Kim Barrett: Marketing the Right Way

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Joining us from Perth Australia, Kim Barrett is known as the seven figure marketing strategist and helps business owners to focus on doing what they do best by taking their marketing off their hands. Thanks for jumping on Kim. Thank you for having me. So I’m actually really I’m in your line of work is something that I’ve come to have a greater appreciation for as, as a business owner.  

Um, and, and business owners always hear, they need to not wear so many hats take on so many responsibilities. So it’s, I think it’s admirable what you do. Why don’t you give our listeners kind of the background, um, from your own voice and tell us what you do. Yeah, for sure. So essentially what, um, when we first started, I noticed that so many small business owners didn’t know how, how to do marketing properly, um, and even be business owners as well.  

And so what we wanted to do is figure out a way that we could either help and install systems in their business for them to run or do it for them so that they could really. Not have to worry about lead generation as one of the core components of their business. Because most of the time it’s like, you know, you wake up in the morning.  

If you don’t have ladies, you got to go get leads who do sales calls, you’ve got to work with a team you could always stuff to do. And it’s just almost almost impossible. I think, for someone to do it effectively and especially the right that. Um, social media changes, Facebook changes, even Google changes.  

It’s pretty hard to stay abreast of that if you’re not in there full time. And even if you are in there full time, some people still miss things. So, um, that’s where we build your social voices to be able to help business owners. So they can just focus on the, working with their clients and the other areas of their business, as opposed to having to worry too much about their marketing.  

Yeah. Is, is there a specific area within marketing that you focus on most more than others? Yeah. So ours is really specifically online lead generation. So we don’t do e-commerce or anything like that. And mostly through Facebook. Yeah. And then using high converting funnels or messenger, depending on the client and what they’re doing.  

So we steer clear of e-commerce and we just focus on people that go look, I, I I’m open to having conversations with clients, um, whether it be through a messenger or through the, through the phone and I just need a volume of them and that’s, that’s who we help. And what’s your ideal client, is, is there a type of business that you work with more than others?  

So it definitely varies because most of the time for when we help install systems into someone’s business and get them to run it for them, we work with people probably who are doing $60,000 Aussie dollars a year. So 60,000 plus, and it’s not because we really charge all that much. It’s really because we’re going to teach people with paid strategies to use. 

 And I need to make sure that if I teach them, they can actually. They can afford to pay Facebook for what they’re going to be doing and do all this testing and everything as well. And then on the done view side of things, we work with people who are doing around $400,000 a year plus on that side. Um, cause then it’s where it makes more financial sense for them.  

Yeah, can you help our listeners better understand what type of systems you, you, you mentioned you work with your clients to build systems, give us an example of what type of systems. So essentially the way that I look at it with anyone, who’s probably under a million dollars, these are the three parts of the three systems that I think that they should have in there.  

So number one is a lead generation system. So a system, it can too, that they can have like a tap that consistently brings leads in on a daily basis. So that might be through a Facebook ad, into a funnel where they’ve got, you know, Email is everyday. It’s like, Hey, call this person. This person is interested in your products or services.  

So that’s number one is the most important system. However, the second part is not going to, if you don’t have this one, number one doesn’t really matter, which is also the sales system. So we always also teach and really emphasize on having a script or sales and not because a lot of people think that if you have a script, It means that you going to sound robotic.  

It means you’re going to, um, be a pushy salesperson, which I don’t think is true. I believe that it’s like, if you are passionate about your business, it’s your duty to be good at sales because you need the only way for you to help more people and with your products or services is to. So the Portico service.  

So I try and, um, and help people kind of get over that a little bit and go, well, Hey, if you want to help people, you’ve got to sell. So in sales, not a bad word. So we also teach how to build a script only because we need to create a measurable process. So you can really have a system if you can’t measure the success of it.  

So that’s why I recommend having a script because otherwise, if every time the process that you have in the conversation that you have is different. You can’t effectively measure how well you are performing because everything has a hundred different variables in it. If you start the conversation differently, if the questions you ask a different, um, and that’s why I think the script is important more so to guide you as the business owner to say, cool, I need to ask these questions.  

Not saying that you say the same words every time, but you need to hit the same points. You need to go through the same process because then you can figure out what your actual conversion rate is. And then see, what needs do you optimize? Do you need more leads or do you just need to get better at sales?  

And then. Sorry. Did we? You gotta say something there. No, I was just agreeing. Yeah. Keep, keep going. Yeah. And then the third point is then following up. So one of the first things that we get people to do when we look at their systems is reactivation. Cause a lot of the time business owners already have leads in their business that have come in and they haven’t interacted.  

They haven’t engaged with them. They haven’t done anything with them. And we use a couple of different reactivation processes. One is, it’s a nine word email. Um, my famous thing was by Dean Jackson, who first off I created that. And it just works so effectively because people have. Potential gold in their business from people that have reached out to them previously that they haven’t been able to get a hold of who is talking about before we started like that.  

Haven’t had it, didn’t show up on Kohl’s or whatever it might be that are interested in what you do, but they’ve just kind of dropped off. So we just teach people. We’re not simple nine word email, and we had one, um, one client who’s in the space of, um, first home building in Australia. Australia is what the industry’s called, where they’re buying their first home.  

They just did that one. Strategy, they just do a follow up a reactivation. They haven’t done anything else in the room. So the program, uh, to help them grow their business. And they made, like, I think it was over $36,000 in revenue for themselves. And they’re like, always, we’re so busy doing this. We haven’t even looked at the ads yet.  

And I was like, Oh, that’s good. But you’ve probably like check the other stuff out. But, um, I mean, it’s a good problem to have. Yeah. So you had mentioned that, um, you, when you start working with clients, you say it’s good to wake up and have this calendar full and Hey, call this person. So do most of the clients that you work with, are they service-based and that’s why they call people or do you, um, you had mentioned you, you don’t necessarily work in eCommerce space, but, um, you know, what type of clients do you work with?  

Yeah, predominantly service-based because it’s and as well, because you have more. Room for error, especially when you’re teaching people to do it for themselves is if your product or service is a couple hundred bucks. Um, and your margin is about that as well. If you spend $200 on it, it doesn’t really matter.  

