When you’re starting a new business, it’s tempting to aim too big. Reach millions, and serve hundreds of thousands of customers.
That’s a nice idea, but in reality, often your efforts to reach everyone lead to diluting your message, influence, and impact. Worse, without a clearly defined audience, you may end up reaching very few people at all.
Jeff Goins thought he had to go big, and he succeeded. A few years ago, he launched a bestselling book, generated a million dollars in revenue for the first time, and acquired 17,500 customers for his online courses and programs.
What did he end up with, other than the money? A ton of stress and dissatisfaction.
Part of the problem was that Jeff didn’t really know the people he was serving. Worse, many of them hadn’t arrived at the solution they wanted through the mass education programs that he was selling.
So Jeff made a radical decision — he would work with only 100 people a year going forward. And he would still maintain his 7-figure revenue, except with higher profit margins due to lower overhead and a lot less stress.
Sound impossible? It’s not at all. In fact, serving a small well-defined group of people delivers more value to those people, and therefore can be more lucrative. And the non-monetary upside includes more influence and impact, and more professional satisfaction.
How many people do you need to work with to create the change (and the revenue) you want to make? Is it 10? 100? 1000? Listen in for guidance that may change the way you think about the people you choose to serve with your business.
Links
- The 100-Person Rule: Why You Shouldn’t Try to Help Everyone
- Follow Jeff Goins on Twitter
- Follow Brian Clark on Twitter
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Transcript
Serve Fewer People, Make More Money
Jerod Morris: Welcome to 7-Figure Small, the podcast that brings you the stories and strategies that are driving the growing number of solo businesses achieving 7-figures in revenue, without investors or employees. Here is your host for this edition of 7-Figure Small — serial digital entrepreneur, Brian Clark.
Brian Clark: When you’re starting a new business, it’s tempting to aim too big. Reach millions, and serve hundreds of thousands of customers.
That’s a nice idea, but in reality, often your efforts to reach everyone lead to diluting your message, influence, and impact. Worse, without a clearly defined audience, you may end up reaching very few people at all.
Jeff Goins thought he had to go big, and he succeeded. A few years ago, he launched a bestselling book, generated a million dollars in revenue for the first time, and acquired 17,500 customers for his online courses and programs.
What did he end up with, other than the money? A ton of stress and dissatisfaction.
Part of the problem was that Jeff didn’t really know the people he was serving. Worse, many of them hadn’t arrived at the solution they wanted through the mass education programs that he was selling.
So Jeff made a radical decision — he would work with only 100 people a year going forward. And he would still maintain his 7-figure revenue, except with higher profit margins due to lower overhead and a lot less stress.
Sound impossible? It’s not at all. In fact, serving a small well-defined group of people delivers more value to those people, and therefore, can be more lucrative. And the non-monetary upside includes more influence and impact, and more professional satisfaction.
How many people do you need to work with to create the change (and the revenue) you want to make? Is it 10? 100? 1000? Listen in for guidance that may change the way you think about the people you choose to serve with your business.
I’m Brian Clark, and this is 7-Figure Small. Thanks for joining us.
This episode is brought to you by Freshbooks, cloud accounting software designed specifically for freelancers and solo business owners. They’re offering a 30-day unrestricted and no credit card required free trial to listeners of the show. To claim it, just head over to freshbooks.com/unemployable and make sure to enter UNEMPLOYABLE in the “How Did You Hear About Us? section.
Okay, on with the show.
Jeff, thank you so much for finally being on the show. How are you?
Jeff Goins: I’m doing well, Brian. Thanks for having me.
Brian Clark: Yeah, I just realized, I was like, “Why hasn’t Jeff been on the show before? And I think you squarely identified me as the problem. I didn’t ask you.
Jeff Goins: Yeah, well, I’ve been a big fan of your work for a long time, so I’m honored.
Brian Clark: Well, I am a fan of your work as well. I was honored to be able to speak at your last Tribe Conference, as in final Tribe Conference, unless you decide to change your mind on that. What a great event, what a great group of people, I’ve got to say.
