[00:00:00] Dave Polykoff: Welcome to the first episode, we'll say of the personal brand blueprint, where we take a little bit of a different tactic, uh, in this, this rebrand of the What used to be called brand science, where now we're going to be talking to personal brands that have grown a successful business on the heels of a successful personal brand and kind of pop the hood and understand what it was that they did, the things that they focused on, the tactics they use, the channels that they were focused on.
[00:00:28] Dave Polykoff: That allowed them to grow such a successful business, successful, personal brand, so that you, the audience can learn a few of those tactics yourself, maybe apply it and see if it works for you as well. So today with me, I have Brian Smith, a serial entrepreneur and world class leadership coach with an impressive track record.
[00:00:48] Dave Polykoff: Uh, Smith has coached 1000 plus entrepreneurs, worked with hundreds of small businesses, raised millions in capital, and led several multimillion dollar projects. He's also a member of the young entrepreneur council [00:01:00] and invite only group held as America's most elite entrepreneurial organization is currently the founder of strategy ladder.
[00:01:06] Dave Polykoff: So I'm pleased and excited to have a conversation today, Brian, welcome to the show.
[00:01:12] Brian Smith: Awesome. Thank you, David. So good to be here.
[00:01:14] Dave Polykoff: Yeah, for sure. And, you know, we had a really great conversation before the show. Uh, started and you're kind of giving me some insights into, uh, how you started your business and how personal branding was a large part of that. So let's start there kind of, you know, talk to me a little bit about what strategy ladders is, how you came up with that concept.
[00:01:33] Dave Polykoff: What was the kind of catalyst for it? And then what was the early days like, and actually launching that and getting your first few clients.
[00:01:41] Brian Smith: Absolutely. So what we are today is a, what we call a holistic consultancy. We have a strategy advisors who have built and scaled eight figure consultancies. B to B service businesses, and we partner with B to B service businesses, agencies, virtual restaurant companies, events, companies [00:02:00] and so forth to help them scale very, very rapidly.
[00:02:03] Brian Smith: We also have a lot of subject matter experts that we bring in, and we have a very unique format that leads our our clients to generally achieve 3 to as much as 8 X year over year growth. Um, but getting there was, uh. A bit of a journey. I started, uh, about a year ago. I was telling you earlier, I, um, I've been an entrepreneur full time for about 17 years and about a little over three years ago.
[00:02:31] Brian Smith: Now, I took a job for the very first time. I had taken a, uh, a poultry exit out of a agency. I had started, um, just, uh, Terrible partnership. I just needed to get out of it. And I took a job for the first time and at that point 14 or 15 years. And, um, I was depending on that and that income as I was moving my family down to La Paz, Mexico, and literally the [00:03:00] day before we crossed the border to drive down, uh, they fired me.
[00:03:04] Brian Smith: And so it was, uh, probably the, um, worst experience of my entire professional career. And that includes a investment banking stint, which says a lot. So I, um, I, uh, So I, uh, arrived in La Paz with, um, we, we actually crossed the border with about 6, 800 in our bank account, which we had to drive two days to get there.
[00:03:28] Brian Smith: So that's a lot of gas and an Airbnb. And most of that money was already committed to our deposit and rent for the house that I'd gotten based off of what I was making at the time. Um, and so. I had to get to work really, really quickly. And, you know, when your back's against the wall, you're willing to do stuff that.
[00:03:51] Brian Smith: You weren't really doing before. So, um, I immediately went back to what I know, which is, um, consulting [00:04:00] founders and, and working with founders. And in the past, I had done a lot more just direct leadership coaching and sort of like mindset coaching and so forth, and also a fair amount of consulting. But I always found it's, it's easier to sell consulting than coaching.
[00:04:14] Brian Smith: Because with consulting, there's generally a much more direct ROI on that work. So I immediately started hitting every single contact that I knew and tapped into a buddy of mine who is, um, one of the top, uh, Upwork gurus in the world, Adam Palmer, and he kind of gave me some guidance on how to land some clients there as well.
[00:04:35] Brian Smith: So immediately within the first two weeks, I got my first client and it was an agency owner. And, um, so I worked, I was working with her and I immediately had this recognition that, you know, one of the benefits of working with agencies and I've built agencies in the past is, um, any B2B service company that doesn't have any sort of [00:05:00] product, if they're not a direct to consumer, there's only about.
[00:05:02] Brian Smith: 10 to 12 different variables that you can actually influence. And so I got to work really, really focusing on those. Um, as my ICP because, or ideal client profile, because, um, I knew that they would be an easier group to work with. There's far less variables to deal with. The other thing I started doing is in the past, you know, I'd started posting on LinkedIn, you know, I put up a post and then not again for another two months, but, uh, I made it my, my, my, my, my, my, my, Mission that every single morning when I got up and I was living right near the beach before I walked on the beach before I went outside anything, I sat down, I wrote a post and I went through a list of activities on linked in and I'll get into that in a minute.
[00:05:50] Brian Smith: But what I, what I first started doing is I started. Doing two things. One is sharing intimate details of my life. So people [00:06:00] could see like, hey, this is somebody who's interesting, right? Like, there's a lot of boring people out there. And I wanted to stand out from, you know, the average suburbanite, you know, sitting in
[00:06:11] Dave Polykoff: was this? So we can kind of paint the picture because LinkedIn's taken kind of an evolution.
[00:06:15] Dave Polykoff: Over the last few years.
[00:06:17] Brian Smith: Yeah, so this was, um, almost 3 years ago. To the date, like it was 3 years and 3 weeks ago. So that was 2021. Um, it was September 7th that I signed my very first contract, um, for this. So, um, we, um, so I was, you know, and at that time there was, that was, you know, back when Luke Matthews and some of those people were really taking off where it was, um, Basically the equivalent of like reality TV or trash TV, right?
[00:06:52] Brian Smith: Like LinkedIn just wanted eyeballs time on on site. And so almost anything that got people [00:07:00] engaged would get would get views. And so I was writing about my experience, moving to Mexico and so forth. And that, uh, that's something that people were really interested in, especially just because Post COVID they were, they were stuck indoors.
[00:07:14] Brian Smith: They were, they were just now getting out, like realizing that, Hey, there's, there's other stuff out there.
[00:07:19] Dave Polykoff: Well, let's jump in real quick. So you
[00:07:21] Dave Polykoff: had an offer. You had your consulting offer and you started to get, you know, a client or two here and you started to post online, but it sounds like at that time it was, you were posting less about the offer itself and more so just like personal stuff, which was attracting eyeballs, but maybe it wasn't necessarily like, was it
[00:07:43] Dave Polykoff: helping convert or kind of what was the,
[00:07:45] Brian Smith: I, it was starting conversation.
[00:07:47] Dave Polykoff: Yeah,
[00:07:48] Brian Smith: at that point, it wasn't what it was doing was, yes, I was able to convert some of those into clients, but what it was doing was just, I was being inundated with lots of people who were not [00:08:00] founders that were not, you know, my ICP I was getting, um, I referred so many people to my immigration attorney that, uh, she now does work for free for me because I think I referred something like 60 people to her.
[00:08:13] Brian Smith: Um, and so. What I started to realize was, um, you know, even, even at the time where things would take off the viral posts, you know, when I'd get a post that got, you know, 500, 000 views on LinkedIn, the people that were adding me were maybe, you know, at best 5 percent my ICP and. I started to take note of something.
[00:08:39] Brian Smith: I started looking at the Justin Welsh's and the other, and the other really big sort of accounts out there. And there, I started to analyze this in a different way. And now I've been posting about this for several years and it's being now talked about more, but it's revenue per follower. And what I realized is once you hit about 40, 000 [00:09:00] followers, that revenue per follower drops exponentially.
[00:09:03] Brian Smith: And so someone like Justin Welch, in fact, I did an analysis of, of his revenue per follower. He's only at about 2 per follower. So if you're operating with an account that's much smaller, his approach will not work for you unless you're happy making, say, 40, 000 a year off of 20, 000 followers. And honestly, most people don't have 20, 000 followers.
[00:09:26] Brian Smith: So. What I started to do was in addition to posting every day, I would go through, I would max out through sales navigator. My, um, My invites every single week, just focused on my ICP. I would not accept invites from anyone that I didn't know personally or were in my ICP. And I messaged every single person that was my ICP that accepted my connection request.
[00:09:55] Brian Smith: And what that does, if you think about how the algorithm works, number one, [00:10:00] you may have noticed this in LinkedIn. This was true then, and it's true now. You can receive a message from someone that you've never messaged before. And even before you read it, their content is showing up pretty high in your feed.
[00:10:12] Brian Smith: So now I'm biasing the algorithm towards my ICP. The other thing that I realized really quickly is why is it that Justin Welsh, even Alex Hormozy and these other people are not able to sell high ticket offers. The reason that they don't sell high ticket offers is that in order to have a high ticket offer, you are speaking to a much more narrow group of people.
[00:10:34] Brian Smith: So I started to focus on just having that narrow group of people. And I also noticed that buyers don't engage, they DM. So I would have posts that were actually my lowest engagement posts, but highest DM posts. And so I started to really, really
[00:10:52] Dave Polykoff: you and say, Hey, I, I, I saw your whatever, whatever post and I needed to reach out like that. Is that how you're correlating it?[00:11:00]
[00:11:00] Brian Smith: It would be that or one thing that I've done religiously is I track what the post was, the number of DMS I sent that day, the number of responses, the number of inbounds. And so, um, to this day, uh, actually my team tracks that now so that we can correlate those things. A lot of times you don't find out until you get onto a phone call with someone.
[00:11:22] Brian Smith: You know, I'd have a lot of people that said, Hey, I've been following your stuff for six months and they're, they never engaged once, but then they said that one post that you, that you posted, like it really resonated. So I wanted
[00:11:32] Brian Smith: talk
[00:11:33] Dave Polykoff: think that's a key point for the audience is like, some of your best clients are not going to be those that are constantly engaging on your content. Like it's, it will be kind of a one day, just eventually they fill out the form and they're like, yeah, I've been
[00:11:47] Dave Polykoff: following yourself for some, some time now, and you would just, you would never know it.
