Bryan McAnulty: Welcome to the Creator's Adventure, where we interview Creator's from around the world, hearing their stories about growing a business. My name is Bryan McAnulty. I'm the founder of Heights Platform. And today I'm talking with Michael Johnson about how he took his experience as a professional ballroom dancer and applied it to sales and operations in order to help businesses create more meaningful impact.

Hey everyone. We're here today with Michael Johnson. He is an author master NLP practitioner and business mentor, and investor. He works with businesses to help them attain the necessary solutions to save them money, improve their revenue, and create more, meaning, more meaningful impact for their team, their customers, and themselves.

With over 30 years of teaching, coaching and mentoring experience. Michael brings a unique and effective approach to taking businesses to the next level, using the power of business choreography. Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Johnson: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me. It's it's always a pleasure to join some great things going on in other people's world.

It seems like you guys are doing some amazing things.

Bryan McAnulty: So my first question for you is you're the co-founder of business choreography, a consultancy that helps businesses grow their marketing and their sales. Can you explain to our audience a little bit more of what your business is about?

Michael Johnson: Yeah, absolutely.

Business choreography was kind of founded after a lot of years of trial and error and failures and a lot of businesses that we've run like so many entrepreneurs out there we've started so many, some of them succeeded, some of them didn't. But what we found was we were working with a lot of businesses that needed.

Putting all the pieces back together again. And, and one of my favorite examples is that if you think about Frankenstein, you know, they eventually got Frankenstein to come to life. It was a monster when it did, but they got all the pieces and the parts and the, the patchwork put together and eventually created Frankenstein.

But at some point you've gotta look back at this business that you've created and say, okay, Hey, you know, We we've gotta sort this out and make it work and turn it into a, a real human instead of just a monster. And sometimes business does that. So we help businesses scale and grow. We help take you towards that exit point.

If that's something that you're starting to now get in your vision. And we do that using, like you said, the power. Business choreography and choreography is sort of the background, the, the basis of it, because we have a background in professional, ballroom dancing. We were both my partner and I, we were both professional ballroom dancers during different generations, but during our day I, I had my run and the professional circuit danced in it for about 10.

And what we realized when we came into the business scene, as we entered into our new portion of our life, after retiring from compet. Is that people were out there in business and they weren't actually taking the time to hire choreographers. Like we did in dance, in dance. You could be a professional dancer and you would still hire a choreographer to come in and put your best stuff together in the best possible way so that you could show up in the best possible way.

We realized that was something that was needed. And we started trying it. We started working with different businesses to put their choreography together and it started working and now that's kind of how business choreography was born. So we do a lot of choreography for a lot of different size businesses and help them get all that patchwork stuff sort of put together in.

Great piece of choreography.

Bryan McAnulty: Cool. Yeah. So I was gonna ask that as as my next question, actually, because I noticed that you and your co-founder Lexi have this background as a professional ballroom dancers. That's interesting. I think I really love it to see when Creator's take something that they've done either as a hobby, as a profession, and then find a way where the things that they've learned or done with that creative topic, and then bring that into their business later on.

Michael Johnson: Absolutely. And you know, we try to fight it. I think I, I, I would imagine a lot of entrepreneurs do that. They have these great ideas, these really cool like direction that they want to go. And then they don't necessarily take that thing and try to do something with it. They're like I should do something else I should do.

You know, they look at what the market is needing at the time and they go try to do something that's outside of their wheelhouse. And we did that. I, I can't say that we are innocent of that of that failure. And we tried to do a bunch of things that maybe weren't in line with what our skillset was.

And it wasn't till we started to recognize that the skills that we had learned along our journey being professional athletes, cuz whether you realize it or not, there is an entire. Massive ballroom professional world out there, and it is seriously competitive and there's a whole world organization and there are some incredible athletes and they are athletes nowadays.

They have. Push their bodies to the very, very limits of what you would think humans can do in dance. And we took that knowledge and that education and that training that we had and started to apply it to our business. Side of things, all of our marketing, our sales, our operations, and we started incorporating those things into the business world and people love it.

They love it. Every time we say we're professional dancers, like, oh my gosh, do you know anybody on dancing with the stars? I'm like, yeah, like. Four or five of them were good friends of mine, you know, and, and they went and did that thing and used their skill in that manner. We took it and used it in a business manner.

