Key Takeaways

 •  Dig into the surprising secrets of a winning ad that he has spent over a million dollars on over the last 18 months.

•   Why the offer is the most powerful part of any ad -- and how he consistently comes up with ones that crush.

•   How he never loses more than a hundred bucks on testing an ad.

•  The insanely simple principle that fueled his rise from welfare to 

     riches (and you don’t have to be a finance wizard to understand it).

•   How a crazy idea and two helicopters helped give a $36K three-week 
      billboard advertising campaign eternal life.

RESOURCES/CONTACT

https://billygeneismarketing.com/

Follow on instagram at billygeneismarketing

Speaker 1 (00:00):

In this episode, we interview the Wolf of advertising. Mr. Billy Jean from Billy Jean is marketing and we tied,

Speaker 2 (00:09):

Ah, just

Speaker 1 (00:11):

Died. All right. Three, two, one. In this episode, we dive in with the Wolf of advertising, mr. Billy Jean from Billy Jean is marketing. We dive into his winning ad that he has spent over a million dollars on over the last 18 months and exactly how he goes about creating, winning offers and winning at plus how he limits his losses on his poor ads. He talks about how he never loses more than a hundred bucks on testing an ad and how he's incredibly disciplined, uh, into the pro. Uh,

Speaker 1 (00:51):

So sorry, who has to ever these interests three, two, one. In this episode, we interviewed the Wolf of advertising. Mr. Billy Jean is marketing. He's got over a hundred thousand students in 75 countries and 800 million people have seen his videos. He's an absolute legend and OJI in the world of advertising. And in this episode, he talks about his process for creating rich ads. And it actually has nothing to do with ads. It's all about the offer and how to craft a winning offer and how you can guarantee and ensure your success. Plus, he talks about how to limit his losses on poor ads and how he thinks about managing the numbers and the data and the financials in his business every single day and how he responds to them. It's an amazing episode.

Speaker 2 (01:40):

You enjoy.

Speaker 1 (01:44):

Welcome to another episode of the rich dad. Poor dad podcast is your host sack Johnson. I'm with mr. Dylan Carpenter. Dylan, are you excited?

Speaker 2 (01:53):

That's an understatement, man. I'm freaking out.

Speaker 1 (01:56):

We have a legend today. It is the one and only mr. Billy Jean Billy Jean is marketing man. The Wolf of advertising. I'm so excited to have you here, man. I honestly, I appreciate it. Thank you very much, Robert. And by the way, I just love the name of the podcast. It was inspired by you dude. I was like, Wolf of advertising was just so legendary. I love that. Oh yeah. Well I'm just saying it was inspired by you made that move first. Um, I was like thinking for months on how we could pull that off. If anybody's listening to this podcast and they don't know who Billy Jane is just, just stop listening. Um, you've been sleeping under a rock man, cause you're all over the place. You've uh, I mean, gosh, you got over a hundred thousand students now you're in 75 countries. You're just telling me you've got, what, how, how many times do your video has been seen like 800 million, 800. That's almost as many downloads as we get on this podcast. Um, amazing. And I, I I'm, I'm pumped to have you on. And um,

Speaker 2 (03:13):

It's interesting with those visa, like, cause they're always targeted right at entrepreneurs or people that entrepreneurial space. So like my world is really funny. Like if I'm outside and I'm any in any place that has like entrepreneurs in it or something like that, like some award recognizes me in a second, but like if it's outside of the entrepreneurial world, I'm just like, who the is that guy? So it's perfect blend where I still get my life. But if I go into the realm, you know what I mean? Like it's it's yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:38):

I love it, dude. That's awesome. So tell me a little bit, like what's new with you? Like what do you, what do you got going on right now that you're excited about? And, um, you're most known for, for your, for your advertisers that you rolled out like a couple of years ago, but uh, I feel like you've been like super focused this year. And so,

Speaker 2 (03:56):

And um, honestly, you know, for me on the professional side, it's our virtual experience to our students. You know, we, we have a studio here in downtown San Diego and we spent a million bucks renovating our office and um, and just to deliver an incredible experience, like when people come to our calls, it is immersive. Like everyone's got their zoom cameras on, it's scored with music and all of that. And we got like seven different cameras and we do break out rooms for people to like practice. So like, you know, just think about any webinar you go to. Right? Usually you just sit there, everyone's muted. You can't see anybody in, someone's just talking to the president. You come here, we're like, hello. We say, hi, there's a tech test before, you know, and Tony Robbins really, the UPW really led the way with that.

