#5 Cash Now: Placement and Proof

Nic does homework, you get insights

Jul 16, 2023

This was posted previously but never sent as an email. It’s being sent as an email now because I am breaking all the rules.

Read about the Letter. It will be obvious how it’s breaking the rules of the “creator economy”. Then, circle back and read below, which explain why I love breaking the rules.

Read about the Letter here.

Breaking the rules isn’t new. See below, another excerpt from the retired direct mail newsletter:

Cash Now: Placement and Social Proof

I’m in the middle of building a top-secret program. Part of the process is tracing my steps from the day I opened my first business until now.

What I'm looking for are the levers that led to quantum leaps so I can dissect them and extract the core principles. Then, apply the same principles to the industries I am currently in.

Of course, I’ll also be breaking down the things that I missed. I would have made different decisions then if I knew what I know now. If I can pass it along to you, it might save you some time, effort, and energy.

As I was compiling information, I came across and set of old photos of Christmas cards hanging in my office. It triggered some glorious memories, so I crafted up this email:

Subject: That Time I Was A Total Idiot And Didn't Get A Return On My Investment.

“If you need encouragement, don’t become an entrepreneur.”

- Elon

Dan Kennedy always tells the story of a beauty brand that was struggling. They went to all the beauty trade shows and were advertising in all the beauty magazines they were "supposed to" be in. Yet, they couldn’t figure out why they weren’t getting ahead in the industry.

Well, it’s tough to get ahead when you do the same thing as everyone else, no? [I’ll share how they found the magic bullet for the business in a few minutes]

Years ago, before I had any B2B or coaching/consulting stuff, I still owned a majority of my nutrition company. We were doing well enough that we could pick and choose how we wanted to market and who we wanted to market to. In the nutrition space, we were somewhere between “a little too high” and "outrageously high" priced.”

Anyway, it occurred to me that I should join a high-ticket mastermind for high-ticket internet marketers. I had no intention of changing the price or internet marketing, so the idea was met with some resistance:

Do we really want to learn Internet marketing or be like Internet marketers? Why wouldn’t we join a program or mastermind specifically for fitness professionals?

No, of course, we don’t want to be like internet marketers. And no, I am not interested in joining a program specifically for our niche.

Counterintuitive?

Stick with me here.

I paid about $40,000 for the mastermind, broken into payments of about $3,400 a month.

I didn’t watch their training modules.

I didn’t show up to most of the live calls.

And I never downloaded their share funnels or built the strategy they were teaching.

All I did was show up to events.

I heard things like, "Bro, your stuff is so cheap, how can you even make money?" And... "Are you even getting a return? You don't even have an offer that would make sense for this mastermind." [This is also when I realized that I was making way more than them at the time. They couldn’t figure out HOW it was possible to make profits with a model other than their own. Which should have been an obvious red flag.]

At the time, our offer was a $1,500 setup fee for the first month of front-loaded support and then $900 a month ongoing. We had never paid for traffic or needed salespeople and had 300-400 active clients at any given time.

I attended four events that year and enrolled seventeen people from those events into our program. It was an easy sell because $1,500 was “so underpriced" to this market. It was also non-competitive with anything or anyone else in the room. It was a solution they didn't have but might benefit from.

So... ...I was paying $3,400 a month.

Enrolled 17 members at $1,500 setup each and a year of support at $900 a month.

17 x $1500 = $25,500 in set-up fees
17 x $900 = $15,300 a month recurring

That means we spent $40,000 and made $210,000. That doesn't account for the second, third, and subsequent years they stayed on as clients. It doesn't count the referrals they sent.

So... You tell me. How did I make money which such a cheap offer? How did I get a return since I wasn’t blindly following their strategy?

There are a few lessons here.

The first is the conclusion to the Dan Kennedy story:

I am paraphrasing here, but he calls it his “placement strategy”.

He told them:

“Go set up your beauty supply table somewhere like a farm equipment convention. They have money to spend, there is nothing else like it thers and you will stand out in a big way. Also, many of the people there had to be away from their families for a weekend. They’ll want to be sure to bring something home to the wifey.”

Second, what makes sense to most people doesn’t make any sense to a strategic mind and vis versa.

Most people get stuck on the form of a thing; how it looks, the labels, the name. A strategic mind focuses on the function of a thing.

Had I joined a fitness-specific mastermind, I wouldn't have gotten any clients from it because I’d have been selling a similar thing as them and at a much higher price. Best-case scenario, I would be learning the same strategy as everyone else...

If I implemented what I learned I would be more like everyone else - which is the exact opposite of what I want.

The best place to be, strategically, is often where you think you don’t belong. And if you get it right, it won’t make sense to anybody else.

If you need to learn skills, learning them from others that have done it can shortcut your process. But if you already have the skills, think about breaking away from others doing the same thing.

Placement matters.

If you are doing the same thing in the same place as everyone else, placement is likely working against you.

Can see little half-brained action there, no? This is the challenge I am facing - transferring concepts from one domain to another in a way that is palatable and high utility to you. I think I’m up for it.

**READ: This post called “Half-Brained” and the below section will make more sense to you.

For now, let’s just talk placement, duality and inversion.

Placement, Duality and Inversion

The concept is super simple. What is your industry doing? And what is the opposite? here is an example":

See.

Simple.

Some of the inversion may not make sense - but that’s okay. You are training a muscle/ developing the skill of inversion. I would do this to every aspect of your business. It will make you a better problem solver.

And it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone except your bank account.

You can also just list strategies your competitors are deploying and invert them: