Bryan McAnulty [00:00:00]:

You've probably heard the phrase, there is no shortcut to success a 1000000 times. And by the way, I totally agree with this saying, but if there ever was a shortcut, then Brian Harris has found it. If you are a coach or creator looking to grow your business revenue, then listen up because today we're interviewing Brian Harris who has discovered a way to get over a 1000 leads in less than a month without having a big audience. Brian calls this approach BOPA, meaning borrow other people's audience. And he discovered this marketing strategy by accident about 10 years ago when Noah Kagan shared 1 of his blog posts with his audience positioning Brian's work in front of 100 of thousands of people. Today, Brian will share with you how you can replicate this strategy in your own business and generate a consistent 10 k per month in revenue.

Bryan Harris [00:00:44]:

That's really easy and really hard to screw up. So that's my basic thinking. First of all, is it's not a mystery, it's math. What's the math? First off, how much money do you need? What's your what do you charge? How many clients do you need? Almost nobody does this, by the way. This is like elementary business 101, but no 1 like, this might sound super stupid. Oh, I'm the only 1 that had done it. No. No.

Bryan Harris [00:01:05]:

No. Like, I didn't even do it for a decade.

Bryan McAnulty [00:01:08]:

Welcome to the creator's adventure where we interview creators from around the world hearing their stories about growing a business. Hey, everyone. I'm Brian McAnulty, the founder of Heights Platform. Let's get into it. Hey, everyone. We're here today with Brian Harris. He is the founder and CEO of Growth Tools, an Inc 5, 000 company and monthly coaching service that makes it nearly impossible to fail at growing your online business and getting new coaching clients. Since quitting his job at Home Depot in 2012, he's consulted leading companies like Facebook, Keep, ConvertKit, HubSpot, and Teachable.

Bryan McAnulty [00:01:46]:

His clients include industry titans like Michael Hyatt, Neil Patel, and Amy Porterfield. Brian is famous for BOPA, the most overlooked and underrated marketing strategy he inadvertently discovered 10 years ago when Noam Kagan showed, shared an article with a 100000 people. Brian, welcome to the show.

Bryan Harris [00:02:06]:

Thank you for having me. I appreciate that.

Bryan McAnulty [00:02:08]:

Yeah. My first question for you is, what what do you say is the biggest thing that you did that has helped you to achieve the freedom to do what you enjoy?

Bryan Harris [00:02:18]:

Oh my goodness. You could go 20 directions with that. I've been thinking about this. I actually just read an email 30 minutes ago in the vein of this question. I would maybe start with the definition of freedom is very different thing. It means a very different thing to me now. I'm a little 12 years in, started in March of 2013, so 11 or 12 years into doing the online business thing, which is shocking. And I think at the time I would've defined freedom as the ability, I don't know, having enough money to do the things I wanted or some superficial answer like that which is a superficial not real answer by the way.

Bryan Harris [00:02:58]:

That is not true. Money enslaves you the more you get it if you don't grow as a human as well. Actually I I was looking up recently and my wife and I, when we first got married and went through all the Dave Ramsey stuff and did the debt free scream and all that stuff, back in 2012 or 2013. And, I think a lot of people define financial freedom specifically as that some number. It's a number of some sort that is usually a moving target. But even if you make it a static target, it's still a number, which isn't freedom actually. That means you're slave to that number. And if you have that number, you're good.

Bryan Harris [00:03:30]:

And if you don't have that number, you're in jail. You're bound up. And I just don't think that's that can't be true. That's actually by definition not true. So I think the answer to the question what have I discovered I'll re ask the question. What have I discovered over 10 or 11, 12 years of doing this? And here's a unique maybe flavor to add to this. This is a long, long winded answer to the question, but it's something I've been thinking about just a lot lately. Coaching a lot of of the names of people that people know and looking behind the scenes of lots of businesses, man, you can have lots of zeros onto revenue, onto your profit, onto your bank account and your investments or whatever.

Bryan Harris [00:04:07]:

And none of that equals freedom. Some of the most fear based bound up people I know have lots of zeros. So they set a number at some point along the way and that number ain't got nothing to do with being free of anything. You become a slave to that. If the bank account doesn't go up, you get filled with fear and you do dumb stuff and your hand just clenches. So I think for me, I think about that visual a lot like what what gets me here? What gets me just open handed? And it has nothing to do with money. In fact, it gets harder to do this the more zeros that exist in the revenue top line p and l bank account. So what is freedom? I think that's a good question, but it's not money.

Bryan Harris [00:04:46]:

It actually has enough. It can't by definition have anything to do with your business success. If it does, you're just a slave to the business then and you will never have peace. You will never have joy. It's impossible because the business will never be the full completeness of whatever you want it to be. You will never get there. It's impossible because it grows. So what is freedom? I think that's the first question before we answer the question, how do I have it? That's a great question.

Bryan Harris [00:05:09]:

And if so, what has worked? And I would say, am I totally free? No. What has worked? I think there's a couple there's a couple things. 1 of those being being aware of the fear that exists and not working through it or from it. I think if I were to go not super duper deep, I think that's like 1 of the most fundamental things, being aware of what fear exists. Is it fear of the launch networking or the email networking or the product never being right or the engineer or hire doesn't work or whatever's going on for you? What is that thing? And then how can I not live in the place of fear, which is always alive 100% of the time? And what is the truth about that thing and operating from that space. That is the only thing that can actually get you to any level of freedom. Otherwise, you're just a slave to a different thing. You used to be a slave to a boss.

Bryan Harris [00:05:58]:

Now you're a slave to a number, your business, or the team, or whatever's going on for you inside. So I I don't take a a light view of that question. I think it's actually the question. I think about, like, when we coach people, there's 2 things we coach on. It used to be 1. For 10 years, it was 1. But turns out, you can't just coach this and get what they want. Thus, they will eventually move on to somebody else they think can give them the thing they want.

Bryan Harris [00:06:21]:

And the thing we coach on, you know, our goal is to make it almost impossible for our clients to fail at getting more customers in their business. That's the number 1 optimization point. The 2 major things that we have to do to make that happen is first, get to handle the the hard skill set. Think about we think now, like, getting there is a French door. It's not just a single door, of walking through, like, tactical marketing work that you do. A Facebook phone or Instagram thing or ManyChat or s c whatever thing you're excited about right now. Yes. You gotta have a sales channel that actually works.

Bryan Harris [00:06:47]:

That is a fundamental item. It's the rebarb in your foundation of your house. But you can't just have rebar. You gotta actually have concrete. And the concrete is I don't even have the right words to talk about this yet, but like you gotta have that part. You gotta the tactical marketing side down and really just need 1 sales channel. You can go to a $5, 000, 000 company with 1 sales channel and go to a $20, 000, 000 company with a 2 with 2 sales channels with 1 product. That's all you need in 99.9% of situations.

Bryan Harris [00:07:14]:

But if you don't have the other side, which is working, not working out of fear, but working out of a place of what is absolutely true about you as a human, and about the situation, you will always be a slave to something. So now we coach both sides, and it's a little tricky because people don't hire us for this. People don't usually aren't problem aware of this side. Some people are, if they're super intentional and really pay attention and work on themselves, they'd know this is a thing. The people that are harder, the people that don't know it's a thing. They can be way along in business, way mature. Everybody knows their names, but this ain't got nothing to do with this over here. You're smart marketers.

Bryan Harris [00:07:52]:

You could crush it. You could triple the business every year if if this wasn't the thing, but you're close fisted over here. Like you are trying to compare yourself to Tony Robbins or Dave Ramsey or the prep whoever. Whoever the person, whoever you Alex or whoever you're obsessed with right now on YouTube and Instagram or whatever, like you're trying to compare it and try to do the things they would do, but but you aren't them. You will never be them. Like you can't do things, like you can only do things like you do. And if you do that, it'll lead you down fear. Anyway, blah blah blah.