Jeff Goins: Thank you.
Brian Clark: So kudos to you on that run. We’re going to talk about the direction you’re heading. But I think a lot of people in this audience probably know who Jeff Goins is, and yet, they may not know how Jeff Goins became Jeff Goins.
Everyone thinks people were born mega successful. But we both know, following each others’ careers, that we all started out at one place, and then you just go year by year by year until you achieve a certain amount of, I guess, success. Maybe more than either of us intended.
And it’s funny, the recurring theme when I talked to a lot of people — Jonathan Fields was one interview I did that I remember, same thing. You get to a point of success and growth and you’re like, “How did I get here? I wasn’t quite aiming for this.
And then there’s kind of a reckoning and then you readjust and you go on a slightly different path. I think that’s a decent way to summarize what we’re going to talk about today.
The Early Days
Brian Clark: But let’s go back to the beginning, the early days. You’ve been blogging for a long time. I know your first guest post on Copyblogger was in the summer of 2011. And you, at that point, said you’d been blogging for six years, and that jives with my recollection of Jeff being around in blogging circles.
But then you really started to take off. Tell the story so everyone can see how you become a 10-year overnight success.
Jeff Goins: Yeah, well, it was longer than that I suppose, depending on when you count.
I started blogging in 2005, the year I graduated college. I had a double major in Spanish and religion. I find that it’s helpful to talk about all the random things you did in your past that have basically nothing to do with what you’re doing today. So that it just shows you, it doesn’t really matter.
I started blogging that year, because I was traveling with a band, and my blog was on Xanga. I was documenting this year of playing shows all over North America. And then we had a little stint in Taiwan, and it was just a way for me to share my thoughts with the world.
What was funny about it was here I am playing professional music, something I had always dreamed of doing. My dad taught me to play guitar when I was 16 years old. It was his dream to do this and kind of his dream for me. So here I am fulfilling both of our dreams. And my favorite part of that experience was writing a blog post once a week and sharing it with our friends and fans and family back home.
So I got to the end of that year and our bass player said, “If I couldn’t play music, I don’t know what I would do. And I literally thought, “I would just do something else. That to me was a pretty good sign that playing music for a living was probably not what I ought to be spending my time on if I could take or leave it.
So I quit the band, I moved to Nashville, which is the opposite order that those things happen. I chased a girl, I slept on a friend’s couch, I worked as a telemarketer for a while. And then I eventually got a job working for a nonprofit. I became the first marketing director there.
I learned how to do online marketing, because we had no marketing budget, so I had to learn about blogging and social media. Twitter had just started to become a thing, Facebook. Then I started getting into email marketing. Anything we could do for free to help grow our brand and increase the donations to our organization, I was trying to figure that out.
Doing that for seven years provided basically an education in marketing that I then translated to creating a personal brand, becoming a blogger, and then an author, and eventually digital entrepreneur.
The First Iteration
Brian Clark: Yeah, so when around that point, 2011 or so — I’m trying to remember, because I know your focus has changed, as it often does over time for all of us. But when you first started out and you said, “Okay, I’m going to go approach Copyblogger and I’m going to do a guest post there, what was that iteration of goinswriter.com at that point.
Jeff Goins: I was writing about writing. I mean, there was a whole generation of little Copyblogger wannabes (which you may be aware of). You were telling your story, and you were at the time, I think, still one of the primary writers on Copyblogger. And I remember that story well. You built the audience first, didn’t have anything to sell, and then once a year, you’d come up with a new product, often partnering with somebody else that you would then sell to your audience. And I’d been following this for years. I’d been following Copyblogger and ProBlogger going, “I want to do this.
I remember Darren Rowse sharing on a webinar — it must’ve been that same year (2011), where I was really starting to get a vision for turning this into a business, because I’d started to grow an audience. And I remember Darren saying that his first year of professional blogging, he made like $30,000 that year. I thought that sounded amazing. I was like, “You can make that much money blogging?
