Magazine RainMaker Podcast
Behind the Scenes Look at Mike Sedita's $558,421 Record Breaking Month
In this episode of The No Cold Calls Ever Show, I have the pleasure of interviewing Mike Sedita. Mike has been a publisher for 2-1/2 years, and he’s no stranger to breaking sales records. But his latest record was well… special!
Mike is hot off the heels of smashing the BVM record for most sales in one month… in the history of the company!
For the month of December 2023, Mike brought in over ½ million in sales. $558,421.80 to be exact. To put this in perspective, he bested the previous record by $80,000!
How did he do it?
Let’s take a listen as Mike peels back the curtain to his record setting month and how he has scaled his operation over the past two years to achieve even more success.
Magazine RainMaker
MagazineRainMaker.com
In this episode of The No Cold Calls Ever Show, I have the pleasure of interviewing Mike Sedita. Mike has been a publisher for 2-1/2 years, and he’s no stranger to breaking sales records. But his latest record was well… special!
Mike is hot off the heels of smashing the BVM record for most sales in one month… in the history of the company!
For the month of December 2023, Mike brought in over ½ million in sales. $558,421.80 to be exact. To put this in perspective, he bested the previous record by $80,000!
How did he do it?
Let’s take a listen as Mike peels back the curtain to his record setting month and how he has scaled his operation over the past two years to achieve even more success.
Magazine RainMaker
MagazineRainMaker.com
In this episode of the no Cole Calls Every Show, I have the pleasure of interviewing Mike Zadita. Mike has been a publisher for about two and a half years and he's no stranger to breaking sales records, but his latest record was well special. Mike is hot off the heels of smashing the BVM record for most sales in one month in the history of the company. For the month of December 2023, mike brought in over a half a million dollars in sales, that's $558,421.80 to be exact. To put this in perspective, he bested the previous record by $80,000. How do you do it? Well, let's take a listen as Mike peels back the curtain to his record-setting month and how he's scaled his operation over the past two years to achieve even more success going forward.
Speaker 2:Hello. Hi, it's the no Cole Calls Ever Show Go away.
Speaker 1:Well, welcome back listeners and viewers to hey, maybe this is your first episode. This is actually, if you're counting, episode number four. And boy, do we have a treat for you today. We have can I call you a legend, mike? If you aren't already, soon will be. We have the legendary Mike Sedita, and I say that because he truly is. Something happened last month, and last month was December of 2023. And I just found out about it the other day and I almost fell off my chair. So, mike, you're starting to turn red and I know you're not a self-promoter, but I'm going to promote you here because what you did is phenomenal. I am so thrilled and happy for you because, as I said to you in my text, you worked your tail off. I know how hard you were working it and I don't even know it all and you pulled off a monster of a month. So, if you don't mind, just share real quick with everyone what happened in December. Then I want you to get into your background.
Speaker 3:Charlie, you're making me sweat. I'm usually on the other side of this usually, and now I'm on this side of it. I appreciate the little intro there. The month of December, really, just it was like a bunch of things coming together. The company had started offering this three month ad upgrade to sponsors and what I had done is went through my list of sponsors and I looked at a couple things to kind of get this perfect storm, if you will.
Speaker 3:And at one point, with BVM, there was BVM was print and DTS was digital, and then sometime in 2023, they combined the two and clients started getting single billing and it was more convenient for clients. So what I did is not just go to them and try to upgrade them, but one of the things I used to upgrade them was the ability to consolidate their billing. So I went to clients and I upgraded them on some new features, but I also said, hey, while we do this, not only can I get you three additional months right out of the gate upgraded, but I can also consolidate your billing. So a few of my existing clients just jumped right on that and it helped to pump that number up over half a million dollars per month.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so so cool and as fun and the numbers reflected there is more to, in your case, multi-million dollar sales years than just going after the next big fish or the next lead and but maximizing all your opportunities. So very, very cool. You went back to your, to a number of your existing sponsors and, you know, kind of repackaged their program right.
Speaker 3:And you know the old adage is it's easier to retain business than it is to go out and get new business. So cultivating that relationship and showing them that you're trying to add some value and listen, bvm did a great job by offering the three months. It made it enticing for them. But I just took the previous thing that they had done to make things a little simpler and I started to package it together with clients that were in relatively new contracts, extending them out for a year, two years, three years, consolidating billing and getting them the upgrade. So it worked out for everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and of course, you have great relationships, which allows you to get their attention and schedule another meeting and do all that fun stuff. Yeah, yeah, it was great. Yeah, so my publishing. How did you get into this business?
