The Modern Consultant

After our Jay Abraham episode, I kept thinking to myself, who'd be a great follow-up to buying, growing, and selling businesses? Then, a Modern Consultant listener recommended I chat with this week's guest. Why? Well, she's a master of negotiation - $1M+ deals, $1B deals, and $100B deals. So, no matter what level of business you're playing at, there's something everyone can learn from here. Meet Christine McKay, CEO of Venn Consulting, a master business negotiator with extensive experience in M&A (mergers and acquisitions), divestitures, and integration. She is also the author of the book, Why Not Ask? A Conversation about Getting More and contributing author for several compilation books. Topics We Cover: How The Hardest Negotiation Starts Within The Four Primary Styles of Negotiation The Champion Style of Negotiation Evaluating the Success of a Deal Benefactor, Maverick, and Ambassador Styles of Negotiation Negotiation as a Way of Life Understanding Negotiation Styles in Relationships and Business References and Links: https://www.vennnegotiation.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinemckay/ Book: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Not-Ask-Conversation-Getting/dp/1734954906

For years, she's tested, refined, and perfected her small group coaching program. She's done it so well, that she boasts an incredible 95% success rate. And with those kind of results, her next natural question is... "How do I help more people?" But then, the next thought is... "Will it make it worse for those who are already inside my program?" That, right there, is the conundrum many skilled coaches and consultants face. Effectively, do we stay small and help a few people really well? Or do we scale, and help more people, but not as well? This week on The Modern Consultant, I have the pleasure of saying to our guest Leslie Chen... "What if you could have both?" Then, in this week's special "coaching podcast" episode, you'll hear me walk her begin to architect how to do it. More about Leslie: She is running an executive weight loss coaching program focusing on helping a community of high-impact women remove a toxic relationship with food while experiencing automated, inevitable weight loss. Topics We Cover: Lead generation and scaling Leslie Chen's business Refining messaging and value proposition Scaling coaching program without compromising quality Surveying and data collection for decision-making Pricing and revenue considerations Lessons learned and future goals References and Links: https://www.riselean.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/leslielchen/

This week on the Modern Consultant, I have the honor of hosting Zack Arnold. Zack is an award-winning Hollywood film and television editor (Cobra Kai, Burn Notice, Empire, Shooter, Glee), a member of the American Cinema Editors, a documentary director (GO FAR: The Christopher Rush Story, narrated by Mark Hamill), an American Ninja Warrior, and the creator of the Optimize Yourself program and podcast. With his group coaching programs, he helps ambitious creative professionals and entrepreneurs design a unique path towards a more balanced, more productive, and more fulfilling career they deserve. Zack's website: https://optimizeyourself.me/

Imagine this - you're the head of Kajabi, a platform for creating and selling online courses. In 2023, with 19,000 customers, you hit $60M in revenue, and you're valued at $2 billion. Who do you call to help grow your community from 19,000 to 100,000? Maruxa Murphy - The Heartful Community Architect & Revenue Strategist I'm proud to call a friend, client, and this week's guest on the Modern Consultant. She’s been featured in Forbes, Reader's Digest, Fox News, The Huffington Post, NBC, and The Austin-American Statesman for her work in creating profitable enterprises that do good in the world. Maruxa believes in empowering all individuals to live their fullest lives, and her work has been instrumental in bringing people together to create positive change. To learn more about Maruxa, visit: https://www.revolutionarycommunities.com/

This week on the Modern Consultant, I have the honor of hosting Jhana Li. Jhana first stumbled into Operations 5 years ago, while traveling full-time in a converted van through North & South America. Since then, she's been COO at 2 successful startups, directly consulted over thirty 7- & 8- figure businesses, and coached hundreds more. She helps founders scale their businesses & scale themselves out of the day-to-day by training their Operator to become the Second-In-Command. Her mission lies in transforming purpose-based businesses into vehicles for growth & good.

This week on the Modern Consultant, I have the honor of hosting Brian Kurtz. Brian Kurtz has been a serial direct marketer for over 40 years. He had two careers. The first spanned 34 years as a force behind Boardroom Inc., an iconic publisher and direct marketer. His second career, which he is seven years into as the Founder of Titans Marketing, is a direct marketing educational and coaching company where he has also continued working with the best-of-the-best including past guests on The Modern Consultant (Jay "$50B man" Abraham & Kevin "CopyChief.com" Rogers)

A few weeks ago, we had about 350,000 email subscribers and now it's about 600,000+ subscribers which changes our focus from getting more subscribers to "how do we convert?" This week, I take you behind the scenes of how I'm doing that for an active client project. For confidentiality reasons, I can't share everything but here's what I do cover: -Average email open rate (as of Sept 2023 from a database of 200M emails) -How I’m getting 150%-250% higher email open rates -Why 2,210 people asked us to sell them something -2 kinds of emails I send in every campaign -3 subject line templates you can use right now