He was saying it like, “Hang on, with all the talk about 6-figures and stuff, everybody just calm down. It’s a lot of hard work. And that sounded like a dream come true to me.
So I was a little Copyblogger wannabe. But my take on it was, “I’ve been writing my whole life. I was a good writer. I knew that, and I knew there were a lot of bloggers out there that weren’t very good at writing.
You had a lot of people talking about online marketing for people who wanted to be entrepreneurs. And my shtick was I was learning all this stuff as a marketer working for a nonprofit, but I wanted to grow my brand as a writer. I wanted to write books and I thought, “Can you take all this online marketing and apply it to the brand of a writer?
So I was taking all this stuff that I was learning on these digital marketing blogs like Copyblogger and sharing it with an audience of primarily writers. It was novel to them. They’d never heard about this stuff before. They didn’t know about email lists, guest posting, and all these marketing strategies that could really grow their brand in a significant way, and help them sell more books and get known.
That’s what I was doing. I was a writer who was learning about online marketing and I was sharing what I was learning, because I was practicing it in real time.
Everybody used to get an email list. I got an email of 10,000 people. And then I got a book deal. This thing that every writer talks about being difficult, it happened in a few months for me, because I had figured out the marketing side of it.
So I was doing this stuff in real time and then sharing it, but I was sharing it as a writer for other writers.
Brian Clark: Yeah, that’s what I remember as well, because during, I’d say 2006 to 2010, 11, 12, around that period, I saw so many people take the approach that Copyblogger did — talking about writing, teaching writing, and marrying it to marketing and sales through copywriting, etc. Many of these people were freelancers trying to get clients who realized all they were attracting were other writers.
But you, from the beginning, were very intentional like I was, that I do want to serve writers. Now, I ended up going into software and hosting and all that stuff. And you did it to build your career as an author and then beyond.
I like that. I remember that — that you were being very intentional and you understood who you wanted to attract, as opposed to some people who didn’t quite understand that I was writing about writing not to get writing clients. I never wanted to have clients again. In 2006, that was my main goal.
How Did You Progress?
Brian Clark: Yeah, so that was a very intentional choice on your part, and obviously, it’s worked out well. Let’s fast-forward a little bit to how that progressed.
Jeff Goins: Okay, and I would say, yes, I was intentional. But I had tried lots of other things. I had tried writing about leadership, I had tried writing about marketing. I had tried to be all of my heroes. I’d tried to be Michael Hyatt and Steven Pressfield and Seth Godin and Brian Clark and Darren Rowse.
I’d tried to copy other people and I realized, “Oh, I can’t really do that. I love that story when somebody asked Bono how they got that famous U2 sound. And he said, “All we were trying to do was sound like all these other bands — particularly hairbands in the ‘80s that were shredding and these punk bands and all these. “We were trying to copy other bands and this is what came out. We weren’t good enough to do what they were doing. This is what came out.
And I think of what I do as art. So an artist’s craft often comes out, their style comes out as trying to do what somebody else is doing, and something else comes out. For me, that’s what happened. And I realized, “Oh, writers are paying attention to what I’m doing.
I knew lots of people who were like, “Oh, you don’t want to help writers. And I thought, “Well, actually, I think I can do that. I understood the implications of that. What I could charge, what I couldn’t charge, how many people I’d have to reach. And I thought, “Yeah, that sounds great. I will help writers. I will build a business teaching writers on how to succeed, because a lot of them don’t know how to do it. And then I’ll do my own thing too. I’ll write books and spread ideas on my own as well.
So that’s essentially what happened. I ended up growing, what felt like for me, a pretty large business. At one point, I had probably 20 people that were on the payroll full-time, part-time in contract. And we were running a million-dollar-plus business, selling information products to writers and creative entrepreneurs, hosting events, doing all kinds of razzle dazzle things.
I was running a million miles an hour, always chasing the next thing, because that’s what I thought the game was. And running myself pretty ragged, and actually moving pretty quickly in a direction that was away from what I originally intended to do, which was write and spread ideas.