Bryan Harris [00:08:16]:

So now we work on both things. Because if you don't, like, they won't win. They will get to a point of success where the fear overcomes and then they'll stop and they think it's the tactical marketing set. And sometimes it is. Like a lot of people need help with that. But if you don't get who you are and working out a truth right, you'll lose every time and you'll be just a slave to, now I got 20, 000, 000 in my bank account or 20, 000 or $20. It does the number actually doesn't matter. That's why you hear like trust fund kids and people that get rich, all this stuff.

Bryan Harris [00:08:40]:

It is people who have the number, but they have no freedom. Thus, they're killing people or an equivalent. Some people literally, some people figuratively, they just go hurt everybody, hurt people, hurt people. It's because they they don't know who they are and they're wrapped up in fear. They might have got this success over here. 1 door is open, but they ain't got both doors open. But when you get somebody, any any human who knows who they are and you have the mind. The number in the bank account doesn't matter.

Bryan Harris [00:09:11]:

So something in the direction of that is where the freedom thing is.

Bryan McAnulty [00:09:16]:

That's a excellent answer and I'm I'm glad that you, went into it so deeply because I like to ask people this question because I feel it's so important. And

Bryan Harris [00:09:24]:

Yep.

Bryan McAnulty [00:09:24]:

It's something that I I feel that I was fortunate enough to discover the importance of thinking about this for myself early on when I was in, like, high school. Like, I was scared to death about, like, what do you mean, like, go to college? Like, what am I gonna do? What do I wanna do? That's really expensive and really deeply thinking about, like, what is it that I actually enjoy and care about? And and not trying to realizing I didn't wanna become a slave to to money, to a problem, to my business, whatever it was. And my philosophy now is very much like, what can I do today that I am enjoying and I would be doing tomorrow regardless of the outcome of today?

Bryan Harris [00:10:05]:

And I'll take it a step further. I don't even think that's sufficient. Here's why. There's a popular mode of thought in different veins of self work and religion and whatnot that all the answers are inside of you, and that just ain't true. If all the answers were inside of you, you could be a monk in the woods and sit there and meditate all day long and be and be totally fine. And that doesn't work actually. The whoever you look to as a higher power that created you and put you on earth, that's the 1 that actually knows. Just like like you know your software better than anybody, cause you made it.

Bryan Harris [00:10:37]:

And and more specifically, I don't know if you're the engineer or not. The engineer who's writing the code, they're the only 1 that actually knows it. The user experiences it through their perspective. So they use the software, they use high and they know all the stuff, but they don't know the software. The only person that really knows it, the bugs and the features and what's good and what needs some refinement is the actual human who made the thing. So like, if you're trying to find it all yourself, like that's actually impossible. You won't get to who you actually really really are. You you can't like you can't read the label from inside the jar.

Bryan Harris [00:11:08]:

Doesn't work. You can get a long ways. You can talk to Fran. You can do all that. But like, like, unless you are asking up, you will never find out down who you actually are. It's it's by definition impossible because you didn't write the code. Last I checked, I didn't make me. I just happened 1 day and came out.

Bryan Harris [00:11:25]:

In fact, today's my son's 7th or middle son's 7th 7th birthday. And I was like, he didn't have any part of making himself. He just came out and he was who he was. And, you know, he can steward that and do different things along the way. But like, he didn't write the code. So he doesn't know the code because he didn't write it. But, yes, getting to the answer of who am I and how does that play out right now in my business? I think as a because I'm a super practical person. You can easily take these topics into woo woo land and I hesitate talking about any of them and very rarely ever have actually.

Bryan Harris [00:11:59]:

But it felt more and more convicted that this is such it's as core actually, it's more core than whatever marketing tactical stuff you have going on. And I spent the 1st decade only doing this. And I feel like now it's like you gotta have both of those things to win. Cause if you can get $10, 000, 000 in revenue yearly here at high profit margins, but you don't have this, you lost. Yeah. You lost.

Bryan McAnulty [00:12:20]:

Well, if if you have

Bryan Harris [00:12:21]:

If you don't if you hit it like you're messed up.

Bryan McAnulty [00:12:24]:

If you have that, you'll do it forever. And you'll eventually get to whatever number, but All that'll come. Yeah. Exactly. So

Bryan Harris [00:12:32]:

that's great. Said money only makes you more of what you are, and it just puts a magnifying glass and a multiplier on it. So, like, if you have fear making $80 a year and doing whatever, like, bro, you had 2 zeros on that and you're really messed up. So yeah. Anyway.

Bryan McAnulty [00:12:49]:

So, along those lines and I I know I'm I'm asking a a big question here to go through all of your history. So Sure. To to go through it quickly enough so we can get into some tactics.

Bryan Harris [00:13:00]:

Yep.

Bryan McAnulty [00:13:00]:

Can you share maybe, like, a a moment or series of events that, led you to quit your job at Home Depot in 2012 and then eventually turned into what you have today?

Bryan Harris [00:13:10]:

Yeah. 2 things. 1st, I'm gonna say this to close the book on what we're talking about before. I'm gonna I'm actually doing this is the first time I'm ever gonna teach this publicly. We did it on our team internally a little bit, and I've done a little private stuff with friends on, like, how do I clear the fear out of my life and how do I figure out who I am? Who I was made to be and how does that play out today as a salesperson or owner or engineer or whatever? Like, how do I use that tactically today? Because I'm like the most tactical human ever. So like but what does that actually mean? Great. You're whatever. But like, I'm not your your spirit animal's a butterfly.

Bryan Harris [00:13:40]:

Awesome. Cool. Who cares? Back to business. But how do you actually use it? How do you do it? So next Friday at 1 PM CST, I'm doing a a free workshop. There's nothing to buy, nothing to sell. It's just me talking about this in-depth, how it very practically affects me every day. So I'm gonna as we go through, there'll probably be other things we talk about, but growthtools.com/heights will be a little landing page. You can grab the link over there, and show up to the workshop.

Bryan Harris [00:14:03]:

So we do those every Friday. So we'll do 1 next Friday. If you wanna come, feel free to, feel free to pop in, register for it so you can actually be there. Okay. What led me to quitting job? You know, there's there's a long version of the story. 1 short version is I was watching I'm pretty sure it was Stu McLaren, who's a great dude. I was watching like a launch video of his. I think at the time he was working for Michael Hyatts.

Bryan Harris [00:14:24]:

They were probably launching Platform University or something. That detail does not matter. But they they were doing a prelaunch like Jeff Walker style, video series leading in. And I was watching 1 of the videos and I remember being in the cubicle. I was working in an engineering company. At the time I was past the lumber company and in an engineering company. And, I was watching the video and he said something to the effect of, you know, and you just wanna quit your job so you can, you know, work less and spend more time with your family and live life on your own terms. All of which sounds great, but I remember having a visceral reaction when he said that.

Bryan Harris [00:14:55]:

Like, that's not why I'm doing this at all. Like, what are you talking about? Like, it was it resonated 0%. Like the pure I mean, actually not the pure. The surface level idea of the 4 hour work week has just never been anything remotely interesting to me. There's super tactical stuff that Tim talks about in the heart of what he's saying is actually really good and true. But for me, it's just like, the reason I wanna do this, I think is because part of what I was made to do is to create things. I think that's just part of who I am. I've never been able to get away from it when I do it and live within that things feel good and peaceful.