[00:11:51] Dave Polykoff: It's almost
[00:11:51] Dave Polykoff: like people who engage with your content are typically, you know, friends, close acquaintances, maybe people who are like tire kickers, [00:12:00] but yeah,
[00:12:01] Brian Smith: There are people that have screw around Yeah, there are people who have time to screw
[00:12:06] Dave Polykoff: Right. Right.
[00:12:07] Brian Smith: somebody really is out making money They're not sitting there and just spending a ton of time engaging and so A couple of other things that I'll just sort of, as an aside, I'll, I'll point out. I got to know some of these really, really big influencers on LinkedIn.
[00:12:23] Brian Smith: And there was a couple of things that really stood out. They would, a number of them came to me wanting to hire me. And so they would share with me where their numbers were. And at the time I was only charging a little over 3, 000 a month for what I do. Some of them could not afford it.
[00:12:40] Dave Polykoff: And to, to, to pause here. So at this time, I mean, you have a sizable following now, where were you in terms of like industry clout, you know, I know we look at kind of follower count
[00:12:52] Dave Polykoff: count is like, you know, A way to kind of gauge that, but you were saying some of these big accounts wanted to work with you.
[00:12:59] Dave Polykoff: What do you think, [00:13:00] what were you doing? What were you saying? How were you presenting yourself that you were able to win over some of these accounts?
[00:13:08] Brian Smith: So the reality is I, I ended up in almost every case, not working with them for a number of reasons. And I'll go into why. Um, the reason that they came to me was I have business experience and I can help them actually monetize what they had. The thing is, most of these folks don't actually know how to monetize what they have.
[00:13:26] Brian Smith: I know personally a handful of people who actually there's one. Fairly large influencer that has about 120, 000 followers. Now, at the time, he had about 80 or 90, 000 followers. He came to me. He's teaching people how to sell on linked in and he came clean that he's never sold a single person through linked in.
[00:13:48] Dave Polykoff: Sheesh,
[00:13:48] Brian Smith: This is why this is why you see me do. Exactly. This is why you see me do all of these influencer teardowns and now I'm blocked by a huge number of influencers because I, I actually go [00:14:00] out and share what is really going on. I don't necessarily share the confidential information, but when somebody does a breakdown of this is how much time I spend every day.
[00:14:11] Brian Smith: LinkedIn. I'll say, okay, let's break that down. This person just showed that they're spending 44 or 48 hours a week on LinkedIn. How much money can they really be making from the other activities that they're doing? So
[00:14:25] Dave Polykoff: they, were they finding you from the content you were publishing or was this from your outbound
[00:14:30] Dave Polykoff: early days?
[00:14:31] Brian Smith: both, so I would, I would engage in their content and then I would message them. And when I message, um, my philosophy of LinkedIn is it's, uh, it's like going to a networking event. And it's almost really LinkedIn is like going to a banker's networking event where everybody's wearing Brooks Brothers suits.
[00:14:50] Brian Smith: And if you wear like a bright red hoodie, you're going to stand out.
[00:14:53] Dave Polykoff: there
[00:14:54] Brian Smith: And the other thing is you don't sell at a networking event. You just connect and then Talk [00:15:00] later. And who do people pay attention to at a networking event? They are the people who are the most charismatic, the people who tell the best stories and are the most engaging.
[00:15:09] Brian Smith: And so, um, I've been asked many times, like, what was it that helped you the most with LinkedIn? Um, It was 2 things. It was 1, not living a boring life. So I had something to talk about and the other was hanging out with fishermen all the time. So I learned how to tell good stories. So,
[00:15:26] Dave Polykoff: There's the, there's a storytelling hack. Yeah.
[00:15:29] Brian Smith: yeah, yeah. So it was, um, but I, I would. Even still to this day, even if I'm putting like technical business information up there, which is, you know, generally stuff that's higher converting for our ICP. I'm still putting photos of me in Mexico or me with my family and so forth because when people come to me, um, at this stage, people will.
[00:15:54] Brian Smith: Literally get on a call and be like, Brian, I don't need to hear your pitch. I know exactly what you do. Let me tell you my problem. Cause [00:16:00] I want to work with you because they've already, they know my background. They know my family. They know, you know, my business and the people that work within my business.
[00:16:08] Brian Smith: So I think being overly forward with what it is that you're doing. And I, I also found early on my best performing pieces were the ones that I sat down, wrote and post. The ones that I would edit multiple times, they were the ones that had far less, far lower performance. And so I try to, you know, make it as authentic to me and that that's really been, um, part of the, the journey for me is to be as authentic as possible when I'm posting and that has paid off tremendously.
[00:16:45] Brian Smith: Even my DMS, when people look at my DMS. I share, you know, my inbox with my clients all the time so they can see what's going on. They're like, oh wow, that's, that's the way you talk. Exactly. Like you, you make it as, as personable, you know, as, you [00:17:00] know, conversational as possible. Cause nobody wants to feel like they're being sold to.
[00:17:04] Brian Smith: They want to feel like they're talking to another human. So that starts in the feed that goes into the comments and so on. Um, I will add another thing, and this is something that really helped me early on, and to this day still helps me. Um, you have to understand that polarity is power. Fundamentally, that's what power is.
