Kris: Today we’re talking with Brad Gains. And Brad, glad to have you on the show today.

Brad: Thank you. I’m glad you’re having me.

Kris: So you are with Reset Strategies, and I love that name, but what do you do?

Brad: Well, Reset Strategies was named on purpose. You know, when you think of the word “reset,” most people tend to think of starting over, or re-doing, and that’s exactly what we recommend for most marketing and fill strategies. Most of marketing and fill strategies that businesses implement typically stay stagnant or the same for many years. And they’ve never really challenged themselves to re-set what they’re doing to yield the most profit and productivity out of their efforts.

Kris: And so, are you a business consultant? Is that how you would define yourself?

Brad: Well, (laughs) formerly, yes, Kris, but I don’t know if people like the word “consultant” any more. We are considered business-growth advisors. Marketing consultants, would be typical of the label. So we come in and help people who are either stagnating or declining, or even growth businesses who want to reset their results, their profits, their margins, and a slew of other things that they’ve really never sat and figured out how to do.

Kris: Brad, what is so much better about your system of marketing that you use? credit, but there’s , business books published every six months or every year, I can’t remember the stat – and if you were able to read all of those books, you would have something like umpteen masters and umpteen Ph.D.s, and umpteen degrees, or something like that, I can’t remember. It’s a ton of education, but most people don’t have the time to go out and get that knowledge. So many people don’t realize that there are a lot of other great systems already out there, that you can just learn from and educate yourself with. And use THEM instead of re-inventing the wheel. So I don’t know if any of your listeners will know who Jay Abraham is, but he’s deemed as the $. billion man, probably one of the greatest solo consultants ever to live, in terms of getting all you can out of what you’ve got. And he has certain systems that he uses to help businesses grow. So I was introduced to Jay several years ago, became an avid follower, an avid fan, and just a true believer in his philosophy and trying to understand how his systems work. Now, “if it works for billion-dollar organizations, multi-million-dollar organizations, why wouldn’t it work for small business?” was my thought. So I went on and studied Jay. I ran into Richard Johnson, who was a protégé of Jay Abraham’s, and then discovered a gentleman named partnership that he had with Richard, and just all the hidden marketing there was a rainbow in front of me, that hidden marketing asset system was the treasure of that rainbow. When I found Michael Senoff, and hidden marketing assets, it put everything together for me as a system and a process to use in business, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. So I didn’t have to re-invent the wheel. I just used what was already successful, but the beautiful part of that whole system – Harvard Business Review had a study come out that % of business failure is due to lack of execution. Big number. Just the ability to implement something! Just the ability to execute something! Just the ability to get something done! Execution. We’ve all got great ideas, but sometimes they never see the pavement. The hidden marketing asset system – before it came along, we were relying on clients to do everything and we would talk with them over the phone, and see if they had things moving forward. The hidden marketing asset system changed our whole paradigm. The main difference in the system that we use, and the systems that other people can recommend or teach, is WE do the execution for the client. People today – most business owners, want done-for-you consulting. Done-for-you strategy. Done-for-you implementation. Done-for-you sales approaches. Done-for-you sales processes. They don’t need to know all the specifics, they just want the results. And so we use the hidden marketing asset system, which is all geared toward a structured process that we execute for the client. So what’s different about our system is that it comes from people that have made millions of dollars for other people. We’ve just basically taken it, and implemented it in small businesses. The second reason, we implement everything.

Kris: Mike Senoff’s interviews are amazing, and I’ve listened to so many of them myself. An amazing fellow, very generous, and an incredible amount of content. But I’m wondering, even though I’ve known of him for so many years now, I haven’t really ever looked into the hidden marketing assets consulting system. I guess my first question that I’m thinking of is, there’s a lot of systems out there. And like you said, there’s a bazillion books on business and … How does it differ from other consulting systems that you’ve seen? And have you seen other ones? Why did it attract you so much?

Brad: I would guess the main reason was I was already a believer in the opportunities that were being leaked in certain businesses. Like I said earlier, most marketing firms don’t go in looking for how is a company loosing money; they go in looking for, “Hey, how can they pay us more money so we can get them more advertising?” So I was already a believer in the “spoiled food” concept. You know, have you ever thrown spoiled food out of your refrigerator? You got too busy, you forgot it was there, you passed it over, it didn’t sound good … A lot of people stay on the surface of where their business is and where their results are coming from. This particular system is a system that allows you to crack the shell, so it differed from most systems, because they went a hundred miles deep, Kris, instead of a hundred miles wide. marketing and direct mail. And there’s all these great fillers, but what would happen if you answered the phone differently? What would happen if you changed your content on your website to convert more customers? What would happen if you had a different follow-up process? What would happen if you changed your wording? What would happen if you found a competitive advantage sitting in your business, that you didn’t even know existed, that you could leverage? What would happen if you already had strategic alliances and if you get them all to help drive more leads to your business, but you just weren’t leveraging them all that well? So what was different about that system was it went SO deep inside of a wide net, when most people are looking at fifty different things that you can do. Here in this system, you only need to do three or four. Great!

Kris: I’m going to ask you to be more specific, because I’ve got to be honest. I’m not really clear about how the system works, or how it works for you. I mean, is this kind of how you built your business? And how do you get your clients? And how did you start with all of that?

Brad: You know, I got my clients by sheer sweat and faith. Most of it was on the speaking circuit, most of it was doing high-level impact groups. But this system is the system that our company uses to grow their business and differentiate themselves in the market. We grew % in year and % in year three, utilizing this system. So it helped us focus on how everything should be structured, from the first four weeks to the second four weeks, what’s the timeline in which we’re going to uncover these things. So it laid it all out for us, instead of us having to guess or experiment with what we were going to do. So this is the system that we use daily, and it’s the system that we really believe in, because we’re the only company that’s sending out messages about finding lost money. And that’s what this whole system is about. And there’s a psychological trait: that more people try to compensate, and get away from pain, than they try to gain pleasure. So we went after the lost money aspect, which this whole system works on. And we’re able to uncover it using the minds of people who’ve done it for many, many years. Like I said, we’re just bringing it to small business. You’re listening to an exclusive interview found on Michael Senoff’s

Kris: So if you were to describe your business to someone, what would it look like? How would you describe that?