Speaker 2 (04:38):

Him and Danny shout out to them. Um, and I was like, yeah, we're going, we're going, we're going to do that. And, and put it the business application to it, right. Because they're in personal development, but it's like, when's the last, so we'll, we'll do an exercise like, Hey, let's practice writing headlines or something. And then you'll go into a breakout room with 20 other entrepreneurs and practice together and get to share just nobody does that. You know, we do it at the most affordable places in the world. And that's important to me, you know, because that's, that's the impact, that's the reach, you know, like I think it's so funny as cause sometimes we level up and people are like, we'll only focus on like high ticket, only find people who can like really afford those services. And I'm like, nah, that's not how I started.

Speaker 2 (05:14):

Like, let me, let me give tools to the people who can't afford it. Like that's actually the game, the people who wouldn't. So I always say like, let's deliver a Harvard type of, you know, uh, education level, but do it to ways that, you know, 30 bucks, like 30 bucks, 40 bucks, like, and, and also too is when you create raving fans, they they're like, I paid like my favorite thing is someone just goes like, man, I feel like I stole from you. That's my favorite thing. Anybody can say. And I'm like, what do you mean? They're like, I just get so much value and you're only charging this. I'm like, that's the point. Yeah. That's how you build brand. And you know, so to me that's the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (05:53):

Well, first off there's nobody else. I know there's actually, there's one guy I know that's been a million dollars on a studio and it was actually where I started in marketing or like 10 years ago, it's this guy named Mike, Mike Keenings who used to have this business called traffic Geyser. And um, he did like this, you know, eight figure launch. And like he spent, he's like, all right, I got enough money to just go crazy with this, with this studio. And it was, most people would be like, see that as like a liability. You're like why you're like over investing, but there is so much money. Mike has made off of bringing people into that studio, including his own lines.

Speaker 2 (06:32):

I mean, we made our money back. We made our money back in the first six months we lived through an event like virtual event, like tickets and did it right away. It was like the easiest return on investment. Like, you know, people don't realize

Speaker 1 (06:45):

The gamble though for you, right? Like when did you say like, Oh, I have the balls. I have the balls.

Speaker 2 (06:50):

I mean, it honestly didn't require any balls to be real with you, but let, let me explain. Why is we already had a massive student, not massive, but we had, we had a large student base online and when I asked them, Hey, would you guys like us to create a hub where you can also come in person to, they all said, yes. So how ballsy was it? When I already had people who were asking to pay me the money for whatever. And I'm like, okay, here it is. So, you know, that's why. And then also too, like I view content, you know, props, things of that nature, just like most people be real estate. You know, people I'm invest into real estate. My property value will go up and X amount of years I'll flip it. And you know, it's, it's a forced savings account.

Speaker 2 (07:31):

However you want to, you know, quantify or qualify, whatever. And to me, that's what a video is, except the difference is I don't gotta go through escrow. It doesn't take me a whole bunch of money. I can literally make a video, put it some places and it can sell for me 24 seven. And it brings me cash. How is that? Not an asset with a lot less risk. So like, to me, you know, those plays, people are also looking into like, yeah, does it take risks balls? I'm like, no, it was really logical to me, you know? Uh, and every single investment that I've made into content, um, has, has been a killer return. Even my Lamborghini, you know what I mean? On my Ferrari Bentley, all that . We get returns on all that stuff. I just put it in, add it, it increases the click-through rate, which brings my costs down, which makes my cost per sell cheaper. And it literally pays for itself in months and months. So, you know, it's a different way of doing things, but it's effective.

Speaker 1 (08:27):

I love it is. So we were talking right before this and you, I was asking, we were telling you the format of the show. I was like the first thing we talk about rich ads. And I love it when, when people come on the show and like they're, they're kind of knee jerk, instant reaction of like what their, what their response is and why that's their answer. And you immediately said, what's all about the offer. And it wasn't, it's not even about the ad. Like, we're like, Hey, we're talking about Anthony. And you're like, it's about the offer. And that makes sense. Honest. And it's coming from a guy that like, I don't know of a single other person that pushes out more offers than you. I don't know how many, I don't know how many domains you have. Like it's

Speaker 2 (09:09):

How many domains, but you know what it is is all of it. So you see a lot of front end stuff, but all of it leads to the same backend that we've been doing for six years, which is weekly calls on how to get more customers. So it's the front end, right? And this is actually the thing I struggled with my background was doing lead generation for franchises, right? That's how I got good at this stuff and started to master it. And I still have a lot to learn. You know, I still got a miles to go. I can't wait to see where I'm at in a decade because I still felt like a crazy student, you know? Um, but what I realized is when we let's say I'm running a campaign for a really large gym franchise or something like that, a campaign would start off.