Speaker 3:Well, I had spent 20 years in corporate finance. I worked for insurance companies and finance firms and did a whole bunch of different things that bored me to death for 20 years. And then, when the real estate market crashed back in 09, 2010,. As we were in the middle of it, I got let go from a job and a buddy of mine said hey, I have a media buying agency. You should come and see if you're any good at this. And I stumbled into it. They told me hey, it's going to take about six months before you actually make a sale. And I ended up selling a big account, like in the first three weeks, and they were like all right, well, you can have this office now and we'll get started.
Speaker 3:And then I spent about a year with that company. And then another friend of mine we went off and started our own ad agency and it kind of just snowballed into media. And then, when I moved to Florida in 2019 to take care of my sick folks, I needed to find something that kept me local and I wasn't traveling or doing any of that stuff. And BVM reached out to me through my LinkedIn profile and one thing led to another. And, next thing, I know I'm in training and next thing I know I'm making my first sale with your assistance.
Speaker 1:That's right. Wow, wow, yeah, I won't even say you've come a long way. I mean, it was obvious. It was just a matter of you would have knocked it out of the park whether I was there or not. But I hear you and that's the wonderful thing with the culture that I was in, that you currently are in Having so many folks that are willing to lend a hand and help without any monetary gain. Right.
Speaker 3:It is nice. I mean right now in the Tampa market we have some people that are getting started. Finally, the market is starting to take hold and some people are getting in there and it's nice to watch them. It's one thing to do it on your own you kind of work off your own your sweat equity but when you have a little part in helping somebody else like a publisher text me made her first couple sales and she said thank you. Our paths crossed and this worked out and I said, listen, it doesn't matter. Just when you're on the stage next year getting your million dollar reward, make sure everybody knows that it's all because of me. And then we'll go from there and we'll have this joke. But it is. It's gratifying seeing other people get there, get their start and get going.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well you never know, it says little things. That maybe doesn't look like it's much, but can be the difference between that publisher really knocking it out of the park or, or, for that matter, leaving the industry, which is always a sad thing.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:How about? What would you say is your inside advantage?
Speaker 3:I could tell you. I would love to say that it's all me. I think the thing that makes me successful at this is the team that I have behind me. I took this to heart when I started. My division manager said listen, fill up your calendar, fill up your white space on your calendar and make sure you're focusing on revenue generating activity.
Speaker 3:I do some networking stuff and I make those appearances to cultivate those relationships, but when it comes to actually putting someone in one of my publications, my process is very simple. I meet with them revenue generating activity. They sign their agreement. I say listen, charlie, as soon as I get back to my office you're gonna get an email from me introducing you to my team. And sure enough, I send that email out to my assistant, to my content coordinator, and I say Maggie's gonna help you with your ad and Sandy's gonna help you with your content, and I put it in their hands and then I continue to cultivate that relationship with the client. But when it comes to uploading ads and writing content and all the other stuff that makes the magazine pretty, I leave that to people who do it better than me. And I guess the short answer is knowing what I do well and sticking to that and finding people who do the stuff I need to have done well, who do it well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I'm sure you found like that because you probably did the, for example, the ad, the deadline thing once or twice, and when you guess someone to do it, it's oh my Lord, there's so much better at this and I actually enjoy doing it.
Speaker 3:So my assistant, she has another job and there's one month out of the year happens to be December where she's a little bit busier and I got a text saying, hey, can you look at this ad upload? I'm having a problem, I can't do it. And I went, oh shoot, let me go back and do myself a refresher course on how to do an ad upload. But I mean, I did it, but yeah, again, exactly that. What takes me like painting my house. I could probably paint my house. It would take me like a month. It would take a painter two days to just find in the right people for the right job.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna throw in a tip there, because that happened to me once as well. And, by the way, one of the best decisions I ever made in the publishing business was to get that assistant to take care of all that deadline stuff. I call it deadline days D-A-Z-E because you can walk around in a day. I know publishers are for a week. They're like, oh my God, deadline's coming up in three days and then they need days to recover after and it's like craziness right.
