How to build your high ticket solution - Part 2

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
This is part two of building yourown high ticket solution that customers will love,
they'll pay, stay and refer.You'll build a client base that will
have both passive and active income.It doesn't require any special skills on your
part. As a freelance copywriter ora marketer. You can do this in
the course of going from just afreelancer to a small million dollar agency.

(00:24):
Now I say small because a lotof folks want to maintain their independence and
they don't want to have a bigteam of people. But high ticket packages
very often can use tools, contractors, and other people to help you be
more efficient and more profitable. We'lltalk about that here shortly. In the
first part of this program, wetalked about month one in the rationale behind

(00:46):
developing your high ticket course, I'mjust in hit with ad briefings, copyrighting
tips, and the example here ismy twelvemonth lead accelerator, which is a
high five figure project and when wehave larger clients it can be a six
figure project. But is a twelvemonth program that in the first month delivers
a deliverable that has a perceived valuemuch higher than the investment. But most

(01:10):
importantly systemizes, standardizes, and ithelps the organization implement best practices. Now,
this particular twelve month service may bebackfilled with my subcontractors who are helping.
Now these aren't employees, they're notsitting around the office all the time,
but they're hands selected subcontractors, mostof which I've worked for or worked

(01:30):
with over the years, because Ido offer this twelve month acceleration program as
a white label program for the agenciesthat graduate from my coaching program. But
ultimately, what we're doing here iswe are understanding that this is not something
you're going to do on your own. If you want five figure regular retainer
payments every month from three to fivesolid customers who you're doing a specific set

(01:55):
of work for. And we'll talkabout some of the optimization because some of
these parts can be group calls ratherthan individual client calls. But what we're
delivering to the client is a measurableway to improve their business through words that
sell. So let's just do alittle recap. My twelve month lead acceleration
program includes a content strategy, includesmarketing metrics. It includes auditing and improving

(02:21):
their source attributions. Specifically, themeasures are measures that are both meaningful to
the stakeholders in the organization and themarketing team that likely hires me or introduces
me to the executives. In thefirst month, we do an onboarding,
we do audits, We build thema package that helps simplify their life in

(02:42):
general, and then our life aswe implement the following months. Now,
month two is going to be implementingany standards we found in the first month.
It's going to be implementing what Icall the topic testing methods, where
we deep dive into their data.Now, I understand this is something that
the typical freelance copyrtor cannot do.But remember I have a background in information

(03:04):
technology, program management, business development, risk management. I've worked with finance.
I've worked with the treasury departments ofa massive fortune one hundred banking company.
You know. I this is thatspecialized skill that you can deliver.
I package it as the topic testingmethods because that is my That is the

(03:25):
hook that I use to sell thatindividually. So really, your twelve month
lead acceleration program is a composite ofthe smaller projects that you already do,
except instead of being on a menuwhere they select, it is prescribed specifically
for the needs of the client.So in my case, the lead acceleration

(03:45):
program helps million dollar plus organizations whoare starting to realize their lead costs are
getting prohibited, that they're where they'regetting customers from is hard to determine.
Their profits are not increasing even thoughthe gross sales are increasing. They have
high overhead, and they're now lookingfor a way to get better, higher
quality leads. Now, when youname your high ticket program, you must

(04:08):
name it according to the customer's desire. To the client's desire, lead generation
is not the only thing this packagedelivers, and lead acceleration is what the
client wants. But what I actuallygive them is more dollar revenue per lead
they generate, So it doesn't matterhow much they spend on a lead.