Speaker 2 (09:44):

We get high volume in the, in the cost would be low. And then over time it starts to creep. And when that happens, people, they, they go and let's show it to different people. Let's change the colors, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can do all those things. And you get like a little minutiae change, but you want to blow it up, change the offer. And that's why I started to get really frustrated, dealing with franchises. Because as you started working with bigger franchise at the more corporate they are, and when you're dealing with corporate, you know, they're like, this is our offer for a year and we're going to stick with it no matter what, and they're going to lose, they're going to lose you. It doesn't work like that. You don't dictate your corporation. Like the market dictates how that works, not you.

Speaker 2 (10:22):

And so I used to get in arguments like, yo, y'all need to change the offer. They've seen your one week offer for forever. And I'm like, look at the most successful companies in the world. Let's look at the most successful franchises in the world, subway, which is the biggest. And I think McDonald's behind it. Um, and what do they do? Five, $5 foot long McDonald's rib McFlurry. Uh, uh, come here, play monopoly, uh, two fries, 29 cents cheeseburgers. But you get there and it's always the same thing. It's the same , you know what I mean? They put a little fancy on it to offer you something, to give you something new, because new is a powerful word in marketing, but then when you get there, it's the same process, you know? Do you want fries with that? What'd you like to shake? You know, would you upgrade to supersize? Like, so it doesn't change. You know what I mean? Like, so you, I mean, down to such a great example of that, it's like, you're like, McDonald's is always McDonald's, but yet they're always offering new things,

Speaker 1 (11:13):

Your process, what's your process for making a great offer. We basically spend about 20 minutes before this and you know, you just came up with like offer after offer. You have this ability to just kind of cut through the .

Speaker 2 (11:31):

No, I start with the impossible. And what I mean by that is the best offers are always things that make you go, well, how the can we do that? Like, think about an offer. Like, Hey, what if we can, what if everybody that came into the store, we gave a brand new Lamborghini to like, would that not crush, no matter what, I wouldn't sound like. They're not crushed. Hey, with your purchase of this pack gum, here's a brand new Lamborghini like, Oh , there's a waiting line. Right. I'd have a line to sit here from San Diego to Los Angeles. It would work. Right. So instead of trying to figure out my time of what's the offer, I make up something ridiculous and say, well, how could we make it happen? Switch it because that's what creativity is. Crushed. Creativity is crushed into trying to figure it out. That's where you lose. So I spent a lot of time with my team is like, stop saying, can't stop saying, I don't know, like just what would actually make them come and get them excited, then it's our job to figure out how can we deliver that? Impossible. And yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:30):

Okay. So I want to talk about your funnels too, for a second, because your offers it's like, it's always a crazy URL and then it is

Speaker 2 (12:41):

Yes.

Speaker 1 (12:42):

Yes. Easy, easy to remember URL. It's always like, not like a super long form sales page. It's just like a medium sales page. Not like a ton of VSLs like on them for the most part as a, you know, as, as of late. So I feel like you, in the last couple of years, I've seen you go from like crazy VSL, like crazy videos to just be like, what's the offer? What's the domain, here's the page. And like, let's go. And I dunno, I'm just curious how that's evolved for you. Is that a fair, accurate depiction of how you've evolved in terms of creating our offers,

Speaker 2 (13:18):

Parts, parts of it? You know, we, we really let the data dictate. So I'm, I'm very on, uh, committed. Like I'm not in a relationship with the way I do business. I'm in a relationship with winning and money and helping people. So, you know, when I realized that I realized the amount of pivots, I need to come with that, the reason why people don't see a ton of VSLs with this, because when I write a VSL, we usually end up using it for like a year. So, you know, we got over 30,000 members in our membership site with one single VSL that we ran for like a year and a half, you know? Um, uh, another one I just recently did, you know, we, we launched this whole thing. Um, and if I had, if I lost it all, what would I do? Here's my 30 day business plan.