Yeah. If you only get one lead and then you call them and they become a client, You’re still profitable. However, if you’ve got an eCommerce product and your margin is very, very small and very, very tight, you’ve got to be pretty spot on with everything in the flow of your business, your website. Yeah.  

You’re advertising. And if you’re trying to learn it for yourself, you don’t have as much margin or room for it. So we do help people in the space of e-commerce. We do a lot of, um, messenger marketing for that, but we don’t really teach or do if we have like one kind of part that we offer for people.  

There were, you know, we had a client the other day who got. And, um, when I say these that’s, it’s not like, this is what to show off as actually it was actually by accident. Um, so they got ‘em 1,444 leads, they, um, into their, into messenger. So we use many chat, um, had $2 of ad spend. That was the accident part.  

Cause we didn’t, we didn’t kind of realize that because it was so their offer was so engaging. Um, facial just wasn’t spending the money and I couldn’t really, we couldn’t really get it to go. So they only spent $2 on ads. Um, and then on the end they got a hundred sales and uh, about four and a half, just under $4,000 in revenue  

Um, from that one thing. So it was like, if you look at the return on their ad spend for that, that was a physical product. That’s like 2000 times. Return on ad spend. And again, that was, that was accidental. We meant to spend about a hundred dollars, but I just couldn’t, we couldn’t get Facebook spending more of it.  

Cause it was a really engaging offer. That’s amazing. Now, when you work with clients, do you work, do you have packages that people kind of pick from, or does your pricing vary based on the client? Yeah, I mean, most of the time, so one of the big things I think for any business owner to think of, and I was talking with one of our clients on this the other day, cause we have packages that start small up to where.  

We help people basically emulate what we have in an agency, which is a reasonable investment for the year and what we have, and what we truly believe in is preeminence, which is a strategy popularized by Jay Abraham, which has been around for a long time. And so what he says is that in, in that process is if the best interest for a client is to not work with you, you should make that recommendation or the best interest of the client is to do something else.  

You should be recommending that for them. So probably. Like five out of 10 conversations that we have. Um, people are not right for what we do, but we, we know pretty much the best in the world in all areas of when it comes to marketing, just because we’ve been around and I’ve spoken at so many events and have a pretty robust network where we go look, actually, no, you need to do what your business needs is.  

Go Google, local business. As soon as you need to go speak to this person, or you need ad words that you need, LinkedIn, you need this, you need to go make a TV ad, whatever it might be. We direct people in that way, because we don’t think that necessarily everything that we do is always going to be the best for someone.  

And if it’s not, we tell them. And that’s why I say a lot of the time. It’s hard for us to say when people go, like, what are your price ranges? Well, I don’t even know what your problem is. I can’t really tell you that because what I suggest. May then scare you off from wanting to do anything. And actually what you need is a much more affordable, alternative over here.  

That’s going to help you get to the next level. Maybe actually what you need. You just need a sales coach to help you because everything else is working in your business and we’re not full time sales coaches. So that’s, that’s what you need instead. So we always really try and identify the biggest problem for a client.  

Um, and if it’s not us, then we, we refer on. So we probably are. Like I said, we probably like, even this morning, I’ve already sent off. It’s not even seven 30 in the morning yet. And I’d already sent off two referrals of people who came to me and I was like, Hmm, actually, you should go speak with this person.  

And you know, sometimes I get rewarded from that, from that person, sometimes I don’t, but I know that for that client, that if I send them to someone else, they I’ve got to remember that. As long as I know that person it’s good. But they also remember that, Hey, Kim told me to see this person. So that I’m building Goodwill in the marketplace.  

I’m building, you know, like good, calmer as well, if you will, um, out there. And I think every business should do that as opposed to having that lack mindset. Like, I need everyone to come to me and pay me. It’s like, well, no, there’s, there’s like over it, even just in Australia alone, if you don’t look at even the world for myself, There’s over a million small businesses here, like in the U S I think it’s something like 10 to 15 million small businesses, low and medium and large businesses.  

So it’s like, I’m sure I’ll come across someone else that needs my help in the next week or two. So I’m not too worried about that one person coming through. I a hundred percent agree. Um, I, uh, and for all the reasons that you said, and a couple more that I could add, but I think it’s huge to be yeah.  

Transparent with your clients and potential clients and people that aren’t your clients. And primarily for the reason that you mentioned is building that Goodwill and, and, and a lot of people. Especially newer entrepreneurs. They might be scared and say, well, I’m, I’m losing that business, but you’re not losing that business.  

You’re gaining trust and there, and for me, at least a lot of the times they end up coming back later when it’s a better fit. Exactly. And it kind of sounds weird as well, but yeah. Um, and this is kind of gets into a lot more of the, like the more we were side of like spirituality. I find generally every time, if you take someone that is not right, you generally miss out on a better opportunity.  

That was more perfect and ideal for you in some way, shape or form. And when you leave the space for that potential client who finished all your criteria, Yep. And step number one, make sure you have a criteria of who you work with when you leave that space open, then you will see at that like a perfect person comes in and sits there.  

Like, as I said, um, we had two this week, we’ve dealt with it. I might be between myself and my sales team. I think we’ve had like nearly a Wednesday. So nearly 10, 10 pitches of potential new business of that two or potentially right. The rest were either not right or referred on. Which is a big portion.  

However, because we left that space and looks there’s actually one, which was kind of borderline. We were like, Oh, we could take this client or we could help them. But then just why, like, I really looked over their stuff and I was like, Hmm, nah, that’s like, let’s not take them on this. Refer them to this person and be caught.  

Then their last night we had two people who were most ideal that would work with us at really the highest level come to us. And I was like, Well, you know, if we are taking these other people on, that would have probably we would have caused, they will cause that probably headaches down the track and she’s not worth any money like this.  

You can’t pay me enough money to deal with headaches and problematic clients. And we had the most ideal clients come to us as like, they, I just know from doing this like last six years, that if I had taken those other ones on these ones probably wouldn’t have come along. So I would have been so focused on these other ones over here.  

So it’s kind of weird the way that that happens. Yeah, that’s true. One of the only things that’s worse than losing a client is, is getting one that’s a bad client. Oh yeah. And it’s funny that one big thing that I think a lot of business owners forget as well, is that you can, you can fire a client.  