And it's incredible because, you know, people say, well, what does dance have to do with sales? And I'm like, well, you know, it's interesting when you put yourself out on the dance floor, you've gotta sell yourself to two sets of audiences, one, the judges, and two. The audience members and both have to actually approve and both have to vote with their applause and their energy.

And the worst part about it all is it's harder than sales in sales. We get to speak, we get to talk, we get to use our words. We get to use other things and bring it to the table. But when you're out on the floor dancing, you don't get to talk. You have to do it all with your dancing, with your moves, with your presentation, the costume, whatever you're gonna do, and people can see right through it.

When it comes to body language, people can see right through you. They can tell whether or not you're authentic or not. And so when we bring those skills into sales, it's huge when we bring it into operations. Oh my goodness. Dealing with partnerships and coaches and your team that you put together, because it takes a.

To do well. We bring those skills into business and then of course the marketing side of it. Oh my goodness. You've gotta market yourself. You got as dancers, whether you're on a team or whether you're dancing individually, or as a partnership, you've gotta bring those skills and market them.

Otherwise, nobody knows who you are and they don't care. Right. It's, it's a lot of the same types of things that we bring into the marketing side of business. And when it's all said and done those things have to be choreographed together. One of our things that we talk about often is this inability for whatever reason, and it's, it's different for every business, but this inability for businesses to define and articulate exactly what it is that's going on, could be a problem, could be something they want to get to a goal and then be able to.

Across their departments. This is huge. We call it the choreography triad. Those are two pieces of it. And the third piece of that choreography triad is you have to measure everything. I can't tell you the number of times we've walked into a business and you ask them, well, how's it going? And they say, well, it's we think it's going like this.

And we think it's going like that. And we're not sure how things are going. We're like, do you measure. Exactly how it's going. Well, you can't measure employee happiness. That's baloney. Of course you can, you can measure everything. And it's amazing how many times we can just go in and fix that one piece, teach 'em how to measure everything.

And between those three things of that, that what we call choreography triad. Oh my goodness. Make such a huge difference for most business.

Bryan McAnulty: awesome. Yeah, it's interesting. And to hear this coming from not an analytical background, but a, a creative background and, and how this came from from dancing even.

And I, I feel like I can relate to it a bit myself because I I'm thinking of lessons that I've taken from other things in life that I enjoy and how I've applied those to business. And like one thing is kind of what you're talking about, where in, in games and, and sports and things I've played, when you're playing there on the team, you have to define, okay, well, what is our win condition?

And how much time do we have left before the, the game clock is out and in business, often people don't think about those things. And, but, but why wouldn't you, you, you can, you can still apply those things. So what, in, in your business, what is the wind condition to get you to that next. and so, yeah, I think that's really interesting to, to think about things that way.

I also like the, the mention there of saying that like how you, you were guilty of, of trying these other things, but I feel entrepreneurs suffer from the, the grass is always greener thinking like, oh, I hear about this thing is profitable. Maybe I should try that. Especially for those just starting.

But even, even not even those who have been very successful and now suddenly they think, oh, maybe I should just jump ship and try something else. But it's so true. Yeah. Often the the way to be successful is kind of right there in front of you. It's the accumulation of what, what business can you build of all of these skills of your unique skill set that you've built?

Michael Johnson: It's amazing. How many times people just bounce from one thing to the next. And in walking into businesses, we see it all the time we walk in and we take inventory of what they're doing and we go, why are you doing this? It has nothing to do with what you're doing. And they're like, we just started this project and we thought it would be fun and it's not earning us any money.

And we just can't figure out why. And I'm like, because your audience doesn't want that. I'm like, well, but it seems like something they would want. And I'm like, yes, if you had a different audience, so you're gonna have to build a different business for that thing. But it happens a lot. And you know, I don't blame entrepreneurs for it.

I I have an extensive background in as you said earlier in neurolinguistic programming or NLP as is a lot of people know it by. People want to stay engaged, especially creatives, especially entrepreneurs. Part of the reason we're entrepreneurs is cuz we get excited about a lot of different projects and a lot of different things.