Speaker 2 (13:58):

You know, we've got 25,000 students in that and a handful of months, um, with a VSL. So VSL is actually my whole thing. Even like last week, I just shot a new VSL. It's fire to bring up our new membership for the GA. You know, that does take time, like, you know, thinking. So the thing is, is the sales mechanism is the hardest part of the equation. A lot of time, it takes the most time. There's the most variables, et cetera. So when I have a sales mechanism that works, I try not to touch it, adds it easy. I can shoot, I can take out my phone and shoot an ad right now and throw it up. And you know what I mean? I can strike out. Right? You know, our, our, our process is not about, um, uh, uh, uh, doing this and that it's about speed.

Speaker 2 (14:38):

You know, we, that's why we have in-house, you know, five media people to bang out videos, et cetera. That's why I have, uh, five people on my marketing team that are in charge of direct response advertising for the Billy Jean is marketing brands. So that's 10 people in total. So, you know, most people's rotation or process looks like this. What should we sell? They spend three days arguing about that. And then they go, okay, well, how should we sell it? What is it? Facebook and scam. They spend another three days a week goes by. And then they say, okay, well, let's, uh, let's do this. Okay. Well, how are we going to film it? They planned it out that another week goes by. And then they finally test it two and a half weeks later. And then it doesn't work and they get discouraged because so much energy time and resources came into it.

Speaker 2 (15:17):

And then they say, it. And then they don't want to do something. And the next thing, the thing that happens though, that triggers all this is, uh, expenses come every 30 days, expenses come. So as the owners and decision-makers, we start to get frantic, why I need to do something different to add stuff, doesn't work and we get discouraged, et cetera. Now take our process. You know, most people take weeks, months to test one thing for us, years, years. Yeah. Years we'll test an ad daily. Hey, I'll test an ad. I just test. I just made one, like two days ago, we tested it. It sucked. We spent a few hundred bucks on it and scrapped, move on. So think about it. I can take 30 shots before somebody takes one. How can you compete? It's just math, you know? And one of those were hit, you know what I mean? And, but a lot of people realize we strike out a lot. I actually, my last two ads, I just did sucked. Um,

Speaker 1 (16:02):

That's a perfect segue to pour ads here because I love just to recap, like you're rich as just like start with the offer.

Speaker 2 (16:11):

The other thing is for, for everybody listening, it's like a good ad lasts for so long. That's the other point. That's why I don't mind like taking the shots then creating that rhythm because when it lands and when it works, you can use it for years. I use, I use some ads for years in cycling back. Cause a winner is a winner. It's a mess. What's

Speaker 1 (16:33):

The winner for you that you're still using right

Speaker 2 (16:35):

Now, this, this beach house ad as like we were there at the beach house for 4th of July. And honestly the only purpose was just to get drunk and have fun with my friends. And I'm Paul, our media guy was like, PIL, you should just shoot an ad. And I was hammered. I'm like Brian shooting him a ad right now. Like, I don't really feel like, um, but I did. And I literally, it was like one of those, I think it was like one or two takes like 30 minutes. I'm like, Paul, like, stop, like I'm done with this . And it crushed, you know, dollar leads on, you know, Facebook, YouTube and led to sales and, and, and a whole bunch of members and whatnot.

Speaker 1 (17:07):

How much you think you put, how much media, how much do you spend on behind that one ad?

Speaker 2 (17:12):

Uh, now, uh, uh, God, um, we probably spent a million bucks on it at least, um, at least, um, and it, and yeah, it just, it just worked right. It worked and it was good. The message was good, you know? Um,

Speaker 1 (17:26):

So it was so separate from like everything you were doing before, right? It was like high production, like you were talking about, we have the one you were in a beach house you're on like this little whiteboard and I'm like, this is so not like Billy Jean, like raising production message. The message like was, was on, on point,

Speaker 2 (17:45):

Right. The message and the offer, that's it. That's what, and does it, and I see students do it all the time. Right. Because the hard part with them, when I teach ads and people see our ads is they think they have to do what I do. And I'm like, absolutely not. Like it doesn't even work for the people when you're like, and you know, people don't like, you know, like this don't, don't do that. And, um, you know, but I have students like in their own little way there, they shoot the video. Some people read their lines in the video and it's still crushes. Shout out to Brooke. You know, my broker's a student who had been with us for years. And, uh, we went through a script together and one of our sessions, I was like, I'll just to shoot it. And she literally reads the whole thing, you know, on camera. Right. And I'm like, it. Who cares? Put it out, whatever. And it worked and she's, she crushed it. Like, again, it's like when the message lands and also to some people appreciate that. People love to know that like, yo, like it's just a human being in front of me, like putting the word out for the business, you know, you see how people rally around supporting small businesses. Right? Like, you know, it's, it's a thing. So, you know, it's the message in the office. That's the game.