Brad: That’s a great question. Well, you know how most people think of marketing?

Kris: They … don’t?

Brad: Right. And if they do, they think of it what way? A chore? A hassle? A frustration? An inconvenience? A money pit? You know, Peter Drucker, who many call the most esteemed executive of our time, was quoted as saying, “Marketing and innovation are the only things that you need in business. So the paradigm that we Reset Strategies works on when we’re explaining to businesses how we work, % of businesses in my area think that the word “marketing” means “advertising.” Which, it can include advertising. But Reset Strategies focuses on growing businesses without spending money on advertising. Most marketing firms deliver in three core areas: typically, design, advertising, branding. They’ll come in, do a little shake-up with the colors, or they’ll put together some nicer collateral, or magazines, newspapers, but where they stop and where it’s mostly a disservice to many businesses is, they don’t uncover any assets already existing in the business outside the core complex of what marketing really is. So when you look at many businesses, there’s typically four to twenty-five upside leveragability points, that unless someone shows or uncovers, or cracks the shell to what those are, many businesses just overlook those opportunities. So, much of the marketing world, they say, “Who do you want to reach?” “Who’s your customer? What’s their age? What’s their gender? Where do they live? How much do they make?” … which is all great, but advertising is one of the most expensive ways to grow your business. The reason I say that is, trying to acquire and attract strangers, new customers if you will, is one of the most expensive ways for growth. So when Reset Strategies is called in, we’re called in to help businesses reset how they’re going to grow their businesses. And we use a specific formula, or a specific growth pattern that details four ways to grow, instead of focusing on just one, which is where % of businesses typically focus, which is advertising. But there’s three other ways, that many marketing firms don’t even talk about, discover, or bring up to clients. The increase of new prospects is one way, where you can certainly advertise and try to attract strangers. The second way is increase the average transaction, meaning how much more money can people spend with you? Increasing the average frequency, which means how many times they come back and buy from you over and over. And lastly, increasing the conversion rate. So people have website hits already to their website. Are they converting as many as they can? Many have sales appointments. Are they converting as many as they can? So those three areas… increase the average transaction, increase the average frequency, and increase the conversion rate … If you do all of those along with increasing your prospects and -- by the way advertising isn’t the only way you can increase your referrals, because those are new too. When you do ALL of those together, you can experience growth in each area ten, fifteen, twenty percent. And by the time you have all four of those working in a system, you can have an exponential growth across your whole company.

Kris: So Brad, I want to ask you specifically, because Reset Strategies is a very interesting business model. But are you the only owner, or do you have partners?

Brad: Yes ma’am. Myself and another business partner, along with other advisers and partners that help with strategic plans. But that’s another difference that we’ve chosen to have in the market. You know, most marketing firms are limitLESS, meaning “Oh bring me all the clients that you can. Reset Strategies has chosen a business model of being limitED, so we only take on a certain number of clients each year. And instead of passing or handing off to junior partners, which most marketing firms do, the clients that we work with only deal with the principals, which is myself and another gentleman.

Kris: And what kind of clients do you normally have?

Brad: Well, we don’t focus on any specific industry. We have experience in over industries, but b-to-b is where we tend to focus, where there’s a sales force that we can leverage, a database that we can leverage, joint ventures that we can leverage, strategic alliances that we can leverage, sales approaches that we can reset, marketing angles that we can reset. So the only types of clients that we’re not a great fit for, are start-up clients, who don’t really have any assets to leverage. So we work with businesses that are typically doing anywhere between two million to million, and have been in existence for about five years. And so the way that we tend to get relationships with clients, is most businesses don’t have a plan … They have a business plan that they filled out at one time -- or maybe someone else filled it out for them -- and it talks about a mission statement, a values statement, but it’s not a real action plan. The way that we realized was that this service to business owners was -- when you wanted to do marketing or you wanted to grow your business -- two things were happening: one, your decision was made by default. And what I mean by that, it was typically made when a media rep – someone that sells newspapers, magazine, yellow pages, radio [ads] would knock on your door, and present an opportunity to you to broadcast your message. Then and there was the only time that many businesses thought about, “Oh, okay, ya, I’ll do some advertising.” The second was when you went to commit and decide to do that type of advertising, you’re asked to sign a contract … whether or not you knew you would get results. So it was really a “hope-and-pray” method, that was like, “We’ll put your message out there, and hopefully you get some leads.” Well, Reset Strategies took a different approach. : And we said, “It’s not fair for business owners to take on all the risk, when they don’t know what they’ll be getting, you know, what the return will be. So we removed all that stress and all that risk on the business owner’s shoulders. And we said, “Hey, the way to get started with Reset Strategies is, we go through a thirty day reset. And a thirty day reset is a CAT scan, degree view assessment of what your business is doing, how it’s performing, where it’s under-performing, where’s the overlooked opportunities, where’s the under-performing activities, and mainly, it’s to share and demonstrate how you are losing a million dollars or more in lost revenue. A very intensive, a very structured approach to finding lost money. Once we go through the thirty day reset, we find the lost money. We then put together an annual plan – an action plan, that a business owner can sink their teeth into and they can take that plan, and implement it in-house or they can take that plan and give it to another marketing firm to implement, or they can retain Reset to shadow their efforts on the action plan that we’ve all built together in thirty days. There is a nominal investment for the thirty day reset that’s guaranteed to be five times the value of that investment. If you feel like you don’t get five times the value or if we can’t find a million dollars or more in lost revenue, you pay nothing.

Kris: Wow! That’s a heck of a guarantee! And you know that’s pretty impressive, if you’re working with two million to million dollar clients. What is it, Brad, that makes your consulting different from all the others? You know there are so many marketing things out there now, especially with the internet just exploding? Is the reset one of the main differences? Can you explain to people what that is?