Bryan Harris [00:15:29]:

And even if it's hard, it's still good. So that was a launching point for me of, okay, well, if I'm made to make things, what am I supposed to be making? And after a winding bit of a journey, I found myself 12 years later, to our goal is to start a company, a coaching company, who makes it almost impossible for our clients to feel a good in their business. There's lots of reasons behind that, but, like, eventually, after a while of trial and error, and we did courses and memberships and software and books and every product type that I've ever come across. But when we got down to the end of the day, the most effective thing, which is a a resonating point for me over and over and over again, we could sell lots of course and do lots of things, but like they were never all that effective. The completion rate was single digits. The success rate was below a percentage point, and that's the case with any of them really. But the thing that worked, the thing that actually really truly helped people was 1 on 1 coaching. It just works great.

Bryan Harris [00:16:21]:

But the reason you don't have a lot of it is because it's hard to do with a lot of people. Anybody can coach 10 or 20 people, but man, you get past that, even get to that. And that's like, that was a lot of effort and I can't do other stuff so the income becomes capped and all that stuff. But the the even more root level problem we're trying to solve is how do you scale? How do you do 1 on 1 coaching on scale? How do you take like imagine somewhere out there if you were to take all the marriage counselors that exist for instance, there's 1 of them that's probably like the best. Like a really, really good 1. Their effectiveness, their all that. Just like the best. There is 1 of those humans somewhere.

Bryan Harris [00:16:56]:

But they can only work with like 20, 30 people. Like, they literally can't see more humans than that. The schedule is full and the word time doesn't exist. So then they do what all of us do. They write a book, they make a course, they have group coaching. That's that's that's what some version of that is what they're gonna do. But all of those totally suck in comparison to the thing that actually works, which is 1 on 1 coaching. Like, there's a reason that Jesus in the Bible had 12 people that followed him.

Bryan Harris [00:17:24]:

But really amongst the 12, he had 3 that were super close, and amongst the 3, he had a 1 he was really close to. It's like even Jesus worked with 12 humans. He had a pretty tight cap, but then he taught those people how to anyway, blah blah blah. So like you have a cap, and you can either go to a less effective product type. It is all of them. Your course is not great by the way. Everybody's course kind of sucks. Everybody's book kind of sucks.

Bryan Harris [00:17:45]:

If you're measuring off success rate, the number of humans that purchase and get the result that they were looking for. And there's lots of reasons well beyond the product for that, but 1 on 1 coaching just works. So for the past 4 years, we've been just exclusively honed in like a laser to solve that problem. And the skin that we're putting on that is helping clients get customers. And once we solve that, we'll hopefully roll it out to other industries. Like, how do you hey, how do you make it almost impossible to feel like having a great marriage? Because right now it's way easier to have a sucky marriage than a great 1. How do you make it almost impossible to fail to be great at personal finance? Because right now it's way easier to suck at it than to be great at it. So I'm hopeful that over the next year or 2, we'll finish nail in the coffin on that problem and then be able to give that to other people and use it in other industries.

Bryan Harris [00:18:31]:

And that is exciting, because we're creating, like, a a real solution to a real deal problem that when solved helps way beyond what we're doing, and it is lucrative and all that stuff. It's fun. It scratches all the digits as well.

Bryan McAnulty [00:18:46]:

Yeah. So, yeah, a lot of things with that. I I agree with with all the things that you're talking about for the most part with the courses. I think I'm gonna be biased on that, but I think that there are many things that if you are a coach, you've gotta teach kind of the same thing to everybody. And so a course product is great if you want to kinda get everybody up to a certain level of this baseline where now you can help them 1 on 1 after that and get them to that that moment and that that full result that they're after.

Bryan Harris [00:19:17]:

Oh, totally. I do agree with that. Learning learning is a terrible use of 1 on 1 coaching time. Application and troubleshooting is a great use of 1 on 1 time. So for even us, when we teach it, like the like, wait a marriage counselor, our favorite marriage counselor we've ever had. We've all tried to always have 1 in our marriage. And 1 of our favorite ones, like the first 12 sessions was just some telling stuff. In fact, after the 3rd session, I was like, do you have a book we can just read? So we can come in knowing this stuff and just like, you can then quizzes and ask these questions.

Bryan Harris [00:19:42]:

So absolutely, like, the learning piece is kind of the easy part. So doing that async or group, what that's fine. But but wherever where the rubber hits the road is, okay, how do I apply that? And here's a tricky here's a fight we had, or here's a tricky situation we keep encountering. And I I I'm not able to make the connection between this concept you taught and the actual application. You know, in coaching, that's where it actually shines, and that's where all not directed learning really sucks. Like ultimately, like, everybody that has a course. I have a course. We sell it.

Bryan Harris [00:20:12]:

It's great. But like I know the effectiveness of that is just a a small portion, but it does prime people to, 1, receive coaching and you need it. Like, you need a learning mechanism in coaching because you do have to teach things. But that's not where the superpower in coaching is at all. Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty [00:20:25]:

Yeah. Well, I agree with that too because so we're actually focused on a similar problem, though, not as in-depth as you are, but inside Heights platform. So we built Heights AI Coach, and that was our take on, well, how can we how would we be able to scale 1 on 1 coaching to help all of our customers in in that same way? And, it's it's a hard problem. I'm interested in in your thoughts about it.

Bryan Harris [00:20:50]:

It is not an easy problem to solve. It would be solved. No 1 solved it, by the way. Mhmm. Yeah. Because no 1 called. This is a open problem for humanity that has not been solved. Yeah.

Bryan Harris [00:21:01]:

Yeah. It's a real thing.

Bryan McAnulty [00:21:02]:

So I I think though, also, like, for our audience, like, I think they're not gonna go out and and start building AI systems and things like this. But what I think would start to apply to them and and interest them is on your website, you state that it's nearly impossible for your clients to fail, and you guarantee results in 90 days. So what what systems have you put in place to be able to, like, ensure a success rate that's high?

Bryan Harris [00:21:30]:

Oh my goodness. We we need to do like a 4 hour workshop just on this genre of topic. How do you have high success rate teaching people ultimately? How do you get the result? Because ultimately, they don't really care about the training. They don't care about the trinket. I mean, they think they do in the beginning, but it actually has nothing to do with that. What I want at the end of the day is a great marriage or to be a good parent or to have a business that's actually growing and stressed for all that. So that's the actual thing. So for the first thing, like, if you wanna guarantee result, which I think is we've learned a lot about that.

Bryan Harris [00:22:00]:

Oh, my goodness. With zeros on the end of it. Lots of zeros on the end of it to the negative. But the first thing is having a reasonable timeline and a reasonable result in a 90 day period. And people drastically and they do this due to pressure, typically, in the industry of other people promising lots of things. I just tell you flat out, these people promising these absolutely insane results in short period 30 days, 90 days, they're actually full of crap. And their refund rates are over 30% and their business is tanking. If they aren't now, they will be very soon.

Bryan Harris [00:22:33]:

We've learned this. We've learned that this is not like a theoretical lesson. You do that crap, you will lose.

Bryan McAnulty [00:22:38]:

Yeah. No. I've seen that. I've seen especially more recently, there's been more of a Yeah.

Bryan Harris [00:22:43]:

It's hard now.

Bryan McAnulty [00:22:44]:

Marketer is running ads, a crazy promise. They see money coming in and they think, oh, must be working. Then they find out 6 months from now, a year from now, wow. Actually, I have to refund this many people. That was the money I needed to grow and scale, and now I I don't have that.

Bryan Harris [00:22:57]:

You will lose. It is impossible.

Bryan McAnulty [00:22:59]:

So what's the solution?

