Brian Johnson Interview

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Name: Brian Johnson

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.strategicprofits.com

Brian Johnson’s Bio: Brian Johnson is the Chief Operating Officer of Strategic Profits, Rich Schefren’s company that helps Internet marketers become better businessmen and make sustainable profits. Brian attended the Harvard Business School and has been known as a corporate turnaround expert, helping businesses in jeopardy become profitable again. He was once in charge of the manufacturing and distribution of AOL CDs mailed in the U.S.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from davidjenyns.com. Today I’ve lined up an absolutely fantastic interview with Brian Johnson. So for those of you who haven’t heard much about Brian Johnson, I suppose he seems like he’s a little bit more behind the scenes over at Strategic Profits but I think he’s starting to step out a little bit more. He works over there with Rich Schefren, and is the COO of Strategic Profits. He’s got a really excellent business background. He’s been to the Harvard Business School. I think he’s an expert on business turn arounds, I suppose that is where his real core focus is, working with banks and things like that where he’s called in, they’re having trouble and he comes in and looks for those real key leverage points that can just turn their business on its head.

I actually saw Brian speak recently in Sydney at James Schramkos’s event. He pretty much blew away the audience with some things they were working on at Strategic Profits which is what we’ll talk about today. The final thing I wanted to mention about Brian and something I suppose I admire about him is, I love it when you see entrepreneurs who are out there who live outside of just the internet marketing bubble. They’re very much into I suppose you’d call it lifestyle design. He’s an accomplished musician, an accomplished pilot, does scuba diving and pretty much lives life to the full. So he’s definitely someone worth listening to. I just want to welcome you to the call, Brian.

Brian Johnson: Hey David, I appreciate being on and I’m looking forward to it.

David Jenyns: Excellent. I suppose just to pick up from where you were talking at James Schramko’s event, I know a few people on my list obviously haven’t heard about the things you guys are doing with the evergreen event driven marketing and that’s what you were talking about at James’ event. I think it’s a fantastic way to think about business and it can plug into any business. Perhaps if you can talk through the process of what you guys are doing and how you’re implementing that.

Brian Johnson: Yes, sure, definitely just to give you a bit of background about the reason we got the company going. Richard and I were big in the industry and a couple of years we just looked at each other and felt like we were doing launches, we were releasing new products, constantly doing new products and releases and we said, you know we’re working too hard, we’re doing this over and over. We’re constantly doing a release and we’re constantly finding partners and we’re constantly working every single day. The results were great, no doubt about it, we were making really good money but we didn’t have the lifestyle that we really wanted and we definitely didn’t have the lifestyle that the internet marketing world touts, you can push this button and make money. The reality is that’s not the reality.

We needed to put things in place for two reasons. One because we wanted that lifestyle, we wanted to be living the dream so to speak but number two we thought it was our responsibility in our business to our clients to be able to find the right ways to build a long term sustainable business. That’s what we were about, that’s what people come to us for.

After they’ve been through the rat race and tried all those push button things, saying I work twenty hours a day and I don’t seem to be getting anywhere, that’s when they come to us. We felt it was our responsibility to actually test things, build these processes out and really show people at an ultimate level how to build a real, sustainable business that will take them into the future while they’re not working.

Fortunately we’ve been able to do that in an outstanding way and that’s what I talked to you about David at the event and we’ll dive into some of that now. That’s just to give you a little bit of background about why we did what we did and where we’ve got to today. Now we have a plethora of clients who are using these processes as well as many people in the industry who are building tools and things to be able to work and create the processes that we’ll walk through today. Any questions before I get into that background?

David Jenyns: The way that you guys came through and discovered this breakthrough, I am curious. Did it come from your business past? We talked about you going to Harvard Business School and the process that you’re going to go through now really reminds me of that whole business process mapping and that idea of actually mapping out the way that a client will move through the relationship with you. I’m just wondering where the insight for what it is that you’re going to talk about actually came from.

Brian Johnson: I think part of it is just that Rich and I are a good team and we use my strengths, we use Richard’s strengths and we use the different strengths of the team to be able to create the ultimate scenario. Part of what we teach when our clients come to our program is all about understanding strengths, understanding your core strengths and how to deal with those and properly deploy your strengths. We just really focus on our strengths individually to really do this but also it is we’ve taken all of the best practices from marketing to operations to processes and put all of those into one package, that’s what we’re doing here.