Brad: Ya, I’ll explain the reset, and the biggest difference actually comes into something that’s not done – it may be done somewhere else in the country, but in my area, there’s I think about marketing firms, and we commoditized now days. We’ve got great ideas, great people, great staff, great customer service, we can help make you money, we can help save you money, we can help beat your stress, we can help put you on vacation more, we can help you with systems, we can help you with processes. So it’s hard to differentiate within any service provider any more on what someone can actually do, because we all sound the same. So, I don’t know if you’re familiar with McKinsey Consulting, but during some acquaintance meetings that I had with some of their top-level advisors or the mastermind session, I realized that some of their services came with an ROI guarantee. That really perked my ears up, because you don’t really hear about return on investment guarantee in marketing. We’ve actually called all , I believe the number is, marketing firms in our area, and asked them if they guaranteed results. Most of them laughed at us. And the others said, “No, we can’t guarantee what the market will do. We can’t control that,” which is accurate. It’s still not fair for a business owner, so the biggest thing that sets us apart is we guarantee a three-to-one ROI on the annual plan, the action plan that we give you at the end of the thirty day reset. And if you don’t receive it, you get a full refund or you just basically stop the relationship. So we’re really putting ourselves out there, and we don’t recommend plans unless we feel like we can get a : ROI. There’s no one within miles that’s guaranteeing an ROI in this space. And we’ve decided to do so, and have been doing so for three years now.

Kris: And has that been an effective way to get new clients?

Brad: It has been a very effective way to get new clients. That’s because what most people refer you for is the : ROI guarantee.

Kris: And how many have you had to refund?

Brad: Well, we haven’t had to refund any. All of our clients are on retainer for the year. But we did have to let go of one client, simply because the : ROI also … If we’re going to put our neck out there, we need the client to green-light and implement things. If they’re unwilling or not wanting to, or not caring enough, we simply can’t work with that client. So if we ever get in a situation where we feel like we care more about the business than the owner does, we’ll just have to back out, and that’s what happened in that particular case. For more exclusive interviews on business, marketing, advertising, and

Kris: So it’s almost like a partnership situation, it sounds like.

Brad: Well, it’s a marriage for sure. You know, it’s very structured. Kris, the thirty day reset is so front-end heavy on research, observation, just looking down the list of deliverables that occur during the thirty day reset – we have a mystery shopping firm that we partner with, that we scope out all of the businesses that we work with, within that thirty day reset, so they’ll get mystery-shopped in person. They’ll get mystery-shopped on the phone. All transaction was, how was the interaction, there’s video that’s taken, so that we can get a real picture of what’s really going on. You see, the business owners have the best of intention when you ask them how they think their marketing or sales systems are being implemented by an employee. And many of them want to believe it’s perfect. So without that kind of data on the front end, it’s hard for anybody to make the case that they need to reset or do anything differently. So Reset Strategies is all about demonstration, and where you are losing money. So we have a mystery-shopping deliverable, we have a -page SCO analysis that’s conducted, TPC analysis that’s conducted, website conversion that’s conducted, we send their website off to usability testers and gauge how they’re navigating through websites with feedback: “Oh, I can’t find the phone number, I don’t see how to get a hold of somebody.” All that information is brought back into report style. All of this is happening while we’re going on sales appointments; we’re actually calling current clients, getting feedback -- inside opinions from them. Then, we have four to six minute strategic sessions that’s required with the business owner or the internal champion of the Reset plan. So, there’s tons and tons and tons of value on the front-end, because we believe in giving first. If you think about that for a minute, a lot of service providers ask for tons of money upfront before they ever produce anything. Businesses who’ve been in business for twenty years … twenty-five years … thirty years … It’s the most valuable month they said they’ve ever through, because it gave them a helicopter view and a pulse on what was really happening in their company. So I think that’s another difference, Kris. Of all the information that they get on how exactly things are occurring in their business, whether it be with service, with customers, with sales appointments, in pricing, and product opinion, and what their clients feel – and what non-clients feel. We’ll actually interview people that have never even purchased or heard of this company before, and we’ll gain a lot of insights from that. So it’s very, very, heavily loaded on the front-end to show and demonstrate, “Hey there’s room here for opportunity. It’s time to reset.”

Kris: Do you find a lot of business owners are surprised by some of the data that you come up with? a theory of mine is that overconfidence is killing businesses. You know, it’s good to be confident about what’s happening with your business and where it’s going and what you’re providing. But overconfidence is the silent killer. So if you don’t think there’s something that you can improve in your business so that you’re not losing money, you’re simply saying that you have nothing new to learn about your business, and that you’re really constricting it from its full potential. So, a perfect example is, we have a client, very large state-wide organization, who by law are supposed to be asking a question to every person that does a transaction in this particular space – by law. And I don’t know, a counties in Kentucky with the average staff of maybe five to ten, so you’re talking to people across the state of Kentucky, who by law are supposed to be asking a certain question, for this particular organization. When we employed people across the state to see whether to be asking the question that was supposed to be asked. And the executive director of the statewide organization, along with the baffled that that could be occurring, because before they were so confident that everybody was asking. So we just had to demonstrate that that wasn’t happening. And at the end of the day, sometimes it doesn’t have to be rocket science to grow your business. Sometimes you just have to have people do the things they’re supposed to. It really doesn’t take that much. people want things on their time and on their convenience and when they want it. If you’re a business not willing to give that, you’ll suffer. We’ve had one of the greatest ROIs (return on investments) with an ophthalmologist client, just giving you some little background. He’s been in business for years now, and a very stable practice, but obviously with the Affordable Care Act and all the Medicare cuts and all the reimbursement cuts, he’s really been faced with decreased revenue, based on the services provided, because the insurance isn’t just paying -- not like it used to. cancel their scheduled eye exams or scheduled appointments that they had. Now the office said, “Okay, thank you for calling.” So most people just hung up the phone. They didn’t have a process or a system to get those people back on the schedule. So most people have the best of intentions, to call back, re-schedule their appointment. Most people have a busy life – it doesn’t revolve around the business, like the business owner wants to think – that people are thinking about us all the time. So we took the theory of “no child left behind,” which was instituted in the Bush era, and we called it “no patient left behind” and that strategy was … Every time someone calls to cancel their appointment, there was at least an effort to get them re-scheduled on the phone. Now that’s something simple that wasn’t even happening. It wasn’t like they were going, “Okay, I understand, not a problem. What’s the next best available day?” They weren’t even saying that. So just by instituting one more question, we were able to get an increase of -% reschedule rate. But here’s the part that blew me away actually. After that, we had another back-up process that at the end of the week, we made one person responsible for “no patient left behind.” And we called back every customer – and I’m talking, it could be any where between - patients that week, that would cancel. And we would call back with a script, obviously, that Reset wrote. This person would call back, and they would re-schedule over % of those appointments. And at the end of six months, this thing was delivering a : ROI.