And thank goodness we do because otherwise you know, some of the solutions that are out there in the world wouldn't have been created, but that's why it takes an incredibly good team, maybe a good team around you to keep you on track and make sure that you continue to support the thing. Created in the first place.

Yeah, definitely.

Bryan McAnulty: So you mentioned like how, a little bit about how you're differentiating yourself kind of in what you do with your business. So can you explain more of how you can do that? Compared to other marketing agencies and like looking at this whole picture rather than like just individual strategies what are some examples of how you achieve.

Michael Johnson: Well, that's a good question. First of all, we're not a marketing agency. We have one we call it marketing choreography. Okay. So that's, that's another business we have. But a lot of times people say, well, you you're a consultancy, right? And I say only when we have to be, we're actually more mentors and investors.

We tend to try to get involved in businesses on a, on a deeper level, because we know that's. We can help them the best that's where we can actually make the most impact and move the needle most. So we'll do consulting here and there to, to get involved when, when we want to, when we see that it might have a long term opportunity, but for those people out there that are looking at it and saying, well, what what's different about the marketing side?

Well, listen, there are so many. Marketing strategies and tactics that are being thrown around out there in today's internet marketing world, direct marketing, online, marketing, whatever you wanna call it. In fact, the word marketing right now is so saturated and so misused and misunderstood. I would say that on a daily basis, I hear somebody call themselves a marketer and it has been used.

In so many different fashions that everybody's kind of confused about it. And so right now, the word is kind of being taken advantage of I'm a Instagram marketer. I'm a TikTok marketer. I'm a social media marketer. No, wait, I'm a direct marketer. No, wait, I'm an online marketer. Well, okay. So you know what?

Everybody's a marketer. If you are in business and you're an entrepreneur, you better dang. Well, learn how to. that's, that's a fact. And if you don't know how to market your own business, I can tell you how well your business is doing. Just, just from that right there, marketing is in and inundated throughout your whole business.

And that is why choreography is necessary for your marketing, because if you don't have it integrated into your operations, your sales and have those three areas talking to each. Then you're gonna be missing something that choreography that needs to be done for all of those different areas of your business to dance together.

If that isn't in place, what happens is the marketing team, right? People like to pretend they're corporate entities, right? Corporate entities hire a marketing team. And so little small and medium sized businesses say I have a marketing team. Next thing you know, their team doesn't talk to their sales team and their sales team selling whatever they want.

Because sales people like commissions. I don't blame 'em right. So they're selling anything they want because they're just trying to get money in the door, the marketing team's saying, why aren't you selling what we do? The fulfillment team in operations is saying, wait a second. We don't do that. What are we supposed to deliver?

and everybody's going what's happening. Right. But when you can clarify the choreography between the marketing, the operations and sales, right? That's your MOS system, right? Your marketing operation sales. When you can clarify how those three things are engaging each other, how they operate together, then it creates some really cool things.

The engagement between the marketing and the operations, where those two things. That actually is your machine. That's your machine that runs your business. When you look at where the fulfillment or the operations and the sales meet, that's where we actually find some really great profit because when those two things are in combination together, now all of a sudden we have some really good synergy because now they're selling what you're actually doing.

And the customers get really happy. They love your product. They'll refer you better. Man that can drive revenue in such a powerful way. And of course, when you can actually meet in the middle between where you have marketing and you have your sales. Now, all of a sudden the sales people are happy because they're selling the thing that the marketing is actually creating.

The marketing is happy because those two things are actually coming together. And when you combine all of those together, the efficiency and the profits that you can drive from doing that chore. Oh, my goodness just goes through the roof. And now you can really start to talk about scaling. You can start to talk about massive growth because now you've got an actual machine that the choreography can bring to you.

So the idea of saying that one. Type of marketing. If, if we were to use today's language, is the answer. It never is. It never is social media. Isn't gonna fix your problems and marketing, getting a funnel. Isn't gonna fix your problems, but it could help all of those things could help doing direct marketing, sending out mailers.

I can't tell you the number of times people have said direct marketing. Doesn't. I'm not gonna send any postcards and I'm like, you just don't know how to do it, but if it worked into the strategy and it was part of your choreography, it would be easy to make work. In fact, if you talk to so many of the big players in the game, these days, you'd be absolutely blown away by how much they're actually sending out direct mail.