Speaker 1 (18:44):

All right, Dylan, I want to know you're not perfect, man. I want to talk about a poor ad, but I want to talk about, because, because it's easy to talk about that poor ad that you spent a hundred bucks on. Right. And you're very disciplined in that front and my hats off to you, but like tell me a time where you went in a little bit over your skis and you kind of strayed from this, this approach and you were less disciplined and you kind of paid for it.

Speaker 2 (19:13):

Never again. It's not because like, I'm so cool. They're so disciplined. It's because you just watched the numbers. It's like, yeah, like I got a question. If you spend a dollar and every time you spend a dollar, you lose 75 cents. How much do you have to spend before you stop doing it? Like if you spend a dollar and you're losing money, like you don't have to like, what the you want me to do? Just keep spending to lose more money. Right. And I just, I just know a truth about advertising. If it works, it works. And if it doesn't, it doesn't, that's what people don't get because they go through that cycle. Well, it took me so long to make this ad, so they try and force it to work, but not because they think it should work because they just are mad at themselves for putting so much into it.

Speaker 2 (20:00):

So now it's like, well, I'm going to get my money out of this because I did it as ego. So I just, you know, so no, I don't have any like crazy losses because it sucks now time, right? Like, yeah. I may like get too fancy and we may do some funny and like, you know, highly produced some things and before testing it, but also too, I use my Instagram a lot. Like my Instagram to me is just like a playing field where I can test this. Something's going to work. So like, for example, I'll sit in the marketing team and we're like, Oh, that's a good offer. I'll I'll take my camera out. You can scroll through my Instagram. You'll see it. And I'm like, Hey guys, if I created a book that teaches you, this, this and this would you want to comment below and then no exaggeration within the first three minutes of the response, how many comments I get?

Speaker 2 (20:41):

I will know if I'll make an ad out of that or not. And if I see it pop in like, Oh , then we'll literally go big. Hey, let's build an entire out of this. So, you know, any, that's why I love advertising. It's just like the safest gamble ever. Like people are like, would you go to the casino and just put a hundred grand on hand? People are like, hell no, because you can lose it in a second. But if you spend a hundred grand in ads, you realize how many decisions you would have to make to continue to lose that money. You would literally have to sit there and refresh your account and be like, yeah, I'm down to grand. I'm gonna keep losing money on 1100, 1,212, you would have to make, you would have to literally say I'm okay. Losing money, like a thousand times real number if they're responsible, you know? But again, people do it. Not that they're just unfamiliar with the process, you know, they're groomed from, you know, uh, the radio and television era where a sales rep tells you, Hey, it's going to be 20,000 bucks for three months. And there's nothing I can do. Or your money stack or a quarter million bucks or a million bucks for three months. And you just have to play it out. They poisoned, they poisoned the air.

Speaker 1 (21:42):

This is what I see on here.

Speaker 2 (21:48):

People like it. So I haven't been forced to do it

Speaker 1 (21:58):

Instagram today, tomorrow if that's what the people want. So for those people that can't see, I'm basically pointing out to Billy, you know, he was just saying he tests offers, but I only see like a dozen of you, like getting ripped here.

Speaker 2 (22:20):

That's that's it. So I'll give you a great example. Like, you know, the progression was like, for everyone, like I, from my twenties, I was like extremely in shape. And then I just got lazy as . And I got really fat. And then I was like, I'm not going to be fat anymore. Let me get like really in shape again. So like posting pictures, et cetera. And people just engage in them like crazy. And I'm like, all right, cool. That's what people want. So I turned one of those into a story ad, and now it's an ad that we're running right now to go watch a VSL dictated that, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (22:46):

So the recap I'm going to do with me,

Speaker 2 (22:49):

Here's the funny thing I don't, I don't even like social media. This is what people don't realize. I am. I'm truly a direct response advertiser and a salesperson, social media and posting . I can't stand. Like I literally can't stand it. Like, you know, I'm not out there , you know, Sharon memes and . Like I just post, like, what's easy. Like I work with my, I work on my training every day at two 30. So if you see a surgeon fitness ones, it's because one, it gets engaged on. And two, it takes me two seconds to do it. Cause we're already working out and I just don't want to, I don't even want to do it, you know? And like with my ads, right? Like I can film something once and then I can make it live for years. I never have to do it again. Social just like, God it. update you my life when I'm eating. I hate that . I want to chill at home. When my daughter, when my girl, you know, eat dinner and like play video games, you know, shout out to among us, if anybody plays it.