Bryan Harris [00:23:00]:

And right now, I will say this too. Right now is the hardest time in the market since I've been in the market been in this for 12 years. So people are getting desperate right now. If you see a spike in that, they need sales and they're just promising lies. So solution first. What is a if if people were to do 70% of the work over 90 days, what's the first big milestone they would hit? What is that? And then promise that, if they do the work. It's actually kind of simple. Now that takes it depends on your like, okay.

Bryan Harris [00:23:27]:

So 1 client, for instance, they're a marriage counselor, and they defined your marriage will be, what was it specifically? It's gonna be, twice as good. They had a measurement there. So III will butcher the specifics. I'm trying to remember the exact line we wrote, but it's something like your peace level or your confidence or or whatever will be twice as good as it was when you hired us 90 days. If not, you get your money back. Now, there's a condition on that. You do have to do work. If you don't do work, I can't guarantee you anything.

Bryan Harris [00:23:58]:

So like, if you just buy the thing, don't do anything. I'm not giving you a refund back. That's a you problem, not a me problem. Now I'm gonna design systems to try to, like, make it almost impossible for you not to either, you know, unsubscribe or do the work. So I'm gonna text you. I'm gonna email you. I'm gonna check -in on you. I'm gonna, like, do my job as your coach to chase you down.

Bryan Harris [00:24:15]:

But, ultimately, like, I mean, if you're on the other direction a 1000 miles an hour, I I I'm not gonna handcuff you and drag you in. But I will go to the edge of that actually, because I think that's my job when you hire me to advise and coach you. So I think a reasonable result in 90 days that is of substance. So if you can increase your marriage quality by 25% in 90 days, is that possible? Yeah. It actually is. And this client has a very particular tool that takes about 2 minutes to do every day. It's called the core emotion wheel. And if you do that every day for 90 days is actually 1 of the most life changing things me and my wife have ever learned and we apply to our kids and apply to team and it's fantastic connection codes.co is their website.

Bryan Harris [00:24:54]:

Go check it out. Grab their lead magnet. It's called the core motion. Well, it's awesome. And you spend 2 minutes every day doing this little exercise and like it diffuses situations so quickly, the ones that would escalate escalate and have a glass radius on them. Again, you can plot marriage, parenting, kids, team, whatever. So they can but here's how they would do it. They would measure it in the beginning.

Bryan Harris [00:25:13]:

So survey, onboarding call, whatever your mechanism is. Hey, right now, scale of 1 to 10, what's your quality of marriage? Right now, it's a 4. Great. So that means our goal, your goal, actually, because it's not my goal. I'm your coach. I'm not I don't own your marriage. You own your marriage. So your goal over the next 90 days to increase that by 25%.

Bryan Harris [00:25:32]:

So, was it a 6 or something? Is it get get it from a 4 to 6? I don't expect you to have a world class marriage in 90 days. And if you even say that, you're totally full of yourself. It's never gonna happen. That's not real life. And then at the end of it, I'm gonna measure it again and we'll have a binary measurement. And then the only question is, did you get it? Yes or no. And, did you do the work needed to get there? So what I have found is the only people and you could define, what do you do if that doesn't happen? Do you refund? I found that to not be helpful, actually, in any way. It drives them out of the product and solution instead of into it.

Bryan Harris [00:26:10]:

Instead, it's less sexy on the marketing side, but we found it affect conversions basically none. But you want to you want the you want the mechanic, if they fail, to drive them deeper into relationship with you, not further out of relationship. And if you tell someone, as soon as you say the word refund, they're looking for the way out, especially as you add zeros on the end. This is slightly less important if you're in the sub $1, 000 range. It's gigantically important if you're in the $5, 000 plus range. If you attach a refund in a coaching product or teaching product environment, that person always has that it's like a prenup in a marriage. It's always in the back of your mind. I always got a way out.

Bryan Harris [00:26:47]:

I I can keep my money even if it didn't work out and you're just slave to money again. So for us, it's a reasonable result 90 days, a clear measurement on the front end, a clear measurement on the back end. And the only people that really get sideways are the people who you did not they think you don't care or they think you didn't do your part. So ultimately, you can control their thoughts, but you can do things that signal that to them. So you can check with them every week and say, hey. The thing you're supposed all you gotta do is a core emotional every day. Takes 2 minutes. That's it.

Bryan Harris [00:27:18]:

90 days later, your marriage will be 25% better. That would be their core promise. And that is true. If you do if you do that even 70% of the time, you're gonna be substantially better. So it's just did you do it or not? And did I reach out to you once a week check-in? Did you do the core motion move 7 days this week? Nope. What's your plan to fix it next week? So 1 other thing I'll share here and you can ask me questions is a thing we messed up on that sounded good, but in retrospect, just like laid the wrong foundation of relationship was we talked about us getting new results. We talked about, like, our job, probably a more well, anyway, us getting new results and that's not it. Like, I can't care more about your business than you.

Bryan Harris [00:27:59]:

That should be impossible. If I care more than you, something's wrong. So our job and we have these clearly defined roles. And the first thing we do when somebody hires us is, here's your job, here's our job, just so we're clear. And that means our job isn't to get you results. My job isn't to impress you. My job is to make it actually, we clearly define it as my job is to focus on relationship and giving good advice. That's my job.

Bryan Harris [00:28:25]:

I actually can't do more than that as a coach. And as a course creator, membership person, you actually you definitely can't do more than that. Their job is to focus on taking action and get results. That's their job. So if they're not if they're not doing stuff, that's their problem. Now my job is to help them, so I need to point that out and show them and facilitate the process. So clearly defined roles as you lean in more and more to promises and guarantees becomes substantially important. Or your refund rates and your pissed off people and all that stuff will just go to crap.

Bryan Harris [00:28:53]:

So those are a few things we've learned.

Bryan McAnulty [00:28:55]:

Yeah. Ruben running. That's excellent. So you you mentioned about how, like, somebody's expectations or or them feeling that you didn't do Yep. Your part because they're expecting you to get results for them. I found definitely that when that happens, now you've got a client that they feel bad about the whole experience. Yeah. So you're not you're not getting great reviews from them.

Bryan McAnulty [00:29:17]:

They they didn't get what they want, and so, like, you're not happy you wanted to provide them to get them to their goal. But it is an issue of, like, maybe their action, maybe their expectations, things like that. If it gets to that point, is there a a way to to fix it or repair the relationship? Or are you saying that the best solution is actually the upfront, like, expectations and setting it up?

Bryan Harris [00:29:42]:

All of the above. Because you're ultimately, you're dealing with humans. You can have the best frame person ever come in and a 120 days in, they're totally sideways or you can have somebody, literally, we're talking about somebody this morning, 3 hours after hiring us and signing their contract, they're totally sideways. It's like, ultimately, you're dealing with humans and we're just really mess eject at people. So you you gotta be able to navigate interpersonal relationships. So maybe pause here real quick. What I'll do at that slash heights page, I'll put a copy of a couple things, 2, actually, 3 things that'll be super helpful here. 1 is our contract.

Bryan Harris [00:30:10]:

That's the like, a contract you can think of as, like, when we disagree, here's the terms by which we disagree. It needs to be the place of truth of what happens when things go sideways, because they will. So I'll put a copy of that. 2nd thing, I'll put a copy. 1 of the key things we do at multiple points in the 1st 90 days is we have, like, expectation video. Like, hey, you just literally, there's a video as soon as somebody buys before they can even sign the contract that is called, what did I just buy? That clearly defines out. And like normal human terms is me on a Loom with a doc. And they get a link to the doc and everything.

Bryan Harris [00:30:40]:

And when they get on the onboarding calls, like, hey, did you watch it? What'd you like? What made sense? Great. You good? Cool. Alright. Next. Because from that point forward, 3rd item I'll give you is our our, what do we call it? We call it our, what's SOP for disgruntled clients? And then we have a name for it. I forget the names. I'll put that in there as well. It is like, I use it all over life now.