Printing companies are not dead by any means way, shape or form because the big companies, they all know that they can pay 25 cents and get thousands of postcards with their information. Now, I'm not telling you to go do that because it might not be the right fit for your company. And now you might end up with that Frankenstein.

We talked about earlier.

Bryan McAnulty: interesting. So I wanna take a step back actually, and kind of deconstruct this or. What it would look like for more of an individual business or individual Creator's starting out? Oh yeah. So most of our customers are online course Creator's coaches and a, a common story of the main issues that they face.

Is something that goes a little bit, like they work really hard in creating this really awesome online course. It's full of valuable information. They're really talented and skilled at what they do, but when it comes time to sell it, they're not reaching their sales goals because nobody knows about their program.

So of course, would you suggest to someone in this kind of situation?

Michael Johnson: I love this element of it because these are the people that I believe will be changing the. These people that have taken the leap and they've created these amazing courses, using their knowledge to really make an impact on the people they serve.

And let's go ahead and relate it back. We've we've been talking about my, my past dance career, but let's relate it back in dancing. You've got music. You've got the audience and you've got the dancers. I kind of relate music to your goal. Your why, what it is you're going after then I relate the audience to, well, that's kind of your customer.

Those are your customers wants and needs and what they're looking for. Right. And then you've got the dancer and that. You're the dancer, your business is the dancer. So how would we use this to market your thing? You've worked so hard. You've built this great course. You know, it will change people's lives.

So what have you done? Well, you've created a scenario where you understand your goal and you know, your why otherwise you wouldn't have gone through the process of building it and putting this whole thing together. So your music, you got that you've started to evaluate it. You know what your music is and you're ready to dance.

Now you're looking at. As a business, I've got these things situated. I've got my tools down, I've got this great way to present it. And so many of the people that you are talking about are in that space where they're like, I built it. So they're gonna come right. it's sort of that old. What was that baseball movie?

If you build it, they'll come but it's not true. They won't come just because you built it. Now. Now you've got to actually go out and make noise to your audience. And the reason I relate this, this part is where you probably hung up. If I was a dancer and I went out in my street, clothes and danced in front of you as the audience you'd go well, they don't take it very serious.

they, they just must not care that much. If I didn't do my hair. If, if our, our beautiful partners didn't do their makeup, you would look at us and you'd go, wow, you just, you just didn't, you must not really have a good product. Now. Here's the funny part. And, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but here's the thing.

If you create a course and you do all the stuff on the back end and you make this beautiful, amazing. but you never put lipstick on the pig. Nobody's gonna buy the pig. Right? So that's a, a silly, old farmer thing. I guess I should use a different metaphor, but the idea is simple. You actually, and many people recommend this.

I think it's a balance, but you could actually create all the marketing, all the message, all the things that could sell your thing. And make sure you sell it before you build it. And some people go, oh no. Oh no, I wouldn't. I would never sell a thing that I didn't have. That wouldn't be right. That's not legitimate.

Well, if it's in here, if it's in your mind, then it, then you have it. You might need to prep it a bit. You might need to get your outline. You might need to get the basics. You might need to even get the first two or three portions of your program, your module, your course, whatever it is, get those ready and now sell it because don't spend, you know 10 years trying to figure out how to put together a six module course and then try to sell it first, go try to sell it because you've got to learn how to get your message to the people that need it.

Most, your customer needs you to figure that out, which is really funny. Right. But if you think about it, they don't know that they need the thing that you are present. So you have to be able to talk to them where they're at. You've gotta be able to bring out their pains and say, Hey, I can help you with that.

I can solve that thing. And if you'll just take a chance on me. I'll walk you into it. Now you go, oh, cool. I got like 10 people to buy. And so you'd put 'em through the first two or three. And as you're putting them through the first two or three, you already built your outline. You know what you're gonna do to serve them.

Now you start finishing it off because you have people to finish it off for and oh, by the way, ask them. Ask 'em how they like it ask 'em what else they need that might actually give you more insight as to what to build in your course. I've seen so many times people say, I just am not ready to do some marketing on my course yet.

I said, well, how much of the course do you have done? They're like, you know, I've been working on it for two or three years now. And. You know, I think my module 86 you know, part five is almost done and I'm thinking you have got to be kidding me. You don't even know if people want it. and you just build 85 modules.