Speaker 1 (23:40):

So I love it. It's uh, Billy has no losses. You heard it here first.

Speaker 2 (23:50):

And you know, you have bad months as a company and stuff. Or like, what happens is you go through that rhythm, right? You test an ad, it doesn't work. You test it out. It doesn't work. And now you're like two and a half weeks in. You realize sales have halted. And now, you know, you hit your email, right? Like, so hold on. I lose all of the time I lose. But in regards to like an ad that bombed like, nah, like not, I don't know, Paul, what you think? Like, I don't know if there's any, like we don't. I dunno. Well, I get, I'll give you a great example too. It's like you, you know, you can solve anything with creativity. So take billboards, for example, right? We've got like four billboards in San Diego. One time, it was like 36 brand. And like put our picture up there and and had a fun call to action.

Speaker 2 (24:25):

And it led to an automated over, uh, ever webinar and it went okay. Um, but it wasn't like phenomenal. Like we, we lost a little bit. That was me sticking my neck out though. Cause you commit to the billboards regardless of what happens. And I was okay with that. I literally put it out with the expectation mentally of like, Oh yeah, I just burned 36 grand doing some stupid , but then it's like, you do it. And you're like, I don't want to burn 36 grand. That's stupid. So what do I do? We, we rented a helicopter. This is true. This is ridiculous. As I said, we're really in a helicopter and had took a bunch of budget ropes. Paul had a camera shoot. Now we actually got two helicopters. Then we got two helicopters, me and my COO we're in one, we got another helicopter that Paul was in filming to chase us and the camera. And all we did was fly over all of the billboards so you could see them in the city. So that, cause the billboard only gave me three weeks. So if we filmed the billboards, now we can make those billboards last forever.

Speaker 2 (25:18):

That's how you get it. All right. So, you know, when the billboards got popped in, when I posted on social media that I have a billboard, you know what I mean? So it's like, you can get out of anything with creativity, you know what I mean? And then resourcefulness. So that's awesome.

Speaker 1 (25:34):

I love it. So let's dive into this next section where we're really bridging the world of advertising and finance together, right? We're this, the enemy of this show is a, what we call market or math. We're rounding up to the nearest million and um, and uh, sharing a lot of, a lot of gross numbers, but we also want to uncover really how you look about, you know, managing the cash in your business, how you look at, you know, driving revenue growth, um, and how that really plays out operationally. We've had people in here talk about, you know, their mindset on things. You know, people talk about how they'll just like, never leverage like credit or investors or anything like that before. But what are some of the guiding principles, you know, for you, as you think about like, you know, managing the cashflow?

Speaker 2 (26:22):

Well, a couple of things, you know, my background is, I mean, my parents both grew up on welfare, so there was no like, you know, talk about like funding or venture or capital stock bond, you know? Like there was none of that . You know, when I went to the university of San Diego, that was the first I heard anybody talk about any of those things and it intimidated the hell out of me. And I, I had no, I literally had no clue what any of that meant. Like, and when I say no clue, like literally imagine hearing something for the first time and note, by the way, this isn't about white, black or et cetera. But when people are mentioning the word privilege, a lot of people don't like that word. That's what they're talking about. It's a privilege to even know those things exist.

Speaker 2 (27:06):

And people don't realize that that's the privilege. Like my daughter being black, my daughter is going to grow up extremely privileged. She will be a black girl. That's privileged as , just because I'm a dad, you know, you know, she's going to know that a don't know. Right. And again, it's just one passionate about like hooking people up and educating people, you know, and doing it in an affordable way. But anyways, I aggress. Um, so my whole thing at an early age was money was simple to me. Which was, is it there? Or is it not there? There was no like, well, let's get this, uh, you know, nice cush funding round where we can sit on a couple of mil and half time to figure it out. It was a, I ain't got no money in the bank, so we need to go make some sales.

