Kylon: Welcome to the Kingmakers podcast. Kingmakers is an accelerator for business buyers. We help entrepreneurs acquire their ideal business and provide them with the tools to succeed post-acquisition.

I’m your host Kylon Gienger. Join us as we explore and unlock the secrets to successful business acquisition, growth, and exiting strategies.

Hey guys, so if you’re enjoying the podcast and you wanna take the next step in your business buying journey, there’s a couple of different ways that you can do this.

First, check out our business buying workshop. The Kingmakers workshop will give you a backstage pass to a private equity firm that acquires and operates six plus new businesses per year. This is an opportunity for you to peek behind the curtain and understand the entire process of finding, buying, and growing an online business. The workshop is limited to a small amount of serious business buyers so you can count on it being intimate and you can plan on spending plenty of one-on-one time with some of the best and brightest entrepreneurs in the M&A space. So go to kingmakers.co/workshop. Again, that’s kingmakers.co/workshop to get more information and to apply.

Second, if you are serious about buying a business. I would love to have a quick chat with you and see how we can help. Go to kingmakers.co/call. Tell us a little more about yourself. And then you can schedule a free consultation call and we’ll see what we can do. Again, that’s kingmakers.co/call. Talk to you soon.

What is up business buyers and welcome to another Kingmakers episode. Today on the show we have Adam O’leary. Adam is an experienced online entrepreneur and traveler. One of his top skills in the online space and something he’s been kind of you know quite known for is being able to dramatically grow online businesses via webinar sales. He’s done some significant work on Wired Investors properties, which if you guys remember is a private equity firm and portfolio of companies that preceded Kingmakers. And through his webinar expertise, he’s built an agency that helps websites grow through this monetization method. And if you become a Kingmakers partner and buy an online business with us, chances are you’ll meet Adam and his team and they’ll be a part of the growth plan for the business we buy. So yeah Adam welcome to the Kingmakers podcast good to have you on man.

Adam: Thanks for bringing me on. I’m excited for this. It’ll be good. Excited to share a little bit about what we’ve worked on and things like that so…

Kylon: Yeah, man. So I’ll give you guys listening a refresher. We’ve talked about this in previous episodes, but when you look at a cash flowing website, all it is really is you know we really break it down is it’s a combination of one or more traffic sources in one or more monetization methods. And one of the things that you’re looking at before you acquire a website is what are the risks of the current traffic sources and monetization methods that are in place and how are we gonna mitigate those. But more importantly, where is all the low hanging fruit and how are we gonna capitalize on those growth opportunities and how are we going to grow you know slash you know add more traffic sources and monetization methods. And there a lot of different monetization methods and at Kingmakers we have several that are in our wheelhouse and that we’re very good at and we’re constantly adding more to our quote unquote bag of tricks. And webinars is one of these methods and so I wanted to have Adam on to basically dive deeper into that. In future episodes we’ll likely dive deep into other traffic sources and monetization methods and just learn everything we can about it them. So Adam, man, you know I love to start by—maybe you can give us a bit of a background on yourself, your story, kind of fill in the blanks from the intro and tell us where you’re at in the world now or… I know we’re talking earlier you might not want to mention that, but maybe give us a little bit of background on yourself

Adam: Yeah, absolutely. So I am I guess—just some background… So I when I first started out in the online world to say the least, I wasn’t really in a good space. I was like $32,000 in debt at that point. I didn’t know anything about business. I understood that I like sales since a very young age to say the least but I would say the whole business side of things I thought I knew what I was doing because I went to school. And of course if you go to school it means you understand business inside and out, but I went out and I ended up racking up some crazy crazy crazy debt. I was like 32k. I was like basically putting everything on a credit card and I was living in Boston at the time and if you’ve ever lived in Boston or been to Boston you know it’s a very very expensive place to live. And yeah, it was nuts.

And what ended up happening, I was actually working in real estate at the time and what ended up happening is I was a real estate agent and I started realizing that I didn’t really like the real estate side of things just because I was always looking at it as like a sales thing. You’re selling houses and things like that and then I ended up starting to feel like a psychologist at one point where you’re just like talking about like kids and all of this is where my first lego set was built and this is where my grandmother said Happy Birthday to me in my thirtieth birthday party and I was like well that’s cool like that’s really great but like that doesn’t help really sell the house. I started not liking real estate to say the least. So I started going out and I started learning how Facebook ads worked and that’s kind of what I started doing. I started doing really local type of of Facebook ads to start getting buyer leads and seller leads in the door and I basically just started referring them to the other agents that I was working with because I like the getting side I just didn’t like the touchy feely type of stuff.