I’m glad you’ve brought that up because the important thing that these processes we’re going to talk about are built around are not all about technology. It’s not about a piece of software that you push a button on. What it’s really about and what makes these practices extremely powerful is the fact that we have not negated the decades or centuries of proven marketing and persuasion techniques that have worked on us as human beings. Those things will never change as long as we are human beings.

That’s a lot of what you’ll see in these processes because ultimately the most important thing in this process is the conversion, it’s persuading somebody to want to buy your products. Too many people right now in the market, in internet marketing or any business get too wrapped up in technology. They think it is all about technology, but it’s not. It’s really about the strategies and the techniques to deploy the most effective marketing techniques. That’s really what it’s all about. It’s really all about the best practices that we’ve learned and that we’ve accumulated from our partners like Jay Abraham, and Rich and some great people that we were fortunate to be around.

David Jenyns: Then to dive in because I suppose we’ve been dancing around the topic and some people who didn’t actually get to see you speak in Sydney are wondering what is it that these processes are about. Digging in a little bit deeper there, how would you break this down?

Brian Johnson: Ok, let’s start. What we wanted to accomplish is a few things. One, we wanted to build a process that is totally automated. I don’t mean automated like I go in and change a date once in a while or I get uploaded recordings. I mean absolutely totally hands off from the time somebody opts in somewhere in our systems, all the way through the marketing process, the conversion process, down to delivering the actual product. We wanted to build processes that are totally automated.

The second thing that we wanted to do is to make this an evergreen thing. Technically this is an evergreen practice that has been running and it doesn’t matter what the date it is or anything. That was the other thing we wanted to do.

The other things that we wanted to accomplish in these processes which are part of the marketing side which we know work through the conversions point are one, deadlines mean a big deal and you’ll see deadlines as I talk about this process as we go through. Number two, we know that events drive a business. Events make a difference. So that was another thing that we wanted to do. Hence this is why this is called the Event-driven Evergreen Marketing Process.

So we’re going to dive into this and keep in mind that the product I’m going to talk to you about right now are some of our more expensive products. These are $3000 to $5000 to $10,000 products that we’re using this process on. This process works even better for those because it’s very difficult for someone to came in on day one and for you to be able to sell them a $3000 product that same day or even a couple of days later.

So it’s our responsibility to bond with a client, to bond with that prospect, to give them incredible information so that they feel like we know what we’re talking about. It gives us a little bit of a longer cycle but converts extremely well versus just trying to sell something from a sales page.

As we go through, there are going to be a few chunks that we’re going to talk about. To keep things simple, these chunks are basically just put together. They are very simple chunks, four or five chunks that as people go through these processes, they connect one to another depending on what that person has done. So it’s going to be a little hard to explain this without a visual but we’ll walk through this.

Basically somebody will come into one of our sites somewhere, it could be a free report, whatever it is, we call this our front ends. This front ends bring people into our business. They go through a gauntlet series as we call it. This gauntlet series is basically a set of emails. Depending on the channel they came in it could be three, it could be five, it could be seven. But these emails, these gauntlet series, basically all they do is shape our ability to bond with the person who just came in, to get them to know us, to give them some more great information, for us to give them some things they can take action on that makes a difference in their business right away.

When they do that, then they trust us, now they see we’re real people and we have real products. So we take them through that bonding process called our gauntlet series. Then at the end of that gauntlet series they get put into one sequence that is our invitation sequence to a webinar. That’s what I said at the beginning, that events we know make a difference. So they get their first email which says, sign up for this free coaching program. It’s a three hour coaching program, two part coaching program and it starts in seventy-two hours, it starts on this Friday.

If they come in on a Monday it’s this Friday, if they come in on a Tuesday, it starts Saturday, if they come in on Wednesday, it is this Sunday, so it’s an automated process. Basically whatever day they hit that page, they click on that email, that Java script that we have on the page displays the date a few days out and allows them to register for that webinar.

There are four emails in the series I am going to talk to you about now which is the registration series. Each one of these has a trackable link. We track every single step of the way through the whole process that we’re going to talk about. The other thing that happens, if they click on one of those emails and they register, they no longer get the rest of the emails in that first sequence, so there is some intelligence built into the process.