They’re like, once you start working within that, like, Oh, I’ve got to work with them. And like, they’re here for oversight. Well, no, if you don’t like it, not that you don’t like them, but if there’s no working or not jelling and I’ve done this, so like, it costs me. Yeah. Not doing it. And then once I realized that it also helped me leave, maybe I had a lot of stress and I was able to go actually, I choose not to work with you anymore, but I’d also, don’t leave them in the lurch, being preeminent, find someone to help them and refer them across that alleviates so much stress because everyone was like, Oh, I’ve got these clients.  

Trust me. I was like, well, why are you working with clients that stress you out? Choose to work with someone different and send those clients on to someone that may not be stressed out by working with them. And we’ll be much better fit. Yeah. You know, I had a guest on the podcast, um, just a couple of weeks ago and he has a, what he does is on his birthday.  

He fires a client every year on his birthday. He doesn’t tell it the most and let them go. I love that. What a good birthday present to himself. Yeah. So you mentioned that you’ve been at this for a while. Why don’t we kind of go back in time a little bit and tell us how you got into this industry? Yeah, well, I mean like the originating power I got into this industry was actually probably.  

15 years ago, 15. Yeah. About 15 years ago. So I was 15 years old. Um, and I used to back in the day of like forums and things like that online. So I was a, I’m a moderator on a forum. And this is when I first realized that the internet was kind of powerful for business and making money. And. They, um, they had a, we had a whole lot of expenses because obviously forums, we had like hosting costs and things.  

It was quite expensive back in the day. Um, but then we also had, um, like we had sponsorship things that we had to do. We had to do, um, give away it isn’t all that sort of stuff like contractually that people that are already signed up for. And then I call, we need to get about $40,000. Um, You know, over the next two months, otherwise we can’t pay our hosting costs.  

We can’t do all the things that we’re, you know, we’re meant to be doing. And I can, we, can you help us sell sponsorships? And I was like, Oh, of course, like, that sounds like that’s easier as I have never sold a sponsorship before it was like, yeah, Of course I can. I’m Googling at a sales sponsorships on the internet.  

And I was like, well, we had a banner space, right? So there’s top of the websites where you have like the banner at the top, in this space there, you can have several, um, people’s links and websites there and you can, they can be up there and people can click through and check out this stuff. We had a space for 10.  

And I didn’t know that I was using marketing tactics like scarcity and things like this when I wrote this email, but I took a screenshot of the backend of the website with all the traffic that we were getting every month. And it was pretty targeted. It was in the space of a tropical fish. And there was in Australia.  

There’s only a handful of them, places that were on those about 20 places online that sold stuff, or were pet stores and had that would be interested. So. I got the data I draw, I just basically seed everything. And I was like an email myself. Cause they didn’t really know how to do that otherwise. And I was like, I’m just going to do this was like 11 o’clock at night, started writing this email  

And I was like, well, we have only 10 spaces available. We have, I think it was pretty substantial, like 50,000 views per month. On this website, who in this space of aquarium fish. Now, what we need from you is either $4,000, or we need $4,000 worth of goods so that we can promote those to our audiences as like, because of this arrangement that we have.  

And, you know, we need to pay for some of the costs, blah, blah, blah. Here’s our PayPal link. Put everything in sent off the email and then I went to bed and the next morning I woke up and I was like, Oh, one of the moderators had messaged me and he was like, Oh, what, um, what did you do last night? And I was like, Uh, did I like not BCC everyone?  

Does it send everyone their emails and stuff? I was like, Oh, I’ve just sent out this email. He’s like, we’ve got nearly $42,000 in PayPal and of contributions. So I was like, this is amazing. The internet makes money. Like this is really cool. I didn’t get anything from that. I was like, okay, this is right.  

I’m going to start learning how the internet works and start to learn about marketing online and how these things come to play because. Once I realized that it was possible. Okay. That opened my eyes up to potentially being in and how powerful that was. So when you work with, um, you know, before I go to that next question, what’s interesting about your background is I had a very similar start.  

So I started, um, a car enthusiast website that was forum based, and that’s really where I got into things as well. And then even before that, I was a moderator on, um, uh, you, you might even know since your, your is the forums. Do you remember a forum called YAB by ABB? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I was, uh, I was a moderator on that way, way long ago, so that’s interesting.  

Um, now, okay, so you take that and then what was your first, um, formal kind of introduction into online marketing where you actually started to make money? So the first thing, like as a lot of small businesses kind of do, I was like, Oh, I do. Everyone’s like, what do you do as I do everything on the internet?  

Yeah. It’s like, you want a website? Yeah. Don’t get your website. You want social media management? Yeah, I do that. So the first thing that I did, I actually sold the people that aren’t sold my house for me at the time. And I, um, bought a house, uh, built a house together and then we sold it. Yeah. And then the people that sold the house for us, I signed them up for social media management.  

And that was the very first thing that I did. And I was like, but this is also where I kind of formatted what we do now, because they were like, Oh cool. We’re getting like, okay, we see that we’re getting results here. People are engaging. Like, how many, how is this getting us new customers? And I was like, that’s a good question.  

Um, it’s not really. And they’re like, okay, well, like we know we liked that we’re getting more engagement and stuff, but not getting new customers. And I was like, Yeah, cause I’m just managing it like social media. I told you, I’m building your engagement, blah, blah, blah. And they’re like, well, but we need more customers.  

And I was like, Okay, fair enough. Good point. So it was like, what I could do is if you guys can give me more money for your ad spend, I can promote something out and see if we can get leads and inquiries coming in, rather than just managing. I’m not going to post anything on your page anymore. You guys can do that.  

I am going to look at doing a targeted ad campaign to see if I can get someone to indicate that they’re interested. And that is really where I started then going. Okay, cool. We need to focus on the paid side of things because most small business owners go well, they have a medium sized business owners. 

Um, what’s the, like how, how is this growing our business? And it’s funny because what I realized though, is people. When you look at the internet and online, they’re very hypercritical and they’re very much metric based. However, when they go and put out a record video, ad a TV ad, a newspaper ad, they don’t know their metrics from that.  

But suddenly they think that the other side of things they’re like, well, I needed to put the exact specs, Roy, that you’re like, we deal with like some big shopping, like, uh, stores and things like that here. And I go, well, how did you track your ROI with your, um, with your radio ad? Oh, we can’t. So it was like, but you want me to be able to specifically tell you exactly to the dollar?  