(04:29):
We've calculated and made sure that theyactually get profits. We're also working on
the sales funnel. We're working onother things, but month two is going
to be implementing the things that webuilt in the first month, and it's
also going to hit punch lists andmarketing automation. I had mentioned before that
a lot of this stuff is goingto have subcontractors, and this is for

(04:51):
the practical purpose. You might beable to do the work itself. So,
for example, if you determine theyneed twelve email follow up campaigns on
their purchase, and these emails arefocusing on retention, but you also figure
out that they need follow up onleads so that we can increase conversion there,
and that's twelve articles there, andthen we've got some blog posts and

(05:14):
stuff. You're gonna end up withmore work that you can feasibly do yourself,
okay, because we have to consistentlydeliver something every month in order for
the client to feel that there's seventhousand dollars retainer is going somewhere or they're
ten thousand dollars retainers going somewhere.Now, you're not going to have as
high a profit when someone else isdoing the work. And that's not because
it costs you money to hire asubcontractor. And it's because you don't value

(05:38):
what you're doing. And you've falleninto this trading hours for dollars mentality,
but have never figured out how manydollars you're actually paying yourself. And so
I've worked with coaching clients in thecopywriting world and they're saying to me,
justin I'm a freelance copywriter, Iwant to be able to write copy from
anywhere in the world. I wantto be able to travel. I want
to be able to do these thingsand have a bunch of subcontractors. Means

(06:01):
I'm going to have to manage thesepeople, and I'm willing to get a
little bit less gross in order toto to have that lifestyle. And I
assure them that once we do themath, they aren't going to have gross,
They're going to have disgusted because they'renot paying themselves a living wage,
one of the reasons that they're flyingaround the planet like a vagrant. So

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I've seen clients and I don't meanto be disrespectful. Then have a homeless
lifestyle who feel like they're doing somethinggreat or making six figures gross. But
when I when I ask them,well what do you do about health insurance?
Because they were complaining about a medicalissue. They haven't been able to
write as much because they haven't beenfeeling well, and they're just concerned that

(06:47):
their their lead flow is going down, that they're not getting as many clients.
And I said, well, whatare you doing about health insurance?
Why don't you just go to thedoctor and get some medicine and get better.
It sounds like you have a respiratoryinfection. And by the way,
this wasn't COVID time, this wasbefore COVID and and they said, I
just can't afford to go to thedoctor. You know, health insurance is
so expensive. And I had topull the gym ron on them. They

(07:10):
said, health insurance is too expensive. And I replied back, just as
Jim Ron would is it's not thathealth insurance is expensive, is that you
can't afford it. And they said, well, I'm doing you know,
six figures. I'm like, youknow, I'm not going to go into
the numbers here. But they weredoing what would be very respectable salary job,

(07:30):
but their contributed overhead was so high, not in actual money out of
pocket, but hours they were spending. And the reason they were unhealthy is
probably a vitamin D deficiency because theywere in front of a computer eight to
ten hours a day, twelve tothirteen hours a day on the you know,
back and forth between the computer andthe phone, and the only exercise

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they were getting is when they periodicallygot up and took a dump. Now
I don't mean to be rude,but if they were a gamer, they'd
be peeing in a can the deskbecause it looked like more of an addiction
than it looked like a reasonable work. Don't get me wrong, freelancing may
require more hours. Of course,you don't have a commute, you don't

(08:11):
have these other things. But ifyou're doing that at the detriment of your
physical health and you're the only personin the business, then your business will
fail. I have made that mistakeso many times. I'll have seven or
eight subcontractors' LIFs going really good,and then you'll have that little law and
contract. And this happened during twothousand and eight, for example, when

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a lot of companies were just seizingup and they didn't have a lot of
money, and I didn't have theinformation products, I didn't have the membership,
I didn't have enough people in thequeue because I was overwhelmed having one
or two clients. Really ought tohave five retainer clients in place. If
you've got five retainer clients each hadabout twenty thousand dollars in each, or

(08:56):
even five thousand dollars each, you'regonna have between twenty thousand dollars a month
and one hundred thousand dollars a monthcoming in It is entirely possible that as
a marketing agency that you're going tomake the same net at twenty thousand dollars
a month coming in as you wouldat one hundred thousand dollars a month coming
in. The difference is is havingsubcontractors. Maybe you can get your fat