Bryan Harris [00:30:59]:

So when someone gets sideways despite all of that, or we didn't do a great job of that, but still they're there. They're at a place that we call it the snow globe is shaking. You can't see straight when the snow globe is shaking. You got practical anything doesn't matter, actually. If you try to go like, if you have a kid who's losing their mind and, like, crying or whatever because somebody made fun of them and they hurt their self. But but think about it real quick. Let's examine the neurons in your brain and they're like it's like what are you talking like? If you try to go hyper practical in emotional situations, it doesn't work. If you're married, you know what I'm talking about.

Bryan Harris [00:31:25]:

If you're not and you've been in relationships, you do. But So 1 thing we found, and I'll just give you this opinion. I'll go walk through it and see it. 1 key item, the person who's handling the disgruntled person better not be in fear right then of what might happen. If you are, it will make everything worse. If you're scared of, oh, man, they paid me $7, 000 and now they're super pissed off and threatening because they're going like, there's, you know, 1% of the population is just crazy, by the way. So if you sell them enough people, you deal with legitimately diagnosable crazy people. So you're gonna deal with that person.

Bryan Harris [00:31:55]:

It's gonna happen. So 1, you better be out of fear yourself. You better clear the fear before you go into that call. So the very first thing we do, first step of the SOP, is we have something called an airing of grievance call. Where we get on the call, and we tell them in the email, like they're they write and you could tell these emails because they're usually like 17 pages long, single spaced, whatever. I I just see that email. I don't read it. And the first thing I do is send an Aaron agreement's email.

Bryan Harris [00:32:19]:

Our team does it. They did the majority of this now. And Aaron agreements email was like, man, Susie, I totally get where you're coming from. Thank you so much for bringing this up, man. I value what you're saying. I would love to get on a call just to hear you out. The goal of this call isn't to fix anything. The goal of the call isn't to debate you or disagree with you.

Bryan Harris [00:32:34]:

I just wanna totally hear your heart and where you're coming from. That's the email. First off, that just disarmed. I mean, crazy people still crazy. So there's they're gonna be all over the place and the snow globe still shaking. But that's like calm the snow globe. Just a calm to measure, not fear based approach to it. That email does a lot.

Bryan Harris [00:32:49]:

Then you get on the call and you just listen and ask questions. Not defensive, not explaining yourself, not 0 defense, 0 protection, 0 promoting yourself. Oh, man. I get that. Tell me more about that. What happened there? Is it and then at the end of the call, no solutions. Like, hey, Susie, what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna spend the next 24 hours just thinking about this, reviewing this, investigating a few things, and I'll email you back, in 2 days about this. Does that sound good? That sounds good.

Bryan Harris [00:33:12]:

First off, what happened there for Susie? Probably for the first time, literally in her entire life, was somebody just set there and held space and listened to her. But that is a exceedingly rare thing for any human to do for another human, especially the 2 humans who are in open combat. So if you can not be a beer You

Bryan McAnulty [00:33:30]:

respond to that email with another long email. Now now you're in a fight. Now now there is a combat instead.

Bryan Harris [00:33:36]:

No. Never combat ever. It never works. Ever.

Bryan McAnulty [00:33:41]:

Yes,

Bryan Harris [00:33:41]:

sir. Unless 1 of you kills the other, it will not work. Is Israel and Hamas will never get along. Either they will come to it from a place not in fear or 1 of them will die. It's the only possible route. As long as you're in open combat, either 1 side dies or you come to it from not or from a place of fear and you get to solution. If you're in open combat, no 1 wins. Everyone dies every time.

Bryan Harris [00:34:04]:

So the way you would respond to that let's work through this, because this is like this is this is the real stuff behind any teaching, coaching, sales business. What do you do with the crazy people? And I'm using crazy in quotes of, like, the hard the hard people because they're just hard there's hard kids. There's hard this is just people. So if they respond back, if I send that email, I'd love to get on a call. 1, that practically never happens. A very small percentage of cases, but similar to a call email. In fact, if a coach said to me, hey, Susie went off the rails and sent the air in agreements email and she just went off the rails again. Over 2, 000 1 on 1 coaching class, I don't think I've ever actually heard that.

Bryan Harris [00:34:38]:

But if I did, the first thing I do is look at the email the coach sent and I would bet they were triggered and fear based in that email and it would be palpable. It's it just doesn't happen. If it did though, if they responded back, nope. I hate you and this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna sue you and BBB and all all the things you could think of to do. I'd be like, dang, Susie. You gotta stay out of fear or you're gonna get in a war and everyone dies. Those those are the only there's not another option.

Bryan Harris [00:35:04]:

If you go try to do the self righteous like, Susie, I sent you an email and I tried to be good to you and I tried to do that. All you're doing is defend you're in war now. Not gonna work. Yeah. So it's like, excuse me, man. Totally get where you're coming from. Unfortunately, the only positive step forward here is for us to talk person to person, not via text where we misunderstood and hear and I want to hear you. So if you're not willing to do that, I totally get it, but I'm not gonna respond to anything other than that going forward.

Bryan Harris [00:35:29]:

I'm not I'm not being mean. I'm not trying to be defensive. That is the only next step. And they'll get on the call. And if they don't, I'll literally just ignore their emails until they do. That's it. Because nothing positive will happen with that person unless you talk to them and hear them out and bring the snow globe down. And then, after you do that, you can get to like practical actual solutions.

Bryan Harris [00:35:50]:

We have something called an options email. We send them after that, depending on the situation. It's like, hey, Susie. You know, most situations, you know, either yes. Hey, actually, you do deserve whatever the refund or the whatever whatever bonus or whatever thing they said, or they don't, they just don't qualify or egregiously don't qualify at all. And it's like, hey, can't do that due to x y and z, but here's 3 things we can do. And you give them options, and you just walk through that. So anyway, I'll put a copy of that.

Bryan Harris [00:36:15]:

I think this is man, it's 1 of the reasons people don't do a lot of high end stuff is because you hit you hit these really real situations and they can like gut punch you like literally nothing else will hit you like these kind of situations do. But if you know what to do, it'll help you in every area of life, and they're not, at the end of the day, that complicated. You can diffuse them, and you can't some of the people probably half the time with the crazy ones, they come back in and they're some of the best people ever. Because now they've had someone walk through a hard situation with them, hear them, see them, treat them with respect, and they resolved it. And man Yeah. That just doesn't happen.

Bryan McAnulty [00:36:50]:

Yeah. Like after years helped them like nobody else would.

Bryan Harris [00:36:53]:

Yeah. Yeah. So you know?

Bryan McAnulty [00:36:55]:

Yeah. And you mentioned the point about the the contract earlier too and, like, sharing that. And I think it's important to note that, like, the contract, it's not about, like, just the legal, but it's, like, what you're describing here, defining these processes. And it made me think back to, like, early on in business, I did graphic design.

Bryan Harris [00:37:13]:

Mhmm.

Bryan McAnulty [00:37:13]:

And I remember working with this 1 customer, and there was, there was all these designers involved in in producing these magazines, and things were just not defined well. And all the time, like, the thing is supposed to go to print, like, it has to be printed because it's gotta be mailed to everybody. And we have these designers, like, asking these questions about, like, how to set up a file or not asking them and setting it up completely wrong. And it's like, well, how how could we get to this point that this this has happened? And later on, I've I've built this print business, with, doing these high end business cards, and people could order the business cards. And at first, people that that worked with me before in the other business thought, like, well, how can how can you even begin to do this? There can be so many problems of all these designers submitting files and having no clue what to do. And I said, well, we defined it all on our website. We show them how to prepare it. We we give them all the things they need.