Brian Clark: Such a common thing. I think that there are many people out there, potentially in both of our audiences, who whenever they hear anyone complain about, “Well, I succeeded at, beyond, or in a different way than I ever intended, then they say, “What are you complaining about? You can’t be ungrateful. And I’ve never been ungrateful.
I would not trade that run up to 8-figures that we went on for anything. But did I ever envision having an 8-figure company and 65 employees? No. In fact, when I started Copyblogger, I swore I’d never have an employee.
But you go along and the opportunities present themselves. And this is my personality, and it’s probably yours too, where you’re just like, “Okay, I’m not going to pass up on the obvious next step. Even though you may one day arrive at a point where you’re just like, “How did I get here?
It was every year doing a new thing, or trying to do the next bigger thing. And I admit, it got to be an ego thing for me. That once we grew to a certain level, I had to grow beyond that. I was just on that marching path until I finally said, “Okay, you’ve got to stop this, because you’re becoming unhappy, and this is becoming unwieldy.
You just kind of have put yourself in a position where you’re taking yourself out of your own job, because you don’t want to be the CEO of the next level of this, if that’s what it’s going to take. And so we’re faced with this decision — you either take private equity, or you sell. At that point, you sell. I mean, at least, that was the decision for me.
For you, you got to a point, it seems, that you just said, “I can still just put this train on the track that I want it to go on. And that kind of culminated, and I remember you spoke about this at the Tribe Conference in September of last year. And then you very much followed up on it with this article that is fantastic — The 100-Person Rule: Why You Shouldn’t Try to Help Everyone.
This piece touches on some of the major themes that we discuss over and over on this show. At that point I’m like, “Okay, why hasn’t Jeff been on the show? Well, we can fix that, because this is a perfect topic. His path is illuminating for people that staying small and focusing on a very specific audience is a good thing. I think we’re seeing a shift away from a lot of the mentality we had with the VC, scale up, go big, or forget it type mentality.
Jeff Goins: Yes, yeah, I agree.
Why Did You Make a Change?
Brian Clark: Let’s dive in a little bit into why you decided to make this change. You express it well in the article of course, and we’ll link to that in the show notes. But I’d like to dig in a little bit with you. Do you feel like you were unhappy or you just saw that perhaps you might become unhappy in the future?
Jeff Goins: Yeah, I was unhappy. First of all, this was a change that I had been trying to make for several years. 2015 was probably my biggest year, made the most amount of money, had something like 17,500 new customers of all kinds of products that ranged from $7 to several thousand dollars. And the goal was always more. That’s what I understood the game of entrepreneurship to be, which is just more and more and more — go, go, go. Never quite feel content with what you have and just always try to get to the next level — level up.
I do think some people are wired that way and that’s great, more power to them. The more I did that, the less satisfied I was. And because I’m a creative person, I was feeling like the core part of what I do, which is writing and creative expression, was really starting to suffer.
I had this wakeup call I think in 2016, where I had just gotten everything I ever thought I wanted, and it was underwhelming. And I thought, “So what am I supposed to do? Double all my goals again and have more of this? That doesn’t make any sense. And if more isn’t what I want, what do I actually want?
That set me into a whole existential crisis, which I think you were a bit privy to, and maybe can empathize with in part. I think that’s often true, I would hope always true, but I think is often true of journeys of success, whatever that means. You want something, and you strive to get it, and you start sacrificing things that you never said you would sacrifice — time with your family, money. I mean, I was generating a lot of money, and spending a lot of money to make that money. It was just this exercise in ego.
I tried a bunch of different things to make that feeling of discomfort go away. I tried to chase bigger goals — that didn’t work. I tried to completely change my business model — that didn’t work. I tried to go out of business — that didn’t work. I sabotaged myself.
And a couple of things happened. One, I realized no external accomplishment was ever going to fix an internal sense of brokenness or incompleteness. That’s a philosophical conversation for another time maybe.