Kris: That’s dramatic! And you’re actually doing those folks a favor, you know?

Brad: Ya, you’re doing them a favor, and the beautiful part is, ask me Kris, how much money did that cost them?

Kris: Probably not much. We found the girl who needed more work during the hours she was working, and we used her ability of talking with people, developing relationships – it didn’t cost anything! Now this company had spent thousands of dollars over the course of twenty-something years in ads. And they could never track a return, but they never had a process or system to deal with some of the most simplest things. So those are the types of strategies that Reset puts into play. And I can’t justify the types of strategies that continue to keep giving and giving year after year, because that’s not a promotion. That keeps paying off, every week. Because people are going to cancel, right? Versus a one- off promotion which is just a lead aggregator to get people in; this strategy, he can use for his lifetime. It’s not just a one-time promotional deal; it’s a consistent system, much like the franchise prototype that we like to work with out of Michael Gerber’s e-myth. The franchise prototype is creating systems and processes much like McDonalds, and if you really break … the types of systems and processes that they have. That’s the type of stuff that businesses really deserve, because many of these business owners – they’ve mortgaged their home, they’ve spent their life savings, they’ve worked their tails off, they’ve helped people pay their own mortgages, they’ve helped feed people. They do so much but they can’t do it all. So trying to create better systems and better processes from where they’re leaking money is one way that they can start seeing some real results without that much effort.

Kris: So how do you set up an appointment with a client?

Brad: There’s several ways in which we do. At the end of our day reset, clients get a discount if they call four of their business associates, and set a meeting for us. The other way is, we’re invited to several different high- level impact groups, CEO mastermind groups, at which we’ll do workshops and seminars on “How to Find a Million Dollars or More in an Hour,” is the title. The other way that we do, is we send out sequential mail, talking about finding lost money, and do you have a treasure map? And do you have a growth plan? That’s how we get a majority of our clients. Now I have contributed with one of the highest-paid copywriters on the planet, his name is Dan Kennedy. I was able to contribute and co- author a book with him recently, that’s really got some attention in the direct marketing world, because he’s a direct marketing expert. So, we now have people calling us, asking for certain information, certain advice, so we do more along the “expertise” marketing than just with books and contents and reports. My business partner was interviewed on the Brian Tracy show recently. He’s doing a book with Steve Forbes. So we get all of our clients off of referrals off the deals we do with businesses already. You’re listening to an interview on Michael Senoff’s

Kris: And did a lot of these ideas come from using the ideas in HMA Marketing?

Brad: Ya, I mean a lot of the copy and content and the way to project things in front of clients came from HMA, but the referral strategy in regard to getting names once people signed the dotted line to get a reduced investment, that was something that I’ve been doing for quite some time. It seemed to work really well. Now as far as the HMA system, the main driver of that with new customers that we don’t know, has been the workshop idea, that I gained from that system. And implementing the “Million Dollars or More in an Hour” or how to identify ten thousand or a million dollars or more of lost opportunity in your business – that all came from the HMA system.

Kris: That’s a pretty intriguing offer there. And so how many workshops do you actually do, and then what kind of results do you see as far as people signing up from those?

Brad: Well, we do quite a bit of workshops. We try to do at least one or two of those a month, and we’ll typically get – you know, if a room’s got twenty business owners or so, there’s a strategy some people use where they say, “Hey, if you’d like more information, you can put your name in a make people more uncomfortable. I actually like to go around the room, and actually ask if they’d like more information. So with that being said, more people are hesitant to say “no” to you in front of everybody else, so you’ll typically get % of the contact information out of these workshops.

Kris: And how do you get the people to the workshop?

Brad: That’s done by invitation. We actually print out tickets and we have give- aways. We send them the treasure map, and where they’re going to find lost money in an hour, the workbook that they’re going to get, which came from the HMA system. We take them through that, through promotional or social media connections that we’ve got, or other clients inviting other business owners. The coordinators of a lot of the high-level impact groups of our local chambers will do a lot of marketing for us, too, because we’ve done some pro bono work for them. So we’ve really leveraged all our relationships with people that have access to traffic.

Kris: And do you charge for the workshop?

Brad: We do charge for some workshops; some workshops are anywhere between $ to $. And if they’d like an extended session, which is a private session after that workshop and a lunch, it’s typically $ with % of the proceeds going to a local charity that we sponsor.

Kris: When you do set up an appointment with a client, and where do you normally meet them?

Brad: We typically meet in their environment first. So we’ll travel to the business owner’s place of business. But within that thirty day reset, which is four to six meetings minimum, typically half of those will either be at our office or at a neutral destination, so they get out of the normal environment of people coming in, asking them questions. So it’s a mixture of three places.

Kris: And what do you do once you meet with the person?