After about a couple months or so of me doing that. I was generating—it was like 15 to 13 to 18 leads on a weekly basis that we’re like looking to like either buy or sell within the next 30 days and my manager called me into our office and goes, Adam I need you to stop what you’re doing and I was very taken away to say the least. And she goes, I need you to stop what you’re doing and I need you to teach other people what you’re doing and she said that the thing is you can keep doing this and you’ll get your way up to a couple thousand a month or so, but if you are able to scale this online and teach every agent out there how to do this, your life will look a lot different and your young—you should take advantage of this opportunity.

And it was the next day—I think was actually that day, I was very confused but the next morning I think I woke up at like 6:00 am or something which is like really early for me at that time. And I just start looking online I remember just I didn’t know what I was looking for. All I cared about was finding somebody who’s making at least $1,000,000 a year online. That was it. That’s the only thing that I cared about. And I don’t know why it came to my mind but I started looking on Udemy and I was looking on Udemy and I was looking at all these places and I saw this guy and he was talking about webinars. He was talking about sales. He was talking about private equity. It was like kind of all over the place. I didn’t really know what any of it meant. I thought the word private equity was a really cool word. I literally didn’t know what it meant.

Yeah I just thought it was cool so I bought all the courses. I think was like like 60 bucks I spent or actually it was like 50 something dollars ’cause I found a discount code. And I went ahead. I bought all of them and I watched all of it and I was like this guy knows what he’s talking about and I didn’t even know what I was listening to, but I thought it sounded cool. And his name was Eric and I just found this guy’s email and his name was Eric and I find his email and I start pinging him on every channel I can possibly find. So whether it’s through Facebook or email or whatever and he messages me back and was like—hey man like kind of like leave me alone. And I was like no no no you don’t understand, I’m going to come and work with you for free for 30 days and you’re not gonna pay me anything. And you’re gonna teach me everything that you know and then by the end of that 30 days, I’m gonna make you more money than you would ever have to pay me. And he just messaged me back—you’re crazy, leave me alone. And I was like no I’m not gonna leave you alone like I want what you have and I know that I can help you out dramatically.

And after about he like gave me like this crazy assignment. It was like probably a month’s worth of work that he probably gave me and I did it in like 48 or I think it was 72 hours. It was like 3 days and I just didn’t sleep for 3 days and I got all that done and I sent everything back to him. And Eric was like, dude like what’s wrong with you? And I was like, I’m coming to work for you for free, you don’t understand. And he was like, okay well I’m going to the Philippines in 3 days and I need you to buy your plane ticket by midnight tonight to come meet me there and you can come work for me for a month.

And I didn’t even have a dime to my name at that point, like I really didn’t. And I just remember asking a family member I said I need $3000. Like that. I said I need $3000 I’m gonna pay you back next month. And I remember my family member looking at me like you don’t even have a dollar, how are you gonna pay me my 3k? I was like, don’t worry about it, you’re gonna get it back don’t you worry. And I bought the plane ticket that night and I flew over the Philippines. And I’ve never traveled at that point outside of the U. S./Canada and I went to go see my family over in Italy. But outside of that I never went to like a third world country. I literally was scared for my life. Like I thought I was going to die. It was so horrifying like getting on a plane going to a third world country thinking like, okay I’m gonna die because on the U. S. all the news is all this craziness his is happening all over the world. You’re only safe in the US.

Kylon: Yeah man.

Adam: And I go over the Philippines and I landed in Makati. Yeah dude it’s crazy and I landed in Makati and I get there and I meet Eric. And I remember I think it was like 2 days later he goes, okay what I need you to do is I need you to respond to 100 percent of the messages that are coming in to the chat box. And I was like okay I don’t even know what we’re doing but let’s do it. And he does a webinar and it’s the first time I ever saw somebody do a webinar. And I remember by the end of that webinar, he made about like $1500 in an hour. And like my eyes just lit up. I really…it’s kind of like I don’t know how to describe it.

Kylon: Was there an aha moment?

Adam: It became an addiction. Yeah, I just all of a sudden I saw that $1500 and I just stared at it for maybe like a solid 4 minutes or so and Eric at the end of it he goes, what did you think? And I said I think you just discovered like gold. And I just watched every one of his webinars that he ever did. And he did a lot of webinars. I went back I just went through all of them and I watched it and I looked at the earnings that he had and everything like that. And my mind was blown. Like truly in literally blown. And it was just an obsession. That’s the only way to describe it and after that, it was I think I did my first webinar. Well my first webinar was actually…it was the most horrifying experience of my life. He goes it was about my like 2 weeks in and he goes, okay just do all the messages in the chat box and I said okay cool. And he starts the webinar and goes, hey guys how’s everybody doing? He goes, I actually brought a special guest with us on tonight and Adam is going to be doing the rest of the webinar for you.