So they click on the first email, they go to registration. If they don’t click on the first email, the next day they get another email. It says, hey, hopefully you heard about Rich Schefren’s coaching program, but there is only 48 hours left to register. Click here if you want to join. Then if they still don’t join, they get another email a day later, except this email has a recording. It says, hey, there is only 24 hours left to register. Now you see what I’m doing here David? There’s a deadline. I’ve got a deadline and hopefully they will respond to this deadline.

That’s 24 hours and then instead of this email having a lot of copy or a scroll of copy, there is only a little bit of copy that says, there is a very important message here from Rich. You’ve got to check out this video. Then it goes to Rich and there is a video of Rich who says, we have sent you a couple of emails about this, it will change your business or whatever it is that you want to say in that video, and it’s a video. We’re breaking the pattern a little bit right now.

The first two emails they have our typical header at the top. Then if they still don’t register they get one more email on the fourth day, except this is a text email, at least it looks like a text, no header on it and it basically says there are only 12 more hours to register. The reason it is text or looks like text is because we’re breaking the pattern. They’ve been seeing registration emails, now we want to put this one right in front of their face, just like a regular email to try to break that pattern.

Once they click on any of the emails and register, now they have gone into a different set of sequences, it’s another one of the chunks I talked about. The first thing that happens is they go into the registration page and it’s a basic squeeze page, join our seminar. Then they go to a thank you page and from that thank you page you can do all kinds of things, do a tell a friend process where they can share this webinar with other friends. If you’re not doing that, you definitely should do that, it makes a big difference.

After they register, now they start going into sequence number two which is a confirmation series. Most people will look at this as a reminder series. It’s the wrong way to look at these. They’ve just registered, four days left until the actual event that they’re going to attend. So you want to take advantage of those four days, not just to send reminder emails, you want to do what we call a reconsumption email. It’s an email about why they just made the best decision for their business. It’s all about the webinar. Or maybe the next one is grounding materials where they get a booklet with some questions that they are going to fill out on the webinar.

You have to be very careful about grounding materials not to put too much information in them because it will give people a preconceived notion about what they’re going to learn and they might not show up. You can give them a page and say we’re going to help you fill this out in the webinar. If you use those grounding materials in the right way it should help to reconfirm that this is really something they want to be on. What you want to do is get people who have registered to actually show up at the webinar. So these are just little techniques that we are doing and constantly improving to get people to show up.

The third email in this series is maybe a day before reminder. The day before reminder might be a video of Rich or whatever product we’re dealing with. The reason that we’re doing the video is not just to be cool and use a video but really it is because we want to give the visitor the opportunity to hear the voice of whoever is going to be on the webinar and see their face. We want them to come into this webinar comfortable and when they start to hear it, they have already heard the voice and seen the face and they’ve already bonded with that person.

So there’s a video the day before. Then of course they also get an email the day of, to remind them, so in the morning. We also send them an email about an hour before the webinar. If they’ve left us their cell phone or their mobile phone number, we also send them an SMS message to their number about fifteen minutes before.

So there are just some techniques we’re using right now that you could tweak, try, test, do all different types of things and remind me David at the end to talk about testing, because that is important. So that’s sequence number two, after they’ve registered, before they show up at the event.

Now it’s the time for the event. We have a little bit of code on our webinar page. It basically looks at a cookie that we drop when they register, we drop a cookie in the machine. When they get to that page there will be a countdown to that date and time for their actual event. It’s a really simple and you don’t have to do this. Even if you didn’t want to build a fully automated process right now, even if you just built this out and then changed it once a week and did one webinar a week, it’s all about the concept we’re talking about here.

Then they come to the webinar. Again we track, we know all the people who are registered, we know the people who have now showed up to the webinar because we’ve had them put their name and password to get into the webinar and then at the end of the webinar they go to another button and they click that and we know that they actually stayed. Why is all that important? Now we can talk about another couple of sequences or other chunks that they will go into, based on the habits that they did.

If somebody registered and they didn’t show up to the webinar, they automatically go into a sequence, I call our sequence five that basically starts to take them down the path areas of replay or you can reinvite them back to another set of dates. So that’s a whole other sequence. So they get the first one, sorry you couldn’t make it, obviously it’s something you’re interested in, so we wanted to give you the webinar. Here’s the replay. Maybe the next day if they haven’t clicked on that one, it says, we sent you the replay, maybe you just didn’t have time, so guess what, now we have an audio recording you can listen to.