Speaker 1:Like you said, it was an RGP. How did you phrase it about the cash? Focusing your energy on the activity? There we go, revenue generating activity, yeah, and so, as you well know, I mean it's a question that we always ask ourselves, even in my new business. If what I'm doing right now I equate it to, I mean, my Lord again, not gonna embarrass you, but your hourly rate is in the area of $300 to $500 an hour, right? How many weeks a year you work and you reverse engineer that folks? So if you want to earn a half a million dollars or whatever that number is, back into it and ask yourself, you're gonna find that you're in that $300, $400, $500 or more an hour range. So ask yourself, is what I'm doing right now, whether it's ad deadline stuff or admin stuff or responding to emails, worth $300 an hour? Or can I hire someone who loves doing that for whatever, the going rate is $15, $20, $25, $30 an hour, Right.
Speaker 3:It is absolutely that's one of my peeves having someone miss an appointment with me. For me in Tampa, if I have to drive to Tampa from Wesley Chapel and it's 30 minutes and someone no shows an appointment, that's why, for me, I'm very, maybe, against what the orthodoxy is. I do send people meeting invites. We're business people. It's gotta be on your calendar, I know. If it's not on my calendar I forget it. So I make sure I do that, because I would rather somebody cancel on me the day before, even two hours before, than me waste 90 minutes of my time going to a spot waiting there getting ready to go and then. So it's just how you approach it. For me there's more value in them canceling up front and rescheduling than me going and wasting my time doing that. And it's all comes down to what my rate is per hour.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, good, good stuff. So back to before I forget would help me, because I would forget. You're right after you stop doing the deadline days stuff for a few months or even a few years and then all of a sudden, hey, someone gets sick or new job and all that. That's always in the back of my mind. How do we protect ourselves against that? And if you listeners are familiar with Loom L-O-O-M, look it up. You can do 25 free looms before you have to pay for anything or just record a video. But I walk through that whole deadline deal for my content coordinator. I hadn't heard to it and I didn't even train her. I just said hey, sydney, follow the videos and if there's anything missing, let me know so we can fix it. And then think about the peace of mind you have Now. If two years later or that December next year, that individual can't do it, you can bring someone else on your team to say follow the videos right.
Speaker 1:Or we have something to follow because we forgot everything Anyway. So number one tip for new publishers what would that be?
Speaker 3:I think the most important tip that I could give a new publisher number one is get organized and, in that vein, getting a database that you use or a CRM that you use. That helps you to stay on task, and there's a bunch of them out there. There's various ones you can use. When I first started, I used one and I used a spreadsheet to begin with, but then I'm like tracking every column and seeing all this stuff and I was getting things were getting lost. So I started using a CRM. That gave me 6 am.
Speaker 3:Every morning I'd be in the gym, I'd get an email and I would say these are your action items for the day. Boom, that's what I have to focus on. And then the other nice part about it I mean, there's a bunch of nice features in it, but it tracks email. So if I send you an email hey, charlie, I met you the other day at the Rotary Club. I would love to talk to you about your marketing. I see when you open it, how many times you open it, and then I can magically randomly say follow up, when I know you've looked at it three or four times. So it gives me some insight into the engagement with the sponsor that I'm trying to get to. So there's all sorts of stuff out there you could use. That really helped me to stay on task because I would get up, I'd have these leads in my head but I didn't really have it organized and the CRM did it for me. That's important, that big, important task.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can waste so much time trying to get organized or use it as an excuse not to do-.
Speaker 3:Right not to do work, yeah, not to do revenue generating activity.
Speaker 1:Yep, yep, rga, how about let's go back in time? If you were to start over tomorrow, and with the knowledge that you have today, what would you do differently to accelerate your success in your income?
Speaker 3:Well, I'll tell you, I've been pretty fortunate. There's all stories of people that come out of training and go to print in days, not weeks, weeks, not months. My story wasn't that. I mean, in the beginning, when I was first getting started, I did cross sales right away so that I could generate some income, and then I started focusing on my baseline. But a funny story, and I don't know if you know this, but I was going to print on my first magazine and then another and I had cross sold into this other magazine close by me and it just so happened that, through happenstance, the publisher was going into something new and that magazine became available and I ended up flipping a second magazine before I even published my first magazine, and there was a sports magazine that was with it. So, before I published a single magazine with BVM, I published three in February of 2022. So it was like hey, get your feet in the fire, we're just going to throw you in the volcano. And it took me about three months to really.