Kylon: Oh my gosh.

Adam: And dude, I was like what? And I was like trying to whisper like what? He was like, Adam, say hello to everybody. There was no script. There was no webinar deck. There was no product. There was nothing. Nothing at all and he just said, just keep talking just keep talking just keep talking. And I talk for an hour straight and I mean I was like literally dripping sweat the entire time.

Kylon: Geez, man.

Adam: Yeah dude, it was horrifying. But after that, the next month after just that obsession just I mean I worked (not even joking) about 20 to 22 hours a day. I was getting about an hour to 2 hours of sleep at night and I think that first month I did like 10 to 14,000 in sales or something like that. And then after that it just kept scaling up from there. I think in the fourth month, I did like 70 something thousand dollars in sales and I was just obsessed at that moment. There was like it was literally like I just discovered a goal of mine. It was the coolest thing ever. But yeah that’s that’s how my obsession came to be.

Kylon: And thus, Adam the webinar king was born thanks to Eric.

Adam: Exactly exactly.

Kylon: That’s great and so you know now you have this sort of service that you provide to people to do webinars for them to kind of dramatically increase growth and you know last we talked you were just traveling all over the world doing these webinars. And for those listening Adam came to one of our business buying workshops and gave kind of a presentation there on what he does and the importance of webinars for your business and that went really well. Tell us like, let’s go over some of the basics of webinars you know for people that really have no idea what they are or why they’re important or how they work. Let’s get kind of the primer.

Adam: Yeah, to me webinars are cool because and as you said like I love travel I really do. I think I’m at been to 37 countries in the past 3 years or something along those lines. Yeah, I’m quite an obsessive person to say the least. When I do something I do it. There’s no middle ground for me. Yeah it’s really funny, but yeah I was like looking at it the other day and I was woah that’s a lot of countries. But yeah it was only like 37 countries I think in like 3 years or something give or take ever since that first trip over to the Philippines. But yeah that just sparks. I just started loving it.

But for me webinars are cool because one I can do it from anywhere or anybody can do webinars from anywhere. But I think the most important things that people don’t understand about webinars and there’s definitely a big misconception I would say about webinars. It is because a lot of people think that you have to go ahead and you have to build up this like crazy crazy where you’re going out and you’re like hard selling people over the course of like an hour or something along those lines. And I’ve seen a lot of people scared of webinars or not even people… companies scared of webinars. It’s because of that misconception that you’re hard selling the customer. The reality is if you look at any webinar out there, it’s just trust building. When you’re doing any sort of a webinar, every webinar that I do, 80 percent of the webinars is building trust. And it’s not just trust with the presenter. It’s trust for the company, it’s trust for the presenter, it’s trust as a whole.

And the thing is so many companies miss out on that basic basic thing because if we really think about how society works today, everything’s…I mean if you’re running an online company, it’s totally online. If you walk into a clothing store, if you walk into a restaurant for example. Let’s say in a restaurant, immediately the door gets opened for you. The person says good day, sir, how are you? Here’s a seat, take a seat. And they start building rapport with you if they’re a good restaurant. If they’re a bad restaurant, they just throw you to the wolves, but that’s something that’s the human touch that people can start identifying with.

And when you’re going on and you’re running your blog or anything along those lines, it’s great if you’re running say a software company, a blog, e-commerce or anything like that—you’re going ahead. You’re goal is to make a sale. An affiliate sale or anything like that. But even if we look at a blog in general, a blog is not just going out to pump out articles for the sake of pumping articles. It’s structured to blog and there’s a structure to that rapport building inside of that article that you’re going ahead and writing. People don’t just click on your affiliate link inside of an article just because they feel like they want to click on that link. No, there’s something that you said inside of that article that made them build up enough trust where they decided that they’re going to click on your link. And when you look at a webinar, that’s what it is too. It’s rapport building. It’s trust. I’m trying to make you laugh. I’m trying to make you smile. I want you to like me. That’s it. I want you to like the company. I want you to have trust in the company enough where at the end of that session you’re making a decision that you know what, this guy seems down to earth. This company seems like a trustworthy or reliable company that they’re going to stick with me. I’m gonna put my my trust in these guys and a lot of companies that are out there they forget about that basic trust.