These are the things we’re doing just to continually try to touch them, to get them to consume that webinar. These are just extra things. After that third one, maybe we send them one more email that they registered, didn’t show, they went through all those emails, they didn’t consume the replay, they didn’t consume the mp4. This sequence just does exactly the same thing I just talked about in sequence five, but it just talks to them a differently based on the habit that the person took.

So we could say, hey, we want to thank you for coming to the webinar. You probably would have learned this and this, but just in case you didn’t, here is the replay. Next email, here is the audio, next email here is the transcript and then if they still haven’t bought, then we down sell them to the Founders Club. So you see a pattern here. So they start at the beginning of the funnel and we always bring them to some kind of closure. They’re either going to buy at the webinar or buy from the processes or down sell them to the Founders Club.

If they did show up and they stayed at the webinar, but they didn’t buy, they go to sequence three. Hey, hopefully you appreciated what we talked to you about at the webinar, but you didn’t buy. Why not? Here’s your chance, buy our product. That’s email one. We’re always serving people. Who knows what the objections are to why people didn’t buy the product? They came to the webinar and didn’t buy.

There are usually about six or seven major objections that cover most people who didn’t buy. What we do here now, in the emails now in sequence number three is, we address those objections through emails. You came to the webinar, you didn’t purchase it but all I can think of it’s got to be one of these reasons. Let me talk to you about it: this or this or this. We surface the objections and then we satisfy the objections. Then we do that in one more email. If they don’t buy, we down sell.

The only other thing they could have done is actually buy. If they buy, they go to the sales page, they buy and they go through a sequence of welcome to Strategic Profits. Here’s what to expect, here’s how to get into your program. Then they go into what we call the sixth sequence that tries to make sure that we do our job in keeping people engaged in the program for the next eleven months.

After they’ve gone through all these processes and they’ve either bought the program or they’ve been down sold into our $49 a month Founders Club, if they still haven’t bought any of that, then they go into a sequence which basically starts to offer them our different products for the next seven to ten weeks.

So I really tried to encapsulate more about the concept of a very effective way to drive people into a funnel and how you bond with them, warm them up, try to sell them your product, down sell them and then after that make sure we extract what we can out of that process.

That gives you the overall view, David. I think if you have any specific questions, then we can get into specifics. One thing I wanted to talk about was testing. This is one thing that I try to make everyone I talk to understand that you can’t just listen to everybody that sells there in the market place. You can listen to them only from the standpoint of trying to see if they do some best practices that might work for you, that might work for your product, your market, your channel, but testing has got to be done.

You have to make decisions based on your own testing and not what everybody else in the marketplace says. I say that because, number one, from experience, I’ve listened to people and not found what they said to match my own experience. Number two unfortunately there are a lot of people out there that say this is the best, but they really don’t know because they don’t know how to test properly in the first place. It just irks me personally to see too many people hurt from listening to people who don’t really know what they’re talking about.

Even what we say, when we suggest you do certain things, we’re subjective from the standpoint to try this and test it. We’ve tested it, we’re confident in our ability to test it appropriately, but your market is different from ours, your channels could be different, the way you buy your traffic could be different, your AdWords could be different, there could be a whole different group of criteria that would make our test not as valid as yours. So it’s important that people really understand that.

They can be simple AB tests and that’s all that needs to be done. We don’t do multi variant testing. We do simple AB tests, AB tests, AB tests. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. I suggest that you do test. It’s a rule in our company that every time something goes up, that there’s a split test. There’s just a little bit there on testing, David, before we go on to some of your questions. Hopefully that gave a clearer picture of that as we go through the questions.

David Jenyns: That whole process that you went through and to recap if I may be so bold, whether or not we can even go ahead and give that graphic to the listeners so that they could look at it while they’re listening to this. I don’t know if that’s sensitive or not but maybe that is something we can chat about after the call but that might help cover it.

To do a recap, the idea being, that you start off having that bonding series. After they get through the bonding series, which is a no pitch bonding series, then you funnel them into a series of invite emails with the goal to get them to commit to a webinar. Then there is a series after that which is hey, making sure that they show up to the webinar. Very much you’re just tracking the response and what people are doing at every step of the way. When it gets to the webinar, you’ve really only got two things, either they show up or they don’t show up.