Then, the second part though — I mean, they were sort of part and parcel. Because the second part of that process was I realized, “If I’m going to run a business, which if I’m going to be unemployable, if I’m not going to work for somebody else in some shape or manner, I’m going to be running a business.
It was Seth Godin who told me this, where he asked me what I wanted to do. He said, “Why did you start the business? I said, “I started the business because I wanted freedom. And he was like, “Oh, that’s a terrible idea.
He said, “You should never start a business, because you want freedom. You should start a business, because you want to run a business. Because that’s what you end up doing. And he said, “So why not run the kind of business that you want to run? Why not start something that you want to run?
It took me awhile to figure out what that looked like, and I’m still figuring it out. But I began to realize that I would just pay attention.
I would send an email and 100,000 people would read that email. Or I would do a big product launch, and we’d make several hundred thousand dollars off of a product launch. And the next week, I would just feel, “Eh. An article would go viral on Facebook and somebody would share it 250,000 times. And by Monday, I would still just kind of be like, “Eh.
And then I would get an email from a reader who read a book, or somebody who came to the conference. Our conference was not that big, a couple hundred people. I would look somebody in the eyes and they would tell me how my work had impacted them, or they would tell me that they’d been reading my blog for seven years every single week.
I realized, from just a job satisfaction point, that was the stuff that I lived for. So why not structure my work and my business around having more of those interactions where I can have deeper, more meaningful interactions with fewer people, get paid for it?
And then, look, I have a podcast, I have a blog, I’m on the social medias. I can still do stuff for lots of people without having to charge them money for it or build an entire team around that model.
So that’s what I started building. And it’s been really fun to focus on fewer people, while still creating content for the masses and giving that away for free. That’s great.
But then working with fewer people in a higher level way — I know all of my customers. I’ve met them all. And I am really enjoying this, working with no more than a hundred people this year. Compared to back in 2015 when I had… the model required me to have thousands of customers whose names I didn’t know and whom I wasn’t sure I was actually helping.
Brian Clark: Yeah, that is interesting, and that level of connection is clearly important to you. I love Godin’s answer, because he’s not wrong. Our take here on this show is you want the freedom to run the kind of business that you want, so he’s not wrong. You do have to want to run a business. The wannabes and the get-rich-quick people are dreaming of sitting on the beach, whatever — laptop with them or not. And I’m like, “Man, no one does that.
Jeff Goins: That’s a terrible way to sit on the beach. Either go to the beach or go to work.
Brian Clark: Exactly. So my motto is: if you want to have a very small business or even a solo business that does 7-figures, you can structure it that way and you can get there. You’re not restricted, you have the freedom to do that. You also have the freedom not to, because you don’t have investors and you may not even have employees. So it’s just you now.
If you can heed the warning both of us just gave about how your ego can get in the way and put you on a path you don’t want, then you’re right. The freedom to run the kind of business you want is the goal. But I can’t do anything for you if you don’t want to run a business.
That clearly wasn’t your situation. You just wanted the freedom to run the business as you see fit. And it looks like that’s exactly where you’re headed with this 100-person rule.
Jeff Goins: I hope so. It’s fun. And yet, I have to pay attention to the typical snags that I recognize, which is you could charge a little bit less and get more people. And then you’d have to hire somebody to help you run this. I may do that at some point, but if I do it, it’ll be a conscious choice, not something that I feel like I have to do.
A lot of this was unconscious. I was just doing it, because I thought, “This is what you’re supposed to do. This is what all of my friends are doing. This is what all my mentors are doing. And so I have to do it, even though I don’t want to do it.
The thing that I kept doing, that I realized I couldn’t do anymore, was I was looking for an easy button. The easy button was hire a COO, hire somebody to run your company for you, when I actually hadn’t created any systems, when I didn’t know how to run my company. Or get somebody to partner with you or sell your company, and do all these things that I didn’t know how to do, I wasn’t equipped to do, and I actually didn’t want to do.