[00:17:24] Brian Smith: It is polarity. And so if you are not taking controversial stakes, nobody's going to take it. Nobody is going to pay attention. So call out Alex Hormozy, call out Justin Welsh, call out these people on what they're doing and give an alternative take, make it actually factual and intelligent, don't just argue for the sake of arguing.
[00:17:46] Brian Smith: But I would also go into, you know, if I was one of the first comments on an influencer's post, oftentimes I'd be like, this is absolutely wrong. And then go into why and guess what was the highest comment on that, uh, on that [00:18:00] post every single time. So taking that controversial stake is, you know, people love drama.
[00:18:05] Brian Smith: But then it also helps for the people who actually are buyers. It helps them see that you understand something well enough that you can actually hold an argument, an intelligent argument about it. Of course, you're going to have all the people who, um, aren't capable of that. Um, there's other influencers sort of in my space who, um, have blocked me just because I call them out on stuff that like has been proven wrong 20 years ago.
[00:18:34] Brian Smith: For instance. But, you know, that's the way some influencers work out and it's sort of the, uh, you'll notice a lot of people that come from Twitter to LinkedIn. They, they're the ones that would literally DM me after I posted something to say, like, why are you doing that? Like, why are you calling me out? Um, but.
[00:18:52] Brian Smith: You know, it's the, if you're not there to be able to have a healthy debate. And I encourage it in my comments too, which, um, you know, [00:19:00] that gets people engaged enough, signed clients from it, where somebody comes in and tells me that I'm, um, that I'm a, uh, that I'm wrong about something and I'll go back and forth with them and explain to them why I believe that they're wrong.
[00:19:15] Brian Smith: And I, it ends up with sales calls and sometimes converting.
[00:19:19] Dave Polykoff: Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's kind of one of the core content strategies too, is this mind transformation. It's like so many influence or push influencers are pushing the same rhetoric, the same strategies, and you find that that's. Incorrect. You know, and the, the kind of zeitgeist of the industry is just being kind of like a school of fish being led in one direction.
[00:19:45] Dave Polykoff: Um, and then your clients, your, uh, your ICP is attempting to do that and is. Because it's, it's incorrect or it's maybe not right for them specifically. We'll say, then [00:20:00] they'll get frustrated and they'll think, oh, this isn't working for, this doesn't work. Um, or this whole, you know, they want to flip over the table and say, you know, forget it, but then you come along and say, well, wait, wait, wait, what they're preaching is not correct.
[00:20:13] Dave Polykoff: Like you shouldn't be doing that. You should be doing this right. Don't do X. You should, you really need Y and going to like wake up your, your client and go, oh. This all makes sense now. Like I, it's because I'm doing the wrong thing this whole time. Sounds like, you know, Brett has like the, uh, Brian has the, uh, the, the solution that I've been looking for this whole entire time, I understand now why. It hasn't been working. So like to
[00:20:43] Dave Polykoff: be able to present the solution, that correct solution to what the industry has been pushing this entire time, again, it's kind of like showing up to with like an orange blazer to, uh, uh, you know, the networking event where it's like, oh, okay, maybe we should be looking over in this direction,[00:21:00]
[00:21:01] Brian Smith: absolutely. And, and, you know, people start to get it. Like if you're working in, we work with high ticket offers. And so when we have clients that come in, like I have some clients that have sub 10, 000 followers, but they're doing between one to 3, 000 per follower. Like these are big, big numbers. They're doing more with less than 10, 000 followers.
[00:21:26] Brian Smith: Then Justin Welch is doing with whatever his number is at now, like they're,
[00:21:32] Dave Polykoff: a hundred and something.
[00:21:34] Brian Smith: yeah, he's, I think he's at 300 something across multiple platforms. Yeah. And so,
[00:21:40] Dave Polykoff: And that's, that goes to through, like, I think a common misconception is like, you need a large following to make a lot of money.
[00:21:48] Dave Polykoff: And like, you as you're stating here, it's really not about quantity. It's about quality. And then what you do with that quality following.
[00:21:57] Brian Smith: Exactly. And there's one other thing to keep in [00:22:00] mind, too. When you look at the people with the large followings that have, like, say, the low ticket business model, it's not just whether or not you can follow what they did to get there. You have to look when they started and what was the situation when they started.
[00:22:14] Brian Smith: Justin Welsh did something that, you weren't willing to do, right? If you're starting today, you weren't willing to take the risk back in, I think, 2017 or 2016 when he started actually posting and trying to sort of become an influencer on LinkedIn. So the reason that his growth was the way that it was, was because he got in, in a completely different market condition than you.
[00:22:39] Brian Smith: And as you already addressed, like the algorithm has changed substantially on LinkedIn, even just in the last three years, his tactics will not work. And you can also see like when some of these guys are releasing new, you know, Post templates and things like that. You start seeing the same patterns showing up in the feed.
[00:22:58] Brian Smith: And it's, it's [00:23:00] something that I think many people fall victim to, which really pains me because oftentimes people are coming to us where they've built up an account and they might have 15 or 20, 000 connections and followers on their account, but. Basically destroyed the account because, um, this is actually a case study that you can see with, with what, what has happened in is happening with Alex Hormozy.
