Transcript
Jim: Hey, business-building warrior welcome to Silent Sales Machine Radio. This is your host, Jim. I’m honored to be behind the microphone again today. It’s just me. There actually was a Facebook live broadcast of this episode as well not too long ago. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes so you can go see what everyone was saying while I was doing this episode. I spent about ten minutes or so talking to everybody who showed up randomly on a Friday as I recorded it. You can see the whole thing by going to that link.
Today’s episode is the things that I think make this community special. Now, you may have some things that you’d add to the list or you may disagree with something that’s on my list. Jump into the conversation. Like I said, there’s a link. Come join us. We just spent about a week in Florida, our family, along with several other people from this community. The thing that I walked away from it was thinking there’s nothing like this anywhere else out there. There really isn’t. I’ve been doing the internet marketing thing for 20 years now. I’ve been in the internet business for a couple of decades. That’s been the full-time source of income for my family for coming up on 20 years before long. I’ve seen a lot of what’s out there at this point and there are some things that stand out in this community. You may not like all of these things. You may disagree with some of them. I think this is the heartbeat of what makes us different. If it resonates with you, then you really need to jump in with both feet and be part of what we’re doing around here.
Today’s episode is you need a community and here’s what makes this community special and different. If you’re not in a community yet, I’ve spent significant amount of time in past episodes and I’ll spend a little bit of time in this episode convincing you that you can’t do it alone. Every time I see someone thinking, oh, this is an internet business. I could just hit some buttons behind my keyboard by myself in my office and make a little money and then go do my life. No, it doesn’t work that way. You need relationships. You need community. I’m not going to spend a lot of time here because I’ve hit it so hard recently in other episodes. If I haven’t convinced you yet, maybe I won’t be able to. Here’s the best latest evidence. I’m talking to a good number of people now that have been around a while and they shrug the whole community and relationship thing off when we first started talking about it, they first heard of us. They just wanted the techniques and the strategies. They applied the techniques and the strategies maybe five years ago, ten years ago, and they’ve got a great business now.
They’re burnt out and they’re kind of lonely and they’re a little lost and they’re asking themselves questions like, what’s it all for really? That doesn’t happen to the people that have a community. That doesn’t happen to people who have a bigger why. Even if you have a family, you need people around you besides those people who live under the roof with you, you need people around you that understand the business. They’re doing it with you. They’re in the weeds with you that you can call. I’ve talked to so many people at our Tampa event, for example, they’ve organically formed masterminds and they meet together, once a week, once every other week, and they all get together, four, five, six people and they spur each other on. They tackle each other’s challenges together.
You hear them talk about those relationships and the business is almost a secondary thing. They’re talking about these relationships not as someone who’s helped them build a business but as a life that they’re involved in. Their spouse gets sick, they pray for each other. The kid gets married, they attend the wedding. It’s that kind of thing. They’re doing life together. I just love that about this community. That’s what you need and that’s what’s going to really keep you going. You need community.
Back to our topic today, as a reminder, you need community. I’ve made that point. Hopefully you believe that. What makes this community special? Should you be jumping in a little more with both feet? Here’s my top ten list. It’s not really in any particular order necessarily but I did give it a little bit of thought. We could kind of throw these out at any random order, though, and it would be just as effective, from my vantage point.
I wanted to start with this one. We teach strategies that work. Now, that may seem obvious but there’s a lot of communities out there where, if you dig deep, you’re not finding a whole lot of success stories, if there’s even a community at all. Remember I told you, one of the ways to evaluate any business opportunity on the internet is to say, hey, where do the people gather online who are doing this business the way you teach it? If you can’t surround yourself with those people and hang out with them and ask questions with transparent answers, that’s probably not a real good idea to be in that arena of business opportunity, at least not that particular course or expert because if they’re not transparent with, hey, here’s the people doing it and here’s what they have to say in an open arena – ideally, it’s free, like we do right here in the My Silent Team Facebook group. We’ll stick a link in the show notes, by the way, 65,000+ members hanging out from around the world 24 hours a day.