All I was trying to do was get to a place where I could go to work every day, feel good about what I was doing, and make the kind of money that I wanted to make. I remember one morning, as I was trying to make this decision, making pancakes for my kids on like a Thursday morning. For whatever reason that day, I didn’t have some meeting at 8:30 in the morning that I normally had, that I was dreading going to, even though I was the one who called the meeting.
And I’m sitting there with Seth’s words ringing in my ears, and I’m flipping pancakes for my kids, thinking — at the time, they were like six months old and four and a half. I had hired a business coach that I paid $30,000 to basically ask me every week, “What do you want? And I couldn’t answer the question.
And he says, “Either you want to run a business or you don’t. We can do that a lot of different ways, but you have to decide if you actually want to run a business. If you want to scale it up, it’s going to take two years, and you’re going to have to become a CEO, and you’re going to have to work harder than you’ve ever had to work before.
Here I am making pancakes for my kids and I thought, “I don’t want to run a business, not like that. What do I want? And I just began to step back from the situation that I had found myself in, that was completely out of my control. And I realized, “This isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t why my wife quit her job and I quit my job, to start this thing that was supposed to provide some sort of lifestyle for us. And here I am hating it.
Really, what I learned from this journey was: as an entrepreneur, you always have to have a vision of what you want to create, what you are creating. It’s easy to lose track of that. And I love that Jeff Bezos quote about Amazon: “We’re stubborn on vision, flexible on details. I had inverted that.
I was starting to get really stubborn about the details, and I had no vision. So for me, I just had to get clear on what I wanted again and even give myself permission. Like, “It’s okay to build the thing that you want and run that and miss out on all kinds of ‘opportunity.’ That’s okay.
Insight on Value-Based Pricing
Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely, I agree. Very, very interesting to hear your perspective on this. If we’re going to say, “Choose a number, say, 100 people so that we actually know everyone we’re working with — contrast it with 17,000 in 2015, which was quite the number. We have to price differently. We have to think about the type of person we want to serve, and the value that they desire, and what they’re willing to pay for it.
Now, there’s a new book that was just released. It’s called The Passion Economy. It’s basically, in a journalistic view businesses like ours, whether they be the year-old model of 17,000 or what have you. But I haven’t got to read it yet. It’s pretty interesting and I’m going to tackle it soon.
One thing I know is talked about is value pricing and how you shouldn’t — I think this was an example I heard on NPR. It was if you’re an accountant who wants to specialize in a certain way or serve a particular type of person other than trying to help everyone, then you don’t compare what you charge to other accountants. What you do is you price based on the particular value that you are giving to these people.
So if you, Jeff Goins, may not want to make as much money as you used to. I don’t know, that’s not the point. But whatever amount it is, you do have to select a price point and a value point for that group of people you serve that’s going to support what you’re looking for. Is that a fair way to characterize that?
Jeff Goins: Yeah, I think so. The way I understand value-based pricing, and it could be wrong, is depending on the customer, product X offering X, especially in the service world, could be worth 10 grand for this particular client. And the same product, same thing, same amount of time and how you’re delivering it to another client could be worth $6,000 or $20,000. And the way that works for me is, because I base this on — what is that called? What is that number? Dunbar’s number: 150 people.
I thought, “You can only really have a relationship with about 150 people at a time. So I figure 50 friends and family, that sounds pretty good. And then I’ve got 100 people left that I can work with at a variety of levels. And so I want to make $1 million a year working with 100 people. So I’ve got to charge $10,000 per person on average. But that can look a lot of different ways. And I’m not going, “Okay, everybody’s paying me 10 grand, but I have to have a suite of offerings at these three or four different levels.
And now I’m looking for customers to fit those little notches that I’ve got for various things that I’m offering. Whether I’m ghost writing a book, or having somebody join a mastermind, or teaching them how to write a book, or they’re booking me to speak, or whatever it might be.
But I found that that was a fun experiment for me, because it was such a change from, “We’ve got a product launch, and this is a $500 course, and we’ve got to sell as many as we possibly can. And if we do this one thing on the last day, at the last minute, we can sell 20 more or whatever it is. Instead of just using the power of constraint to go, “I’ve got to find 100 people. How do I do that? That was a fun exercise for me, because it was like a rifle shot approach instead of a shotgun approach. And it made me better, I had to get better at sales.