[00:23:25] Brian Smith: He went very, very broad and then he said, okay, we're going to actually focus on this B2B content and like much more actionable business knowledge. Well, If you notice his content, he's already started stepping away from that now, because what happens once you make that switch, your engagement is going to tank tremendously.
[00:23:47] Brian Smith: And so if you think about how the algorithm works, if, um, and this is not just on LinkedIn, it's YouTube, Twitter, and so forth. If you've got say a hundred thousand followers, but only 5, 000 of those are your [00:24:00] ICP, you put up a post and the first people that it shows it to chances are those high dollar ICPs, Also aren't sitting there on LinkedIn engaged with your content.
[00:24:10] Brian Smith: So it's going to show this, you know, more technical information or this high dollar problem information to people who don't understand it and don't engage with it. And then what happens, that post starts to get buried. And we're humans. We want to get that feedback and you go from having high engagement to almost no engagement.
[00:24:27] Brian Smith: It doesn't last very long. And that's why you're also going to see Hormozy continue to go back and do what he's doing. He's got solopreneurs making 5, 000 a month coming to his Las Vegas, uh, events now. It's, it's a self fulfilling prophecy every time.
[00:24:44] Hey, Dave here... obviously, but I want to just pause this episode real quick and say, thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Brand Science. I hope that you're getting as much value as a viewer or listener as I've gotten as a host.
[00:24:58] And if you are getting [00:25:00] value from this episode, It must mean that you enjoy nerding out on all things personal branding, content creation, and strategy, which means you're my type of person. So I want to connect. Once you're done this episode, go down to the show notes where you'll find my LinkedIn profile. Click on that link, head over to my profile and send me a request. When you send the request, there'll be that little pop-up that comes up, that you can add a note in the request.
[00:25:26] Just tell me that you found me from a brand science episode so I know that you are one of those loyal, awesome listeners of mine. And let's connect and learn together. Anyway, just want to say, love you. Thanks for listening. Let's connect on LinkedIn and a yeah. Back to the episode.
[00:25:42] Dave Polykoff: And it's tough too, because it's important. There's, there's like this dichotomy, this double edged sword when it comes to post engagement numbers, where on one hand it can be very like fluff metrics. On the other hand, it does point you in [00:26:00] a direction of, okay, what is my ICP care about. And am I on the right track with what I'm talking about?
[00:26:06] Dave Polykoff: Like I'll, I post video content consistently and a couple of them pop off to like a million impressions. And I'm like, okay, apparently that's something that people care, care to listen to and other ones, you know, get. 500 impressions. And I'm like, all right. So it, and again, is it, is it cause I, it was the wrong date, wrong time, whatever, who knows, but, um, clearly there's something that people, you know, when, when something really spikes up good indicator that people are interested in it, um, so it can kind of help.
[00:26:38] Dave Polykoff: Guide the boat in terms of your content strategy, the topics you talk about and such, but then at the other end of things, like don't discount a really a quality piece of content, just because maybe only got five or six likes or whatever, or a couple hundred views, you know, I'm sure even if you get one client out of that, it's still worth.
[00:26:57] Dave Polykoff: Worth posting, but it doesn't [00:27:00] feel as good in the sense of like, you know, the, the one that really exploded and got all the likes and views.
[00:27:05] Brian Smith: Well, I think you're bringing up a good point, but I want to bring up a counterpoint to that too, because what ends up happening is, again, that million views, you may get one sales call from that 500 views, you might get three or four from, because it's a much more targeted, um, It's a much more targeted, you know, content.
[00:27:28] Brian Smith: It's much more speaking to a core issue that a small group of people are having. And so we're always looking at revenue through the platform where really we couldn't care less about the followers,
[00:27:41] Dave Polykoff: And it's tough too, because
[00:27:43] Brian Smith: the engagement numbers and so forth. Like we like to, to see them just to see where we're at also to know, because, you know, I've been, uh, gone through a number of attacks where, you know, The influencers are using all their secondary accounts to report every piece of content I put up and so forth, [00:28:00] but you know, I think that the The core thing is looking at the numbers and I guarantee you Anybody who's had massive account growth?
[00:28:10] Brian Smith: I guarantee you our revenue growth is probably 10x at minimum what theirs has been with much more tepid Growth in terms of our overall follower count. So it's, um, if you're only looking at in feed metrics, you're going to end up not making nearly as much money as if you're just looking at what hits the bank account as a result of those posts.
[00:28:33] Dave Polykoff: Sure. Well, let's talk about that. So I know your early day strategy, early, early, early days was posting more of like personal content. Then you saw, okay, I'm not attracting the right eyeballs here, started to tweak that content strategy. And that was also in combination with, it sounds like outbound and Engaging with people who, who's engaged with you.
[00:28:58] Dave Polykoff: So I think one [00:29:00] important point here is with your personal brand, it's not just about publishing content. There also needs to be kind of a boots on the ground strategy of like actually reaching out, proactively reaching out every day. And doing some of the grunt work to like, you know, message people proactively.
[00:29:16] Dave Polykoff: What, how did that that's early days. How did anything kind of evolve from there as you started to get more attention? Like also to like, when you were getting DMS, what was that for those who want to understand how to convert is kind of multiple questions. So we'll focus on this one when you were getting, uh, DMS from, from people interested in your, in your offer.
