Part-time $40K Per Month Side Business

Show Notes

• Trent and Ryan, along with another business partner, have created a side business that brings in an additional $40K per month.
• 20% of their revenue goes toward the cost of the tools used.
• They use a Facebook Lead ad as their primary lead source.
• They created 50 different ads with 10 different images, 5 different calls to action, and they identified the top three which had the best response rate.
• They tested the ads using FixYourFunnel Sync.
• Once someone clicks on the lead, they can opt-in to receive text messages.
• They typically experience a triple rate of conversion in sales when people say “yes” to a text message.
• Usually prospective customers are very interested if they are willing to text you.
• Once they opt-in through a lead ad on FB, FixYourFunnel Sync pushes the lead into a CRM, and the CRM will push them into the appropriate campaign (whether email, phone, text, etc.).
• Trent and Ryan have a 90 day sale cycle, so they will follow-up through a system that takes up very little time or resources.
• Dan Kennedy says, “The worst number in business is one.” Meaning that you don’t want to only have one lead source. Trent and Ryan use two other lead sources.
• They typically send an email and text on the same day so the prospective customer is more likely to respond.
• Another aspect of the sales funnel is an automated webinar that runs every night where they can share their ideas and services right away.
• They have two different webinars depending upon which lead source is unique to them, as one includes the price ahead of time and the other doesn’t.
• Focus on “good is good enough” rather than perfection.
• With this in mind, they started with one sales funnel and once it was producing good results, they moved forward with other funnels.
• Are you using just one funnel or are you making one for each lead source? If you can make the same funnel work for all your lead sources and the message is congruent, you could use just one funnel.
• Trent and Ryan use live text message engagement. They like to have the ability to text back and forth with their customers. The goal is to engage in conversation so the customer can say yes or no to the buying decision.
• The goal is to get the prospect on a phone call with a salesperson to get them to make a buying decision.
• You will sell in a different way if you have an on-line product that is a one time sale than if you are selling a life-time product or service.
• You often need to adjust your business model as you go.
• If you can wisely outspend your competition to get a customer you will win. (Dan Kennedy)
• When you are curating your sales and marketing strategy, identify what tactics are necessary to make the sale successful.  Then go back to the beginning and ask yourself what you need to do up front in order to capture the lead in a way that will give you the ability to follow up with a prospective customer.

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] Hi, this is Trent Chapman again. I'm filling in the podcast for Ryan Chapman for a few more days. And today I was going to share with you something that I think would be valuable to anybody in any business and that is an overview of one of our businesses that we started part-time with a partner that's producing $40,000 a month.

So, this business doesn't require my full-time attention and it doesn't require Ryans full-time attention. We have a partner that works in it, and he even works part-time in the business because of the way it's set up, and it still generates 40,000 a month with about seventy percent margins. Our only cost is the marketing and one piece of equipment which we send out.

It has very high margins, very great business, and even has a recurring revenue component to it, so that monthly profit and revenue continues to grow. Now, the thing that's great about this business is that we just started it at the beginning of 2016, so it's a relatively new business, and it's already taken off and done quite well.

Now, I'm going to share with you some of [00:01:00] the components of this and some of the strategies we put into place that have made it so successful and I'm gonna explain the strategy and explain the why behind that. So this is a $40,000 a month part-time business on the side.

Most people would say, that's awesome. That's what I want, but I don't mind doing it full-time. I just want something that produces great revenue and great margins and great profit. I'm going to go over some of that today. I'm gonna try and keep this brief, 10 minutes, so I'm not going to get too much detail, but I'm going to go into enough to where I can give you some ideas that you can incorporate into your own business.

Now with this business, we sell a training program which teaches people how to start a business in a specific niche and we also include some tools that are needed. The tools are, that's what our costs really comes down to, about 20% of the revenue goes towards the cost of the equipment and shipping it and sending it out to these people to start the business and the other part of it is just [00:02:00] basically online coaching of how to use these tools to make money in their own business.

What I love about this business is it's legitimate, awesome business opportunity. I know that if you look out there in the world you see business opportunities everywhere. Most of them are just piles of crap that don't teach you anything and they don't work, whereas this business actually produces results. We have people that, within two weeks of starting, are quitting their jobs and they're making five to six thousand a month where before they're making two to three thousand dollars a month.