Just so you know, one of the things that makes that group really powerful, if you’ve never heard us talking about it before, is the fact that we put a lot of work, there’s dozens of moderators admin around the clock around the world keeping out the clowns and the spammers and the manipulators and the people – we’ve seen all those slick tricks trying to get in there and use our community as a platform to launch a tool or a course or an idea or a service. Until it’s vetted, you’re not going to get away with that in our group. You’re not going to get to spam your offer in front of our group until we know who you are and we like you and trust you and you’ve proven your stuff is legit. So that’s a pretty powerful community to be a part of. This first one, we really do a good job at. We teach strategies that work. We’re transparent in our community and sharing openly, the successes, the failures, the struggles. We’ve got coming up on, I think, about 1,000 success stories. I think I’m borrowing from one of my later points so I don’t want to talk about that too much. That’s just in our Facebook group. I’ll talk about that one in a few minutes.
We teach strategies that work. We don’t teach fluff. You’re not going to hear us promoting big launch after big launch after big launch. So many communities burn their followers out that way. We’ve been focused on the same few things for a very long time because these are the things that work. If something else works and our leadership team tries it and some others on our team try it and we have some proof, that’s why we call our conference proven. We teach proven strategies that are working for a lot of people. That’s when we’ll roll it out to everyone else. We teach stuff that works is number one.
Here’s a good point maybe to remind you of the two promises I’ve been making for – I think I first started saying this over 15 years ago – but we stick to it to this day. Anything that we’re teaching you to do, any of these business strategies that we teach, there’s two things you can expect. After it’s proven, of course, because that means several people have tried it and it’s working, that those two things are you’re not going to have to spend a whole lot of money to get it rocking. You don’t have to slide a pile of cash and hope it works. The other thing is there’s no big tech skills needed. There’s no big learning curve. You’re going to have to work. There’s a few things you need to learn, sure, but it’s not like learning a new computer programming language, that sort of thing. It’s never going to be highly technical complex. We teach strategies that work and it’s not complicated. We’ve been doing it a long time.
Number two, it’s bible-based. Now, I always feel the need to put the caveat out there. I don’t care what your worldview is. It really doesn’t matter to me what your religious background or affiliation is. We’ve got people from all walks of faith and people who claim to have no faith and people who claim to have a higher faith than what we’ll ever have. None of that bothers me. Everybody is welcome. I just like to use the bible as a tool for proven concepts in business. I shared this at the event in my opening remarks. I said the bible has twice as much to say about business and money as it does about love and prayer combined. Why does that matter? The bible is just an ancient book full of some stories. Why does that matter? There’s a longitudinal study of about 2,000+ years of people who have applied these concepts and they work. I’m not going to go off into those weeds right now but there’s signs and data and evidence to support what we’re saying when we say use the bible as a foundational book, as a foundational reference point for your business and you will benefit in a big way.
Even some of the little things we do differently around here, they’re based on biblical concepts. For example, I’ll give you one example off the top of my head, something you may have never noticed before. In our Facebook group, we have a rule. That rule is you confront privately, you praise publicly. That’s based on a biblical standard. If you’ve got something you want to say to somebody, you don’t confront them in front of 65,000 people if it’s negative or if it’s possibly going to put them on defense somehow. You say that. You send them a private message. You earn the right to speak to them and say, “Hey, I want to challenge you on something, if it’s okay. You may not want to hear my opinion.” You give them that opportunity to respond privately and then you hash it out. Then the two of you come forward hopefully and go, “Hey, you know what? We had a little disagreement. Here’s what he thought. Here’s what she thought. We’ve come to this conclusion together.”
That’s how adults conduct themselves. It may seem like common sense but you don’t have to go very far in Facebook to see people doing it very differently. I cringe. You don’t put people on defense publicly on the internet in front of thousands of people. That’s not good. The bible says, if you want to confront somebody, you do it privately. We’ve taken that simple strategy and we’ve said, hey, let’s apply it to our Facebook group. In big ways and in little ways, we’ve applied these biblical truths to our group.
Here’s the next one, number three – so we use biblical strategies. You’re going to see it everywhere. Hopefully that resonates with you. Number three, we produce leaders. We’ve been doing this long enough now that the track record speaks for itself. We’ve seen easily dozens and dozens of people go on to do incredible things, write books, create courses, grow communities, launch brands that are global. We’ve been producing leaders for a long time now. I think one of the reasons that we’re so good at that is because literally every person on the leadership team around here has an openhanded approach to leadership, meaning they don’t have to be the person in the spotlight. I think that shows through. We want others in the spotlight.