Bryan McAnulty [00:38:09]:

They have a template. They can use this. And because all of that is defined in a certain way, because we've set up ways for them to communicate with us, we just don't have those problems.

Bryan Harris [00:38:18]:

Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty [00:38:19]:

It just doesn't happen because it's all been properly defined in a process. And so I think having that in, the form of coaching in your contracts

Bryan Harris [00:38:29]:

Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty [00:38:29]:

It's not just about, like, legally protecting yourself, but it's it's setting both you and your client up for success.

Bryan Harris [00:38:35]:

100%. It does both because you do want to legally protect yourself especially if you're in the refund.

Bryan McAnulty [00:38:39]:

Yes. You you want

Bryan Harris [00:38:40]:

that refund. You for sure want to be protected. Because you can you can win all of those. Like, the crazy people that wanna sue you, did XYZ, we won't have 1 of those ever, but, like, we've had people threaten and it's like, man, like, the like for us, 1 way anyway, I'll put the current contract because I'm a little fuzzy because we've changed it a few times over the years. But, 1 of the ways we used to define it is just number of action items completed. So think back to the core emotional things. Do it every day for 90 days. Your marriage can improve by 20 in fact, just do it 70% of the days and you're good.

Bryan Harris [00:39:09]:

So if somebody gets the end of it and their marriage hasn't improved by 20%, because that's a very subjective thing too, by the way. And that 1, I love to have it a little more specific and less subjective, but I think that's good enough for them. But if you get to end and you have a refund clause that kicks in for like a 5 or $10, 000 thing, man, losing 5 or $10 is not is filled with pain. So did they do the work or not? And if, like, you look at your tracker, whatever the maybe it's a spreadsheet or a text they send or something for the some mechanic for that, and they've only done the core emotion 6 times out of 70 or 70 times they're supposed to do it. It's like, Susie, I don't know again, you wouldn't wanna talk like this. You wanna talk in a non cheery way. Internally, I'd be saying, Susie, I don't know what to tell you, like, you didn't do the work and I texted you every day you didn't do it and you still didn't do it. Like, let's just go another 90 and let's commit and get on the call, recommitted the thing go forward.

Bryan Harris [00:39:54]:

But if Susie were to come out, she was like, nope. You said I would get there. I feel like I did my part. Here's a notice of serve and you're gonna pay me. It's like, you just wanna be able to send a copy of your contract because any any lawyer would see it and they're approved and be like, yeah, no. You're good. You don't have anything to worry about. Because if you get into the refund game and you sell a lot of units, you will encounter that.

Bryan Harris [00:40:12]:

So you do wanna protect yourself legally, but it's less about that. It's like, you know, it's like your marriage vows. It's like if at any point in the relationship you're like pulling them up and going through them to improve a point, like that's gonna hurt relationship not help it. But if you get to the point at the very end, it might probably be helpful thing to pull out and look at so we're aware of what we just said in the very beginning. So same thing with this. It's it's when we disagree, what what are the ground rules? And it isn't something I want somebody to rush through something like I'm I tell them stop, read it. In fact, I make them watch a loom video of me reading it before they can read it, so they actually know what it says. And just know because like I mean, 99 times out of a 100, it doesn't even matter what it says as long as people know they'll adopt that frame and work within it.

Bryan Harris [00:40:51]:

So being egregious with these guarantees and everything, it just it it isn't even it is a net positive in no way. But if you just tell them the truth, show them what's possible if they hustle. Hey, tell me what b level effort is, c a level effort produces. And then just write that down so it's just in writing so we both know. Like people are good. Like most people are reasonable and fine. It's when we start being a marketing led company that tries to push the envelope with things, that's when things get kinda weird. So anyway, I'll put a copy in /girthtools.com/heights of our contract, our SOP for handling people when the snuggle up is shaken, and our expectations video.

Bryan Harris [00:41:26]:

Hopefully, that'll help you. But you adapt it to all kind of situations, but those have been 3 things that have, like, substantially move the needle for us.

Bryan McAnulty [00:41:33]:

Awesome. So we're we're getting close to time. I wanna ask 1 more question to make sure we cover this, though. You're renowned for your approach to business growth that you call BOPA, which stands for borrow other people's audience.

Bryan Harris [00:41:47]:

Yeah. This is

Bryan McAnulty [00:41:47]:

what you discovered after Noah Kagan shared 1 of your articles. Can you explain more about this? Because I know, like, from our audience of creators, they see themselves as these creators, not marketers. And, usually, most people's first thought is, okay. I'm starting this business. I need to build an audience or I need to go spend a bunch of money on ads.

Bryan Harris [00:42:06]:

Right.

Bryan McAnulty [00:42:06]:

So how is, BOPA the solution to that?

Bryan Harris [00:42:09]:

Both of which have low chances of success, by the way. So I'm a very simple human. My goal is, like, what's the hardest thing to screw up? Let's go do that. If it has a 1, 000 parts, like, these numbers are probably wrong, but it's directionally accurate, like an internal combustion car has something like 25 100 parts under the hood. But an electric car like a Tesla has 200. And as it turns out, Tesla's breakdown still, but they break down at like 1 tenth the rate of the normal car. They just have less things to break. Like, it's harder to screw up.

Bryan Harris [00:42:37]:

Stuff still breaks, but a way lower way lower rates than the other. So my approach to business is just trying to be hyper practical. Like what's the ease what's my best chance to win? And and let's just go do that thing versus the things that are like utterly complicated and have a 1, 000 moving parts in it. Like some Ascension Fund. Let me grow a newsletter, send an email every day, have a $7 thing, a $99 thing, a $500 thing, a $5, 000 is like but there are a 1, 000, 000 things in that to screw up. And and I actually, after 12 years, have not seen a single business ever do that successfully ever. Not 1. Mhmm.

Bryan Harris [00:43:08]:

Not even there and there's a lot of things that work and people get lucky with. I've never even seen someone get lucky with that ever. Like it doesn't it is the most unpractical thing and I feel like it's the most like widely held thing that people wanna do. Like let me start low ticket and work my way. Up. It's like, no. All of that is, like, low chance of success. So for me, ultimately, I wanna think about client acquisition, customer acquisition.

Bryan Harris [00:43:31]:

Like how do I get humans that don't know me right now, random people on the Internet to give me money for my thing so I can help them? That's like the fundamental question. It's a fundamental question I started 12 years with, ago with. And I thought about it most every day for 12 years straight. And 1 key thing that's helpful to think of, and I'll talk about BOPA, is like getting clients, getting customers is not a mystery. It's math. And and there's 3 very basic numbers. There is, how do I, get visitors to the page where they pay money? How do I convert those visitors once they're on the sales page or on the sales call or however you sell? And that equals customers. So if I have a 100 people come to my thing, my sales page or my sales call, and 10% of them convert, then I get 10 customers every time.

Bryan Harris [00:44:17]:

But that's just the math of the thing. So if that's my paradigm going into it, I need some sales channel to produce that. So suspend that for a minute. That could be YouTube SEO, or Google SEO, or partnerships, or ads, or whatever thing you got. Whatever thing you're obsessed with, or in a quiz funnel, or something like that. But all that's going to equal though, people that see your offer eyeballs, people that convert, and that's going to equal your customer number. So you gotta know and this is very simple. A 100 times 10% is 10 or a 1000 times 1% is 10.

Bryan Harris [00:44:46]:

I think my math's right on that. So whatever your numbers are, you gotta know your equation and you just work the equation. So if if if I got the if I didn't get the 10 customers. Okay? So the 100 people hitting my sales page or getting on sales call would equal a 10% close rate and 10 people, but I didn't get that. I only got 1 person. So what happened? Just 1 of the numbers didn't work. So which 1? And go fix that. So if I was supposed to get a 100 visitors, well, I only got 50, but I converted 6 people off that, man, I converted I converted more than 12 or 13%.