Brad: We take them through what we call an opportunity analysis, which is what I gathered from the hidden marketing asset system, and it’s a three or four page opportunity analysis, that allows the client to explain to you where they might possibly be losing money. It has every question that you need to ask, what you need to look for, what you need to talk about, and once that opportunity analysis is completed, then we’ll go through and we’ll actually demonstrate how the thirty day reset will work, and we share with them what that will look like, and also what they’ll get at the end, along with all the case studies that we have, and the plans that we have -- of course, with all the names confidentially blurred out. But I think the most important thing that happens, Kris, is not at the appointment; it’s before the appointment. Purposefully, we’ll set an appointment two weeks out or a week out, so that we can pre-condition their thought process, and expose the opportunity before we even get there. So we’ll send them a book. We’ll send them a report. We’ll send them some testimonials, some video testimonials, an endorsement letter from a client. We really get them involved seven to fourteen days before we even come in. So once we get there, they’re either going to love what we’ve been saying, or they’re going to hate what we’ve been saying. But we’re willing to take that risk because % of people love what we’ve been saying. So the pre-marketing before the appointment I think was sometimes where people who don’t realize that those are action points and a way to position yourself before you even arrive. Again, an overlooked opportunity for many sales people, many people.

Kris: So many sales people just really avoid the close, so how do you close the client, Brad?

Brad: If you’ll allow me to kill a sacred cow here, if you open well, you don’t have to close. You know, I remember following Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Tom Hopkins, Tom Peters, a lot of the great sales trainers, and at that time and that era, it was all focused on how to do the close. And I don’t have anywhere near the experience of those guys, or the background, but I believe closing should be the simplest situation, once you’ve demonstrated on the front end the opportunities that they can have. So to give you an answer to “how” exactly, it’s just one statement and it’s typically, “It makes sense to me. What do you think?” That’s it. So opening well is something that I don’t think is practiced very often in sales approaches. As a matter of fact, I don’t know a book that’s focused on opening, but I think personally that is the area where we have really excelled, and the reason for our growth is, we open differently, with engagement, entertainment, props, education, demonstration and I do to magic shows, if you were able to go in the background and you saw how David Copperfield did something, it wouldn’t be as cool any more, would it? “Wow! That’s what he did? Gosh, that’s not that cool!” But when you don’t know how it works, it’s like the most fascinating thing in the world. The thirty day reset is a different process, Kris, because we’re with these people for the next to days, almost daily, with some kind of interaction or engagement. By the time they get to the end to get the action plan, if they haven’t been bought in by that moment – and the great thing is, they’re building the plan with us – see, that’s the magic behind it. So when we deliver the plan, they’re not confused or surprised by “Where did that come from?” It’s like, “Ya, that’s exactly what we want,” because they’ve helped build it. So the close rate on a thirty day reset to retainer is running at % in our company. We virtually don’t have anybody not go on retainer.

Kris: Can I ask, what kind of numbers are we talking about? How much do you charge for this kind of thing?

Brad: Well, the thirty day reset is $7800. It sounds very different than most things that are $1500 or $2000. It’s a $7800 investment on a thirty day reset. Your $7800 reset, comes with something you’ve never had before, which is a strategic growth plan. So you’re paying for a plan that you can sink your teeth into, that has an ROI guarantee of three to one. And the great news is, that $7800 for the thirty day reset is credited to your annual investment.

Kris: So I’d love to hear about someone that you guys have helped with this. I mean, it’s just an intriguing concept.

Brad: I guess my personal favorite, Kris, is a little outside the business world. who was tasked with growing dollar donations and organ donations. That’s a very sensitive topic. And they had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising and awareness, so that more people would donate a dollar, or more people would say to, “Hey, I’d like to help save a life if I can.” Eighty percent of states outperformed Kentucky in the consent rate, and the dollar donation rate. It was like that for like five years, even though they were spending six figures on advertising heavily. They called us, asked how can we grow without advertising? So one of the interesting things was, because of this mystery shop that we did for them – earlier I told you that we found out that % of these people weren’t even asking the question – we were able to go and observe all the license branches in the state of Kentucky, and determine that, just like you were asking earlier – many people don’t ask for the close – many people weren’t even asking if they’d like to donate a dollar or help save a life. So we said, “Okay, we’ll actually just start asking in this manner, and we changed the statement in which they were supposed to ask for the dollar donation and to help save a live. You know, Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “The difference between the right word and the wrong word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug. One will kill you.” So we actually changed – some people don’t like that word – “updated” three words that they added to their question, and within three months, we were able to increase the dollar donation and “help save a life” registry % just by updating the question and being sure it was being asked. It was the largest year they’ve had since they went into existence … cheeseburger, they ask me if I’d like fries with that. Boy isn’t that interesting? That one simple question while the transaction was taking place, has generated billions of dollars of profit to McDonalds, and it cost them zero. So if % of Kentuckians are already aware of organ donation, Great! You’ve done your job! But what you really need them to do is, to say “yes” at the window. Take action! So you spent enough money on awareness … we’re all aware. But how do we get more people to say yes? So the original question was, “Would you like to donate a dollar to the Organ Donors Registry of Kentucky?” And again, unveiling the magic here, so it’s not as cool if you don’t know, but we added, “Would you like to help save lives and donate a dollar to the Kentucky Organ Donor Registry?” And dollar donations went through the roof. So the approach can be so-o important, but it’s so-o-o overlooked. Think about the complexity of helping, Kris. Most people don’t even think of helping as being a complex situation. But I want to give you an example of how complex helping really is. Have you ever seen someone in public fall down? Not from partying too much, or anything, but just like slip and fall in a public environment?

Kris: Sure.

Brad: Have you ever watched what happens when someone asks if they can help them up?

Kris: Ya, well, a lot of times people say “no” …

Brad: Bingo. We don’t want to admit we need help. We don’t want to be embarrassed. Now isn’t that interesting? Yet when you walk in to % of retail establishments, what’s the first question they ask you?

Kris: “Can I help you?”