You’re going to get a return from putting up one Facebook ad. However, you spend three times as much as you do with me on a radio ad and you can’t track it at all and you don’t know who’s listening to it. I might. Does that make sense? Good point. So it’s like, but it’s funny. Cause they always get into a little bit of a arguing about it, but it’s like, well, I was always trying to tell him, I’m like, well, if you, if you’re looking at traditional advertising, like you need to give online a little bit of that flexibility as well to say that you, you can see like, Historic data when you look back at the month, but when you look at in advance, like it’s quite hard to give you an exact specific number and ROI, because so many things, there are so many things in variable.  

Well, that can change. So yeah, you can. And that’s why I think, especially for a lot of small business owners, they go, how much should my ad spend be? And I’m like, well, How long is a piece of string. Like that’s, that’s, that’s the answer. And I go, well, actually it should be more. So how much are you budgeting towards this?  

And you should set an amount that you want to spend on your budget for advertising, marketing, and promotion. And if you don’t have a number most Mark, like if you go and read any marketing book will tell you that on average, your total spend towards the realm of marketing and advertising should be 10% of revenue.  

Approximately. Right. And I think that’s like, if you just want to do okay, if you want, if you’re in the process of like growing and scaling, you should probably be a little bit higher, probably closer to 15 to 20% in totality of everything in the realm of marketing people, marketing spend. I should take out that amount.  

So that’s an indication for you on how much you could spend, but otherwise people will go. Yeah. Like how much I’m like, cool. Do you have like a million dollars if you’ve got it? Well, that’s kind of what you can do. Um, but it’s also based on the results. Cause obviously Facebook is like the minimum spend is a dollar.  

You can spend a dollar on Facebook or you can literally spend tens of thousand dollars per day. So you need to have that budget mindful. Go. Cool. I want to put this towards this to test sure. And analyze it and get that data back and then make decisions on it because every day you can adjust it. It’s not like, again, it’s not like traditional where you’ve got cool.  

I give you $10,000 and you run five radio spots or 10 TV spots for me every day. If something works, you can increase it or if it does, you can decrease it and adjust it. So that’s why I always tell people I’m like, it’s variable. Like I can’t tell you to spend. And anyone that does, it’s like, I don’t think you can, like, we have a good conscience.  

Tell someone that because it’s too hard to, it’s too hard to be able to know exactly what it is, but invest the amount that you’re willing to invest and then adjust on a daily basis based on what the outcomes you’re generating. Kim. I think that you’re my, my internet spirit animal, because you know how, you know how, you know, when somebody knows what they’re talking about.  

Is is when they’re honest, when you do, when you’re like, you know, I know I cannot tell you an answer because it doesn’t exist. Um, and just like you said, it’s, um, yeah, in good conscious you, you, if you know what you’re doing, you can’t do that because there’s so many variables. So with you talking about that, and earlier, you’re talking about transparency.  

I think you’re my new BFF, Kim. Yes. So, um, now with that being said, I’m going to ask you a really annoying question. So I do agree that, um, there, there’s not specific timeframes to, you know, you can’t say it’s going to take this much money in this much time, um, before you have this specific result, but is there an average timeframe where you say, all right, we need to run these ads for at least three weeks or six weeks before.  

Yeah. On average, you have a comfortable understanding of where things are moving. Well, I always say to people that generally what we see is, especially because Facebook is direct response, right? It’s like people see it and it’s not like we have, it’s not like the old days of direct mail way of going to send the mail out.  

Cross your fingers, it gets delivered open it. And then they’re going to take action. It’s right there for me. I like to see it. Indeed. When I say indication kind of clarify what I mean by that to see indication. If I think it’s on the right track. Me personally, and I shouldn’t tell people this, but me personally, I to see it with 24 hours and I’ll tell you what the indications are for me.  

But I normally say to most clients, like within 72 hours, we should be able to tell if we are on the right track, because if we have traffic, that’s going to an offer. Straight away within 72 hours, we should be able to say it should be able to either get someone to complete a form or close to, depending on how much traffic we’ve generated and how much we’re spending to see whether or not this is going to be viable.  

And then the metrics that I always say is that if I’m sending people from Facebook to a landing page or a one page website to capture people’s information, I caught my normal metric is I want to spend a hundred dollars or get a hundred clicks then from there, I should know, because as well, if I’ve sent a hundred clicks or something and I haven’t got anyone, so a hundred people have clicked from Facebook, landed on a page and read it and they haven’t taken action.  

Then one of three things is probably wrong. So the formula I like to use is niche offer. We call it the NOC method. So if probably the niche, the audience that I’m targeting is not right. The offer is not well enough articulated and not irresistible enough, or I haven’t been able to convey it in words, how beneficial it is for someone.  

So if I haven’t got something after a hundred clicks or a hundred dollars, which comes first, Cause I’ll average. Like, like if I spending a hundred bucks, yeah. It’s actually probably going to be closer to 50 clicks these days. Um, maybe a little bit less, but I normally expect, especially for something is for, is, is free.  

If I’m not expecting, cause I’m saying someone click here to spend 10 grand with me. Like if it’s like click here to have a conversation or whatever it might be or to, to come through and see our team, see a demo or something like that, you know, I should be able to get 10% of people on that page at least.  

To take an action and do it. So, you know, if I had 50, then I should have five. If I have a hundred than I should have 10. And most of the time is my personal desire is what I want to say. And I normally want to say from the Facebook side of things, I want to say. A click through rate. So the number of like over a thousand people that see it, I want to have a 1% click through rate, at least, and I want to have a low, this is a metric that sometimes people talk about.  

Sometimes I don’t budge the cost per impression, which is the CPM. I want my CPM to kind of be under 30 bucks on average. The reason why that is, is because once he goes over that, then the cost per click, the click, the rate, everything is a lot higher. So again, if, if that, and this is like some technical terminology here, but generally speaking again, if you just think about the cost per thousand people scroll past it.  

Again, if that is super high, probably my niche, my offer, or my copy again on the Facebook side is not in the right mix as something not quite right there. So the other things that I look at at the very start or something to go call, is it working? Is it not? And look, sometimes things start and then they slow down and whatnot.  