Bryan Harris [00:45:15]:

So I beat the conversion number, but my visitors list, I need to go solve that problem. Just fundamentally thinking about client acquisition like that has been the most helpful thing. So the next question is, okay, which sales channel is just the easiest to do? So for client acquisition, for getting eyeballs, what I have found the hardest to screw up. And this is like for any client that comes to us, sub 5, 000, 000 typically, a year in revenue, the first channel we help them install is BOPA, barring other people's audiences. Instead of going and spending money or creating content or giving affiliate fees out, those are different primary mechanisms for sales channels. Instead of doing that, just give them content. In fact, this is a version of this right now on this podcast. You have an audience of people to listen to this podcast.

Bryan Harris [00:46:03]:

I have my brain after 12 years. I have content. So there are hundreds of people encountering Brown Harrison Growth Tools for the first time ever. So let's say a 1000 people listen to this podcast and growthtools.com/heights, there's a handful of bonuses that are directly related to what we're talking about. My hope is if a 1000 people listen, a 100 people will go to that page. And I know the math of our page for, you know, related audiences. About percent of them will schedule the sales call with us. So let's just do the math real quick.

Bryan Harris [00:46:31]:

If a 100 people or a 1000 people listen, a 100 people go to that page, and we close typically about 10%. That's 10 clients for us. 10 clients. And our average order value is like $10, 000 That's a $100, 000 That's a plus. Like if the audience is perfect and all that, but like, okay, let's go to like c minus. Let's say just 2 people buy. That's $20, 000 from 1 podcast interview. Like, let's do more of that thing.

Bryan Harris [00:46:55]:

Like, that's really easy and really hard to screw up. So that's my basic thinking. First of all, is it's not a mystery, it's math. What's the math? First off, how much money do you need? What's your what do you charge? How many clients do you need? Almost nobody does this by the way. This is like elementary business 101, but no 1 does it. Like this might sound super stupid. Oh, I'm the only 1 that had done that. No.

Bryan Harris [00:47:16]:

No. No. Like I didn't even do it for a decade. So if you want $10, 000 a month, maybe that's your first milestone you wanna get to. Well, if your course is $500 you need to sell 20. Right? Set the math. $500 times 20 units is $10, 000. Great.

Bryan Harris [00:47:29]:

So now forget the 10, 000 for a minute. You just need to sell 20 20 copies of your course. So that's that's the end. Well, how many eyeballs do I need for that? Well, like, it depends on the channel. Your conversion rates should be different. And with BOPA, for instance, you'll get around a 10% conversion rate to the sales page typically. That's a rule of thumb. Every business is a little different, but 10%.

Bryan Harris [00:47:47]:

So you need, I don't know. Let let's say 2, 000 eyeballs. The math's not right. I put 200 eyeballs, that'd be too bad. Let's say a 1, 000 eyeballs converting at 5%, I think it's 20 people. So every month your game is, I'm gonna watch my number of eyeballs and my conversion rate. And I get humans to the sales page, and I need those humans to convert and give me money. So every month, I'm just measuring.

Bryan Harris [00:48:08]:

Well, what's my eyeball strategy? And BOPA is just the easiest, hardest to screw up 1 ever found. Because when I'm doing 1 of the things I'm doing in this podcast, I love talking to people and sharing. So, like, I actually just enjoy that and would do that no matter what. It also happens to be a marketing channel for us. I did a workshop yesterday where I taught an audience of, like, a couple hundred people, you know, and 5 of them book sales calls for today. 1 of them's converted and another 1 will probably do. I'm like, great. That was a good use of time.

Bryan Harris [00:48:33]:

I love teaching. I love talking. I could talk all day. And we happen to get some clients out of it as well. So great. So BOPA, Barn Other People's Audiences is simply finding people in and around your industry who already have an audience. Don't build audiences, just borrow people's. So Brian, you already have an audience.

Bryan Harris [00:48:51]:

By coming here and sharing, a couple hundred people will come into our audience. But they don't come as some ice cold Facebook ad, Instagram ad person that's never heard of me before. They come after hearing me ramble on for 53 minutes about these different things, fear and refunds and marketing. It's like, great, because that's all the stuff we coach. So if you go to that resource page and schedule the call with us and want to explore what this would look like for you, it's like, awesome. You are 1 of the most prime prospects we could possibly invent. So you're just ready and you came from the sales channel that we teach, so even better. So instead of trying to think about audience building, and this is like the first product I had was how to build an email list.

Bryan Harris [00:49:31]:

It's called 10 k subs and we sold thousands of copies of it and But the core concept was growing it from scratch and that's not the right way to think about it. It's not the the easiest way to think about it. You could do it that way. We grew a list of several tens of thousands of people. But when we flipped our mindset to barn other people's audiences, let's just go on let's do a lead magnet swap once a week. Let's do a podcast once a week. Let's do a workshop once a week. In fact, this summer, I'm on a tour doing that.

Bryan Harris [00:49:55]:

Doing 3 partnerships a week, 1 30 to 60 minute podcast interview, 1 lead magnet swap and 1 workshop. We'll grow our list by over a 100, 000 during that time period and sell 4 or $500, 000 in units directly from those things and indirectly over time from the list and not not a lot lot more. So the definition of borrowing other people's audiences is instead of trying to build it from scratch, go borrow other people's. And in exchange, you're just gonna give them content. Because every audience that exists needs content. The podcast needs an interview. The email list needs a good resource to share. And the person on YouTube that has a big list loves having experts in the industry come teach their audience.

Bryan Harris [00:50:32]:

And those are 3 the easiest ones to do. In fact, if you're just starting out, the simplest thing to do is a lead magnet swap. Take a good resource you have, go email 10 people today that you kind of know or know of a little bit and say, hey, I have this great lead magnet. I'd love to, share it with your list and I would love to share your resource with my list. You'll get some script subscribers and I'll get some subscribers. That's it. That's all you gotta do. And you'll get hundreds of peoples a week just from that.

Bryan Harris [00:50:54]:

Or you could go pay for it on Facebook and you won't have the trust transfer that exists when you have a audience vouch for you. You'll have these ice cold people that come in, and they'll buy. You can get that to work. We do. We have great Facebook ad funnel. We teach that. We do that. But as a second channel.

Bryan Harris [00:51:08]:

Because once you have BOPA installed, you can grow a business to several $1, 000, 000 a year just with that. You layer on a second channel like an ad channel, and you can grow it to 5, 10, 000, 000 a year with that. So that's the order we typically go in is BOPA first, Facebook ad or an ad channel second. Usually, it's Facebook right now, but that can vary. And that works really well. So if you're sub $1, 000, 000 a year, $5, 000, 000 a year, and you don't have a predictable marketing channel, like you you generate sales, word-of-mouth and random things you do. The email list generates some, but it's like it's like a whack a mole. Like number of like do 1 lead magnet swap a week and send them to the page when they get the lead magnet, the sales page or the booking page or however you what your sales mechanism is, and you will generate sales from it.

Bryan Harris [00:51:50]:

And if you don't, just look at the math. Was it eyeballs that were the problem or was it conversions that were the problem? And whatever it is, go fix it. If you need more eyeballs, do more partnerships, do it with bigger people. Need better conversions, write a better sales page, and optimize it as you go. So that is thinking about it all this math, and if it's not working, it's just a math problem somewhere. Find the first thing that's ready and go fix it. And second of all, the channel just with the highest success rate that we found after like 12 years, especially sub million, sub 5000000 is BOPA. Like it's the hardest 1 to screw up.