(09:18):
ass away from the computer every sooften. And I don't mean to be
rude. I was told I wasthirty pounds overweight last year and that I
need to do something about it.I'm probably talking to myself more than anything
else. But pushing yourself away fromthat computer after the tenth hour and taking
a walk around the block, yourmental clarity improves, your health improves,

(09:39):
and now you come back with morevigor and more power. The only way
that's possible is if the other fifteenhours that you were working that day are
being done by somebody else. Andagain, that's why we build a package,
so that we can estimate up frontthe subcontractors, the tools, the
data sources that we're going to useto help our clients all problems. So

(10:00):
when we're implementing these standards that wefound in the first month, it could
be somebody on their team that's implementingit, and now you're just managing them
and making sure that they get thework done, and they turn into metrics
and it's improving the results when wedo things like topic testing. I use
software. Now we're at the beginning. I do pivot tables in a spreadsheet

(10:24):
and i'd correlate. None of thathappens anymore. I dump it, I
send it to a software package.The package tells me where to focus our
efforts. I assign the work tomy staff or to contractors, and then
ultimately the work gets done. Thisis very important because we're taking the chaos
the client experiences, we're organizing it, we're turning it into processes. We're

(10:48):
developing best practices. We're developing testcase more than we're developing content. See
content's great, but content's a dimeA dozen't Today AI can write okay first
drafts. What you do at thetime when AI can write a good final
draft. Well, again, ifyou manage the AIS, you now have

(11:09):
the passive value of someone else doingall the work. If you integrate that
work and bring it together and organizethe outcomes and help with the measurement,
then your value add to the clientand they're more likely to keep you on
for month after month. Now,twelve month contract or a six month contract
is a term contract if they cancelthe contract early. And we can talk

(11:31):
about this at some other place withoutreason. So I have had clients in
the middle of a six month contractsay we can't renew. By the way,
all of these high tickets have anoption to renew. But I've had
clients after the six month contract thatcan't renew. My typical contract like this
is eighteen months, and by law, they can't bring on a ten to
ninety nine contractor for longer than eighteenmonths, but they can accorp to corp

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and that just means they're hiring yourmarketing agency rather than you as an individual.
So understand the and I divide thisup even months, odd months,
and then every three months we doan audit. So here's the deal.
Month two, you're going to startimplementation immediately. They need to see some
kind of performance increase. Now,how do they know that they have a

(12:20):
performance increase? Well, in thetwelve month lead acceleration program, we actually
have specific measures. Now when Ido this from my own clients, or
I do this as a subcontractor toa copywriter or somebody who brought me in
clients. And by the way,that means that if they bring me in
as a white label services provider andwe're implementing the twelve month lead acceleration program,
they get all of the copywork.So our agreement in the joint venture

(12:43):
is that they get all the copywork. So it doesn't free you from hiring
subs as far as your research isconcerned, or your scheduling and things like
that, but you know it's notgoing to be farmed out. We work
on this thing together and then Iprovide my special you provide your specialty,
and then we work within the frameworkof this high ticket system that I've developed.

(13:07):
The reason I tell you this isbecause once you develop your high ticket
program, you can do these jointventures. You can bring on these partners,
whether they're a part of your organizationor not, and you can actually
become a value add not just tothe client, but to other people who
are already serving the client. Andwhat tends to happen is there'll be a

(13:28):
marketing agency that's desperate for results,and they'll go attach your program to their
credibility because they already have an accountthey're already getting a five figure or a
four figure retainer, and now you'regonna take all that retainer to save their
ass and allow them to have theopportunities to keep that client. But you're

(13:50):
going to You're gonna get your regularprice because they know how valuable this is
because it's a packaged solution. Solet's talk about month three. Month three
is the odd month. In theodd month in my twelve month lead acceleration
program, we're going to do contentdevelopment up sale offers. Because again we're
measuring results and I'm going to haveto jump back to measures here. We're