This is by no means a get rich quick type of business. It doesn't have the potential to be. For these people that are buying the business opportunity, it doesn't have potential to be a million dollar a year income. However, it does have the potential to be $100,000 year income as they work up to it. And so we really love the business, really the opportunity we're selling and the results that people are getting from it.

So from that part of it, I love it because I've been in businesses in the past where I felt kind of like, oh, this is good, but not enough people are seeing success. I want to see more people successful with it. [00:03:00] That's kind of the long and the short of what the product is selling.

Now I'm going to go into the marketing and the sales side. And this is where the money is made. Now, in this business, we start off with a Facebook lead ad as our primary lead source. We have two other lead sources that we can pay per lead, whereas with Facebook we're also in a way paying for lead, but we kind of control how much each lead costs us by improving our marketing message match to our custom audience and Facebook. And so we took some time, we created 50 different ads with 10 different images, 5 different calls to action, and we identified out of those 50, which of the top three had the best response rate.

This took a few hundred dollars in testing, and we were doing Facebook marketing. There's a program you can get that will help you with that. It's on syncsumo.com, it's their fast boot camp. I highly recommend it. It'll walk you through A to Z how to set up your Facebook account, how to do [00:04:00] the marketing, so I'm not going to go into any of that today. I'll let you go there, you can listen to Justin Lofton from SyncSumo and he'll be able to set you up on that. So syncsumo.com, check it out after you get done listening to this podcast here.

Now, what we did is we have a lead ad that generates a lead, and in that lead ad we're asking people if they'd like to receive information immediately by text message. With lead ads, Facebook is serving up the person's name, phone number, and email, because that's what we're asking for, and they click a button to say yes, I'm okay with sending that to you. When they do that, we ask a question and say, would you like to receive information immediately by text message? If they click yes to that, they are essentially opting in to now receive text messages as part of our marketing sales funnel. This is an important step that we have.

We've done this both ways. When we do email only versus doing email and text for our follow-up funnel in this business, our conversions are almost triple by doing text messages as part of the follow-up. [00:05:00] Email is great, It has its place, but it's triple the conversion of sales when people say yes to receive a text message.

Now, the reason is twofold here. One is if someone says yes, I'm interested sent to me by text, they're a high likelihood that they're super interested. They've qualified themselves as someone who's very interested in not just, I'm kicking tires. And when they say no, they're kind of saying, I'm interested, but not too much. Now the other thing is, when we're able to drip out a message and send them an email or send them a video via email that's great, but the content consumption is much lower.

If you listen to our previous podcast that talked about how we've increased content consumption using text message and especially using MMS or include an image of that video that we're sending to them and then in the body of the text message, we're sending a link that's tractable to watch the video. So in this case, the person who comes in through Facebook is a [00:06:00] lead ad, SyncSumo pushes that lead right into our CRM and our CRM looks and says, if the person answered yes, push them into this campaign. If they answered no, push them into that campaign.

The no campaign obviously is email and phone call up only, the yes campaign is phone, text, and email follow-up. By having that distinction in the Facebook lead ad, we're able to automatically sift the leads and start different campaigns based upon if they said yes or no.

Once we get that going we have a set of emails, text messages, and phone calls that are going out to those who have said yes over the next 90 days. And in this business, we have in 90 days sales cycle where within 90 days people are making the decision to buy or say no, I'm not interested. And so, it's not a one call close. It's not a simple, they buy the day they come in as a new lead. However, the system is so inexpensive to run the follow-up that it doesn't matter that it takes 90 days. There's not really a lot of cost [00:07:00] out of pocket besides marketing and a few expenses on the follow-up. Very, very little expense though for the return on investment.

And so, in this business, we also have two other lead sources where we pay per lead, like I mentioned. This is important to know. If you followed Dan Kennedy at all, he's a very smart marketer, if you haven't read his books, I highly recommend it. Anyway, Dan Kennedy always says, "The worst number in business is one" and he's referring to marketing. "The worst number in business is one", meaning you don't want to have just one lead source. You want to have multiple lead sources that you're using to generate traffic or leads or prospects for your business, the reason being, if I have one lead source and something happens that it dries up, it changes, it gets shut down, then my business is essentially shut down. It's important that you keep track of what lead sources you're using, which ones are producing results, obviously cut out those that aren't.