If you’re a software company or something along those lines and you just have a home page and you’re competing against 5 other software companies that are similar to you. Like that’s great but there has to be a sense of trust built and that’s what a webinar is. It’s just building trust. And a great example of this is I thought it was the craziest thing I have ever experienced and I think when I understood this concept, I understood what a webinar really was. And I did a webinar and I was doing a webinar every single day for that week and typically I do a webinar everyday anyways just because—just for the sake of doing it I guess. But yeah I did a webinar on Monday and there was (I don’t know) like 150 people on that webinar. The second day, there was I looked at the audience that was there and you would expect on a webinar that if people saw the webinar already, they wouldn’t knowingly go to the second webinar if they put it on. It was at least 15 percent of the audience that was there the second day. And the third day there was even the same audience members on and I was like guys you already saw this webinar. And the thing about it is that they were and you think it’s crazy it sounds absolutely insane, but really think about what they were doing there is they were really intently trying to make a decision if this company was where they should put their hard earned money. Is it where they should put that trustworthy decision. They didn’t just join the webinar because they wanted to listen to my beautiful voice 3 times in a row. They joined it because they were making a true decision whether this was the company that they wanted to work with or not. And to me I think that’s what really opened up my eyes to what a webinar truly truly is. Does that make sense to you?

Kylon: That makes a lot of sense I mean when I think about 2 online businesses that each have a product and you know they’re selling this product digitally you know there’s copy. It could be you know really really compelling kind of personal copy talking about this to the customer, addressing their exact needs. If you have these 2 sort of identical online businesses but one has this webinar component where people can sign up to meet you or whoever’s running the webinar at a specific time and kind of conference like you know or workshop like you know be there with a bunch of other people and hear a real person here story have the product be sort of built around a narrative gaining that trust. Yeah I mean I’d give that significant advantage to that online business that has the webinar. I mean I get why some people especially if it’s a considered purchase why they’d want to watch the webinar. You know even a couple of times. But man yes it seems like a powerful powerful tool. And so talk about your track record a bit. What are some of the things that you’ve seen come about as a result of webinar usage and some of the online businesses that you’ve you’ve worked with. I know with one of the Wired Investors properties you did quite well on a finite list of people just like continually selling and talking to them over and over again. I’d love to hear about that ’cause man when you talked about it in the workshop, I remember just thinking it opened my eyes to webinars. I’ve always liked to listen to like John Lee Dumas on Entrepreneur on Fire and some of these other guys that do a lot of webinars are like Pat Flynn and they’re always ranting and raving about ’em, but you know I’ve never I guess learned about them as deeply as kind of you taught at the workshop and it opened my eyes man.

Adam: Yeah absolutely. So like when you’re thinking of webinars and it is definitely another huge misconception about them and I think it was really thanks to that kind of first experience that I had because I was taught at I think in a very different light than many other people were—because I was told like what basically Eric told me was that you have to do a webinar every single day in order to really master your craft. And then the other thing about it is once you do the webinar you’d have to go back and watch your webinar to make sure that let’s see that you’re using full…

Kylon: That would be painful.

