer, a very successful lawyer, and he would not do business with anyone or work for anyone with anyone until he played golf with them. It really wasn't more about getting to know them. It was about how do they look at the world?

How ethical are they? Can he trust them when he tells them something, etc.? Same exact example.

I love the fact that you shared that that way because it's so critically important that people think about being authentic. And that's one of the things I love about this industry, Seth, is that people that are authentic have that one-on-one relationship with me. You can trust and believe what they're saying, as opposed to the big brands saying, hey, I'm great, etc.

So thank you so much. So anything, any parting thoughts? Anything else you want to share?

Yeah, we have a special offer for your listeners. We have a 37-page ebook, which is all about how to grow your own cult of 50 evangelists who will promote your brand every week for a year, because you should not grow your business yourself. Other people should grow it for you.

That ebook sells on Amazon for $14.95. We've got a 50% off offer for your listeners. If they go to growyourowncult.com, they can get it for $7.

Thank you so much. And actually, so what does that lead me? Does that lead give me more information, more insights into what you do, in terms of market dynamics and some of your other properties?

Yeah, it'll literally walk you through how we do what we do, teach you how to do it. And then of course, if you want to do it yourself, you know what to do. If you want to learn more about how to do it, have us teach you more or do it with you, there will be additional offers on that site after you get the ebook as well.

I'll make sure to put a link to it in the podcast show notes and on the podcast web page. Thank you. And also put it on the video itself.

And what I love about that is that you're telling, you're giving someone the recipe, but you're also helping to guide them through. And that goes back to where we started. A lot of brands don't know what they don't know.

FAnd they don't know what they're good at. And they're so busy focused on the things for survival that they don't have the time or don't take the time to step back and focus on what they're best at, making the most amazing products, connecting with the customer, whatever that is in your niche. So thank you so much for sharing that.

Anything else you'd like to share?

growyourowncult.com, Sharkpreneur. If you just Google it, you'll find it on any podcast platform. And then if you want to learn about us as a company, it's marketdominationllc.com.

And hey, if you've got kids headed to college, go to howtofindmoneyforcollege.com.

So important to think about. So many people. It's amazing what college debt can do.

I self-funded my own. So I know the hard way, what that looks like in terms of being able to pay that off for after a while. Thank you so much, Seth, for coming on today.

And thanks so much for sharing your wisdom and your story. And thanks again for reaching out to me. I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

I want to thank Seth for reaching out to me and for coming on the podcast and for sharing his wisdom and his insights. I also want to thank Seth for a generous offer to help you grow your brand. You can get your 50% off of the insight pack guide at growyouroccult.com.

If you want to learn more about Seth and how he can help you grow and scale your brand, you can listen to him on Sharkpreneur Podcast, or you can go to Market Domination LLC. I've put links to both of them in the podcast and on the podcast show notes.