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measuring results from lead to sale andthen sale to profitability. We're going to
work on the conversion pipeline and thenof course continue to document best practices.
So how do we know what isthe best practice? How do we know
where we should automate what we doby the measures? So I want you
to make a list of the measuresthat people can use to effectively and quantitatively

(14:37):
determine your value. Because if theypaid you money for the job, they
want to know that they got areturn on investment, and so we need
to make it easy for them toknow that. So the first thing I
measure is the percentage of leads converted. Now we're tracking customer lifetime value and
cost per lead and cost per sale, but we need to know that the
leads we're generating on the sources thatI'm supporting are converting more consistently than the

(15:05):
leads they randomly get by whatever meansthey were using before, because that reinforces
the value of why I'm there.We also look at the dollar customer lifetime
value in a ninety day window,because we need to show them that month
to month we're getting results in atwelve month window showing that we're improving year
over year their overall customer lifetime valueand then total customer lifetime value. And

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this is important because in our initialmonth one audits, we calculate it their
customer lifetime value or typical customer lifetimevalue, and as long as we're beating
that average, we're doing better thanwhat they did. Now, how do
we beat the average? Well,it's return on ad spend. It's also
the cost per customer, and wedon't necessarily want that to go down.
We want the cost per customer tobe underneath the gross revenue so that we

(15:54):
have a profit of course contributed overheadin there, and so we're doing a
lot of math. Now. Forme, I have experience with finance.
I have experienced from a business developmentperspective. I can calculate these things.
I can go speak with accounting,I can speak with their CPA and we
can come up with ways to pullthis out of their accounting system. And

(16:15):
then the value add that I deliveris now. So the accounting system is
going to give us overall values,but I'm able to pull it out by
source and medium and then individual campaigns. We want to know that the campaigns
are profitable, because if we're runningcampaigns that aren't profitable or they don't know,
then they got the same damn problemthey started with and they're going to

(16:36):
go hire somebody else. So yourhigh ticket package solution needs to be a
complete solution. You're replacing the workthat their sales vice president would do or
their marketing director would do, andyou're coming in at the request of that
marketing director and making them look goodand then working subbort it to them as

(16:59):
kind of an ass You're almost partneringwith them to manage their team, to
manage the people you bring on board. Now, for some people, there's
a recruiting element in this. Youmight bring on somebody as a subcontractor on
a contract to hire. That's alittle bit more complex, but it solves
a number of problems that they cannotsolve themselves, because if you come in

(17:22):
and the vice president realizes that youcan replace their job as a contract organization,
then they are not going to wantto keep you around for twelve months,
for twenty four months, for thirtysix months. Now, again,
like I said, if they're hiringyou as a ten ninety nine contractor,
they're probably going to bring you onfor six months. They're going to tell
you specifically what to do. Ahigh ticket package is about you telling them

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what's necessary because you're the expert,and in your expert position, it means
you're not doing all the individual contributions. And we're going to have within these
months group calls, which includes stafffrom three to five of your retainer clients
in the same program, and we'regoing to help educate them about why we're

(18:07):
doing the things we're doing, whatare we going to do, and why
are we doing it. You're notteaching them how to do it, because
obviously if they went out and hiredthe same subcontractors you had, and they
had the same package formula that youjust gave them, then they would not
need you. Okay, So Iapproached this a little bit differently. I
know, there's a lot of programsout there that tell you the latest gimmick

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I am building. I built thisoff of government contractors and large technical contractors.
So I used to own a computerconsultancy where we did large integration projects.
I had twenty seven subcontractors all overthe mid Atlantic region of the United
States. This is before the dotcom. Each of these subcontractors could have
ten to one hundred people installing networks, implementing computer you know, installing computer

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systems, updating networks, handling networkstuff, and then ultimately doing custom software.
Now, was I a expert integratorof computer systems and servers? Well,
I had a lot of expertise onthe server side, but I didn't
know a lot about the desktops otherthan to push software to them and every
desktops a clone. Was I anetwork engineer, of course not. I