[00:29:39] Dave Polykoff: What. Was the conversation like, how did you convert an interested DM into a new client?
[00:29:47] Brian Smith: Well, whether it's an interested, so an interested DM is going to be different than somebody who you're reaching out to. So I'm going to hit on both of those. If you're, um, if somebody reaches out to you because they saw a [00:30:00] post, And they bring up something with their business. The fastest thing that you can do is say, Hey, that's something I can help you with.
[00:30:07] Brian Smith: You want to hop on a call? Like too many people want to engage in just long messages. The shorter the messages and the more to the point, if you're dropping that link in there for them to schedule, most of the time they're going to schedule. And then you can always just throw your link into. The search bar and go through and see every time, you know, that's a week or older where you are the last one to have sent a message you just keep following up that right?
[00:30:34] Brian Smith: keep on. Yeah. Keep on re engaging. You have to be persistent. The other side of it is, um, you know, we practice something called a situational I. C. P. which is, um. Identifying the problem or the situation that you can alleviate for a client, but you haven't really identified that situational ICP unless you can identify they're experiencing that problem before you speak to them.
[00:30:57] Brian Smith: So as an example, one thing that we see a [00:31:00] lot of times with founder led businesses is they have really, really weak offers. They're selling services, not solutions. And so as a result, they're in a position where it's almost impossible for them to ever get out of sales, for the founder to get out of sales and our clients want to sell.
[00:31:16] Brian Smith: Their business at some point. And if you're still involved as a founder in sales or operations, if you're lucky, you're going to get like 1.2 times EBITDA. So maybe a little more than you make in a year, the moment that we pull you out of sales and operations, you're at a minimum tripling that number, if not getting it up as high as 12X So that is something that we know right away. I can look at. Somebody's linked in. It takes me, I've taken our team through this many times. It takes less than 30 seconds for me to do this. I look at their, their profile. I look at their, um, their company page. See, do they have an operations manager? Do they [00:32:00] have anyone in biz dev or sales?
[00:32:01] Brian Smith: And then I look at their profile, their website and I see how do they position their offer. So right away I can go in and say, you know, I'm Hey, Dave, I checked out your website. I also checked out your, your company page. It looks like you're still running both sales and operations with your business. Is that right?
[00:32:18] Brian Smith: And so what am, what am I doing there? I'm asking a question that is in a way, sort of turning the knife a little bit. Cause those are, those are, pain points for a lot of founders. And so that would get them engaged. The other thing that I would do is I would go and say, Dave, I checked out your website and I see that you are just, as an example, that you work with e commerce brands, but I'm not sure what type of e commerce brands or what you do for them.
[00:32:43] Brian Smith: And the key is you have to have a well built profile. So people can see that you're an expert in, In offer development in working with the, in my case, offer development and working with founders of agencies and founders of B2B service businesses, I would get somewhere in the ballpark at 25 percent of [00:33:00] those messages responding back.
[00:33:01] Brian Smith: You know what? We've been working on trying to dial this in. Like we haven't, we haven't got it figured out yet. And from that I had, if I got that type of response rate, we'd have close to a 50 percent close rate. And so you want to find those messages that sort of twist the knife. Now on the flip side, um, this is actually something, you know, we didn't develop, but it's a, it's a really, really easy message.
[00:33:25] Brian Smith: If you have an inbound request, you say, you know, Hey Dave, thanks for, for connecting. Are you here to scale and exit your business in my case, or are you just here for the killer content? So you're giving them the opt in. And so when they say, Hey, I actually want to, you know, scale and grow my business.
[00:33:44] Brian Smith: Cool. Let's have a chat. Boom, right away. You're going ahead and going straight to getting them scheduled. So people overthink it, but at the same time, like this is something that you need to be doing every single day when it comes to sales, when it comes to messaging [00:34:00] quality is the result of quantity. So you just got to do this again and again and again and again, and you're going to start to figure out what works for you.
[00:34:07] Dave Polykoff: Yeah, what I love to is what I've seen work for on mine as well as, yeah, being up front with, hey, are you interested in the offer or do you just want to grow your network or you're just here for the content? And so that puts it up front. What, what kind of relationships are we about to have? Um, so that you don't want every new connection.
[00:34:30] Dave Polykoff: There's some value that I'm sure you can derive from, but, um, You know, you kind of, it was so much inbound opportunity coming in, you know, as you grow your personal brand, you'll be getting a lot of new friend requests and such new, new messages and such. So you kind of have to prioritize certain messages over other ones.
[00:34:45] Dave Polykoff: And so having that up front with like, Hey. Is my offer of something of interest to you if they go, absolutely not just want to grow my network, you kind of like deprioritize a slightly versus like, Yeah.
[00:34:57] Dave Polykoff: man, I really saw what you're doing and love what you're [00:35:00] doing. I'd love to chat about it. Okay, let me like prioritize this on my to do list right now.
[00:35:03] Dave Polykoff: So, you know, that up front, you're not creating pen pals, you know, with every new connection, like. You still should establish relationship, establish rapport. I've had times where someone's come to me and said, Oh, I'm just growing my network and then kind of like shifted the conversation and three, four messages later, I'm sending them my, my link to schedule a call.