But as soon as I get my first lead, As soon as someone opts in. Okay, cool. We’re nearly there once we have three. Okay, cool. We’re on the right track. Things can be manipulated from now to bring costs down, to increase number of leads, et cetera. Like one is kind of a fluke. Two is like, Hm, we’re getting there three.  

Is that okay? There’s something working here. Then we can work, figure out the rest after that. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. What, when you first start working with a client and, and even before you get into running an offer, when you start to strategize with them, what’s the most common problem that you discover when you start working with business owners?  

The office sucks. Um, it’s like the, what they presented. Like I had a guy on LinkedIn yesterday messaged me and he said, Oh, I see what you’re doing. He’s like, this is what whereabouts rollout offer. This was an incense to me. And I was like, I was like, do you have time to have a quick chat? He gave me his phone number.  

I called him. I was like, man, I have no idea what that means, but I can, I’m pretty savvy and understand if he doesn’t like, I don’t know. What that is. And that means that I would not stop read it, click through it or anything like that, because this is like, it’s like, I literally could not tell you when I first read, I was like, yeah, I do not understand this.  

And if I don’t understand someone who is, and it was, cause it was in the realm of artificial intelligence and things like this, but then relating it to business owners. I was like, If I don’t understand this and I, we use AI for messenger and a lot of different stuff. If I can’t understand it, I always like a layman.  

I’ll put it in inverted commerce, going to understand this is what any other business owner is not going to be able to connect the dots for what this is. Then afterwards, when I jumped on a call with him, he explained it was like, Oh, man, this offer is terrible. Like in comparison to what you have, that’s August I can and just gave him a bit of free advice.  

I was like, they’re gonna need to flip all of that around because that makes no sense, make it clear, make it easy to understand and take away all the technical words that you use because you want to make it clear and easy. And really, I always test it. And if anyone has kids, the easiest way is like, read out what your offer is to your kid.  

If they do, if they don’t know what it is, if they’re like. God, I’m sorry. I’m like what? And you’ve like, you’ve overcomplicated it somehow. It should be easy. It should be easy for people to understand the offer. And what it is. And nine times out of 10 it’s that our offer socks. And like, we’ve just recently worked with a couple of clients while we’ve restructured their offers with them on just the night.  

So one guy did property, real estate. He is, um, the title before it used to be the new, the new rules of real estate. In 2018 or 2019, then we flip that around to be how to go from zero to X number of income I’m using property and how I’d go to portfolio over X million. Yeah. By doing that, I was like, can you see that it’s more irresistible?  

Cause before it’s like rules of real estate. I don’t care. I don’t care about the rules, but if someone’s going to show me how I can go from $0 to $200,000 using property. It’s a bit more interesting, right? It makes me pay a little bit more attention. Um, so that is the number one thing is most of the time that the offer is just to be blatantly honest.  

Now, do you help people figure out what their offer is and what I mean? I mean, you’ve obviously helped them clarify it, but let’s go even more broad. So I’m Damon Burton. I know a bunch about SEO, but I, and I want to. Do something with it. I want to create a product out of it. Do you help them craft that offer and come up with something?  

Yeah. W um, a lot of the time we do, sometimes they’ve already got it there, but sometimes they come to us. So let’s just say that same example, right? SEO, someone comes here. Cool. Everyone hates SEO people, right? Cause they get 150 messages in the inbox. So for me, the first thing I would do, and we did this with a client who’s in the accounting space.  

Is, um, as opposed to trying to figure out, uh, get an opt in for someone to register, to, to have a free website assessment and not tell them how many key words they’re missing and how slow the website is and all that sort of stuff. Do a controversial video. It’s what we did in accounting. So this guy was an accountant and he did a video why?  

Right, right. And the whole video. And we promoted it to business owners. And then we also promoted it to accounting firms, like the big, like the really big ones from across the world. And we promoted it to them so that they would get all upset and angry because I knew that they wouldn’t watch the video, what we said in the video.  

Not that accountants. Suck, but people that do not position themselves as a trusted advisor for your business and who just go, cool. I see you once a year, I logged your taxes away. You go there. Don’t do planning and stuff like that. They suck. Because that’s not right. So again, same thing for like SEO. I would do that because you’re going to get a bunch of inbound inquiries.  

Then you can follow up because you build trust with them first. So for example, why SEO? Like here’s why SEO agency suck is because some, most of them, they lock you in for a two year term, then they don’t get you any traffic. They don’t even send you a report. I’m just talking from Australian ones here that I know that do this.  

Thousand dollars a month and you get no increase in traffic at all from your website. And you’re still on page 10, right? Those SEO agencies suck. We are the new era of SEO agencies where we actually care what we do. And then you take people through the process that you do. We focused on this, this, this, this, this, all these things, and none of these other guys do that.  

So look, you know, I’ve talked your ear off about why is your agency suck? And that’s why I want to invite you if you’re dealing with that. Let me know, and I’ll tell you all, and I’ll be able to identify all those things that I said that we do. I’ll be able to identify by a quick look at your website, exactly the things that they’re not doing.  

And I’m not saying that you need to work with me. You should get a good back to them with a list and go, Hey, if I’m paying you this amount of money, you need to be doing this for me. So I just want to educate you on what you should be getting, because otherwise these guys are, you know, really Cowboys and they’re not doing anything that they say.  

So I want to help you. I care about you. Not about anyone else. So if you want that, just shoot me a message, click on the link below or whatever it might be. And then let me see. Yeah. Let me share with you how we can help you. That’s what I would do for something like that. For example, because a lot of the times, if it’s a, um, what we call in like levels of market, sophistication of a great book, I’m in marketing called breakthrough advertising.  

They go through this like how sophisticated a market is when you look at industries like SEO, your, um, uh, accounting, uh, really digital, some digital marketing. They’ve heard all the new click baity titles, like people have seen it’s been around for so long now. It’s like, cool. Well, you’ve got to differentiate yourself somehow.  

So you’ve really got to go. Like you’ve got to go sometimes against the industry, against the industry. You’re in it to then go, Hey, this is how we are different to everyone else because the industry as a whole sucks, let’s do something different. Sign me up. Let’s do it. Yeah. Well, I’m moving on to another question you had talked about offline.  