Speaker 2 (27:53):

And I still live by that guiding principle, granted more sophisticated approach. Now there's other things I do, but it is. I obsess about the money that is coming into my account. Um, as a whole, as a company, et cetera, I have an assistant, I have two assistants, but one works specifically with finances and she sends me a report every single morning, a text message where I can see how much money is in every single account and what we are plus or minus for the month relative to that day. And if I noticed we had five days of not hitting the goal of what we want to be at, then I will call an audible and do a promotion or something to get it. Like, I literally let that number, guide my actions to make sure I'm always following the data, you know? Um, so that's one way that I kind of,

Speaker 1 (28:43):

I want to highlight that for a second. If you're not hitting your growth numbers or your, your, the revenue targets, not like the minimums, right? Like the growth part.

Speaker 2 (28:55):

Glad you picked up on that because so many people, at least in the beginning stages, right. For early in the beginning stages, that's the psychology is I was, if I just made three GS, then I could pay for this, this and this. And then you realize when you're doing your thing, it's we don't even talk about man. I ain't talking about no minimum. It is yo what, where we need to be. Right. Like when you, you know, so,

Speaker 1 (29:17):

And then the second is the bells are ringing. If you're not on there within five days, meaning you're taking immediate action to get that back on target, which means you are absolutely incredibly nimble and responsive to that number, which is like the way it should be. Right?

Speaker 2 (29:39):

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that's it. Yeah. It's nimble is kind of our thing. And it's, you know, also too, like I mentioned five days, but even like a day, if I see a day of like down, you know, we can anticipate you do some loan. If you can anticipate, like what's going to bring in sales and what's not right. Like pipeline, pipeline is fundamental in any business. Every business knows when they're going to have a big week. Like there's no like , don't just sometimes they do, but almost very rarely people just fall out the sky and all of a sudden sales again, you know, when you're going to have a day, right? Like if my recurrings low, my accounts receivable as are low, we don't have any ads that are promising, et cetera. My sales team, I got, you know, three guys who are off on vacation.

Speaker 2 (30:19):

There's no, you know, holidays coming up. So this team is out to, you know, money. It's, you know, it's amazing as entrepreneurs, how many times we pretend money is a mystery. It's never a mystery. It's always right in front of our eyes. And you know, my favorite quote is right. You know, like the amount of offers the money, the amount of money you make is directly correlated with the amount of offers that you make. But I asked you about a time like that. They tell me they're in a slump. I say, Hey, how many people did you ask to buy? And I have many sales the last week. Cool. How many people did you ask to buy during that time? Well, I didn't ask any because I was set up the end, the end. It's always the answer out of a cash crunch, ask people to buy and then you work backwards.

Speaker 2 (31:02):

Okay. Well, how do I, who do I ask to buy? All right, well, how do I get those people in front of us? Well, that's called marketing right in advertising. And when I got them in front of me, what do I say? Okay. And what do I charge them? And how do I collect the money? Cool. Marketing and sales. Great. If you figure those two out that you can figure out the rest of the , you know what I mean? Like you can hire other people to help you figure out the rest of stuff, but you gotta be able to make the engine go. You know,

Speaker 3 (31:24):

Curiosity, whenever you get these kinds of morning texts, you know, with the growth decline, have you been noticing a lot more fluctuations this year with kind of code or people are maybe

Speaker 2 (31:33):

Yes. So what happened in March? Um, when she first started going on with, you know, uh, pandemic Renata, uh, the uncertainty really did create a drop in conversion sales, et cetera. And what I mean by uncertainty is now people would make a joke about Corona. Like, Oh, it's whatever the world is fine. We're going to continue. That's about a, I don't know, a million times more competent than March one, literally. I mean, me and my girl, we had our refrigerator, uh, uh, packed because we were like, are we gonna be able to get to the grocery store? Maybe not like this was, this was real people, like, forget, like this was a real thing during that time the uncertainty did. And what happened is in 2019, our message was really focused on scaling, right? Hey, you want to grow? You want to scale dah, dah, dah.

Speaker 2 (32:18):

So all of our ads and our promotions and our communication with our customers about scaling, but in March, wasn't anybody thinking about scaling, they would think about surviving, right? So then yes. And the morning times I see the numbers declining. I see from marketing standpoint, cause I get my, you know, executive summary every day with each department, you know, I see like we're getting less leads on the sales team. We're closing less and more payment plans. I'm seeing all the numbers, right? The numbers are dictating. So I say to myself, okay, we need to pivot. And I said, you know, there's still a truth here, regardless of what happens with the economy. People still need to make their business go. Matter of fact, I would argue, they need to make it more, but why aren't we landing? Because that's what we do is we help people, customers.