If they don’t show up, they get a series that they go through that ends up trying to get them back or getting the mp3 replay whatever it is or some sort of down sell. If they do show up, then you split it into the two, either they bought and then they’ve got the series for the bought or if they didn’t buy, you go through a series that then tries to address all of those objections. At the end of it, regardless of whether they didn’t buy or they didn’t attend the no show for the webinar then they go into a series that basically offers all of your products and this is a very automated system.

As a thirty second recap, did I hit most of those things on the head?

Brian Johnson: Yes, definitely and I think the most important thing in this process for us which you talked about, we track every single step of the way. We do. In our process here we’ve evolved to the point where we’re actually tracking something like forty-seven touch points or something. But in the beginning of setting up this process, it’s not that important to do that.

There are two points you need to look at in this process. It’s important your event converts. If that one event, that webinar or that teleseminar or that video or whatever it is that you’re using for your main point, your event, if that doesn’t convert, all the things that surround that event is only super charging something that is not working.

So we go through a two step process. We start with a very simple process because there is one thing we want to do. If our event converts and we break even or we’re making some money, then we know we’re starting with a winner and now we start to build all the peripherals around it, we start to super charge it. Then we can test the event, we can tweak it, we can try different versions of it and then we can test all the emails around it. So that is an important thing. One, the event has to work.

The second thing is, when we start this, we don’t track all the plethora of places I just told you about in the beginning. So there are only a few things we want to know when we start this process. Number one is how many people registered, how many people showed up, how many people stayed on until the end and how many people bought the product? That’s the only thing that matters. Why? When you start, you need to have clarity on what you’re going to focus your time on.

Too many people and a lot of people I talk to, they come to us for the first time, they’re just confused, they don’t know if this is the right thing to be working on or what I was working on, did that make a difference?

They’re just confused on where to work and spend their time. I have absolute total priority on what my team is going to do every week because I look at my numbers every week on these processes and I can pick two points that I call my highest leverage points and that’s what I’m having my team work on.

One right now that we’ve been trying to crack for a couple of months and that we’re doing test after test after test on is, we want to get our show up rate to our webinar higher than what it is now. I know that is my highest leverage point. If I can jump my show up rate up 10%, it all falls to the bottom line in your numbers at the end of the month. So I have a priority. I know that is going to be the most important thing that my team can work on because that is going to bring in the most money through the door. It’s not split testing an email subject line, it’s not the back end transcript email, none of those things will bring me the highest dollars. It’s focusing on that show up.

The second thing for us is to keep increasing our conversion on the webinar. Once we’ve exhausted those and we reach the point where split test after split test we didn’t really increase that, then it’s maybe that we end up starting to work on something else because now those are the highest leverage points. You don’t know any of those things unless you track this thing; you’ve got to track it and know your metrics and know your numbers and be able to make those decisions. So hopefully that makes sense David.

David Jenyns: Yes, with getting people to show up, no doubt you’ve tested this. I’m curious to know something like if you sell that webinar for $1 or something like that, have you guys done any price testing on that? Obviously it’s going to reduce the number of people who take it up, but you’d imagine the show up rate would be a lot higher.

Brian Johnson: Yes, we’ve been testing a lot of things. What we’re doing right now, we used to send people to the registration page and there was only the one date which was usually five days out that they could register for. Our script would just pick a date and that was five days out and that’s what they could do. The show up rate has now bumped as we’ve given them the option to pick three different dates with three different times. I’ll give the url so people can see the existing page so they know. I’ll give you the link and you can put it below this recording and you can send people to that.

Now it’s three choices. We also just split tested a fourth choice and the fourth choice is sorry, these times are not going to work for me, but I’d like to learn more. This is a perfect example of now being able to know what decisions can be because I tracked this.

David Jenyns: One thing that really sticks out for me what you’ve talked about there is the ability the way that you guys track everything down to such a minute detail. Critical path pops into mind where you can identify where that low hanging fruit is, those really key leverage points and then spend your time on what is going to make a difference.

One thing that Richard mentioned, that I’m keen to get your thoughts on, this idea that a lot of people when they get started, especially in information marketing or any business really, they’re always taught and had it drummed into them that the money is in the back end. But what you’re talking about here, it’s like you’re setting up a process and you talked about knowing the value of a client. Once you know the value of that client, can you tell us how that gives you extra power, because now you know what that client’s worth? How do you take that number and use it?