You had mentioned that you went to a university and studied international business management. Um, but you said it didn’t really help that much with, um, what you ended up getting into. Is there anything that you did gain from college or from university, even if it isn’t directly related to what you do now?  

Um, got some really good, like, to be honest, like the people that I, I know who they’re. I knew from university, I think were really good. And, but to me, I didn’t do so. I think there’s, I think again, like I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I get, I might just be from movies, but I know from Australia to like the us and Canada, I think our universities are very different.  

Like for me anyway, Most people were. I was like, I was working full time. I came in, I studied, I did my work and I left. So it’s not like we, we did have like a candidate sort of big area by again, people didn’t necessarily like live onsite. There was a very small portion of people that lived onsite and they were mostly international students and being based in Perth, in Australia, um, most of those people were from, we had a lot.  

Yeah. There’s people from China, Asia, Singapore, things like that. And not that that is any way bad, but they all very much like, not reclusive, but it’s like they stick to themselves. It’s not like there was a big, uh, like. Ah, like excitement. There was one small bothered that sometimes people would be there.  

Sometimes they wouldn’t. So for me, I was like, cool. I went in, I did my stuff. I tend to my, I didn’t go to any lectures or anything. We went to the tutorials, which was where actual work was done. I did this go and sit there and listen to them. Cause I was working. Then I would do my work and then leave, but I did meet like probably 10 to 15 really great people that I’m still in contact with now.  

Yeah. Um, through that experience that are now running their own businesses, have higher positions in other businesses that I have great relationships with that. I then, you know, I, um, uh, we kind of leverage them. We connect with each other and we help each other out in certain areas, which is cool. However, the study side of things, like most of all, I’ve learned like.  

Tons more in masterminds that I’ve joined or online products and programs that have bought around marketing and management. Then I learned when I was there and that, and that’s not because the system is necessarily bad. I think if you’re going to be a doctor or a lawyer or anything like that, you need to go through that learning process.  

However, because a lot of those things, they are not that they’re set, but they don’t necessarily change as much. When you look at marketing and management. Well, if those things could change next week, the way that thing’s done, it’s like, cool. Now everyone’s, you know, like even though I fall into this category, there’s millennials and you’ve got to learn how to manage millennials.  

Like you’ve got all, you’ve got to learn a new marketing platform. You’ve got to understand how to manage, um, marketing on Facebook, on Instagram, on Snapchat, on LinkedIn, all these things that are only now. Literally coming into the curriculum in university. Exactly. Literally only. Now this year, have they got a section on a Facebook advertising as part of a marketing degree?  

So like when I’m like, well, that’s about seven, like six years, seven years. Oh way too late for some things. Right. It’s like, you really just talk about it now because when I was there, even though it was, it existed, it was not being talked about. And industry as a whole Facebook, like having a Facebook agency, it wasn’t even a potential as a job at that point.  

Like it wasn’t even known to be there. Yeah. So I think for those things, I go, well, like, yes, they’re good for some areas, but I think some other areas really real life experiences work. Cause also everyone said, cool, go to university, get your degree. And then you can go and get a graduate position. Well, they don’t tell you if there’s 6,000 other graduates who also graduated the same time.  

You’re all going for like the five jobs then they’re like, Oh, you knew. I was like, and I worked while I was there. So I was like, cool. I’ve got that up myself. I worked. Okay, cool. What industry experience do you have? Well, I worked at a, um, accounting firm while I was at university. It, so you haven’t worked in our industry.  

It’s like, well, no. Cause you pretty have graduate positions. This is like how I get into the industry. Right. But you don’t have any experience here. I’m like, yeah, but isn’t this the, how I get the experience. Tell me if there’s a secret. I meant to get this experience without, you know, like, how was, does it work?  

And they’re like, Oh, sorry, you don’t have enough experience. I’m like, okay. So I don’t have enough experience for the entry level role that I used to get experience. This makes sense. And then I was just like, That’s great guys. I’m not applying for any more graduate positions that is terrible. Um, so I was like, I’m going to go, you know, I w I managed to get a couple of other, like, and I ended up getting like obscure jobs, which have you gave me a lot of good experience.  

Like I go to them. Um, so I was already working if you’re in an accounting company or setting up companies and trust and Superfund. So I was around business, which was cool. I then worked at an IOT company. Which was good and interesting. And, um, like a lot of the times I applied high levels work ethic and like some of the marketing understanding I had from online stuff while I was there.  

And, you know, and then I went and worked at a grain trading company, managing the Forex covers for trading grain from Australia to other countries. And it was like, that was, it was interesting. It didn’t have like high, not high excitement, but it didn’t necessarily keep me super activated for what I was thinking or.  

And purely because it was like some of the stuff I went in there, the glass that she laughed at me, they told me all the stuff I had to do in this job. And I went there and I was like, great. So is there anything else? Cause that takes, that sounds like it’ll take me like two days, it’s going to like only be like 50% of my time.  

Like what else is there to do? And they literally laughed at me and they say, you’ll see, once you get started, there’s actually a fair bit of stuff there. And I was like, okay, cool. Ended up getting the role, went into it. Literally, it was like Tuesday lunch time. I was like, so, um, is there anything you guys need?  

Cause I’m done? Like what do you mean you’re done? I was like, well, all the stuff of it’s done, it’s taken care of. They’re like the old guy that used to do this, used to take him a full week. And I was like, I don’t know what he was doing with his time. If he was like, I literally can’t say this. I ended up like, sort of clearing all of that work  

And I cleared the work of a bookkeeper as well. Cause I used to work in an accounting company so I can do this stuff. Did all that the bookkeeper came in is, Hey, ma, you’re actually doing me out of the job here. Cause you’ve done good. I was like, well there’s not much like, I know I was like, what else is there?  

Let’s keep the ball rolling. And that’s also when that’s, when I started building my business, your social voice, as it is now, I started researching, it started reading things. Cause I had to be there in case an order came in, we needed to express out or anything like that. I couldn’t really, it’s not like I can just come in and do three hours and then go home.  

I had to be there in case an order came in. So I was like, well, I’m just going to read everything I can on Facebook advertising and read everything I can on funnels on online marketing and just absorb this because I’ve got to be here anyway. I may as well do something. That’s going to be beneficial for me.  