(19:18):
hired subcontractors as network engineers. Itwas I a network installer, you know,
running the wires of the ceiling.Sure, I've done it before,
but at the levels of Category fiveand the new technology fiber optic technologies coming
out, I didn't have the equipment. It would have cost me millions of
dollars to get the equipment. Andfinally, was I the program manager or

(19:40):
project manager to make everything work?Not necessarily, I would enroll the client's
project managers or program managers. Iwould package the work that we were doing
like any other project that they wereworking on, so they could measure it
within their own environment. And thenultimately I would have these subcontractors running around
and doing a lot of different things, and I would collect the money.

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Now, did I do a goodjob of collecting the money? Turns out
I probably should outsource some of thattoo. I had a lot of problems.
It worked very well, and manyof my clients when I shifted to
business development consulting, used the samemodel. But what didn't work about it
for me was that I didn't stayon top of collections. And I want
to warn you about that here,because this is a monthly retainer program that

(20:23):
they must pay you because they canpay you all up front, and this
is not a you do the workto get paid for the work. That
you did, they are paying youfirst. That is the biggest lesson I
learned when I when I was continueto do high ticket projects and I continue
to bring on teams of people,and I was the organizer of the work

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rather than the doer of the work. Now you can still write copy because
I enjoy writing copy. I writetechnical papers, white papers, and sales
letters. But again, if I'mthe only one doing the work and I
have a respiratory infection like the clientI was telling you about, and I
can't show up at the job,then I don't get paid, and I

(21:06):
have the refund money because they gaveme a retainer at the be end of
the month and then nothing happened duringthe month, and now they're giving me
another retainer and they're pissed. Sowe want to avoid that again. And
we have these even and odd months. Even months are heavy into implementation.
Whether you have a team doing itor you have software doing it, they
must see a large volume of workgetting done. Much of that work will

(21:26):
continue over into the odd months.But in addition to the implementation, on
the odd months, you're developing strategy, and this is where your expertise comes
in. You're developing strategy that givesthem direction, it gives them performance measures.
You're giving them a status report.And now what we're going to do
on the overall is in the everythree months, we're going to baseline their

(21:48):
performance. And we don't really havetime to cover what that means, but
you have to have some way ofshowing them that we're ratcheting up results that
were improving results, and that couldbe your monthly reports put together with cover
sheet that explains what's going on.We're going to have some kind of audit
to make sure that all of thesepeople are still doing exactly what they're supposed
to be doing. And then thisis the most powerful bought every three months,

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especially in the lead acceleration, especiallyif you're helping them with sales acquisition,
especially if you're helping them with inboundmarketing, is we're going to do
an audience match on buyers and we'regoing to accelerate the winners. What does
that mean. We're going to gothrough their audience match with their audience of
buyers, and we're going to goout there and specifically promote the campaigns that

(22:32):
we know are winning. Now,the lead acceleration program, I'm doing ab
split measures. I'm doing a lotof performance measures. I'm comparing source A
versus Source B. I'm looking atcustomer lifetime value between sources, not just
overall. And as long as we'rebeating the overall numbers, we should be
able to show the customer that they'removing in the right direction. Now,

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every so often we're going to seea winner in there, and so those
winners, we have to put moneyon the winner and celerate performance. And
that will help them see that forevery dollar they're putting out with me,
they're getting a return on investment.In part three of this, I'm going
to talk about the return on investmentpart because they need to know that hiring

(23:15):
you was the best damned decision they'veever made. That you're not only increasing
performance and meaningful ways, but you'releaving them with best practices, processes,
ways of approaching the work, strategyimplementation, you're developing offers, You're doing
the things that are necessary so thatthey can continue to do this work on
their own. It has to bein their mind that you're helping them build