I don't say go find three leads horses and only one works so that you are [00:08:00] losing your money. That's not a good idea either. But find lead sources that work for you. And even if they're not the most profitable, keep using those that are profitable for your business. And in this case, we found three so far. We're adding in additional sources and testing new ones all the time. But the three that we're using are producing a positive ROI within that 90-day period.

So this funnel incorporated text messaging, email, and phone follow-up. Just to give you an overview of how many touches we include, we had 15 touches by phone, text, and email. In most cases we're sending a text message and an email in the same date, same time so that they're getting it in their email inbox, as well as a text message on their phone. That way if they see it in one, and miss it in the other, then they'll get it the second time when they check their email or check their phone.

I know that for me if I get a text message and someone says, hey, I sent you an email, I'm more likely to read the email they sent to me, and vise versa. If I get an email that says, hey, I sent you a text, did you get it? I'm more [00:09:00] likely to check the text as well. And so we do that and over the course of 90 days we're dripping out content of videos and questions that we're asking and in a previous podcast we talked about conversation starters and how you can use text messaging to engage in conversation with prospects or customers.

In this case, we're asking questions along the way. So we might send an MMS with a video, and then five days later my ask a question saying, hey, were you able to watch that video I sent you a few days ago? What do you think about the rock chip repair business? And so as we're going through this, we're asking questions and we're getting them engaged in conversation that can then lead to a sales call.

Another aspect of this sales funnel is as soon as they come into the sales funnel, we're pushing them to an automated webinar that goes on every night. Now, we don't we don't tell them that it's automated, for all they know it's a live webinar. We don't tell them [00:10:00] it's a live webinar either, we just say, hey, come join us on tonight's webinar at seven o'clock. And when they do that, we're able to, in the one hour webinar, go through the whole opportunity with them, offer them to be a part of our success team, and they send in a text message to say, I'm interested.

Now, we actually have two different funnels that we use this for. So one is for people who come in from a Facebook lead, and we have a different funnel slightly different webinar, where, in that one, we actually tell them the price because in this case, they come in from a lead source where they already know the cost of the opportunity.They're coming in to us, we're paying the cost per lead to this other company that's generating leads for us, and they already know how much the opportunities is going to cost them to get started.

In that case, the webinar is specific to them talking about the business opportunity, why it's such a good opportunity, how quickly they can get set up and going, how quickly they can make profit, and how they can leverage that to add more people to their business to get $200,000 a year within the first year. [00:11:00] That opportunity is explained a little bit different because it leads to us a little bit different.

That's another distinction I want to make here. Initially we started with one funnel for all three lead sources. And the reason was that our goal is to get to profit as soon as possible and to get a funnel working soon as possible. Instead of taking and creating three funnels and then as we tweaked one tweak all three of them and trying to find the right messaging and the right flow of messages to get the conversions to increase the conversions, we decided to focus on one funnel. Get as close to good as we could and that's not, perfect it's as close to good as we could because good is good enough. From there, we did two other funnels broken off specific to the lead source and fine-tune those slightly.

The reason we did this is one, we were able to get to profitability a lot quicker by focusing on good is good enough versus focusing on perfection, and instead of building out three funnels and having to make adjustments to all three every time you made [00:12:00] an adjustment to the funnels, we were able to build out one, get it producing good results and then split it into three. And now as we make refinements and small adjustments, it's not major things. We're having to overhaul and change the system and we can make just a refinement to one funnel that seems to respond better to a certain type of follow-up or a certain message.

That's another distinction that you want to identify in your business. Are you using just one funnel? Or you trying to create 10 different funnels for all your lead sources and it's getting too complex and too overwhelming? And even if you only have three lead sources, you don't need three funnels. If you can make all three lead sources work in one sales and marketing funnel and the messages congruent and the follow-up as it is with the lead capture, then you're going to be okay using one funnel.

So keep in mind, what I'm sharing here is not going to be an exact match for what you're doing your business. But take the ideas and the concepts and the reason behind them and see if it would be a good fit for your business. Another thing that we did that has been successful with this business is [00:13:00] making sure that we have live text message engagement.