Adam: Oh it was brutal. It was because it’s enough to talk but when you listen to your voice for like 2 hours or 2 and a half hours a day, your a king of brutal 100 percent. But the thing about it was that when I was going through when I was listening to myself I was learning how I was talking. When I first started, I used to say ah ah ah ah ah all of the time or uhm uhm or like like like and it was those types of filler words that I needed to get rid of and be able to educate myself on that basic process right there. But when you’re going out and you’re talking to an audience on a regular basis one of the most important thing is to always understand is it’s the same thing. I’m sure whoever is listening right now you have a favorite television show that you watch religiously every week. Everybody has one show that they usually like or if it’s on Netflix if they’re binge watching usually have a show that you like. Now the thing about a webinar is it’s the same thing. It’s a show that you’re putting on for the individual. It’s not you’re not just going out and doing a product demonstration and putting the user to sleep. You’re putting on a show. The person comes to you again and again and again because they like the format that you have. They like your speed. They like your enthusiasm. They like you. They like the presenter as an individual. And the thing is they could like one person and they may like you they may not like you, but the thing is they’re gonna find who they like and they’re gonna find their favorite TV show and they’re gonna watch it. And that’s what a webinar is. When you’re going out the people are going to tune in to your TV show in a sense based on the fact that they like the presenter in the way that they present and the simplicity of the methods or how well you’re able to break down concepts for the user to understand. And when you’re going ahead and you have one webinar, somebody goes ahead and makes a purchasing decision on that webinar. If the person likes the presenter, if the person likes the presentation, they’re going to check out the other presentation from that individual and the cool thing about it is that they’re going to make multiple purchasing decisions through multiple webinars. They’re not just gonna buy one product from you. They are more than likely going to purchase multiple products from you and that’s the thing is that from your customer base that you already have the people who are most likely going to purchase again from you are the people who have already made an initial purchase from you before. If you have a cold lead coming in, compared to a customer that’s already come in that you’ve already built trust and rapport with, who’s easier to sell? Well of course the person that already knows likes and trust you. So when we are doing webinars, we’re not just looking at it from let’s go ahead and sell that front end product that’s cool okay and we have a system that we use which we can talk about it in a little bit, but what we do is we also look at the back end. It’s not once a customer comes in (let’s just say if they’re paying you I don’t know $100 a month for example) and the customers coming in are paying you $100 a month. What we do is we’re gonna look at the back end then we’re gonna look at the lifetime value of that customer and say is there a way to monetize stock back end of that customer which adds extra value to what they need? It’s because what ends up happening is a lot of the times that we found inside of the first company that we are working with is that customers would come. They would start working or they’d start making a purchasing decision. Stay on a monthly subscription with that company and then they would leave after a certain amount of months. And then what would happen is they’d go to a competitor. And when I first started I would call up all of those customers. I would basically doing be just jumping on calls with all the customers who are leaving and saying why are you leaving? why are you leaving? why are you leaving? And one of the biggest and most common things that we heard is it doesn’t match my needs at this specific moment. And when I started hearing that I said tell me more and what we started realizing is that a lot of the times it was something that we had. We just weren’t selling them in an appropriate manner. We weren’t educating the customer that we actually had that available. And for me that was like a huge aha moment. It’s because people don’t make purchases like second or third or fourth purchasing decisions from your company just based on the fact that they like you. They do it based on their needs and the thing is there’s probably a good majority of your customers who have needs that you’re not providing them at this moment and that’s the point of back end sales. Does that make sense?

Kylon: That you could probably easily provide them, yeah.

Adam: Correct easily and it’s like you already have it available like most companies already have that material available and they’re just not presenting it to their customers. That kind of connects the dots for the customers to be able to go ahead and crush it.

Kylon: Right right makes sense and what were those numbers? I mean I remember you shared a specific kind of case study of you know a bunch of webinars you did to a single list for an online business and did what was like 7 figures? Tell me about that.

Adam: Yes so yeah it’s quite… I think when we looked at the numbers not too long I think was at 1.3 million or something along those lines to the same list of I think the list is like 9000 people or 8 to 9000 people—somewhere along that lines. It was the same list and we just like there was a little bit of change—not drastic but the customers that were there from the beginning were still making purchasing decisions 2 and a half / 3 years later on these webinar presentations that we were doing. And yeah I believe I think it ended up around 1.3 million or something along those lines just from going out and just following the process and being able to find the needs of the customers at that moment. We were finding niches. Niches are a huge one. The niches that they’re going after and being able to provide them easier ways to go out and tackle that niche to help them whether if their independent businesses that are trying to go out and get their selves off the ground or agencies or bloggers or whoever it may be or e-commerce people being able to provide them a more niche-type of offer for their specific needs. That really helped us when we discovered niches especially inside of that business we were able to sell. Multiple problems are solved—multiple problems based on people’s individual needs which really helped catapult that sales to say the least which is really really cool.

Kylon: Yeah, that works, man. A list of under 10000 that’s not really changing over a period of a couple years you know 1.3 million or 7 figures by just continually finding ways to give them what they want and continuing to build that trust and there they keep tuning into that TV show to listen to you and you know buy what you have to sell because of that trust.

Adam: Yeah exactly.

Kylon: It’s incredible.