Speaker 3:There was no days like no AZ A's but it was so many moving parts of three publications when I hadn't even published one, getting content sorted out. So it was finding those people. So I wouldn't say that didn't accelerate my success. It definitely having multiple publications helps, but there's also some inherent cost that goes along with having multiple publications. So if I, if I was going to going to do it all over again, I would probably be I mean that circumstance forgiven there but I would probably start with one publication, build it out to a level where I was comfortable with the content, the number of pages, the number of sponsors, the level above baseline, and then maybe roll into a second.
Speaker 3:But it went the way it went and when I started my third publication, but out of the three that I started right out of the gate, one of them we ended up consolidating into two other magazines and then I started a third publication and that one is my healthiest magazine. I mean it is in an area of great growth. There's a lot of stuff going on and it has done really well. But it's kind of taking the model that I would have done originally with that third magazine.
Speaker 3:I'm using that and building it up and it's it's been wildly successful. So, scale appropriately would be my, would be my suggestion.
Speaker 1:So sounds like just picking a target you want, whether it's an income I want to have this much income coming my way every month or a number of pages in the magazine. I mean, is that kind of where you head? Yeah, I mean for me.
Speaker 3:I mean there's all sorts of stuff. Bbm does a great job with all these incentives and things they offer and all these different programs. For me I only focus on one number and that's the bottom line of my revenue statement, and that's affected by multiple magazines. Obviously it means multiple baselines, things like that. I want to get to a point where I know my income is at X and then I can take on another task to know that what it's going to take me to get my income to the next level and the next level. So just scaling it, scaling it in a level of comfortability so that I'm not opening another magazine and then kind of going backwards trying to avoid that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, good stuff. Very, very helpful. All right, this next topic, something everyone experiences, regardless of what, what business you're in the dreaded sales slump, how do you handle that?
Speaker 3:So I worked with a guy probably I don't know, it's been about 13 or 14 years ago and he said, poetically, there's only so many sales calls, only so many cold calls a person can make. Like even the best salesman reaches a point when they just can't do any more cold calls. So like I don't have a problem doing the cold calls, but it really truly is probably the most difficult thing If you own the gym, right. So they used to say what's the heaviest weight in the gym? And it's the front door, right. That used to be the joke In BVM. The heaviest obstacle to overcome is picking up that phone and getting those three yeses. And for me there's all sorts of stuff. Whether you're a publisher, if you're fresh out of training and you're gung-ho and you do this and you say, hey, no, it's never going to happen to me, it happens to everybody. At some point you get that fatigue, that phone calling fatigue, and there's. I've found multiple ways around it. Now, look, I don't want to debunk the orthodoxy. I still make my phone calls, I still get my yeses. At what level I do it at. It might not be three yeses a day anymore, but I still. I've had an appointment setter. That appointment setter offsets some of my three yeses to get their yeses. But again, that's a cost involved in that.
Speaker 3:And then the other thing I started doing in the spring of last year was I took on doing the Good Neighbor podcast as a way to supplement what I was doing on my end to generate those leads without having to do a lot of the I don't want to say a lot of the work, but it's very automated and that really helped me reengage and get back in that mode of I got to get on these appointments. Every week I got to be doing these appointments. So the appointment setter helped the podcast helped me get out of a slump that I was in. I mean I wrote down the numbers. It's funny I have it here from January to July I did under $300,000 for the year with BBM. The three months after that, from August 1st to September to October 31st, I did another 230,000. So I was at around 500 and I don't know 80,000 going into November and then I ended up doing 663,000 over November and December. So it got me reinvigorated. It got me going again to the point where I saw the activity happening and, from experience, once you get a couple of those deals signed.
Speaker 3:It's almost contagious. It just kind of gets you rolling. And the podcast and the appointment setter are two of the things. That kind of an appointment, just the podcast. A podcast just appears on my calendar to record and boom, I do it. I get engaged with that. That sponsor, I get to be in front of them to talk about the magazine and it just kind of automation does it for me. So it works.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love it, love it. It was the same for me. You're right In those times. It comes down to it for me, and I think you've talked to sales trainers who know what they're doing. Not myself, activity, right, but the right activity. Not polishing your stapler, not reall right. This week I'm going to reorganize my database. Right. Meet with people, whether you meet with them at networking or chamber events or call them, or, like you and I both know the podcast, because that's we have to ourselves. Man, that's like a however many minutes of just great one on one interaction and you get to know folks, they get to know you. So you have to jump in.