Brian Johnson: There are two pieces to that component. Most of the time you hear people throw around the term life time value and that is definitely an important thing. However, there is something else just as important that you never hear of much and contributes to the lifetime value of a customer is the life cycle of a customer. Have you ever heard that term before?

David Jenyns: Yes, please, dig into it.

Brian Johnson: First to answer your question, once we know the lifetime value of our customer, what we do with that, basically that gives us the knowledge to know how much we can spend to go out and acquire more customers or more traffic or more often more prospects. So if you have a really high lifetime value for a customer, you know, say you lifetime value is $100, then you know that you can spend up to $100 to acquire a customer. That is a good thing because now you can buy very valuable traffic at $15 registration or something. So that is very important.

The predecessor to lifetime value is life cycle of a customer. We get into high end marketing and things which most people don’t focus on but I focus on the life cycle of a customer because it helps to identify where a prospect or a customer starts to deflect from the public. What I mean by that is we track the normal avatar, the majority of the people coming to our site.

Now if we’re finding a point where they’re in the follow up for five weeks, six weeks, and then they suddenly deflect from us and they’re not engaged any more. That gives me the ability to find out where those points are in the life cycle, back up a week or so and make some changes in the text and do what I can to increase the life cycle of the customer. It also gives me the ability to identify spots that I can increase the amount of money the customer spends.

Once you know the life cycle, there are only two things you can ever do with a prospect or customer. One is you can either increase the life cycle of that prospect or number two, get them to spend more money within the life cycle that you have now. That’s all you could possibly do, so that’s what I want to focus my time on, is increasing my lifetime value and the way I do that is increase the amount of money they spend or increase the life cycle of my customer’s experience. So life cycle is a very important thing that too many people just don’t pay attention to. That contributes to the higher lifetime value of the customer.

Once you know those numbers and they’re not really difficult, but once you know those numbers, it goes back to your original question, what do we do with it? Well we know we average $126 per registration. I know I can make a lot of money. That is such a great feeling to have versus always hoping and wondering, I’m going to go spend this $1000, I sure hope that it works. I don’t have to worry about that because I know it works. This is a process that we’re tweaking to increase the lifetime value increases the registration. I know it’s going to work, now it’s just a matter of me finding the right traffic and taking this process and stacking it into different channels and continuing to do the same process for each channel.

It sounds confusing but it’s really not when you break it down to the simple fact of knowing your metrics, knowing where to focus your time, knowing what the lifetime value is of your customer. Those are components that really give you clarity about what to do next.

David Jenyns: Someone who is listening to this, regardless of what business they have, this can apply. It’s easy to say, oh, that’s internet marketing related or that’s in that little bubble. What you explained there, or information marketing even, that little bubble, that process can be plugged into any business. That whole idea that you were saying you and Rich were bumping your heads saying, hang on, we’re getting involved in these product launches, that seems to be chewing up a lot of our time. Sure we’re making great money but I’m so invested from a personal point of view that I can’t break away.

It’s the idea of creating a funnel, a series that basically enables you to have a sequence of events that you can gauge where the prospect is up to at each point. They get sold on the idea of your product or service no matter what it is and it’s all external of you. You then come in and pick up the pieces once they’ve self sorted them and self selected. It’s like the individual gets to self select before you even touch on that. I don’t know if you guys have ever tested it outside of the IM or even just the information marketing side of things. I’d just be interested to hear that.

Brian Johnson: Yes, we use the same exact process for all of our clients, whether they’re our coaching clients, all the way up to our million dollar clients we work with. We do this process with companies that are selling retail items, they’re fulfilling geo physical shipping to coaching companies to you name it, the same process can work for all of them. Maybe not the exact same structure but it goes back to what I said. We are human beings. The things that we like, the things that persuade us, that’s what the most important thing is, we’re doing that same thing. When it comes to metrics, numbers, understanding your numbers, that’s the same thing we do in building our company. there’s no difference, it just might be a lot more numbers, a lot bigger numbers, it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same thing. The fundamentals are so important to running a business.

David Jenyns: I think a lot of people make a big mistake. They think, oh, that won’t apply to me. That’s one of the big mistakes. You talked about some of the other mistakes like people not understanding life cycle. People get caught very much up in the whole technology side of things. They hear about this process that you’ve just talked about and then they stress over the implementation rather than you mentioning, that’s not where we start. We start off with those core components.