This week on the Modern Consultant, I have the honor of hosting Daniel Ferrari. Daniel Ferrari is a marketing strategist who specializes in helping D2C brands. While his background is predominantly in copywriting, he has developed expertise in, bringing in other copywriters to execute his big ideas. Daniel's expertise lies in helping businesses with offers/product creation, product-driven marketing strategies, and more. Years ago, when I met Dan for the first time, he was working for The Motley Fool, a 9-figure direct-response driven company. Dan was responsible for around 60% of their front-end acquisition. That was over 5 years ago. Just wait till you hear what he's up to now.

I'm back with another solo episode. If you missed the last two episodes, watch them for full context. The first few seconds of this episode are a recap clip from my episode with Jay Abraham, the $50B man (that's how much he's generated for his private clients in profit). Then, the following episode, I introduce the 9-step roadmap I'm using to drive all client results through the end of 2024. Finally, in this episode, I share: - Problems you run into at each step - How to solve them - Results my clients are having at various steps Highlights: - Step 3: We added 372,424 email subscribers in 1 day (client update) - Step 9: Building a sales system that can handle a $1M per month without sales calls. Find out more about what I'm up to here: https://8020solutions.co/

Audience is who you serve. Offers are what you serve. Sales are how you tell them about the offers. In this episode, I'll reveal our 9-step process for improving all three, based on our past client work and what we'll be executing on for clients through 2024.

Jay Abraham: “Marc, do I have your permission to use vulgarity?” Had you told me the man who’s made $50 billion in profits for his private clients would’ve been asking me for permission to curse on my podcast, then I’d be Dwayne “The Rock” Johnsoning my eyebrow at you. That said, I told him “Absolutely”. Never imagined I’d have this much fun talking about how to buy, grow, and sell businesses. But, if you know Jay, then hey, it’s to be expected because: His advice helped the Icy Hot brand you see at CVS and everywhere else go from $20,000 to millions in under a year. He’s also helped a candy company in China sell 49% to Hershey’s for half a billion dollars using his methods. And so long as it doesn’t distract from the deeper mission of maximizing profit for a positive impact, he never misses an opportunity to sneak in a joke or three.

Michael Roderick helps thoughtful givers become thought leaders. To do it, he uses two frameworks. The first is the Thought Leadership Triple Threat - which is combination of becoming a scientist, celebrity, and magician in your niche. The other framework, drastically increases your referability for both more leads and new business. That's the A.I.M. framework, which stands for accessibility, influence, and memorability. If you're lacking any of the 3, then your referability drops. Why Listen: Michael went from high school teacher to Broadway Producer in 2 years. To do it, he had to master the business of creativity, and then developed frameworks to make it repeatable for himself as well as his clients.

What does it take to make the first $100K? If you're an established service provider, that's already at multiple 6-or-7 figures in annual revenue, then figuring out how to your first $100K in online courses or curriculum-based coaching is your magic question. Answer that question, and you now have a pathway to $1M in productized revenue, which gives you the option to walk away from service-based revenue. However, in today's episode, we cover a controversial take: Don't try to escape your client-services business...even if you can do it with online courses.

This week on the Modern Consultant, I have the honor of hosting Jordan Godbey, Jordan is the founder of GrowthCommunity, an entrepreneur, and certified Circle expert who's launched over 40 communities for his clients. He's also a course creator himself who generated over $1.5m dollars with a niche course and his passion is helping other experts build community-powered courses that deliver powerful transformations in their students' lives. While that may sound a lot like what I do - through our podcast, we found the difference: while I focus on making sure that the curriculum within a course is exceptional and delivers the transformational value, Jordan focuses on making sure the community infrastructure that surrounds the course, is also exceptional to support the learning journey.

This week on the Modern Consultant, I have the honor of hosting Luisa Zhou, former space station engineer turned multi 7-figure course coach for professionals who want to escape the 9-to-5, and grow a freedom business on their terms. In a social media world where influencers flip between "vulnerability overshares" and meticulously filtering public personas to grow their follower counts, Luisa has taken a noticeably "quieter" approach. As a self-described business minimalist and very private person, you may hear about her german Sheperd Falco, but that's about it. I don't know about you, but personally, I find that refreshing, because she focuses on creating what I call "high-utility" content. Content that's focused on helping people, as opposed to content that's too focused on being "likeable". Sure, likeability matters - but once trust is established, there's going to be a lot more time spent on problem solving to get to someone's goals, as opposed to knowing the latest that happened on their last dog walk.