Bryan McAnulty [00:52:19]:

Yeah. I I like that, and I think it it definitely is the right approach because all the reasons that you said. You can you can try ads, you can spend a real lot of money, and and not even figure out the thing that is gonna the ad that's actually gonna make things work or you get leads and you found out how to get these cheap leads, but they're not people who buy and and they don't trust you. Or you can make content and you can create this content, slowly build this audience, but then you find out that they're not actually spending that much time with you. Yeah. And so they still gotta go through all of these email sequences before they finally eventually buy. Yeah. But like what you just said here, you have the other person's audience.

Bryan McAnulty [00:52:58]:

They have the audience. It matches yours. You can show them the thing, and you can build the trust with them, and then it just goes, okay. Now they come over here and then they buy.

Bryan Harris [00:53:07]:

Like, there's 3 things every sale needs. And this is without exception in any business that exists. Starbucks on the corner, the coffee shop, your business, my business. First you gotta get their eyes, then you gotta get their hearts, then you can get their wallets. They have to go in that order. 1st, they have to know you exist. They can't buy it if they literally don't know you exist. Then they have to have some level of trust.

Bryan Harris [00:53:26]:

You gotta have their heart. And then you can give them a simple call to action a good deal. No. No. They'll hire you. But like ads are the hardest by a mile. If you don't have $50 to light on fire and flush down the toilet without having a seizure and you touch ads, you are wasting your time completely. That's table stakes.

Bryan Harris [00:53:43]:

And there's a lot of the things you need to do to make those work. Some people get lucky, almost no 1 does. But if you enter ads without that is like the minimum viable, you're screwed. Just don't even touch it. Yes. BOPA though, like, it's really hard. Like imagine, we have let's put this in like normal life situation. Let's say you had a conference and a 1000 people are there, and I get up on stage and speak for 60 minutes and just share tactical marketing things.

Bryan Harris [00:54:07]:

And at the end, I'm like, hey, I'll be in the back with my book. If anybody wants to learn more, just grab the book. And I literally just stand by the door and everybody walks out and shake their hand and show the book. I mean, you would you could be like the worst salesperson ever and still sell 50 copies of your book. Like the pitch is practically not all that useful once you've spent an hour with somebody and the trust is transferred from the person hosting the event. Like that's what this podcast is. You have 100 people listening. They're hearing me.

Bryan Harris [00:54:33]:

Trust is transferred. I have a thing that some people can benefit from. Most people can't actually. And if you're interested in that, go to grizzles.com/heights and see if we can help you. Like and some people will and some people won't. I'm not interested in being a good salesperson. I just want to share the things we've learned, let other people hear it, and the people that feel called to it go to it. That'd be great.

Bryan Harris [00:54:52]:

But man, if you want Facebook ads to work, you better be an a plus marketer. If you're b plus, you're screwed and you better have $50 a light on fire and flush down the toilet or you're screwed too. But if you got those 2 things, you actually can make it work. And it is it is it is math as well. It's just harder math and when you lose, it sucks. Because at the end of the day, like if if this podcast produces no sales calls and those clients for us, I still enjoyed it. It was still a win, and I lost no money. But if I spend $10 this week on ads and it produces no customers, I just lost $10.

Bryan Harris [00:55:21]:

And you better be able to do that for 90 days to figure out that funnel to get it to break even and another 90 to get it to actually profitable. And if you can't do that, you're out. And content can be worse because this is more sneaky. You could spend years writing a newsletter and building a newsletter and have a bunch of non buyers or being an industry that doesn't convert, not actually have a product at all. Like I did that. The 1st 3 years was that. I was like crap, I gotta sell stuff and now what do I even sell to them? So that gets a secondary thought, which is a problem a lot of creators have. They think about themselves as creators, not as business owners and that is a thing almost all of them will have to convert on if they want to maintain and sustain over time.

Bryan Harris [00:55:56]:

Otherwise, you write content and guess what? Content doesn't produce revenue. If you don't have revenue, you will not can keep doing anything and you can't help people. So like thinking of the most fundamental way to think about it for me is what's the problem I solve? At the end of the day, my newsletter, what problem does it solve? Because if you write via that, you can build a product that solves it even more in-depth. But what's the problem? Like, I think the most root level entrepreneur question I've ever heard is what's a problem so interesting? I'd gladly bet the next 20 years of my life on solving it. And then go do that. And man, the stuff will click into place. Listen to wise counsel and all that stuff. But like take some of the things we talked about here and go do it.

Bryan Harris [00:56:32]:

But if you do that, like, then your newsletter does something. You can say, man, like you got a 50% open rate on the news that are awesome. What's the percent people actually doing anything with it? Around 1% maybe. James Clear has 3, 000, 000 people in his newsletter. How many people's habits are really really changed though? He has such breadth a lot, but the percentage is really low. The people nobody takes free advice. Nobody takes unsolicited advice for sure. They get combative on that.

Bryan Harris [00:56:57]:

But when you pay money, you actually listen. When you pay a lot of money, you listen a lot more. Yeah. So yes.

Bryan McAnulty [00:57:03]:

Yeah. That's great. Alright. So 1 last thing is that on the show, I like to have every guest ask a question to our audience. So if you could ask our audience anything after everything we've talked about today, whether it's something you're curious about, something you kinda wanna get everybody thinking about, what would that be?

Bryan Harris [00:57:27]:

I'm gonna get I'm gonna state it as a challenge. I challenge you today to set a 10 minute timer on your phone. Literally, 10 minute timer. And once it's set, ask yourself, ask God, ask love, meditate, whatever frame you wanna put on it. What is the biggest fear holding me back in life? So my question for you is what's your biggest fear, but I don't want you to just like logically think about it. Turn off the logic brain for a minute here. If you're listening to this, you're in logic brain 247, like turn that thing off for a second. 10 minutes, quiet room, go for a walk and ask the question out loud.

Bryan Harris [00:58:09]:

Hey, ask this this morning. What's my biggest fear? I'll read you that. I wrote down. This is the way I articulated it. This is another version of the same question. What's blocking me from receiving everything you have for me today? Here's what I wrote down. 10 minutes in the coffee shop, eyes closed, a little notebook out. Losing everything, being ignored, being alone.

Bryan Harris [00:58:33]:

Those are my those answers that came from me. And I was like, alright, second question, what's the truth? Because the fear is a lie almost all the time. So if that's the fear, what's the truth? And I gotta get answer that was helpful and orienting for me today. So my challenge to you would be 10 minutes right now. First 5, what's the biggest fear blocking me? Second thing, but what's true? Write it down, and today, operate through that lens. Don't operate through the lens of, man, I'm not as good of a writer as Brian, or I can't do a high ticket thing because whatever's coming to your mind. Like, don't operate through that. Write it down and throw it away, but operate from whatever the true things that came were.

Bryan Harris [00:59:08]:

Do just 1A1 day challenge. 10 minutes, then write it down somewhere you can listen and work today through that. That'd be my challenge to you. Share it with me too. Branogroethstools.com is my email address. Share it like put fear and truth in the subject line. I would love to see it. What's your biggest fear? I've shared mine with you.

Bryan Harris [00:59:24]:

What's the truth?

Bryan McAnulty [00:59:26]:

Yeah. That's a great question. Alright. Well, Brian, thank you so much.

Bryan Harris [00:59:29]:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Bryan McAnulty [00:59:31]:

I'd like to take a moment to invite you to join our free community of over 5, 000 creators at creatorclimb.com. If you enjoyed this episode and wanna hear more, check out the Heights platform YouTube channel every Tuesday at 9 AM US Central. To get notified when new episodes release, join our newsletter at thecreatorsadventure.com. Until then, keep learning, and I'll see you in the next episode.