Brad: No, you can’t! Think about that, right? So the culture is people don’t want help. That’s evident when someone falls. You’d think that would be the most effective time to say, “Ya help me up.” But we don’t want to admit our weaknesses, because we don’t want to expose our vulnerabilities. Same thing in a sales process. And the reason why I bring this example up is, we had a high-end interior that as soon as people entered the shop or the showroom, the first question, % of the time, is “Can I help you?” They had % of people saying “no” … for years. So, again, not because we’re creative geniuses -- we were familiar with the study that had been done on different testing phrases in a retail environment of a furniture store in Detroit that increased appointments -% or something like that. And we came to them, and we said, “From now on, we want you to ask, “Oh, are you working on …” and say a specific room. This is the beautiful, psychological element here, that I can’t justify. You walk in, “Oh, are you working on your bathroom?” what they were working on, so that question was simply a plant for the answer that you wanted. But no customer realizes that’s a sales question. It’s disguised. So we instituted these “on-purpose” questions to be corrected … that was the strategy. We want to be corrected by people that come in. “Oh, are you working on your kitchen?” / “No, I’m working on my bathroom.” “Oh, are you working on your bathroom?” / “No, I’m working on my bedroom.” “Oh, are you working on your bathroom?” / “No, I’m working on my living room.” Worked every time. So when that was stated, they would say, “Okay, great.” They would be able to start a conversation. That particular store, which had a horrible location – it was very difficult to get to, which that was another challenge -- that particular store, they increased their appointments from showroom to home demo almost % or %, one of the two – in the matter of seven months. Just by doing a different approach. So there’s a lot of psychological elements when it comes to marketing. You know, if I send you something in the mail, and I twist the stamp a little bit to the right side, more people will open it, because it looked like someone personally sent it an it’s off-center and it doesn’t look like a machine. If I put something inside of it, like a card or something -D that’s sort of sticking out, more people will open it. If I put a message on the outside, saying, “Surprise! Something inside,” more people will open it. And if I put a courier font on the outside, more people will open it. If I hand address it , more people will open it. So you see there are so many variables. You know, you’ve got one business owner who says, “Direct mail doesn’t work for me.” You’ve got another business owner who understands how psychological it is to get attention. He’s going, “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.” So at the end of the day, you’ve got to look at different approaches and different ways to deep. They just say, “Oh, you need to send them a brochure, you need to act like you know what they’re into, oh, you go in their office, they like fishing if you see a boat … Do they like boating?” All this rapport building … bull crap! At the end of the day how do you get people to give you the answers you’re looking for in a way that they don’t feel like you’re looking for them, in a regular sales situation? So those are just a couple of ideas that can work. Changing words can affect whether or not you get an opportunity or whether you lose one.

Kris: So Brad, you know, you’ve worked with a lot of businesses. What do you think most business owners are doing wrong, when it comes to their business?

Brad: Well, they’re thinking transactionally. What I mean by that is, most people don’t think about the average life-time value of a customer. They only think about the one transaction that they make. So I’ll give you and example. We all go grocery shopping. We’ve all probably gone to the same grocery store for forty or fifty years, depending on how long we’ve lived in an area. And we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on groceries at one particular location, whether it’s a Kroeger’s or Von’s. And the moment you walk back into that grocery store with a problem, “Oh my milk is spoiled,” or “My bread is moldy,” and the management gives you attitude, and says, “Well, we can’t give you a refund because it’s out of … “ whatever their rule is. They really have never thought about the hundreds of thousands of dollars that you have spent in that store. They’re only thinking about, “Oh my gosh, you want me to give you $ back, are you kidding me??” They’re thinking transactionally. Most people never get to the number that they need to grow their business … to know what they can spend and should spend on marketing, which is the average life-time value. The average life-time value is very easy to calculate. You take the number of transactions that you’ve had, divided by the number of people who’ve made them, and you come out with an average. It’s just like Dow-Jones, or an accountant could do. And I understand it ranges – it could be $ or $, but you’ll get an exact average, and when you start thinking about the $, you get from customers on the back-end, but then they keep coming back and buying your stuff … You’ll stop wanting to say, “I don’t want to spend anything to get new customers,” or “I don’t want to spending anything to get customers … I just want to them to walk in here,” or “I want to spend the least to get new customers,” when you could potentially spend exactly what you know you need to spend, based on the average life-time value, and be fine on the back-end. So I think overall, businesses think transactionally versus average life-time value and the relationship and the profit that have come in for the long term, versus the short term. You know, average life-time value is a two and a half-hour workshop that we do because, if you can really grasp the numbers … As a matter of fact, Steve Forbes approached us on this concept. The title of it is called, “Know Your Dam Number!” D-A-M, not the curse word. And it’s a play on how you can open a dam of new business if you know this number. And how it stays closed when you don’t. And so we’re contributing to “Success-enomics” with Steve on that concept of how to calculate your average life-time value, how to act on your average life-time value, when you think about the back-end versus thinking about the front-end. Amazon is a great example of average life-time value. They give you Amazon Prime for $. And somebody’s going, “Oh my gosh, we’re going to go broke. We can’t be shipping things all across the country for that amount!” And the smart guy in the room said, “But sir, because it seems free, they’ll spend % more.” Netflix is another great example. Can you imagine the guy in the room at that strategy meeting? “Ya, we’re going to send out DVDs for $ a month.” “What? What if people order DVDs??” The smart guy in the room says, “Actually, sir, people order . DVDs a month. That will never happen.” They know their dam number – D-A-M. Insurance is the same example. Do you know what you pay for your monthly insurance for your car?

Kris: Ya.

Brad: Is it worth more than what you pay monthly?

Kris: Oh, ya.

Brad: How’s that? How in the world could they be charging you , , % less than what your car is worth? They know the numbers. They ran the numbers of the likelihood of you getting into an accident or causing one. They know their numbers. And when you know your numbers, you can create a new focus and clarity on what it would take to get new customers to your door, and you can spend the correct amount of money. Because you may actually be spending more than you need to, which is “cost for acquisition,” which is another model that most business owners don’t calculate. How much money is it costing you to get people through the door, so if you spend a thousand dollars on a newspaper ad, and you got two people to respond, that’s $ for that opportunity. Most people don’t run that number, so they don’t have any numbers working for them, to have a clear focus on what to spend and what they should spend. So other than over- competent, not knowing the average lifetime value of their client base, I think, is the biggest killer. You’re listening to an exclusive interview found on Michael Senoff’s

Kris: And where do you see people wasting money, in most businesses? you ever heard that term before?