Adam: It really is and so one thing I was thinking as well and just one thing I wanted to say… like one of the things that we do—so a lot of the clients I guess that we work with or at least what we look at is usually businesses are very good at doing what they’re good at doing. So if you’re going out you’re you’re running a company or anything like that like you know how to generate sales for yourself and one of the biggest things that happens is usually you have leads that are coming in and some people purchase and some people don’t. And what we’re noticing with a lot of the businesses that we’re talking with that are interested in working with us is that when they’re going ahead in there they have these clients that are coming in, they’re signing up for their programs… the other leads that come in that don’t make a purchasing decision they typically end up just like putting them to the wayside and they’ll usually drip them email content or something along those lines but they’re not really actively trying to to help educate them about why their platforms are for them. When we look at webinars and things like that, webinars are really a conversion optimization technique and one of the biggest things is like if you know how to sell your customers but you’re letting a bunch of leads kind of go to the wayside, there’s a lot of opportunity there because usually the reason that somebody didn’t purchase isn’t because they don’t like your product. I mean, think about it… They came to your site and they came there for a reason because they have that need. That individual didn’t just magically end up to your site for no reason. They weren’t looking for like dog care products and then ended up on a software product for no reason you know. It was because they were searching for a specific desire and when those leads come through and they don’t make a purchasing decision that’s another huge use case that webinars can really help with because usually the tiniest difference is that they’re comparing your offer to 5 other offers. And they’re trying to say okay is this one the best one for me or is it this one or is it this one. And once add that human element to it, oh my god it just starts catapulting it in. It’s just like you look at all these leads that were coming through and you’re like ah okay there’s nothing I can do with it because I’m just tripping them out and just nothing’s happening with those leads so after I don’t know a month or whatever we just leave them alone and nothing happened but there’s so much opportunity right there and it’s just a matter about adding that human experience to the equation in just building that trust and saying listen we’re gonna be here for you and that’s what we do best. It’s such a huge way to look at what webinars are. It’s just that little human touch. It just changes everything and to me that personalization is massive.

Kylon: Yeah, I love it man. What type of businesses or online businesses are best for webinars? And what point do you look at an online business and you just think like that a webinar is not gonna work here or is there even such an animal is that?

Adam: Yeah that’s a great question and I was really…I’ve been putting a lot of thought into that because the thing is with webinars, there’s so many use cases to it. I mean like one of the originals of webinars is QVC. They’re like a 24 hour webinar if you really think about it, which is really funny to like to think about it that way because they’re just literally just selling you like they have all of the elements of webinars actually. I was on a commuter boat in a city and they had QVC playing and I was just watching it. I was like they have the scarcity element there. Their timer’s counting down. They have the timer or the number of sales is going up. They have the items coming in, they have that pitch and everything. It’s literally a product webinar in such an interesting interesting way. But for me, when I was thinking about it, usually what it comes down to most is who is the audience and I think that’s the most important thing that you have to look at when it comes to webinars because if you’re selling to a demographic where if their buying capability or their purchasing desire isn’t higher than buying like a $30 product or anything along those lines. Then, a webinar is not probably gonna make as big of an impact in your business unless you have an extreme amount of leads coming through the door. While webinars are very good for mid to high ticket products. So if your product is $30 let’s just think about a standard or I’ll say a great webinar conversion is usually right around that 15 percent level. So if you only have 100 of these attending your webinar and you’re converting it 15 attendees on that monthly basis or whatever it is that you have coming in, you’re not really talking a lot of money on $30—while if you have the leads that are there and you’re selling a product that’s $500 $1,000 $5,000 $20,000 $50,000, you can do some serious serious serious damage and just go out and just pound it because you’re usually on it… a webinar… The biggest thing about a webinar is usually all webinars as long as the offer is solid. Like that’s the thing it’s like the offer has to be impeccable on a webinar because when you’re going ahead you’re building trust for that 45 minute period or hour and a half period depending on how high take of a product it is. And then after that, you’ll need to go ahead and that person has the trust, they’ve now how the desire as long as we did our job right. They have the desire and now the last missing element there is the offer and if the offer is strong enough where somebody’s looking at this going, wow okay you know what I like I know I like I feel comfortable this guy’s really put some serious value only plate and now they’re looking at the offer they’re saying this is like the coolest offer I’ve ever seen in my life and it’s exactly what I need. Then, 15 percent conversion is totally doable and as long as you’re hitting that 15 percent conversions or even 10 is spectacular if you’re looking at a higher ticket type of a product. So for me I think the most important thing when it comes down to to webinars is just knowing the numbers and knowing what type of product that you have. And usually one of the first things when we’re talking to any companies that are reaching out to us one of the first things that we look at is okay we’re gonna look at all of the products that that company already has and then we’re gonna look at it any way that we can increase the price of merging some of the products together or building something adding a little bit more elements to it to bring that price point up because if we can get 15 percent conversions on a $30 product or 15 percent conversions on a $2,500 product, it’s the same conversions. It’s just a totally different number that you’re staring at in the face. So I think that’s the most important thing—it’s just understanding is there a capability of increasing the price of a product or a service or whatever it may be to a price that makes sense for webinars.