That's I'm you think I'm exaggerating and no, no, I, I know you're not. I hear

Bryan McAnulty: so I, you deal with it. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen, I've seen that that happen a lot. So and like, I mean, if you enjoy that and, and you, you want to, to build all of that, that's fine. But if you want to, if you wanna turn this into a business, if you wanna be able to make money from it and get feedback, it is gonna help you more.

It's gonna help your customers more. If you can get something out to them. so, oh yeah. I like what you're talking about here, because there there's two parts. There's one is like, it's I guess, finding the congruency in communicating yourself in the way that you're spending this time and, and have this care for the craft of the course that you're building.

And so it is okay to spend time and effort in that, in your marketing and make sure that the way you come across is. Something that matches up with the actual care and everything you're putting into this course that maybe it has 80 modules by this point. And but for the course of course like you wanna do a great job on it.

You wanna spend time on it. Sure. But at the same time, you, you can't neglect that marketing side. And you, you can Polish it once you get people in there that that is your skill. You know how to, to teach these things. You, you have this skill already that you already kind of have down. So it, the important takeaway I think you're mentioning is making sure there's that congruency in the way you appear to people.

Michael Johnson: right. It's so true. It's so true. You know, and, and in ballroom dance, there's a lot of different styles. One style, they wear these pretty long dresses ball gowns, and they dance to the walls. And another style they wear these little short, fancy sparkly dresses, and they do the Chacha. If you came out and wore the wrong dress for the wrong type of dance, everybody would look at you and say, what the heck are you.

that's not congruent. It doesn't fall in line. So that's part of making sure that your marketing is choreographed well with what you're selling in your course. That's a big deal and you've gotta learn. Sometimes there's a learning curve. There's no doubt in the marketing. I, I see that all the time.

There's a little bit of a learning curve because you think that you're gonna talk to them based off of what you know, and you have to actually take a few steps back and you have to say, well, that's not the music. That's not the. The music is they are thinking and acting and talking here. So I've gotta talk to them that way so that I can bring them to where I can help 'em and that's a big deal.

Bryan McAnulty: Got it. So how about in your own business then? What would you say is your favorite way? If you have one of acquiring clients or leads?

Michael Johnson: Oh man, we've done it in so many different ways. you've got your classic lead magnets. You've got your you've got your classic podcast. We're on a podcast.

This is a great way to, to build clients. It's lots of different opportunities from a great podcast. There's using the typical social media approach where you are. Producing content. That's maybe one of my least favorite ways because I call it a tertiary action, meaning you're gonna create this content and you're gonna have to create a lot of it.

And then they're going to have to go through like two or three steps before they actually get to your thing. One of my favorite, as you asked, is a summit. I love summits. In fact, we teach people how to do that periodically when it's the right piece of choreography for them, but summits are great. You get to show your expertise, you get to interview others that are amazing at what they do.

And you can potentially bring in a little profit on that first summit and you can lead them to what your thing is later on. So there's just so many great benefits from it. And not to mention at the back end of that, you can still also resell that and continue to make money on it over time. So it's a great asset to have.

So I love summits. If you don't have leads, if you haven't built a list, heck even if you have, I mean, you'll see some of the biggest. And best marketers and business people do summits still to this day, even though they have tons of, of leads, even though they've built their list, they still do summit.

Bryan McAnulty: We did a summit two weeks ago, so,

Michael Johnson: oh, geez. So, you know, yeah. I mean, like it's, it's huge. And so I, I think it's a really great play. It's a hard play. It's a hard place. So if you don't, I, I wouldn't suggest going it alone. If you're gonna do a summit, you probably need to, to look at getting some help and some guidance.

But it is a very fruitful play and it is really worth it on all ends. It's a win-win for everybody involved and, and I love that element about it. So, yeah,

Bryan McAnulty: I, I like what you were mentioning about how the, the value in what it is exists afterwards, too. I like to call out. I think, I, I don't think I'm the person who, who invented or coined this term, but I think somebody else did where they mentioned the term, like artifacts, like what are these artifacts in your business that you're creating?

And a summit is one of those things, because it has value when you do it. But as you said afterwards, you can potentially sell it or something else later. And so it, it is turning into this asset that you can do something else with, even after it's. sure I've

Michael Johnson: seen people turn it into courses. Yep. I've seen people turn it into a book.