Are there any other mistakes? You’ve had a very varied business career and your entrepreneurial journey to get to where you are. Are there any other mistakes that just spring to mind that you think when people are getting online and they’re starting up businesses, where they go wrong?

Brian Johnson: Yes sure, I can give you some that I see from my experiences working in companies. One big one is that too many people spend their time on SEO and all kinds of things. You’ve got to spend 80% of your time on marketing and 20% of your time on everything else, especially with a new company, it’s so crucial. We’re dealing with a couple of clients at the moment who have developed some major financial software and they’ve been running this for two years and have spent millions and millions of dollars. I asked them the simple question, do we know if anyone is going to buy this? They couldn’t answer the question.

I said, how about, guys, if we market this first and number one we’re going to know if anyone is going to want to buy it and number two you’ll probably save a lot of money because there might be a lot of features you’re building right now that these clients don’t want. So that’s one example. We see that quite a bit.

The other thing that I see is people spending time on the wrong things. They’re spending time on things that don’t matter. I just had a client last week, a new client actually say to me, I need to know what’s the best way to protect my intellectual property and what law firm do you use and so on. I said, tell me how much you’ve sold of this product. They said, well, none, but we’re going to go big. So I said, you’re telling me you’re spending your time right now trying to decide how you’re going to protect your intellectual property for something you don’t even know that anybody is going to buy?

That’s another perfect example of people spending time on the wrong things and not the right things. There’s another one. Those are really big ones. The other one we talked about today is not knowing your numbers, not knowing your metrics. That’s a key thing. Another thing is trying to get better in things they think the customer needs but they’re not good at. Forget that. Focus your time on things you’re good at, you’re going to be outstanding at, to drive the company and get somebody else to do the things that you’re not good at. A lot of people say, I can’t afford it, I have to do it all in the beginning. Your company will grow a lot faster, it will be a lot less stressful if you didn’t have that attitude and you actually tried to find somebody to do the things you’re not good at. It will grow faster without a doubt. So that’s another big one that we see quite a bit. Those are the major things David for sure.

David Jenyns: You mentioned that idea of focusing on your strengths which I think is really key and having gone through your business coaching program and things like that, that is one of the first things that I know you guys get the individual to focus on, find out where they’re strong. Rich has got that image that he is really well known for, where it’s you in the middle and then all of the tasks that you need to do. It really represents how a lot of business owners feel, that sense of being overwhelmed.

You talked a little earlier about some of those big leverage points and break through points. I think one of them was, realizing, hang on, I’m not going to be able to do this all on my own, I need to build a team with me. Then I focus in on my strengths. Over the years, if you think about some of the key leverage points, if you look back and you say, the point at which I started to, I don’t know, get my customer service outsourced or the point at which I started to look at these business process maps that we’re talking about now. I don’t know if there were any key leverage points or turning points that you could look back on and say, that was a huge discovery for me.

Brian Johnson: Yes, definitely, some of them were things like understanding the importance of copywriters and making sure you had the right copy. Definitely automating, automating as much as you possibly can was another big one for me. I’d have to say the other thing that was a really significant eye opener for me, the more I got involved in marketing and was part of marketing and really focused a lot more on marketing and a lot less on technology and operations, the better off in the company we were.

That was a real eye opener for me because in my whole career I haven’t always been in marketing, I’ve been in operations and back end. That’s not as important as marketing. If you’re selling things and making money, you can do all kinds of things at the back end. But if you’re not, none of the back end matters. So that’s a pretty significant thing for me.

David Jenyns: Yes, I always get the same feeling as well. The line that sticks out in my head is if you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So as an operations person, you think about how can I solve everything with operations. If you’re a design person you think about how can I solve all my issues with design. Sometimes you need to step back and that discovery, which is a fantastic insight, that idea that marketing really is where the money is when you think about it. You can have a perfect product but unless people know it exists, then it’s not worth anything. So marketing really is that central thing.

The other thing that I always find interesting, you guys are very much on the cutting edge. Thinking about what’s coming down the pipeline for you guys in the tail end of 2010 and moving into 2011. What you’re talking about here with the event driven marketing material, I think for a lot of people that’s very much on the cutting edge. You always find that you might be two or three moves ahead.

So I don’t know if you can give us any insight into any other little things that you guys might be working on or you haven’t quite planned out yet. I’m probably putting you a little bit on the spot there but I don’t know if there is anything like that which comes to mind?