[00:35:24] Dave Polykoff: So it's not, people can start with like, yeah, I'm just here to grow my network, but eventually lead into actually having a call as well. But it's good to at least kind of understand. Why are you, why are you knocking on my door early on? So, you know, how to kind of like navigate the relationship from there.
[00:35:39] Dave Polykoff: So I love that when
[00:35:40] Dave Polykoff: you also, so it sounds like kind of the, the, the universe of your marketing efforts is, was strongly built on LinkedIn. Did you have other assets that you were also working with in terms of like a lead magnet? YouTube newsletter, anything outside of LinkedIn.[00:36:00]
[00:36:00] Brian Smith: up until about April of last year. Um, I had. Um, actually, no, it was even later. It was really until about August of last year. I had a terrible one page website that I built myself and I am no web developer or designer by any means. Um, and that's one of the things that I tell people all the time. If you're getting started, you really don't need much.
[00:36:30] Brian Smith: You don't need much. You have to have a focus on your profile, focus on your messaging and just have something that shows that you're legit because it's what matters is getting them on a phone call. You get them on the phone call and then you can sell them from there. And sometimes having too much actually is going to slow that process down.
[00:36:50] Brian Smith: And so I've really, really focused on, you know, even now we have, we have a much fancier website. We actually acquired a [00:37:00] agency earlier this year and, um, they, you know, the website's great, but it's still like, we don't want to put too much there because we want. To provide just enough to push people to schedule and I'll add one other thing, um, whether it's through our newsletter, our LinkedIn content, um, now YouTube as well, we we literally give away all of the secrets.
[00:37:25] Brian Smith: Because that is what's going to attract the people that actually buy. Um, it's one of the ways that we also make sure the people that aren't going to buy aren't going to waste our time trying to get information from us. So we just give it all away. But the reality is, is most people can't apply it. So they still will come to us.
[00:37:42] Brian Smith: I've had many people who've said, hey, you know, I took these things that you were writing about 6 months ago and they've helped us grow and. You've already made me money. So I'd love to work with you now. And so I, I highly, highly recommend like nothing is sacred. Just give everything away [00:38:00] and people will come to you because of the quality of what you're sharing.
[00:38:04] Dave Polykoff: And before this call too, we, we talked about that your personal brand is what helped launch your business. But then that got to a point where you started to take a little bit of a different approach where you've actually kind of pulled back from the kind of traditional, I'll say personal Brown personal brand founder led strategy and kind of started to implement an alternative approach.
[00:38:29] Dave Polykoff: Can you talk to us about that?
[00:38:31] Brian Smith: Yeah. So as we grew our team, um, I started bringing on other founders who had founded, scaled and exited. Eight figure B to B service businesses as well as other people like the founder of the agency that I acquired and so forth that they all had great positioning and a presence on LinkedIn. Now what we've done is we have a sort of content generation process that we do [00:39:00] internally to help all of us create better content for all of our linkedin profiles and now moving into youtube as well so that what we can do is actually build the profiles of everybody on the team because I don't want this to be the Brian show.
[00:39:15] Brian Smith: I want this to be something where I can start stepping away. Like about a year ago, a little over a year ago, I was doing about 44 to. As much as sometimes 50 hours of client calls a week these days, it's less than 10 because I've got the team that's stepping in and doing that. But to do that, I've got to build their profiles.
[00:39:32] Brian Smith: And I hear this all the time that people say, well, if you're building up their profiles, what is it going to, like, what happens if they leave? Well, that's the risk you have to take and why you have to create a great environment for these types of people to work in. And so not only are we doing that, we have, um, um, You know, a, like appointment setters and SDRs that are building their profile every single day, sending out the connection requests and doing the messaging in the, in the inbox.
[00:39:59] Brian Smith: [00:40:00] Um, I've got somebody who does that in my inbox as well, basically full time for all of us. So what that means now is we have this wide net that maybe if you don't resonate with. You resonate with Kaz or Josh or Austin or any of the other people on our team. And as a result, then we're getting so many more, um, calls scheduled.
[00:40:21] Brian Smith: In fact, I was told that between Friday afternoon and Monday afternoon, they scheduled 12 sales calls. So, you know, we are, we're able to schedule, and that was only working on the weekdays, not over the weekend. And so. We're able to get quite a bit done and be able to afford to have those resources while continuing to build these people's profiles.
[00:40:43] Brian Smith: So my goal is, you know, with everybody on my team, I want them to have personal brands that are big enough that they don't need to work with us, but they still choose to because it's the best place that they can possibly work.
[00:40:54] Dave Polykoff: Yeah, it almost sounds like a little bit of like a employee retention, if you will. Like you said, all right, well, what if [00:41:00] they leave? Well, it sounds like you have like a system in place to kind of help cultivate that personal brand. So if they were to leave somewhere else. That doesn't have that, you know, some of those assets and systems and strategies that they were getting with you, most likely not going to get elsewhere.