I've seen people put it into an evergreen system in a funnel system so that they just can keep selling it over and over and over again and, and keep benefiting from it. I've seen people use it as bonuses within another offer. I, it just, there's just so many great things from it. And especially for if, if any of you are new out.

And you don't have a list and you don't have any leads. It's a great way to get started. You know, it's a great way to start building that list and, and get some attention. Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty: So with your consulting business, then do you tend to tailor your approach depending on like. The the character or nature of your client, for example, like many online course Creator's might identify themselves more as like the creative type, rather than like the online marketer type.

So the, that type, like maybe they don't feel comfortable about the promotion part. But they really enjoy the creating part. Whereas like the online marketer, like the promotion part is more natural to them. What kind of approach would you take with this more creative type.

Michael Johnson: I think that the question is perfect for why we created choreography in the first place.

Right. Business choreography was based upon this idea that every time we had a dancer come in, that needed choreography, we didn't sit there and think, oh, I'm gonna put the same piece of choreography that I would put on a professional. On somebody that was an amateur. Of course, I wouldn't do that. And furthermore, I'd look at the dancer and say, well, gosh, if you can't do the splits, I'm not putting the splits in your choreography.

That would be crazy. If you can't turn, if you can't spin, I'm not gonna put a whole bunch of spins in there. And so I think the idea that is, has really become apparent in the business world is. There are a whole lot of people that can do one thing really well. That's what we teach. We, everybody teaches niche down, go do your one thing.

And what we recognized was our niche down was kind of the reverse. It was that we could actually see people's strengths and their flaws because we're used to doing it. And we don't look at their flaws as, oh my gosh, you can't do the splits. I guess you can't dance. You know, oh no, you can't spin. I guess you're out.

Right. So if somebody is super creative and they're thinking to themselves, I, I don't want to do the marketing thing. Okay. Well, let's find the solution because you cannot not market your thing. That's an impossibility. However, do you have to be the dancing bear in it? No, there are hundreds of other ways to do it.

There are lots of ways to go about it. Do you have to be the face? No, there are other ways to do it. And so what we do is we go in and customize based upon what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are. And we try to combine those together to make the best piece of choreography for you. And that's what should happen.

See, I know that a lot. People in this industry, especially if you're creating courses have been on the interwebs and you've seen, you should do a challenge. You should do a lead magnet. You should do a summit. You should do whatever the next new hot thing is because they rotate. And I've been in this business a long time and it rotates through and don't worry.

The other ones will come back soon. As soon as everybody gets bored with the thing that's happening. But what they're doing is they're telling you to do the thing that worked for them. And that's what they say. And it's totally legit. And I am not dogging them. They know how to do that one thing, but they don't necessarily know that that one thing is best for you.

it might fit one size fits all, but if they get a thousand clients in and they get 10% of them working cool, they use those 10 testimonials and we're off to the races, right. So you've gotta really, really consider, Hey, it's not whether or not a challenge works. It's not whether a summit works. It's not whether a lead magnet.

They all work and all of the tactics and strategies work, but now we've gotta figure out what the best thing is for you, so that it works in your scenario with your strengths and your weaknesses all accounted for, right?

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. I like that. Yeah. I, if you're intimidated by the idea of the marketing, you have to pick something, but that's right.

It, it, it doesn't have to be what the the new flashy thing is that other people are trying to, to sell you. And because yeah, maybe that works for them and that works for some of their students, but it's still possible for you to figure out what works for you specifically. That's

Michael Johnson: me. I like. Well, that's, that's, what's great about things like the Heights Platform, right?

It's not a fly by night flashy thing. It's a place where you can actually do your thing. Yep. Right. But it's not like a one time thing. No, you're gonna need it. You're gonna need it for a long time to come. Right. So you gotta kind of keep that in mind. Right. You gotta look for those types of solutions.

Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. I, I like that. You said that too, because that is kind of exactly how we think. We wanna be an extension for Creator's to kind of just do their thing, that we provide some tools and then they can use those to do what they want in their business. Yeah, for sure. Awesome. So I've got one more question for you related to this, and that is what about the.