Brian Johnson: We used to be in the mindset of always coming out with something new but now we’re fortunate to get to the place where we are now, where we really truly have an automated business. Now we’re spending more of our time on not coming out with new products or things, we’re spending more of our time just getting better at what we’re doing. It’s great, we’re continuing to tweak these processes, and just continuing to build on something that works.

We’re spending a lot more time this year on more media buys, ads, just driving more traffic and continuing to split test, tweak and just build the process better and being able to share all that material with our clients. So you’re not going to see this year from us any significant new products come out because what we have are outstanding. It works for everybody that gets on it.

Our Business Growth System has been one of the longest selling, most successful programs in internet marketing. That’s something that we’re focusing on and we’re going to continue. We have our Founders Club which is our monthly continuity, our BGS (Business Growth System). We’re in these programs every month with our clients. So we’re always bringing them new things, there is always new material coming out, but it’s all related to what we’re all about. We’re helping small businesses and large businesses get to a sustainable point and an automated point, so we’re always bringing the latest information.

What we are going to do from April of next year, we organizing a major boot camp event here in the States with Rich Schefren and myself and someone from Jay Abrahams office. So that’s going to be a really hard core three day event explaining everything we do in the business and not showing people fifty ways to build automation, but the one or two ways that work, that we’re using every day right now that people can implement. That’s something that’s going to be happening at the beginning of next year. Other than that I’m actually happy to say, that’s all we’re going to focus on.

David Jenyns: As much as you say nothing new, that in itself, there is a big, clear shift there from product creation to ok, we now have the product, it’s all about the system. For me, hearing what you guys talk about, a really big break through is that idea that getting clear on what that life cycle and that lifetime value of the client is, having your automated system and then going out and buying media buys. Get out of the notion that you constantly need to be creating new products and if you’ve got a system and it works, the aim of the game is how much traffic can I fill in the top of that funnel? I know you said you didn’t feel like too much new was coming down the pipe, but I think you’re leading by example which is that idea, you need to be focusing on that front end once you get that back end established.

One of the ways that I think is the best way that people can get started with what it is that you guys do and, I’m a member, is your Founders Club. I’ll put a link to it for people. They can find it at davidjenyns.com/strategic. That’ll take them through to the Founders Club, introduce them to all of your different products. It’s a really low end price point wise front end and they over deliver on value with the idea that it’s pre sell and that idea of here’s what we’ve got, now you can check out some of our material. It’s a little bit of a gateway drug for lack of a better word. It’s one of the best ones I think out there and the material that is in there.

There are a few presentations in there that I think are just key and I think all business owners need to check out. So that’s davidjenyns.com/strategic. But Brian if people wanted to find out more about you, I know, like I said at the start of the call, you’re putting yourself out a little bit more than you have been. But if people want to find out more specifically on the things that you’re doing, do you a blog or some way people can keep an eye on or is the best thing just to keep an eye on Strategic Profits?

Brian Johnson: They definitely want to be part of Strategic Profits and the Founders Club and I know you have a link for the Founders Club, so they definitely want to do that. If they want to found out more about what I’m doing, they can go to Facebook and my fan page is called thewinebloggers on Facebook and that’s where my blog is, thewinebloggers.com. That’s just my own personal little hobby that I have. It started with Strategic Profits and us wanting to test a lot of techniques. There was a lot of software that we didn’t know if it was going to hurt our rankings. We started to test it on this wine blog. The wine blog is one of the top ten wine blogs in the world.

David Jenyns: One thing if I may, talking about the wine bloggers. I think I might have even seen on your Twitter stream or something like that, you had the opportunity to catch up with Gary Vaynerchuk too. So I don’t know if you had any comments there because he has quite a prolific business mind, obviously coming out of the wine industry. I don’t know if you have any comments on that.

Brian Johnson: Gary is a good friend and we’ve done quite a few things together. Gary is a great guy and a great marketer.

David Jenyns: I love his work. You’re definitely someone worth watching over at Strategic Profits as well, so people can click the link below to find out a little bit more. I might wrap it up there Brian. We’ve probably taken up a little bit more time than we were planning, but once you get on a roll, that’s what I love most. You just get on a roll and all the good work starts to come out. You’ve been very generous with your time and all the information, not holding anything back. So thanks again and I’m sure my guys will love this, so thank you.

Brian Johnson: Thanks David.

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