Books grow businesses - no surprise there but if you want to do it well, then it will require time, attention, and intention. In today's episode I interview book writing and independent publishing expert Bryna Haynes, where we talk about why it takes 12-14 months, how it can take less time, and where both books and courses fit into the business model of thought leaders.

About Today's Guest: Justin Blackman is a brand voice expert who’s written for more than 429 people and managed to sound like every one of them. He uses an ultra-specific voice mirroring process called Brand Ventriloquism® to analyze and replicate the nuances that make your voice unique, and documents it so you can scale your content without sacrificing authenticity. He’s created voice guides for Amy Porterfield, Stu McLaren, Todd Herman, Bobby Klinck, and Danny Iny — and worked with top brands including Puma, IHG hotels, 5-hour Energy, and Red Bull. He also runs copywriting workshops that show you how to evolve your style and punch, power and pop to your everyday writing at the Brand Voice Academy - all the people say he’s pretty fly for a write guy.

Can A.I. replace sales copywriters? That's just one of the questions I'm finding the answer to on this episode of The Modern Consultant with our guest, Kevin Rogers. If you're in the world of direct response copywriting, then Kevin needs no introduction. That's because he's the founder of CopyChief, a community of direct response copywriters and the world-class companies who hire them. With over 9,294 members, a training vault for learning copy, a professional job board and over 795,550 podcast downloads. If there's anyone who has his pulse on how the world of professional copywriters are not just reacting to AI, but how they are using it in their daily workflow, it would be Kevin.

Can an OnlyFans creator teach you how to grow your online education business? That’s the question I’m answering today with the help of Bryce Adams, who, after growing a successful 7-figure E-Commerce brand, started an OnlyFans account on a whim in the middle of the pandemic. The first night, she made $62, showed it to her boyfriend, who then replied… “Wait what?” A few scrolls and market research clicks later, then told her: “We’re gonna crush this. Give us 6 months.” The rest is business history: They transferred the parts of their E-Commerce skills that they could but quickly learned that any content business can be a grind. That said, they leveraged market research, positioning, product development, and hiring within their families to drive $10M in revenue in 2 short years. Now, they have a team of over 20 employees, give over $100,000+ to charity, and also run their E-Commerce business in less than 30 minutes per week. This…is not a regular story. Inside, you’ll find stories of family, altruism, community growth, paid advertising, organic marketing, and everything in between. Relevant for Modern Consultants that want to spend more time with their families? Yes. Definitely. But only if you’re open to finding insights that are off the beaten path. TImestamps: [00:00:00] “How’d you describe who you are and what you do?” [00:00:54] How she donated $100,000 to various charities. [00:03:15] Started e-commerce business out of high school, grew it with friends and family. Transitioned to digital space. Tried OnlyFans, saw opportunity, did market research. Committed full-time and scaled quickly. [00:07:31] Boyfriend girlfriend team evolves adult content business strategy. [00:11:16] Being authentic on OnlyFans creates community and support. [00:15:02] Team of over 20 employees handles editing, content creation, and support. [00:18:53] Exploring creator economy, payments, and investments [00:23:26] How her family reacted to her doing OnlyFans. [00:27:25] OnlyFans is a secure and transparent platform. [00:29:33] Building a dream house, expanded space, new gym. [00:35:00] Focused on product, building content, social media. Bringing in more fans. Creating safe content for different platforms. Displaying personalities and friendships to more people. Working and documenting experiences for enjoyment. [00:37:03] Filming is done on a phone. Fans appreciate authentic and raw footage. Travel with friends who capture content. [00:44:04] Paying customers better than free; dealing with YouTube comments. [00:50:16] Data-driven approach overcomes fear or success. About Bryce: Bryce Adams is a serial entrepreneur who built her first multi-million dollar business right out of high school. Most recently she's known for being the #1 liked creator on OnlyFans and earns in the top 0.01% of all creators on the platform. She's also the first creator on the platform to have over 1 million active fans. Bryce loves animals and lifting heavy weights. You can find her on Fitbryce.com and Instagram fitbryceadams (both SFW).

Hillary Presswood is a creative director, positioning coach, and founder of Statement Piece Studio @ hillaryweiss.com. She’s also the former co-host of the cult-favorite Youtube marketing talk show Hillary and Margo Yell at Websites (#HAMYAW), and has had her work featured on Business Insider, The Next Web, The Observer, and more. Since 2011, she’s helped thousands of brands all over the world get seen and heard (and make serious cash) through her 1-1 client work, writing, coaching, and videos. Nowadays, she’s on a mission to help more small businesses define their “statement piece”, a.k.a. the bold point of view that makes them radically relevant to their perfect people.