After sale. So you help your clients get new leads coming in. They get new sales. Can you share some tips about how you could help clients retain these customers and keep promoting, even after they've made the sale?

Michael Johnson: Oh yeah. Retention and Ascension, right? Those are the, the RA part, right? Retention and Ascension.

When you get a customer in, I know this is gonna sound crazy. We're gonna do something really out of the box. we're gonna help them by actually. helping them. I know it sounds funny and I'm being sort of snarky about it, but the fact of the matter is that in so many instances, I see Creator's course Creator's entrepreneurs and they're so worried about what's gonna happen if I can't sustain this over.

What if I give them too much and I can't do it over the course of the next five years, and then I turn around and ask them, do you have any clients? And they go, well, no, but I just don't wanna put too much in, because what if I can't do that for a long period of time? And I'm like, you know what, get a customer get 10 and let's find out if you can or not.

But one of my favorite mentors says sell the farm. sell the farm. So that's first, right? So now if you're not in that place and you're already going well, I've, I've got a bunch of people in, okay, well, if you've sold the farm and you know that you're giving everything you have, then you're already in the mindset of over deliver and you should over deliver always over deliver.

Because if you are thinking about how you can ascend your customer, if you've always over delivered every step of the way, then it's gonna be the easiest. To give them the next thing that they need. That's it? I can't remember who it is. It just slipped my mind, but there was one of our famous marketers of the past.

And he said, if you can get a hundred raving fans, Just a hundred, a hundred that will buy anything that you sell, just because not because they need it, but because they love you and they love what you stand for. They love what you're doing. If you can get a hundred of those, you will never go wanting for the remainder of your days.

So how do we do that? We over deliver, think about it. Think about the businesses that you buy from. Think about the people that you consume or the, or the products that you consume and you keep going back and you would never. Those things that you are raving fans of why? Because they over delivered, they over delivered in some way, shape or form, not once, not twice, but every time they always over deliver.

So that's the first step in retention. You gotta find ways to over deliver. And what is it it's stepping above and beyond. It's when you go to the hotel and they say, can we carry your bags up? And you go, well, how much will that cost? And they go, we're just doing it because you're our. Because we like you and you show up and the, the concierge walks in the room and he goes and shows you around and go, wow, you didn't have to do that.

And they go, well, yeah, you're a customer. You are part of our family now. And you're like, wow, I really feel like I'm part of your family. That's really cool when they show up at your door and they bring you couple bottles of water because they saw that it was a really hot day and you. Well, how much do we pay for that?

And they're like, it's on the house. We, we just brought it because we thought you needed it when you're on the golf course. And they send a cart around because it's a hundred degrees and they send a cart around with a wet towel out of an ice chest. And they say, here you go. We want to make sure you stay cool.

Would you like a drink? and they give it to you for free. That's over delivering because you know what you remember that golf course, you remember that hotel, you remember those things and so you stay and that's about retention and you know what, it's not that hard to do. All we have to do is look at the customer's needs and say, you know what?

I could give a little extra here. I could give a little extra there. Here's a little bag of candy. And people are like, oh my gosh, that's the most amazing thing ever. Cuz you gave me a bag of candy, but you can do it in your online services too. You can do it in your courses. You can go, Hey, I threw in this extra bonus because I pulled you guys last week.

This isn't part of the course, but you all asked for it. So I created it and here you go. And they're like, man, you really care about us. This is amazing. Yes. So that's about retention. When it comes to Ascension. Now we've gotta get creative. Now you gotta kind of broaden your horizon partner with cool people, meet up with other people that you would call your, I like to call 'em dream 100, right?

Your dream 100 you're 100 people that you would Dr. Dream about working with partner up with them, use their services and find ways to interact with other businesses doing services that you wouldn't do. That's a great way to ascend. That's a great way to add profit to the backside of your business model.

This is huge. And when you can start doing that, oh my goodness. On the back end, the retention and the Ascension gets so much easier. Awesome. Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty: I, I particularly like this the idea about mentioning this over. Because yeah, the online marketer type may, may tell you, oh, well, it's a good idea to include a bonus or something like this.

They may even say, oh, you should over deliver. But they don't really get more into it too much other than saying that. And I, I think that it is really nice to kind of dispel that worry. That is it okay for me to over deliver, because if you think about it, the worst thing that can. Is that you find out after over delivering that?