[00:41:17] Dave Polykoff: So it's kind of a reason to stick around. It sounds like,
[00:41:21] Brian Smith: Absolutely. And that it comes in down to sort of the team that we've built. We have a very, very entrepreneurial team. Um, all four of us on the senior leadership team are, you know, seasoned entrepreneurs and everybody basically gets to act as an entrepreneur within the team. In fact, um, two of, uh, the strategy advisors that we brought on have, well, Like I swore I would never work for someone else again.
[00:41:44] Brian Smith: And then I met Brian and the team and I was like, this is where I want to work. So, um, you know, it really, it, it's, it, it's also why my content has shifted to, instead of me getting as much into the tactics now, a lot of my content is more focused on building and managing [00:42:00] high performance teams because I'm now also highlighting these folks.
[00:42:05] Brian Smith: In fact, I used to write a weekly newsletter. At this point, I think it's been two or three months since I've written one because we have so many experts on our team that we just go through everybody else and share that. And it's why, you know, we have a, you know, extremely high open rate, very, very low unsubscribed rate, because we're sharing information.
[00:42:23] Brian Smith: Deep insights. And a lot of people say it's the only newsletter that they read religiously because they know that they're getting fresh, actionable content about different aspects of their business every single week. But by leveraging these people and, you know, leveraging what I had initially started, that's allowed us to really explode in terms of growth, in terms of overall visibility.
[00:42:45] Brian Smith: And. You know, again, if you think about if it's just me and just the business that we're really focused on as far as promoting, that's only sort of 2 entry points that we're able to bring people into the, [00:43:00] once we start bringing in people who have, you know, Expertise, like for instance, Austin, one of our strategy advisors, he built, scaled and sold a 20 million, um, recruiting and staffing firm.
[00:43:12] Brian Smith: So he's got tons of expertise when it comes to hiring the right people, recruiting, staffing, and even sales. Josh has a huge depth of operations experience. Now we're all founders, but we can talk about different things. So we get different entry points into our system now.
[00:43:29] Dave Polykoff: yeah, love that. Yeah. I like this approach. It's like, um, you know, a lot of times businesses like sales teams and whatnot, setters. They kind of just hand them the keys and go, okay, figure it out. You know, here's like your scripts, if you get people in, or here's how to DM people, but these days, like, especially on LinkedIn, we are so tired of getting that friend request, uh, that is the immediate pitch within the friend request notes of like, Hey, I was hoping, would you be interested if [00:44:00] I can 10 extra business, would you be interested?
[00:44:01] Dave Polykoff: Whatever, instead of that, you know, if I organically found someone. You know, uh, even if it was a set or a salesperson and was interested in them and what they were selling. And then I would reach out to them. Um, yeah, it's so much easier way of, of selling versus, you know,
[00:44:18] Dave Polykoff: there's the outbound is, is important, but yeah, just, I think.
[00:44:22] Dave Polykoff: LinkedIn sometimes gets a little bit, uh, trashed with, uh, the, the immediate like, Hey, are you interested in my offer? No. Okay. Onto the next thing.
[00:44:31] Brian Smith: Yeah. That's why you don't pitch, right? You, we get people on our calls and we always treat it as, you know, oftentimes we'll even say in the DMs, like, Hey, we're not here to sell you. We're here to, you know, help you solve your problem. And if you want, you can ask about our offer. And so we'll go in and start helping somebody with a challenge that they have and present a different way of approaching it than they've heard before.
[00:44:56] Brian Smith: And then their next question is, okay, so how do you work with clients? How do [00:45:00] you work with someone like me? And at that point, you're setting it up where they're asking for the sale. But, um, you know, fundamentally our approach across the board is, um, our measure of success is the number of founders we free from the sales operations and management of their business.
[00:45:15] Brian Smith: So whether or not we're doing that as a client or not. We're going to keep doing that and putting that that information out there and helping people and every single time then that leads to more and more and more people coming to pay us.
[00:45:29] Dave Polykoff: I think that would be a good spot to stop considering. I think. We've learned so much about how your journey with personal branding has led you to not just launch a business, but then be able to grow it. And then so much so that you kind of replicated your success with your personal brand and actually then applied it to your own like sales floor and employees and staff.
[00:45:51] Dave Polykoff: And now you're kind of like. and 10 X ing your success because now you have multiple use out [00:46:00] there kind of like, um, you know, attracting the business. So if people did, you know, if they're not already following some of, uh, you know, your, your setters and staff, um, and haven't already heard from them, but they did want to reach out and learn a little bit more about you and your offers, where should they go?
[00:46:16] Brian Smith: They can go to strategy ladders. com or you can look for me on LinkedIn. It's S Brian Smith and um, those are probably the two best places to, to start and give me a follow. Shoot me a message and um, yeah, I, uh, enjoy, I enjoyed the conversation and it's been a been fun Dave.
[00:46:37] Dave Polykoff: Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Like
[00:46:38] Dave Polykoff: I said, this is, this is my first take at this new format. So I think, uh, I really enjoyed it as well. I think this is, this is going to be something I stick to. So I appreciate you being kind of the guinea pig for this podcast, but I think the, uh, it sounds like you enjoyed it and hopefully the, uh, the audience enjoys it well.
[00:46:53] Dave Polykoff: So Brian, appreciate you being on
[00:46:54] Dave Polykoff: today, man.
[00:46:55] Brian Smith: Yeah. Thank you so much, Dave.