Speaker 2 (32:59):

And I'm like, okay, maybe it's the way we're saying it. So I was like, all right, what are people really thinking right now? And that's the question to ask yourself, if you go into your customer's head, what will you hear? And what I heard was this is how am I going to pay my bills? What am I going to do? Job employment was an all time high. How many did it? I says, okay, if I lost it all and I had 24 and I had 30 days to get it back. If I had no resources, no team, no credibility. And I had to start over. I didn't even know what to sell. Here's exactly what I would do. And then I put that on Instagram. You'd probably scroll back and find it. And I was like, Hey, if this, if I did this, would this be interesting to anybody to chop up or talk about or something like that?

Speaker 2 (33:36):

I put something up and I think the response was, was crazy good. And so then we, um, I said, it, I'm going to do it with you guys. 30 days. I'm going to bring in a group of people who wants to do it with me. And then when we put it out to the people, and I think we brought in like in a few days or a week or something like a half, a million bucks, just like that of people who wanted to do it. And we knew it was popping. And then from there we continued to push it. And like I said, since then, you know, uh, you know, 25, 30,000 people, something like that have taken us up on that. And here's the thing, as we've seen in the climate, that message isn't going anywhere. Right? So that will be something that we push probably for the next six months foreseeable. Um, but again, maybe, maybe a year, that's how long the conversation may be relevant. You know what I mean? And so, um, and then guess what, when it goes back to a conversation of growth, then we'll switch our message again, because that's the game, you know?

Speaker 2 (34:31):

So

Speaker 1 (34:32):

If you were to simplify your business, right, let's just subtract like all the fancy rememorable domains and all the front end offers. Obviously advertising is a big Boulder sales, a big Boulder, but like, what is the core offer of Billie? Jean is

Speaker 2 (34:48):

As marketing. We teach small business owners how to get customers using paid advertisements period. That's it, that's all we do. And we don't, we don't go away from that. It's, you know, we, we, we have a live call every Tuesday where we walk people through it, we have a platform and resources to help them do that one thing. And then you can purchase additional support if you want to be more hands-on and that's it. And now I was saying is that's the, that is as a, as a CEO and the leader of the organization. That is the discipline that I try and put on us to not shy away from that because every time I've shied away and did too much, et cetera, everything always goes to . We always take steps backwards when we pull our head, you know, and I'm just talking to myself so many times about it's like, it's, it's forever.

Speaker 2 (35:35):

People will need it in a growth economy. Want to go bigger? When things are pulling back, they need to survive. There's no time we're getting customers is going to be played out. And it's also the most to me. And my perspective, it's like a blank spot in entrepreneurship. Like, just think about it when you're in college or like business school, you learn about so much mergers and acquisitions, you know, uh, Corumbere finance and, um, you know, or, or marketing where they call it price, product, promotion, and structural organizational behavior and all the, you learn all this . But what about the course that says, get a customer , where was that course at? Like, it's weird. It's almost weird. Right. But then you realize it's not that weird when they model everything off of fortune 1000 companies, and then they try and dissect that and talk about that. So I'll build a business when 95% of the businesses that has nothing to do with, and they'll never see that type of structure. There's no customer one-on-one. Yeah. You know, and that, and then sales, like, that's it. And so,

Speaker 1 (36:43):

Man, I thank you so much for talking about like all this stuff and how you think about running the business. This has been like absolutely gold. Uh, tell everybody how we can support you. And, uh, and what you got.

Speaker 2 (36:58):

Follow me on Instagram. So you can see my reluctant posts. And like, people are always like, yo engages everybody who comments, everybody go look at my engagement on my last thousand posts. I don't engage with . I don't check my DMS. I don't engage a if I see like, homie's like people I know know like in real life, like I made like, like their stuff, like I'm the worst at social media. Um, but like, yeah, follow me anyway. I'm following you. I'll pixel I'll pixel you or retarget you somewhere online in this space and have you buy our at some point, I promise you I've been chasing some people for eight years and they're like, I finally got in after all this time. You're good. I'm like, obviously I'm not that good. It took me eight years to catch up. I missed something

Speaker 1 (37:51):

Amazing, man. Well, this has been an amazing episode. Thank you so much. Follow Billy Jean on Instagram. You hear Billy. Jean is marketing. I love it. I love it. Awesome. Thank you so much, Billy.

Speaker 2 (38:03):

Thank you.