Okay. Maybe I stretch myself a little bit too far. Maybe that was a little bit too much. You can always scale it back. Right. But you can't, you can't do the reverse. You can't give it's. Yeah. It's much harder to give somebody something and then decide later. I wanna try to deliver more later. You, you can continue to give them free things over time or over the course of their customer experience.

But if you over deliver with that customer in the beginning, That is what will get them to leave a review. We'll get them to purchase more things from you, like immediately right after. And whereas if you don't do that, you're, you can still retain them, but it's a much longer time to maybe have those things happen.

That's so true.

Michael Johnson: It is so true. And it's not, you don't have to get crazy. You can just think of it. Easy. Just think of an easy thing you would be. And this, this would be, I, this is gonna blow some of you away, cuz we're doing online businesses and so many instances these days, but just write a. Send them a postcard, like actually write it.

I know use one of those pen things, right? Crazy. Like in your own handwriting and sign it, send it out to 'em. You're like, but what if I had 200 customers I say, get 200 customers and then afterwards what we're doing? Yeah, add friction later, but first give them what you got, give them everything. But it's also part of why at business choreography, why we chose the model that we like, because then the people that we choose to work with, we just give them everything.

We just load it on. Why? Because we wanna see you succeed. And if we can't help you succeed, then we're not taking you on boy. That gives a lot of confidence to the people that work with us. Right. Cause if they're gonna work with us, they know they're gonna. Cool because we're gonna put everything we have in, and that's the idea.

So think about that before you start adding your own mental friction, right? That's what I call the worriers of the world. And you might be a worrier and that's okay. But you know, you gotta fight that. You gotta fight the worry cuz worry's about the future and you can't predict the future anymore than I can.

So we gotta kind of ease off on the worry thing.

Bryan McAnulty: Great. Yeah. Yeah. Make it easier on your. All right. So one thing I like to do on this show is to have each of our guests ask a question to the audience. So if you could ask our audience anything, what would that be?

Michael Johnson: Okay. I got this. This is gonna be good guys.

If you're creating out there, if you're creating your business, your courses, your things that are helping your customers, your service, that you are providing to change the world. I want you to think about this. How many people would you have to help to make it, worth it, to make it worth it, to start your next business, your next course, your next project.

How many people would you have? To make it worth it to you. Is it one, if you could just help one person overcome that thing that you are helping them with, is it 10? Is it a hundred? Is it a thousand? What's your number? See people talk about what your financial number is, but you know what? We do it for so much more.

I know you creatives, you entrepreneurs out there, you do it for so much more than that. So what's your number? How many would it be worth it? Is it one for some? It would be one. If it was mother Teresa, she'd say it's. But I'm asking you legitimately, how many, how many would it take if you could help 10 people.

Great. And so once you write that number down now, you know, now, you know, if I could just help 10 people, well, let me tell you if it's 10, if you wrote down 10 and it took. Well this year for you to help 10 people. And every one of those 10 people also helped 10 people in the course of five years. That's the entire population of the planet.

It exponentially increases and gets to about 5 billion, 7 billion, something like that. The math goes up really quickly. So when you think about 10 and you might think to yourself, gee, it's not that much. It's not that much of a big deal. No. 10 is a big deal. Go help your. Right. And to, to really hammer that home, I wanna leave you with this saying we have it on our computers.

Our team teaches it. We all believe it. TA TP. That's the acronym. I love acronyms TA TP. Think about the people. So when you're thinking about that number T a TP, think about the people now get started. Go do it.

Bryan McAnulty: Awesome. Well, thank you, Michael. All right. Well, before we get going, where else can people find you online?

Michael Johnson: Best place to find us is biz corio.com B I Z C H O R E o.com. And you'll find ways to connect with us all over the place. We're on social media or on Facebook. We, you know, we're out there, but you'll find all the stuff you need on BIS corio.com. Awesome. Thanks again. Absolutely. Thank you.

Bryan McAnulty: If you enjoyed this interview and want the chance to ask questions to our guests live tune in on Tuesdays when new episodes premier on the Heights Platform, Facebook page, to learn more about the show and get notified when new episodes release, check out the Creator's Adventure dot com until then keep learning and I'll see you in the next episode.