Brian Clark: Yeah, the power of constraints is one of my favorite topics, going back to 15 years ago when writing about creativity and what creativity really is. Sometimes your most creative acts come about, for example, because you’re bootstrapping. You don’t have the VC war chest, so you have to get creative, and you end up with something better than if you had the cash. I mean, that’s just a very simple example that I love about bootstrapping.
From what I know about your business, you do have programs and services that lend themselves to 10 grand a customer or more. Of course, that’s on average. If it were only so simple as, “Okay, a hundred people line up, each of you give me 10 grand, wouldn’t that be nice? But it really is an exercise in creativity and really understanding who you’re talking to.
How Are You Getting People into a Funnel?
Brian Clark: I know you have your mastermind program, which is very interesting, and I think valuable, especially with your focus on people who want to be authors or who want to take that career to the next level. You’re doing ghost writing projects, which can be incredibly lucrative. Then, of course, you’re still publishing to large amounts of people, hundreds of thousands of people.
But if you’re only going to work with a hundred people, that doesn’t leave room for gateway or trip wire products, where you get these customers into the so-called funnel and then you move them to the mastermind or whatever. How are you dealing with that?
Jeff Goins: I’m ignoring it right now. To be honest, I may do something like that. I have nine different online courses and various digital products that are just on the shelf right now. I may work that end. I’m not saying I’ll never do that. And if I do it, I’ll share with people how I’m doing it and why I’m doing it.
But what I had was this infrastructure where 80% of my infrastructure was designed to manage the lower 20% of the business, the people that were buying the 20, 50, $200 products. And it was a lot of volume, but it cost a lot of money. So I just cut all that crap out. Now, all of a sudden, instead of it costing $30,000 a month to run my business, it costs like three. And now, I’m not having to meet with all these people and fix all these broken things.
I see why people get to a certain point, they just sell the whole thing. For me, it was quite difficult to dismantle the infrastructure of a business and restructure it. But I believed enough in what I wanted to do and in the way I saw the market going, which is that people were buying online courses and not doing anything with them, so it wasn’t actually working.
I was seeing people at the conference go through course after course, program after program, and not get what they wanted. And that bothered me to be a part of that.
The whole ethos and nomenclature — a “trip wire, I’m trying to get somebody to trip over something that’s going to blow them up in some way.
Brian Clark: I know. Ryan Deiss gets credit for that one. I don’t like the term either. I like “gateway product. I understand the value of acquiring a customer at any price, because they are inherently different than someone who never pays you at all. Okay, I get it.
I love that you’re questioning that whole model, because it’s just so taken as gospel that you can just spot, “Okay, I can see your funnel. I can see it developing. And I’m just kind of like, “Ah, that can be fun to a certain degree when you’re just designing things in a very abstract way. But when it comes down to the fact that you don’t have a real relationship with these people. I think at one point in my career, that was very attractive, but I felt the same way.
I may be more of an introvert than you are. So I’m just like, “Yeah, I don’t need to know who they are. But that’s not true, because my best relationships and the most gratifying aspects of the last — what has it been? — 13, 14 years has been when I talk to someone and not only did I help them, but they got what they wanted. And the thing that’s driven me crazy over the years is the number of people who actually buy in and do nothing. It just bothers me.
How Is Your Level of Impact Different with a Small Group of People?
Brian Clark: So I figured if I had a different model, I could get in your face and go, “You’re going to do this. Not that that’s a goal, but in a certain way, don’t you have a more satisfying level of impact and influence over a smaller group of people? It sounds like that’s what you’re saying.
Jeff Goins: I think so. I mean, it’s still pretty early on. Ask me in a year. I’m the kind of guy, who if I’m sitting on the couch bored, I’m going to text a friend and see how they’re doing. I realized that a lot of friends of mine were people that I had worked with at some point, meaning they had paid me money to give them something, and we’d become friends as a result of working together.