Kris: No, I haven’t. commoditized, commodity-curve, nothing different about them. They send out all this “me-too” marketing. When I say “me-too” I mean, “m-e-hyphen- t-o-o.” Hey, me too! I do this too!” “Hey, I do interior design too.” “Hey, I sell furniture too.” “Hey, I sell cars too.” There’s no value proposition on the front end or offer. As a side note, there’s never a traffic problem in marketing. It’s always just an offer problem. So when you look at where they’re wasting money, is they’re sending out advertising that just has their phone number, and it’s institutional. You know, it just looks like a business card on a big nice piece of TV screen or nice paper, and it doesn’t scream for anybody’s attention. They’re wasting money there. Where they’re losing bigger money, Kris, is in their own database. I can’t to their database. Meaning, customers that come in on their own, or that come in once over a month period, they never marketed to their database. I’ll go back to the ophthalmologist. Culturally, most people don’t like to go get their eyes checked. Just like a dentist, a physical. I mean, look at America in general. Like, we’re obese, out of shape, and yet, only a portion of us ever go to a physical or do any kind of exercise. So culturally, you’re fighting this battle of prevention maintenance, especially in health fields. And this gentleman had almost 4000 patients that had not been in for their annual eye exam in three or four years. You’re supposed to come every year. But he had never marketed to them in a way that got them excited or got them back in to the office. They would just send a “Shame on You” letter -- basically, that’s how it read when you opened it. It would say, “Hey, did you know you’re supposed to be coming in here? We haven’t seen you. Your eyes are important …” It was one of those lecture letters. And we mined that database, and segmented that database into certain different zip codes and what not. And we sent out – I’m giving away a lot here, but hopefully this is something your listeners can take a tip from. We send the Reset way … the reset way is to send out what we call “lumpy” mail … L-U-M-P-Y mail, which is mail that is not actually packaged or in an envelope. It’s actually mailed as a -D product. So we had the idea – and I’ll ask you – how many letters and postcards have you ever received in your mailbox over your lifetime?

Kris: Probably a lot.

Brad: How many messages in a bottle have you ever received in your mailbox?

Kris: … None …

Brad: Great. So, knowing that, we sent a real bottle, a plastic bottle in the mail to all 4000 patients. The open-rate on those things are gi-normous, by the way, if inside the bottle is a parchment letter -- looks like a scroll, burnt on the edges, got sand in it, I mean the whole nine. And you open it up, and it said, “Oops! Will you accept our ‘we goofed’ gift card?” Now I want to go back to earlier to what I said … the letters that were coming to all people was, “Shame on you! You haven’t been in here!” putting all the blame on the customer, right? We took all the blame in this particular messaging point, and we said, “ Oh my gosh! Sorry we haven’t gotten in touch with your sooner … I think the headline was, “We’ve lost you!” You know, message in a bottle being lost. “Will you accept our ‘we goofed’ gift card?” And it was a story about “Oh my gosh, I just checked my patient records, and realized we hadn’t seen you in …” We had variable data that showed the exact month it had been since they’d been in the office. “We haven’t seen you in over months. And I wish my office had reached out to you sooner. If it’s something that could do was put this offer in here for you …” And we recorded and tracked the phone calls, we used dedicated tracking numbers on all marketing materials, so we could actually see who was responding. So we record all those calls. In three months -- and he’s been in business for years -- he broke three revenue records: month one, month two, and month three of this campaign. He had to hire two new doctors – that was in his database! He just ignored them. They were orphans. He never thought about them. So those are the types of things where people waste money or they lose money, is they don’t leverage all the opportunities they have sitting right under their nose. Seeing them typically comes from an outside perspective. Many business owners will never find them. They’ll never discover them. get results from what you’re not doing, AND the beautiful part was, the upsells that they had in the dispensary, which in the eye world, the dispensary is the eye frames and the glasses, so they were even adding on top of their margin and when we recorded the phone calls, what was awesome for a marketer, when people called up they would say, “Hi, this is Tanya Hutchens. I got this really cool crazy bottle from Dr. Madison? And it said that he hadn’t seen me in months.” That was everybody’s first statement. Like they really grabbed onto to how long it had been. And that, as a marketer, was very glorifying [gratifying?], because to get attention any more, is often unheard-of. I mean, attention is one of fiercest So, how do you stand out? How do you get attention? How do you cater to your database? How do you get people having fun making it easy, appealing, and fun to do business with you. It doesn’t have to be so It was the most successful thing he’d ever done.

Kris: That is a great story. And Brad, you sound like an amazingly creative guy. But I want to go back to Michael Senoff a little bit, just to get … I really would like to know, how much the HMA system helped you with this? I don’t know what your background is, but it’s intriguing to think about, because you really do seem to have a system set up here that’s working for people and working for you. And I’d like to hear a little more about that.

Brad: Well, it helped me tremendously, in the regard to, putting things together and putting them in a system and a process. I’ve got a very wide background. You know, I’ve always had a constant thirst for knowledge and expertise from people that have already done it before. But now, Michael Senoff, as he and I were talking on the phone or if someone was asking me if the HMA System actually is project-based, more than retainer-based. So the recommendation from the HMA system is, do projects for people at a certain dollar amount. So I think that’s where I differ a little bit. I believe a retainer is much better, if you’re good enough to get those types of retainers. I know we have people that pay us anywhere between $3000 and $, a month, but we never had a system for what to do in the thirty day reset, Kris. We don’t know how we sold thirty day resets when we first started. It’s amazing to us, how we were able to sell those, in the beginning. And as any company just starting out, there’s always the time it takes to sell people and get deals closed, but the system itself gave us the whole thirty day reset. We knew what to do in meeting one, meeting two, meeting three, meeting four, meeting five, meeting six, the whole nine. So it allowed us to focus and have an agenda on every meeting, whereas before we were just scattered, we were sloppy. People don’t like sloppy. They like structure and approach. So the one thing that I can say that to focus on in the thirty day reset. Without that piece, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Kris: I think it’s got to be partly the “reset” name … That’s a great name, Reset Strategies. and we know how people feel about change.