Speaker 3:There's a couple of things I want to touch on on. What you just said is polishing my stapler and reorganizing my database. That's something I do on a Saturday or a Sunday when I don't have anything going on, so there's a time for that. But the other thing I wanted to really point out, and this is this is kind of the misconception, I think broadly, of what people think of the podcast.
Speaker 3:The podcast, to me, is no different than me joining a networking group, me joining a rotary club or me joining the Chamber of Commerce.
Speaker 3:It is a way for me to get those relationships built and the nice thing about it, comparatively, is if I go to a chamber event, I have to go sit at a chamber event and there's maybe three or four people I might talk to in the three hours I'm there, because someone corners me and I'm stuck and I got to get dressed and I got to actually entertain people, whereas with the podcast they take 20 minutes to do them, end to end maybe 30 minutes.
Speaker 3:So in that same three hours I'm getting two, four, six, six different people that I'm actually getting a genuine one to one connection with and it allows me the ability to set that appointment right there, whereas when you're at a networking event, people are like oh, we don't do business here, this is just us networking. So there is a differentiation as far as how the connection goes and it's a little bit more. For me it's a little bit more personal. I learned things about people before the podcast on the podcast and then when I set the appointment with them, then when I go to the BVM appointment, I just sit down and it's hey, charlie, did you hear your podcast? How did you like it? And immediately there's a connection and it goes right into let me show you how we can get you embedded in the community. And it just saves me all that initial time on my BVM appointment.
Speaker 1:Sounds like revenue generating activity to me. Yeah it definitely is.
Speaker 3:I mean it definitely is revenue generating, but what's nice about it is the automation, because a lot of it's getting done without me even having to touch it. It's just it's just there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or pay for someone to do it. So right, yeah, good stuff, All right. Which leads into our next question, which is scaling your business. And you were thrown into the fire. Holy God, I didn't realize. You started with three magazines all at once. I mean, it was sink or swim. So how do you scale your publishing business?
Speaker 3:For me it's. I said my third magazine is the one that's the healthiest right now. It's mainly finding. I mean, look, we talk about this in the different levels of BVM. There's market leaders, there's vision leaders. We talk about like the.
Speaker 3:The geography isn't super, super important as far as the type of people that we target, but what I've found for me is I've had a ton of success finding areas that are on the up and coming and getting in there and having something earmarked. So, like I have, in my grand scheme of things, there's a couple little areas in the Tampa market and I don't want to say them on the podcast because somebody will listen to this and scoop in and take them. But there's a couple of little areas that are on the up and coming and I know that if I'm going to scale my business, finding the right area, timing it right. The audience is the same. The BVM audience is the same, the homeowners, home values, et cetera, household income that doesn't change. But finding the markets as they're up and coming.
Speaker 3:Because what I found with, especially with my third magazine, is people see that area and they know it's a growth area and businesses know it's a growth area. There aren't companies that are embedded in that area forever and ever and ever that they have to fight against. It's almost like the Wild West You're in there, you have the local newspaper and the Wild Wild West in Tombstone and we need to be in it. They want to get in and it's a little bit more. It's a little bit more urgency, whereas something that's been established for a long period of time it's kind of like I don't want to say stale, but it's just not as on the cutting edge. So, scaling the business, finding the right area, getting a magazine you set up to go in that area, and making sure again, like we talked about earlier, getting the numbers to the point where I know if I'm going to launch another magazine, I have to have some built-in income to cover that initial baseline and launch in a new one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love it, love it. I mean it sounds like you're very forward focused, mike, that you're looking for that next goal or that next target that keeps you excited and in the game and that's. I think that's a huge tip.
Speaker 3:You hear it here first, my goal for 24 is $2 million. Nobody's ever done $2 million, so I'll tell you. My goal First year was hey, I want to go over a million dollars. Okay, I did that. Second goal was I wanted to do a million two years in a row, because I don't know how many people at BVM because the products have changed and they've expanded from 15 years ago, so it wasn't as frequent someone went over a million, but not many people have done over a million. Their first two full years at BVM wanted to do that. And now I wanted to go above 500 grand. I did that. I want to have the single largest sale, that's one. I got a couple of big fish.