Kylon: Right right. I think you brought up a good point just want to extract here for people listening about leads because one of the things that we do at Kingmakers is you know when we’re looking with a partner for you know when we’re sourcing a business to purchase, one of the things that we want to see is that there’s a very very scalable way to generate leads and that this is you know validated somehow because of precisely what you said. And kind of what I was alluding to earlier that you know a website is a combination of a traffic source and the monetization method but people need to understand like traffic sources and lead volume are generally a lot harder to build up. They take more time takes time to nurture takes more cost to build up a traffic source than it does to just kind of slap on a monetization method. And so when you acquire, you’re sort of thinking in terms of…you’re really wanting to focus a lot on the traffic channel because there’s probably multiple ways to monetize that and these ways don’t take long to implement, but it can take longer to sort of build up that traffic and that lead volume. And again one of the things we’re looking at is how scalable are those leads.

Adam: That’s what I love about Kingmakers, though. It’s because for me when it comes to Kingmakers, that was the biggest thing when I was talking with you guys before. That was the reason I said absolutely let’s start working together. It’s because webinars—if you only have a hundred leads coming in the door every single month, it doesn’t matter if the webinar converts to 100 percent. So there’s only a certain amount of leads that are coming through. While what Kingmakers does is like what I was like this is going to be a perfect relationship right here is you guys have the leads. You know how to get those leads in the door and we know how to sell. And that was it. When you guys look at a business and I remember talking with you I think was like last month or whatever, one of the first things that we were talking about was we were looking at…you were looking at a company all those types of things and the first things that we came down to we’re looking at is like, all right this are the products that we can probably staple together inside of a webinar. What are the lead sources? And you guys knew what lead sources you were going to tack on and you had an idea of how many leads you guys were gonna be bringing in the door in order to make sense. And that right there is the power of being able to add those leads in and then get those conversions through the door.

Kylon: I love it yeah it’s true. I’m glad you brought that up because I can use that as a super short case study on like how we think about these businesses and how we’ve got you know. We’re very buyer focused and when we purchase a business with you, if you’re one of our partners, we’re putting our own capital into the deal. Our incentives are aligned. We want to make sure up front that we’re doing multiple multiple phases of diligence to figure this out that this is a good purchase. And so that particular business you’re talking about Adam, I remember when we talked for… so for people listening this is a business that we’re looking at to purchase with one of our partners who onboarded with us and we were talking with Adam and his team to see if webinars could be a significant growth strategy that we could add to this business post acquisition. And so we were going to do some test webinars and sort of validate that hypothesis. And one of the things we discovered why we didn’t end up doing a test webiner was that there weren’t enough leads coming in and instead we first need to figure out a way to kind of scale scale those leads and kind of up the lead volume. So as Adam alluded to we put together a couple different strategies on okay these are some ways we think we can bring more leads into the business and you know Adam after we kind of engaged we worked to try to validate those. And long story short, we couldn’t validate that and we were in the post LOI. In order to put an LOI this business we’re sort of in the deep diligence phase and long story short we weren’t able to really find a way to scale leads that we knew was fullproof and that we’re very comfortable with post-acquisitions. We actually (last week) we ended up passing on that deal or recommending you know to our partner that we pass on that simply because there were multiple reasons but that was one of the biggest. It’s that we don’t see a way to scale leads.

Adam: But that to me is like that to me was the coolest thing because when we were going through that and I love that and I really really really did because we we’re looking at that deal. When we first went in and we just said okay hey we need to get we need a certain amount of leads on this webinar in order to have any sort of validation and we went to Berlin and we talked about that even further. My favorite part about that was how—As you guys looked at that deal and then you guys actually went through the lead you guys kept us in the loop and everything like that. I love the fact that you guys passed on it because I think to me that was stronger than actually accepting the deal because the fact that you didn’t realize that you weren’t able to add leads that would add the conversions that we needed in order to make that happen. To me that was awesome because it it just meant that you weren’t trying to take a deal for the sake of taking a deal. It was about going out there and saying you know what this isn’t the right deal for us at this time maybe many years so if if they kind of get it up and going. That’ll be better. I just love the fact that you guys didn’t just take the deal for the sake of taking the deal. I think that was actually really really good work on your guys part.