One of our big things that we like to incorporate all of our businesses is the ability to text back and forth with prospects and customers and not only send out automated text messages, and not only have them able to send us a keyword to start a back-and-forth automated conversation, but also we like to be able to engage in a live conversation where myself, a team member, a cell person, so a support person, can respond to text messages on our business line.

We have some services that allow you to do that, you can learn more about that by going to our website and checking out what we have here. But the goal here with the text messaging is to get them to engage in conversation, to take action on the next step in our sale cycle.

In this business, we're selling a business opportunity to high ticket item. After they've watched the webinar and actually watched a few of the videos, they're typically ready to make a buying decision, or they're ready to just [00:14:00] have a conversation and help them to say yes or no to a buying decision.

The goal for us is to get them to a conversation with our business partner who runs all the sales and currently, he only has to do a few phone calls a day as a part-time business for him because the funnel and the marketing sales funnel is built to do all the preparation, to get everyone educated, to get to the point where now they just have to have a few questions answered that are specific to their situation, and then they can make a buying decision.

In this type of a sales funnel, the goal that we have is to get them to a phone call with the salesperson to make the buying decision and the whole purpose of the follow-up is to get them educated to that point.

Now, in your business, you might be selling something online and it might be a different situation altogether where you have a two hundred dollar product and it's a one-time sale, there's no recurring revenue, and there's no potential for up-sell or cross-sell. And in that case, you're going to sell in a very different way from someone who has $8,000 to [00:15:00] $10,000 or $20,000 dollar lifetime customer value because the higher the customer value, then the more I can do and invest in marketing and sales follow-up in order to get a conversion and still make it be a profitable positive ROI within the first few months. So that's the goal, identifying your business model.

And here's what I've also found. You might even be able to adjust your business model. Think about that. A lot of people think that the business model they're in is the only business model that can work. What I've found, a lot of businesses can incorporate either coaching, recurring revenue, other services that can increase the lifetime customer value to make it so that they can spend a little bit more on marketing and sales to get a customer and still be profitable and still grow their business.

If you can outspend, and here's another concept I learned from Dan Kennedy, if you can wisely outspend your competition to get a customer, you'll win. So in business, you are competing. Now, I like to share a lot with my fellow business [00:16:00] owners, but my direct competition I don't like to share a lot with because what I found is if I can beat my direct competition in sales and marketing by having a better sales funnel better marketing model and having a better business model overall that gives me a higher lifetime value of a customer I can afford to spend more than my direct competition to get a customer.

When you look at your business, identify what would be the ideal follow-up for your business and what would you need to do upfront in capturing a lead in order to get them to fit into that mold. So for me, if I didn't ask for a phone number and if I ask for permission to text, or if I have people texting the keyword to enter into my sales funnel, then I wouldn't be able to do half of the stuff we do for getting sales conversions. We wouldn't be able to call people if we didn't have a phone number, we wouldn't be able to text people with content and asking questions to generate a conversation if we didn't have a phone number that was textable with permission to text that person.

When you are [00:17:00] curating your cells and marketing strategy, identify what tactics are necessary in order to make this successful and then you got to go back to the beginning. So if you know, what do I need to do in order to capture the lead in a way that gives me the ability to follow up with them. And some businesses we've done in the past, we needed an address. This address was important to mail them some information to help in the sale cycle. In that case, part of our capturing a lead was asking that they fill out a web form including their address.

So, depending on how you plan to follow up the prospect, depending on how you plan to sell to them, you need to identify what is needed up front in order to get that person into your marketing funnel and allowing you to follow up and convert them to a customer client in a way that works for your business model.

Now again, some businesses, their price point doesn't justify having a sales person calling them, and they just do everything online. In that case, you [00:18:00] have to get very good at refining your online sales process, your online moving them through the funnel. Even in cases where we find that people sell online only, we found an increase in sales by incorporating text messaging. Even if you don't do any phone conversations, if you just incorporate MMS or text messaging into your business, you're able to see an increase in content consumption, which will lead to an increase in people buying your product or service.

Again, if you have any questions on how we're able to do these things in our business, feel free to reach out to us. My name is Trent Chapman. My brother, Ryan Chapman is my business partner and we'd love to have our team work with you and help you get set up to run a sales funnel and marketing funnel similar to what we've done for this business that produces a nice side income for us with very little time invested in each month.