Speaker 3:I'm going after and I want to go over 2 million. So if I could do those two things in 2024, and this will show you my vanity, okay, so I'll let it out into the public. Currently I hold the record for two months the month of August and the month of December. I want to get another. I want to be able to say I held three in one calendar year of BVM records, and there's a couple there that are right for the plucking.
Speaker 1:So I'm high balling those right now. Yeah, that August record still haunts me, mike, the August it was slow.
Speaker 3:You sandbagging me, hey, Mike how's it going?
Speaker 1:Oh man, I don't think I'm going to get many more sales. And then you got 80,000 more.
Speaker 3:So I saw it was the last minute one that came in, but then you went on vacation, so it kind of that helped me too. I'll admit that helped me too.
Speaker 1:That was fun. That was fun. Well, this has been awesome and, I know, very, very helpful for the listeners, regardless of where they are in the spectrum of publishing. Any final tips, words of advice for the listeners and viewers.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say, like all the stuff we talked about, my division manager, my division leader, where they changed the title. My division leader told me early on, remember I was about before you and I, before you, handheld me to my first sale. I had been doing this probably like three weeks and I had gone on 50 appointments, I like 30 appointments. I hadn't made a sale. And I called my division manager and I said, listen, I was really good in my ad agency, Like I think at this, I don't know what I'm doing wrong, I don't know what's happening. We went over my presentation. She was like your presentation is fine. She said listen, the one tip I can tell you and this is the one tip I have said to every new publisher coming out, and it even applies to people that have been doing this a while Activity, activity, activity. If you are staying active and doing revenue generating activity, you are just bound to stumble into a couple of sales.
Speaker 3:I mean and it's usually and this way for me I won't put this on any other publisher when I'm not making sales, it is 100% all me. It is, my mind isn't right, my focus isn't right. So it's a matter of the more active I stay, the more focused I am. The more focused I am, the better I am at making sales and it just kind of falls into place. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's great. I remember when I was first starting out reading and listening to Jed Blount Is it Blount Blount? I always butcher his last name. He's the oh.
Speaker 1:He wrote a number of books, but the one about prospecting, which again I'm drawing a blank Alphathetic, but he talked about, when you make a sale, you need a certain number of prospects to make up for that prospect that you just sold. And to your point about activity, which and that's where the cold calling becomes a grind for publishers. And it's not that cold call calling is bad or it doesn't work. Of course it does. Yeah, but when you combine that with not having a sale in a while and the energy and the emotional component versus, like you said, whether it's a podcast or throwing six other lines in the water. So you have all right. If cold calling isn't working or I get too busy today because I have day full presentations, there are five other fish biting and the other ponds for you, right, right. And that's again. I know just from talking with you that's where you've excelled. You're not counting on that one thing. The worst number I've heard in marketing is just doing one thing, because if that one thing stops working, you're out of business.
Speaker 3:Yeah, throw your eggs in one basket. I mean you can't do that. I mean same thing with anything, right? If you're investing in finance, they tell you diversify. It's the same thing when you're trying to grow your business. If I have an appointment center doing some automation, doing some from the podcast and me doing some, there's always going to be a day when one of us isn't functioning optimally and the others pick up the slack and you always have something coming in. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:I always loved it when I would my probably booking agent slash. Appointment centers didn't like it so much when back on Wednesday we're like no, no, no, no more calls, we're through. We're already booked solid next week, don't make any more calls.
Speaker 3:It's funny when we first launched the good neighbor podcast in Pasco County here in Tampa, we had a couple days open, like we had like four days open when we had short windows in each day, and I found what worked for me too. Anybody thinking about the podcast is I just have right now it's one day, that's it, because at one point I was booking out three weeks and had stuff spread all over the place. So now I consolidated it to one full day of doing it and basically I can do five or six, seven podcasts in a day, because they're not long. That's seven appointments, and then what that allows me to do is immediately flip them to the BVM appointment the next day or the day after. I don't have to record other podcasts in there. So structuring it that way worked best for me.