Brad: You asked earlier, what’s the biggest mistake business owners are making, and I believe there are ten of them. One of them is, thinking transactionally, and not on life-time value. But the other one, Kris, within that ten is, not having a unique selling proposition. You know, Michael Senoff is really big on a unique selling proposition, which is a statement or a claim of something in the market that no one else can say, or no one else IS saying. For your listeners, the formal jargon in the marketing world is USP … unique selling proposition, but to give them a clear example of real life, if anyone can remember Domino’s Pizza … a long time ago, “delivered to your door in minutes or less guaranteed.” “Delivered to your door hot and fresh to your door in minutes or you don’t pay,” or whatever that exactly was. That propelled Domino’s like through the roof in terms of sales because that’s what people wanted. It didn’t say it was the best pizza, right? It didn’t say it was the most delectable pizza, they just said “hot, fresh pizza delivered to your door in thirty minutes or less, guaranteed, or you don’t pay.” Now they had to eventually weed out that particular proposition, because believe it or not, drivers were running over people to get to the door, and there were some injuries that occurred. But that’s an example of a USP. And so if you think about businesses today, when we take businesses through this analysis, we call it the “pop” … P-O-P analysis. We ask them to go down the line. And we say, Can your competitors say they have quality product? Yes. Can your competitors say they have convenient hours? Yes. Can your competitors say they have knowledgeable staff? Yes. Can your competitors say they have best prices? Yes. Can your competitors say that they have bigger inventory. Yes. Can your competitors say they’re faster? It’s a real eye-opening experience to them. To give you an example of that, we work with an elevator company and for years there has been an elevator company who has contracts. So if you’re a building owner or a property manager, you would sign a contract with a elevator company for three, four, five years, sometimes even ten, believe it or not. You were locked into it. So we were called in by an elevator company, and not that they said, “Hey, guys, we need to say something different.” You see, a lot of people call us in, Kris, thinking that they want to do one thing, but then we end up resetting in a way they never even thought about. So we were originally called in for some online optimization, and eventually we worked ourselves into the ultimate reset, which is where we looked at every different process and strategies, systems, procedure. And for years, when you called someone as a salesperson in the elevator industry, and you said, “Oh, hi, this is John from Elevators R Us,” the guy on the other end of the phone would, go, “Oh, we’re already in an elevator contract.” The salesperson would have to say, “Oh, okay, well do you know when it ends? … Three or four years from now, okay, great, sir. I’ll put you on the follow-up list.” Like they never even got an opportunity, because they were in a contract. So, this is where the average life-time value comes into play. He had never calculated his average life-time value. It happened to be $,. And what that meant was, for every transaction, and every deal that he got, he typically on average, with repair work, maintenance work, service work, on average, yielded $, worth of revenue. Now, monthly maintenance contracts, however, are typically anywhere between $ to $ a month, over the course of however many years they have. So, we were the first and only elevator industry in the world to create a buy-out policy. Because what we found in our thirty day reset, and the clients that we talked to, and the non-clients that we talked to, is if they had stakes and they were picketing out in front of their business, on that sign it would say, “We hate contracts.” So we picked up on that. You’ll buy-out policy, just like Insight Cable will do in my region – they’ll actually buy out your contract if you’re with another provider, depending upon how much time you have left on the contract – a beautiful strategy because it’s based on guaranteeing you a customer versus spending that same amount of money on advertising to strangers. We then implemented the buy-out policy, along with the only contract-free elevator company. It’s the only contract-free elevator company in the United States. There’s no contract – the only one. So now when a salesperson calls, and they say, “Hi, this is Jenny from Elevators R Us ...” “Oh, thanks for calling ma’am, but you know I’m already in a contract …” “Oh, yes, that’s exactly why I’m calling. Are you familiar with our buy-out policy?” Appointment rates shot through the roof. So, instead of spending $3000 or $4000 in these association trade journals, or newspapers, we literally went into these businesses and we bought out their contract from the competitor and acquired the business, using average life-time value as our barometer. Now he’s the fastest growing elevator company.

Kris: So a lot of it is thinking way outside the box? there’s not a box. Certainly an elevator is a box, but ya, it’s how to market more successfully. And I don’t do a great job justifying all of these in different tangents, but this is performance-based, Kris. So what I mean by that is the only time you would ever pay off the contract is if somebody said, “Yes, I’ll go with your company.” It’s performance-based versus hope-and-pray. So you know you’re getting the deal, once you buy them out. And secondly, they agreed we pay off the contract that they’ve got with their provider, if it’s three years or less, and they also agree to do all their repair work through this company. Now they have the best of both worlds. They can acquire contracts, because people don’t like them. They don’t have contracts. People like that. And, they get the repair work before they even get the agreement to start working on their monthly maintenance service, until it’s up. So he’s created basically a line of people, going anywhere between six months and three years from now, where he’s virtually ever had no opportunities to get it, he’s got upwards of fifty to sixty-five properties and buildings in- waiting, once their contract runs out with that company, they’ve already agreed to go with him. Talk about anticipated revenue! It’s a lot. And again, the USP is the only contract-free elevator company. No one heard that, and that’s very foreign to this market and to any elevator market. It’s like, what? No contract, how does that work? It allows you to start a conversation. And that’s a unique selling proposition. So when I went down that line earlier, “Oh, they’ve got a knowledgeable staff, friendly prices, great hours, everybody sounds just like that, except for this client, who says, “Ya, we’re the only contract–free elevator company in the country. No one else can say that.” That’s the power of the unique selling proposition.