Yeah. Sent the productive. So you take all that experience and, um, do you have. Since achieved a two comma club award from ClickFunnels and been inducted into the marketer hall of fame. Um, so two comma club for those that are listening, that might not be familiar. ClickFunnels is a software that you can use for landing page design and, and kind of, you know, funnels and lead gen automation.  

And so if you have a funnel, a process where you do a million dollars plus in that funnel, two commas and you get one of these awards. So that’s super cool. That’s a big accomplishment, Kim. Yeah, it was a, it was good family. We actually like, I didn’t know what the criteria was for it. So we actually had like, we should have received it earlier.  

And then someone’s like, Oh, have you applied? Did you know, this is the thing. Know it’s like really. I did that like last year. Okay, cool. Let’s get all the details. I was like, Oh, this is great. But it was cool cause yeah, yeah. Like myself and then like three of our clients all got them at the same time. So it was really cool.  

Have you seen the wall inside ClickFunnels office in the videos where they, where they put up all these plaques and it’s just like this never ending wall that’s taking over their whole building. Yeah, it’s so cool. I love that. I love that they do such a good job of wanting you to, you just want to keep doing more through their stuff.  

Cause you’re like, Oh, now I want to get the next block. I want to get to that. Maybe they got you hooked. Well, tell, tell us about the marketer hall of fame. I’m not familiar with that. Yes. The ones, a company called proof. So they, um, they consider it to be the top 1% of conversion marketers. So that’s where you’ve got a consistently performing landing page that captures, um, it has a 75% conversion rate or higher.  

Um, we have, we actually have three of our funnels that convert between 75 and 80%. Um, uh, yeah, like what industries are those or what type of services are those for? Because the hours, so they’re, um, for generating people interested in inquiry in, um, Facebook. So we’ve got, um, one which is a, uh, what’s it called the converting ad template, which is where we show you a converting ad template.  

That’s been responsible for over $15 million in sales, 80% of people that hit that page register. Wow. And so what we did as well, though, is cheekily. It only dropped, I think it dropped 5% conversion rate, but what I do desire, we ran a lot of traffic to that. Right. Because we are wanting to get the award.  

So I was like, we need it. Do you have to have like a minimum number to your page? So you kind of have like 10 people in seven people opt in. So got to have like hundreds of people go through it. So we did that. And then I was like, I’m more getting lazy, really cheap. Like the cheapest way that we got them, it was like a dollar, dollar, 50 per name, email lead.  

And I was like, this is cool. And I was like, as we started to scale it up, I was like, I want to get phone number leads for our sales team. I wonder if I don’t know would change anything, but all I do is add the phone number to the order form because Facebook’s doing such a good job at finding us these leaders that cheap. 

 I wonder how much it’s going to increase the cost. If I add the phone number field there. So we did that. Um, we left all the ads the same. So the conversion, like there was no change in measuring for Facebook and it only increased the cost by about 60 cents per lead to add in a phone number. So we were getting name, email, phone number leads on people, interested in our product and service for less than.  

$3 less than $3. I was like, this is like, this is crazy. And it’s still, we’re still running now, still works. Um, so that one just works ridiculously well. So we have a need, a influx of people for our team to speak to. We just turn that up and sometimes it might go up to four or five bucks, but most of the time, and I’ve tested it across Australia, U S Singapore, um, yesterday’s around that Mark, because we’ve just had so much data go through that pixel and that site, that Facebook is just like, Whoa, this is a good bit work.  

So. Yeah, we’re pretty stoked to, to make that happen. Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s, that’s, um, a really respectable, um, you know, results right there. Uh, what would you say, uh, I had asked offline and what you would say, what has contributed most to your success, and you said asking for help and getting mentors.  

Um, can, can you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah. I think the biggest thing for a lot of business owners is, is we, even if we have mentors, a lot of the time we sit and we go, Oh, I have to figure it out. Right. Self cause that’s how we’ve been conditioned over time. Like you’ve imagined when you go to school, when you do a test, so you kind of put your hand up and go, Hey, like I know the answer to this one  

Can someone help me? Yeah, I know. You’ve got to figure it out. If you don’t know, then you fail the test, which is really the bad conditioning for someone who then goes and becomes a business owner because you sit there and go, Oh, I’ve got a problem with cashflow, with marketing and sales. I couldn’t figure it out myself.  

When in reality, all you need to do is ask because every, someone has sold the problem that we have, none of us, unless we’re maybe Elon Musk, trying to figure out how to get to Mars. So, you know, like, Oh, I need more leads in my business. Cool. Just ask him for help. You know, like I need help with my SEO.  

Just speak to Damon. It’s not that hard, but just ask for help. So. By having that available to you and actually using it, asking for help. That is literally been the, one of the biggest things, because otherwise I’ve literally sat there a little bit stressed, overwhelmed, and I’m like, Oh, because of my phone call, one of my mentors, I’m okay.  

I’m having this problem like, Oh, cool. Just do this, this and this. Great. Save myself three weeks of stressing. I figure out what to do. I just call them and they’re there. Here’s what to do. So I always it’s like we have people come into my programs and like they’ll finish. And at the end of the program, like all, but I had this problem.  

My, why did you not ask this in the program? If you have a problem? Ask and I’ll give you help to solve the problem. It’s not that hard. And we all have like this. Always someone has solved our problem before that we have like, none of our problems are unique in that way. So, um, as a business owner, by understanding that, and look, sometimes I still do it like the other week, like probably a month ago, we’re hiring a new sales team and I was like, I’m struggling to get the right salespeople and stuff like that.  

And I was like, Oh, My mentor is right here. Why don’t I just message him and say, Hey, how did you find your salespeople? And he’s like, Oh, I’ll just do this, this and this and that. Why would I do that? Right. So it just makes so much of a difference to people that, you know, it’s um, and it sounds simple, but it’s not.  

Cause we all sit there and we’ll start it. Like, how do I do this? And it’s like, well, if you just ask for help, we can get it. Yeah. Well, you know that that’s a good transition into the last kind of business question I had for you. You had talked about hiring. Um, I had asked you what was one of the harder points in your career, and you said hiring too many staff at once and not managing cashflow effectively.  