I met with a high-level, high-profile ghost writer here in Nashville who’s written books for Chuck Norris and Bob Dugoni and all these people — has these incredible stories working with celebrities. And I said, “What does it take to be a good ghost writer? because I was just starting out in this space. He said, “You have to be a good friend. And he said, “I have never worked with a client, I don’t have a client whom I couldn’t call up at any time and have lunch with them. I could go out to lunch with every single past client.
If you’ve ever done service work, especially with celebrities, you’re delivering intellectual property to them that is supposedly in their voice. That could be a very stressful situation dealing with people who can at times be very demanding. So to say that you could go out to lunch with any of them and that they would call you friend is a pretty bold thing.
I heard that and I thought, “This is how I want to conduct myself in the work that I do. It really has nothing to do with amount of money that I can or can’t make, amount of people that I want to work with or not. It has to do with a sense of, ‘Do I feel good about what I’m contributing in the world?’
I have friends who are growing these massive companies, and they’re contributing tremendous amounts of value and good in the world, because that’s how they’re wired, that’s what they want to do. I never wanted to do that. I always wanted to make things and help people. And the trip wire stuff and all that online marketing stuff, I never felt myself when I was doing it. I just did it, because everybody else was doing it.
I feel like some of those strategies are engineered to encourage you to be a little bit dishonest. I saw somebody’s funnel the other day, who was a friend of mine, and it was like, “This thing is sold out. You can get this free thing here. Okay, I get the free thing. “Oh, by the way, normally this is $97, but because I care about changing the world, it’s only $27. You can get it right now. And it’s just like, “Okay, but you just told me thing X was sold out. Now you’re telling me that. It’s just a bunch of BS.
I know the script and I was tired of playing in a space where I felt like, “I’m not being dishonest, but I was sort of having to round the edges of my morals and ethics. And I didn’t like what it was doing to me. And I thought, “Do I have to play this game to just win, period? Or can I change the game in some way that’s more satisfying and meaningful for me and actually allows me to serve people in a greater way?
And to your point of making money, not making money — I’m making more money, because I’ve killed a bunch of my overhead, I’ve increased my prices, I’ve minimized the amount of people I want to work with. I’m only working with serious people now. So from a net profit standpoint, I’m making more money than I ever have.
Brian Clark: That is perfect, a great way to end this. And to Mr. Godin’s point, that’s what freedom looks like in the context of running a business. I think you have succeeded once again, Mr. Goins.
Where Can People Find You?
Brian Clark: Tell people where they can find you. Regardless of how many customers you have, you put out great content constantly. I love your Facebook posts as well. You’re one of the only people I’ll bother with Facebook over.
Jeff Goins: I appreciate that.
Brian Clark: Not a fan, but yeah, let’s send people to where they can find out more.
Jeff Goins: Sure. One of the things I’ll say about this is it allowed me to be more generous with my content again, which I missed. I missed just writing an article, because I had an idea that I wanted to share, because I was thinking about, “We’ll have to write this article, because it fits in the content plan here, and we’ve got an open cart on this day. And it’s like, “No, I just want to write an article, record a podcast to share these ideas.
You can find me at my blog, which is goinswriter.com. And you can find all my stuff there. I also have a podcast called The Portfolio Life. Every week I just write an essay, and then I turn it into an article and an audio essay and share thoughts on creative work, business writing, those kinds of things.
Brian Clark: All right, man, I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. I think it shouldn’t be surprising for people to hear things such as dissatisfaction with the way it’s done and/or wanting to do something different despite the success that you had before.
Trust me, people, you’ll see it over and over again. Some of those people growing those massive businesses are probably discontented right now, but they have an image that says, “I can’t stop this train.
So just put yourself in a position like Jeff has to create the business you want. And if that changes, you’ll have the flexibility to do something else that you want. Jeff, thanks so much, man.
Jeff Goins: My pleasure. Thanks, Brian.