Landing Pages to Double Your Business with Clay Collins Part 2 of 3

Video Transcript:
Now, I want to talk about how we went from zero to 25,000 customers in about 20 months. And this is more of a mindset thing, and then we’ll get back to tactics, because people seem to really like tactics.

Okay, so this is the mindset shift that got us to where we are today. It’s really how we approach this. So most people, especially if they come up from the home business movement or whatever, there’s this term thrown around like biz. And I hate it. “Biz,” what is that? “Oh, start your biz.” And it’s like, no, business has two syllables, and it starts with a capital B. It’s fucking Business. And you should create one instead of a biz if you really want to scale or have any reasonable amount of success.

So what are the differences between a biz and a business? The first difference is that if you have a biz, you can’t scale without discounts and scarcity and drama. And holy shit, the cart’s closing, and these bonuses are going away. And there’s this countdown timer and this hand waving and hoopla. If you can’t drive sales without all that whatnot, you probably don’t have a business. You probably have a biz. But if you have a business, you get evergreen, non-discount sales just every single day, every single day. Every day, lead pages gets hundreds of sales, well, multiple hundreds of sales. I’m not going to say an exact number. But anyway, so that’s the difference between a biz and a business.

Another one, a biz . . . Start up yo biz. Most people who have a biz, when they build out their company, they’re trying to scale themselves. They get a VA who helps them. And they get this other person who helps them and a customer support person who helps them. And really, all they’re doing is getting a bunch of assistants that put them in the center. Whereas, if you have a business, you’re scaling your organization. I think about this as the difference between a Mac business and the Navy SEALs. Has anyone seen Avatar? You know how there’s that army guy who gets in this big robot. And when he moves his left arm, the robot moves its left arm. And when he walks around, the robot walks around. That’s what most people are doing when they scale their organization. They really have an organization that doesn’t work without them. They have to be in the videos. They have to be in the product launches. They have to write all the copy. They have maybe someone to send it out or maybe someone to answer emails and stuff like that. But really, the business is just a larger version of themselves. That’s a biz.

If you have a business, you’re really creating something that grows faster when you’re involved but actually can run pretty well without you and probably still grows without you. I used to do all my webinars, all my videos. I used to speak. I don’t speak anymore. In fact, there’s this guy named Tim and Bob. They do better jobs on webinars than I do. They out-convert me on webinars. They do better jobs on stage. They get more testimonials. They’d probably be doing a better job of giving this talk. So I’m not the face of my business. I don’t write my copy anymore. I don’t do all that. We’ve scaled a team that does that. And that takes a lot of work. But that’s another difference between a biz and a business.

Also, a biz is 100% dependent on partners for traffic. Uh, it just sucks. You got to go to events like this and buy drinks for people and hope they’ll mail when they say they’ll mail, and they won’t be some flaky Internet marketing douchebag who’s going to flake on you or not return your thing, whatever. And you just go around, and you’re just like, “Oh, I’d need you for traffic.” And that’s just a crappy place to be. So that’s a biz. If you have a business, you have diversified traffic sources. You can buy traffic, and you have SEO coming in. And you’re rocking your social media profiles. And you’re doing really smart things like paying people to put retargeting pixels on their blogs. So you can retarget that audience if it’s close [inaudible 00:04:41]. And you’re doing all kinds of things. You’re not dependent upon uncle so and so or cousin whatever to mail for you.

All right, another difference between a biz and a business is that when you have a biz, you’re typically in an HR race to the bottom. You’re finding the cheapest people, and you’re trying to do some arbitrage thing. And you’re analyzing the whole thing on a cost-per-hour basis rather than a return-on-investment basis. So for example, we’ve outsourced marketing before to really inexpensive people, and we’ve outsourced development before to some of these offshore development places. And even though we have to pay, I don’t know, 8 times more for someone who sits in our office, we get 20 times more productivity. We get 20 times more innovation, because they’re sitting there with us. That’s thinking from an ROI perspective, return on investment perspective, rather than a raw dollars-and-cents perspective. I think it’s a much more abundant way to think.

Also, if you have a biz, you have a fluctuating product line. There’s this massive graveyard of products that you’ve just shelved. Every year, you’re doing another stupid launch of some stupid thing that you will forget in six months. You’re just cycling through like crap and you just vomit up products. That’s a biz. Man, I can’t even . . .

Anyway, if you have a business, you have a stable product line. You actually have customers who five years ago bought your product, who refer a friend to it. And they go to your website, and it’s not on some domain that’s not around anymore, like it’s actually there, and you’re running it. And you’re creating a legacy and a history. And you’re going deep in your market. You’re not just like, “Oh, I met some guy at a conference. And we’re going to launch this thing together,” and whatever. You’re actually going deep.

Also, biz . . . If you have a biz, you’re hoarding ownership typically. Whereas, if you have a business, you’re sharing ownership, in my opinion. Smart people can disagree with me about this. But again, this is about return on investment, not about a win-lose number like percentage. It doesn’t hurt you to give a meaningful, maybe meaningful to a person but less meaningful in the scheme of the business, amount of ownership to people that you work with. Smart companies, Starbucks, Apple, Google, companies like that give their employees shares of the business so that everyone wins together. What would you rather own, 1% of a billion dollar company or 100% of a $300,000 a year company? I’d rather have 1% of a billion dollar company. Although, if you were like Larry and Sergey, it’d suck if you only owned 1% right now.

A difference between a biz and a business, if you have a biz, you put marketing before products. If you have a business, you put products before marketing. This is what we did. I can’t get over these CEOs of companies that call themselves marketers, like, “Hey, I’m a co-founder. I’m a marketer, and other marketers do this.” And it’s like, man, you can be so much more. I know how to do marketing, but I don’t identify as a marketer. I identify as a co-founder of my company. I identify as a business person. I’m not like if someone says, “What do you do?” I don’t say marketing. You’re doing something that’s bigger than selling the thing that you sell. Hopefully, you’re doing something bigger in the world.

So yeah, a difference between a Mac business and the SEALs. We want our company to be like the Navy SEALs. If one seal goes down, the rest still know what to do. If they all go down, and there’s still one left, they can still operate, make decisions under stress, and intelligently move forward.

So that’s the motivational or non-motivational part of this talk. And so we’re back to tactics.