So why don’t you tell us that story? Let’s do cry a little bit. When I talked about it, we were going through it. It was a stage where we had lots of growth going on and I’m like hardware, Bulletproof of this. And it’s like, we’ll bring your intern staff. We literally had this old office. And we had like, they told us how many, like we were looking for a new office and they’re like, Oh, you know, per person, you should have X number of square meters or square feet.  

And I was like, and so in this, you should have three people as I. I have seven people in that amount at the moment in one of our rooms does that. So you’re telling me that’s not good. He’s like, that’s not all, it’s like, look, it’s not good or bad, but that’s not what you meant to have, like per person. This is like office average.  

So I was like, okay, we’re probably, I’m probably not doing the best with that. So we had heaps of people come on. But one of the things I didn’t focus on and is looking at how much profit we were retaining, how much cashflow we had, like, uh, coming through going basis and building up reserves in case things happen.  

But then also reserves for my tax liabilities. We have goods and GST goods and services tax CEO that we need to have, and we have to pay off every quarter. So I kept having these things and I was like, we’re making money, but then they get to the point where then we have our taxes. Jew. And then it brings us down and, and GST Jew, and then it brings us back down to like starting scratch again.  

And then we build up again and then all comes down and like, well, I’m not really also looking at the efficiency of staff I have on when I saw it all deciding up, um, your clients and then straight away I’d bring on new people to help kind of fulfill. So I was like, just bring in everyone at the same time.  

And I was like, well, actually I need to look at the efficiency, the, um, so our churn rate of clients and everything like this. And it’s like, I was just on a high, like my head in the clouds going, yeah, well taken off on rocket ship as opposed to going. Hm. Does a rocket have fuel? Does a rocket have this?  

You know, I’ve gotta make sure that I have all these things as opposed to just getting too high and elevated and focusing on the big stuff, which is good. And you need to do as a business owner and entrepreneur, but then also going actually. If I, and again, if I don’t have the right understand any of these things, I need to ask for help, I got painting in accounts and every month, and I was like, cool.  

As soon as I realized that I went to him and said, tell me exactly what I need to do from my financial standpoint. It’s like, cool. You’re going to reduce your overheads by this. Your staff percentage of your income is too high. On average your industry. It should be around this percentage. So you either need to reduce that you may need to fire some people, or you need to bring in a new sales team on commissioner only that needs to then take you to this level.  

And I was like, okay, now I know what I need to do. What I’ve been doing wrong because my expenses are too high and it’s very easy. I’m like, Oh cool. We need this new thing. Great. By Infusionsoft by click funnels, do this. And it’s monthly recurring. I’m like paying like four or five grand a month recurring on just software.  

And I was like, I’m not even using it properly. I’m like, Let’s cancel all of those cool is the team that sort of settle things down like Michaline. After we did that at two of our biggest record months on our two biggest months, pretty much ever. And that was with less people and less overheads and better results all around and less stress for me.  

That’s for sure. Um, so yeah, that one was, but like I said, it’s still kind of amazed when I look at it, I’m like, I spent so much money that we could have anchored in it, but Hey, you know, it was a good learning lesson that’s for sure. Yeah. There you go. Well, cool. Well, um, let’s kind of jump into kind of one last personal question.  

Um, what do you do in your downtime? What do you do outside of work? Um, one of my favorite things to do is Brazilian jujitsu. So, um, I’m a huge fan of that. And, um, I’m actually working with, uh, our BJJ team. I’m helping them with their online marketing, which is even cooler cause I’m like, um, I really, really love it.  

So I get to help them out with, um, marketing as well. So that’s one of my fun things to do. And then literally I haven’t really done much of it this year. Which is kind of good, but I love traveling and exploring new places. But the last, like last year I went through, I went to like the U S free times, like I travel hate and, um, yeah, like I love to travel, but when I can explore places, so this year I’ve only been to one place, which was for my sister’s wedding, which is the melodize, which was great.  

Got to explore it. And then, um, yeah, in my spare time now it’s just, um, yeah, a bit of twice a week, I go to jujitsu and then, um, the other day, try and go to the gym and then play squash and. Tennis as well with my, my brother and cousin, depending on what the weather’s like at the time. Um, which is also a good fun.  

So it keeps me active, but it’s also a little, little funny competition. We have to say, who is that? Who’s the best in the family. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. You, I mean, I’ve always had an interest in getting into some sense, something like Brazilian Brazilian jujitsu, but I just haven’t made the jump yet. That’s so very cool.  

Well, uh, Kim, you’ve been, you’ve been a pleasure. I appreciate your time. Why don’t you put out your contact information? Um, share any information, give a little sales pitch. If you’d like to the listeners. Yeah. I mean, surely if you, if you guys listen to anything I said, and you can understand my accent and you like what I said, feel free to reach out.  

Um, as I say, we’re more than happy to have a chat, yoursocialvoice.com.au is our website. If you want to see what we do. And then the two other places that I would recommend if you’re just getting started and you want a lot of good free content hit our YouTube channel, yoursocialvoice, we put out two content pieces every single week form  

Online businesses to bricks and mortar businesses. And it works really. We cover a lot of stuff, anything that we haven’t covered for you that truly comment on any video and I’ll, I’ll make a video about it. And then I’m on Instagram from the connect with me personally, ask me any questions or you can follow me at real Kim Barrett.  

R E a L and Kim was a high, um, Hm. Who at rural Canberra. And I’m more than happy to go through anything. If you have any questions, you can send me a voice message on there, ask away. Um, I’ll always get back to you, maybe not immediately, but I’ll, I’ll always respond in some way, shape or form. I did check out your Instagram before we jumped on the call.  

And, um, I liked, I liked your quick little videos that you did on there with some marketing tips. Oh, thank you. Yeah, we, so we do those and they lead to our bigger YouTube videos as well. Well, all right. So last thing is we surprise our guests with a random question generator. So I’m gonna push a little button here.  

B boop random question generator. Yours is if you had to give yourself a new name. What name would you pick? Max power. You’ve thought about this one before. This is like, I remember watching an episode of the Simpsons when I was a little kid and then literally changed his name to max power. And I was like, what a cool name?  

It just sounds great. Awesome. All right, Kim Barrett, everybody. Yoursocialvoice.com.au. Thanks a lot, Kim. Thanks for having me.