Kylon: Yeah it’s definitely not the first time we’ve done that. I talked to the potential partners who are thinking of onboarding with us on a daily basis and you know one of the main points we end up drilling down to is the difference between how Kingmakers operates and how you know a lot of these other brokerages out there operate who are very kind of sell side focused and they’re really incentivized to just basically sell you the business and be done with it. They are in their commission from the sell side and that’s that whereas on our end were very again buyer focused. And so you know we want to make sure we have a very quality deal. We’re investing on capital so we got to make sure this is something we can continue to de risk and grow post acquisition and it’s painful sometimes. Sometimes there’s a corporate cost that we have to sort of swallow because we’ve put a lot of time and effort with this particular deal we did put a couple months worth of time and effort into the diligence process you know thousands of dollars really in between us and our partner. But at the end of the day it’s better than having you know 800,000 worth of debt on a business that you can’t grow in a scalable way so that’s kind of where our focus is. So yeah we got a good plug for Kingmakers in here be we’ll also get a plug for you man. Maybe talk a little bit what it looks like to work with you in the Kingmaker system. I know your agency works for a bunch of other websites and you’re doing that thing but explain to people how you partner with our partners in Kingmakers and what that looks like. And then how can people get a hold of you as well if they’re listening and they’re like I have a website or want to know more about how you work with these online businesses to grow them. What’s the best way for people to get in touch with you.

Adam: Yeah absolutely. So the first thing that we do is before we even take on any client that we don’t really take on clients for the sake of taking on clients in any way shape or form. We have a pretty strict due diligence process to say the least we have the number in our head that we basically have to be able to hit on a monthly basis that we are adding into the business and if we truly don’t believe that we can hit that number after talking working with you guys and going through our own little due diligence process on the company and then caring about what for example Kingmakers says that you guys are gonna be adding in and what’s the anticipated lead volume. And if we don’t believe that we can hit that number, under no circumstances do we take the deal because all of our clients that we work with we either have to hit that number or we are working 24 hours a day in order to figure out how to make it actually happen. It’s really funny on our team we have seen numbers that say okay starting my fourth shift today just because everybody is adamant about us being able to hit those numbers. Yeah it’s actually quite funny, but yeah so that’s the way that we work. So before we even take on a deal we always do our own due diligence. We make sure that the lead volume that we believe that the sales amount that we’re gonna be capable of doing is in line if there’s any higher ticket deals that we can structure to be able to add in to that company. We want to just make sure that the number that we have in our head is able to be hit for each of our clients before I even start. After that process, once we look at it and we say okay there’s about an 80 percent chance that we believe that we’re going to be able to hit that number for the client (of course you can ever be 100 percent), once we believe that there is a very higher likely chance that we can as opposed to not, we start our process. And it’s usually about a month of onboarding on our side as well as the client’s side. More our side than the client, but at least just getting everything created all of our our sales gets made everything that we need under the sun in order to to tack on to the products that we’re doing. So for example as I said like we always want the clients to keep doing what they’re doing don’t change anything. If you’re making sales keep doing that, don’t change it, but the leads that are going under monetized, let’s tack into that. We’ll create that system right there and then the back end will tack that in for both sides in order to increase the sales volumes there. Then we basically take about a month or so with our entire team—our copywriters, our designers, everything that we have in order to go ahead and just get that all off the ground. And then after that usually we let it run. We split test. The last client that we had we did 5 rounds of 5 version tests in order to get it to where it is now. And I believe it’s right now converting around 20 percent which is awesome. Yeah it took a lot of work but we got it up there which made me happy which brought the numbers up higher than we were anticipating in the first place which makes me very happy. And yeah, that’s just the way that we work. It’s that we just will do everything in our circumstance or everything in our power to hit our numbers. The numbers that we basically put down on paper, we’re gonna hit it. Everybody on our team is pretty competitive so we don’t really mess around on that side. Everybody in our team is either you’re a winner you’re not even working with us. That’s kind of our little model that we have there. But yeah so that’s the way that we work and we had everything that we need to and then we just get it going but yeah our site is upside dot builders and you can feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]. And then, we’ll probably put the link here or something like that. But yeah that’s the easiest way to reach out to me and if you have any questions or anything along those lines or you just want us to review your current sales funnel or anything along those lines, I’ll jump on a call with you no problem just to help you out and just see if hey is there actually a vision for webinars in your future? If there’s not, I think we’re pretty straight with people if we don’t think it’s going to add too much value to your business, we will tell you it’s not going to be a good option for you.

Kylon: You guys, we appreciate you for that. You’re straight forward and transparent with it so yeah we’ll have links to all that in the show notes if you guys want to get in touch with Adam but again you’ll probably get to talk to him and his team if you work with Kingmakers as a partner as well. And a good way to think about him is this sort of great plug and play option to plug into your business if it works for everybody to keep that customer attention and build trust. And it’s just a great kind of growth strategy for these online businesses so… Yeah that’s all I’ve got folks.

You are the average of the 5 people you hang around the most. And today you’ve been hanging out with Adam and Kylon learning how to build your business empire. For more information or to get in touch head over to kingmakers.co and always remember to build beyond business.