(23:38):
the company, not just delivering apiece of copy here and there, not
just writing a blog post, notjust doing other things. Now again,
we're going to have to talk aboutsome of the mindset in the next section
here, because a lot of peoplefear that if they got seven or eight
people out. Think about this.I had twenty seven subcontractors all over a
geographic region in a day that Ihad to physic visit these people. That

(24:00):
did mean I was sleeping in mytruck. Sometimes I had a suv.
I'd sleep in the suv sometimes becauseI'd have to go from southern Maryland to
Baltimore to Washington, d C.To Dalgrin to Virginia Beach, all in
the course of a week. Andyes, my pisspore planning made it difficult

(24:22):
at times where I'd get to ahotel and they didn't have any rooms left
and we had to stay overnight becausethe next day I had a contractor showing
up on site to do a networkwiring install and I needed to be there
with copywriting. You don't need tobe there physically, and so you can
still we got to talk about timemanagement at another time, but you can

(24:45):
still get the work done without allthe travel, headache, overhead and experience
that I had back in the day. But if this kind of high ticket
package works when in a high overheadenvironment. How well do you think it
works in a low overhead environment?It works like magic. So I've covered
today what we do month two andmonth three to establish an even an odd

(25:07):
month cycle which allows us to havesix months of work or twelve months of
work, or eighteen months of workor twenty four months of work on a
corporate corp assignment in the United States, or a thirty six month contract after
you've shown how well you perform forthem. If you're not getting job offers
with this particular implementation, then you'renot doing it right. Now you have

(25:30):
to resist. I took one ofthe job offers I had doing this,
and I ended up with ten yearsat the same organization. Now I still
maintained two or three clients on theoutside, but ultimately doing this is scalable
and works with three to five clients. Now again, you don't have to
do my lead acceleration program. Wecan design a keynote program for yourself.

(25:52):
We can package up what you've beendoing for the years. But please understand,
this is designed for the clients successwithout burning you out, without having
you on long hours, without beingfrustrated with your team without having to grow
a big team with ultimately scalable approachfor a high ticket five figure even six

(26:14):
figure program with the client. AndPart three, the last part, we're
going to talk about mindset. We'regoing to talk about some of the specifics
of auditing, some of the specificsof the integration and automation, because you
will be able in some services,you'll be able to automate yourself out of
this work and you'll be into amonitoring role. And so you might have

(26:37):
let's say it's seven thousand dollars amonth for the first twelve months. You
might have maintenance programs. It mightbe three thousand dollars a month thereafter,
and you're just you know, helpingthem with software updates and different things like
that, like we do in ourwebsite management program. But ultimately, listen
to this again, and you're goingto outline you got your first month for
onboarding, auditing, things like that, and then you're gonna outline your month

(27:02):
two, which is heavy implementation,and then month three, your odd month,
is gonna be strategy while implementation isstill happening in the background. And
then ultimately you're gonna check your workevery three months to be able to prove
your value to the client. SoI'll see you in the next episode.
If you haven't listened to episode numberone, please go back and do that.

(27:23):
It's on the podcast at www dotprosperity homestead dot org. You're gonna
want to go out to many differentpodcast channels and find this section. And
then at the end of part three, I'm gonna share with you how you
can get hands on development of yourparticular package, because there's some things we're

(27:48):
going to talk about part three whereyou might be a little scared about what
we've talked about, but if you'vehung in this far, part three is
really going to make a difference toyou. I'm justin hit with ad Briefings
copywriting tips. Visit us at wwwdot adbriefings dot co dot uk where you
can ask your questions. This strategyworks worldwide and we have the unique advantage

(28:08):
of being able to do all ofthis remote and so of course if you
have questions, please ask them thereand we have some free resources available to
you. And of course if youask about part two of the how to
Build a High Ticket Solution, I'llknow I'll be able to direct you to
the other pieces, so if youhaven't been able to catch them all,

(28:30):
I'm justin hit Ad briefings, copyrightingtips, Stay tuned for part three.