Speaker 3:But again, there's a bunch of people doing podcasts in various different podcasts that aren't necessarily the good neighbor podcast and they're finding what works for them. What worked for me is the consistency of a day meet with them there, flip them right to BVM, and then I opened my calendar up so someone could book two and three weeks out. But here's the other beautiful part, and again, revenue generating activity Someone I have one right now is booked for. They've been booked since December. For January 30th it's a Tuesday. The nice thing about the podcast is the automation does all the work for me and I tell them. They get that initial email with the questions. They're going to get an email reminding them a day before, an hour before and 15 minutes before. If you miss the meeting, if you miss the podcast, you clearly are either under a rock, trapped under a refrigerator, something's going on, or you just don't want to talk to me.
Speaker 2:But either way we figure it out, because the automation handles all that.
Speaker 3:That's not taking away my time from having to do the stuff that makes money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, the other thing I found. So I was in the business for a little over three years and I could call or meet people that I interviewed three years prior. They take my call. They knew exactly who I was, because we show up differently and I'm guessing you have found the same.
Speaker 3:So you bring up a great point with. That is I can tell you in my CRM I came out of training August 1st of 2021. I had a law firm in my database and it's all documented. I can prove it out. Their date they were input in my system was August of 2021. I called this guy gatekeeper, gatekeeper every time, couldn't get through. What is this regarding? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. My booking agent appointment setter reached out and said look, we'd love to have you on the podcast talk a little bit about your firm. I looked in a minute on the podcast and signed $160,000 agreement three weeks later when I finally did my second follow up with them, when I could get on his calendar and loves the magazine. He's an expert contributor, he writes great articles, loves it. That's the biggest differentiator. So do I get three yeses? Do I have an appointment setter setting point? Yes, the people that I know that are going to be a little bit trickier. It just gives me another tool in the toolbox to go after them. That's all it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's the definition of insanity, right Doing the same thing and expecting a different result. I mean, the gatekeeper is always going to deny us. So let's try a different strategy. Whatever it is, whether it's a podcast or something else you just you drive yourself into the ground. If you just keep making those calls, hey, it's me again.
Speaker 3:I could send her a box of chocolates with my phone number on it. That might work, but this is probably going to be bad to say. But it's like when you're dating, when you go to a bar and you're trying to date sometimes the line works, sometimes the line doesn't work. It's having the extra line to be able to come back as a walk around the bar again and come back with a different line. It's all it is. It's just reshaping the verbiage to find something that connects you to that particular person.
Speaker 3:Some people connect well with the podcast. Some people let you write through and are dying to have the meeting, and some people it takes a little bit of time. But I mean I could listen again. It's documented my CRM. I called every single month for 22 or not even 18 or 19 months in a row, from August of 21 until June of 22. So maybe it was only 12. Maybe it was like 12. No, it was 23. He just went in. So, yes, 20 months calling this guy, never get through, never get through. And she got through with the podcast. So it's just a different way to shape it. And look, my thing is this, charlie, if it ends up turning into an agreement and builds that relationship, I don't care if I have to use a Raven like in Game of Thrones, or if it's a podcast, or if I have to throw pebbles at their window at 12 o'clock at night. Whatever gets me the appointment to get me the opportunity to get them into my communities, I'll do it. It doesn't matter, I'll try it.
Speaker 1:Yep, I'll do it, and as long as you don't get arrested, that's all I have.
Speaker 3:You're all right, I'll wait till like morning. I'll wait till it's morning and I'll make sure the pebbles are tiny enough to not break the ass.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it All right. Well, hey, man, this has been awesome. Mike, I really appreciate you spending time with us Again. I know you're heading to the conference in a couple of days and you got a busy schedule so I will let you go, but we're going to keep an eye on the record books and we definitely want to check in as the year progresses. And, yeah, kudos to you and early kudos for being the first two million dollar year.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's not jinx it.
Speaker 3:I texted somebody at the company and said hey, can you tell me how many people have gone over a million dollars each of their first two years? And I was at like 970,000 and I was like a stall for like over Christmas and I'm like I jinxed it. I totally jinxed myself. I'm going to pull 30 grand short and I'm not going to do it. And then all of a sudden, a bunch of stuff happened like whoo, dodge the bullet there. I'm a big karma. So not, this isn't a two million dollar celebration. We'll talk about that in a year from now.
Speaker 1:It sounds like a plan, mike. All right, well, you enjoy the rest of your day there.
Speaker 3:Thanks, charles, you have a go to appreciate it, always, always good talking to you.
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