One of the things I said in the event that just wrapped up in Tampa was, “Hey, we want you to be on stage next year.” A whole new wave of leaders coming through constantly, that’s the dream. That’s the vision. Now, I don’t want you to necessarily going off and doing your own thing and leaving us behind. We’d love for you to still be a part of what we’re doing, but if God calls you elsewhere or opportunity pulls you into another arena, but you’re more equipped as a leader now as a result of the time you spent with us, that would be fantastic to see and we applaud you and we cheer you on. If I were to start giving you the names of the people who have come through and then gone on and done incredible things, it’s a lot of the leading thought leaders in the Amazon training space have started out in this community, gone on and they’re either leaders in our community now or they’re leaders of their own communities or other places. We love that. We love producing leaders. That is the third one that we’re talking about.
Next, we pray for each other, unapologetically. You’ll see a lot of people in our group talking to each other building relationships. I say often to you, hey, I’m praying for you, business-building warrior. We’re in your corner. I mean that sincerely. We pray for our leadership style, for what we’re teaching, for how it’s delivered to you. We pray for success in your business. We’re praying sometimes often, if your kid’s sick or you’ve got a family challenge, there’s people around here who really care, we get into the weeds with you. It’s not just business content. It’s, hey, we’re praying for you. We care. We’re here. It really starts to feel like family if you’re around for a while, and we mean that. We’re very genuine about these things.
That leads me to my next one, number four, it’s about so much more than just money around here. Now, absolutely, this is a business community. We want to see your business succeeding and growing. We want to teach world class content. It’s not just about the money, meaning we want to help you establish better family relationships. We want to see your marriage improve. We want to see your relationship with your kids improve. It’s about all those other things, not just strategy. Now, if we’re going to be true to our charter, that is, hey, we’re going to have world class business content, but behind that is always going to be, and this goes back to being bible-based, if you’re just trying to make money, you’re going to flounder and you’re going to find it very empty once you achieve your goal. What’s really important in life? We spend time discussing those kinds of things. We pray for each other. It’s about more than just money. It’s about family and so many other things, too.
We talked about that one. Moving on to, oh, we don’t see each other as competitors. I think that’s really cool. There’s a lot of communities out there where, once you join that community, you wonder who’s going to stab you in the back and who’s looking to get one over on you. We don’t see each other as competitors here. We’re very open handed. We share what we know. We share openly. We’re rooting for each other.
Next, number seven, we’re newbie friendly. What’s that mean? You’re going to find a lot of new people at all of our events, in our Facebook page. Again, I think this is where our community is a little different from some others. I’ve heard from many people who are new to selling online who are trying to build a business. They say, “Hey, when I was new, I kind of felt belittled. People actually told me I was asking stupid questions. We’ve answered that question 100 times before. Don’t come in here with all that stuff. Use Google.” We don’t do that here. We want to encourage new sellers. We want to support new sellers. We want those of you who are brand new to the business to feel welcomed, to feel embraced.
Yes, the questions you’re going to ask, the first 50 questions you ask, I promise we’ve answered them all thousands of times before, but that’s okay. We’re here for that because we know that people like you, the brand-new people who maybe don’t know what they’re doing yet, are six months from now some of the most exciting success stories that challenge and motivate all of us. We’re here for you. We spend some time. We invest. I pay people to answer those boring same old questions over and over and over again every day. If you scroll around a little bit and you do a little bit of searching, you can probably find the answer to those questions. Even if you don’t, that’s okay. We love you. You don’t have to do hours and hours and hours of work to earn the right to ask your questions in our group. We want you to step right in and ask those questions. I promise you we’ve got great answers to all of them because we’ve helped thousands of people build great businesses and they’ve come in with the same set of uncertainties that you do. We’re here and I love how we embrace the new sellers. We’re newbie friendly. That’s the next one.
Next, number eight, I mentioned this earlier. I don’t know if this is number eight. I don’t know where we are on the list exactly. I didn’t do a great job of keeping track but it is a top ten list for those of you who really want to take notes and see how this whole thing went down. It is a top ten list. Success stories are everywhere. I don’t think I’ve seen anything else like this out there. I’ve never noticed it. Just the ratio of people who come in, who do what we tell them, and then go on to succeed. We’ve got just in our Facebook group, this isn’t through – we haven’t always had a Facebook group. We’ve had 7,000 coaching students over the years and Facebook group, we’ve had it for a while but not since the beginning. Just the thousands and thousands of success stories in our Facebook group alone, which is free, you can go scroll through, you can use the topic tags, the success topic tags. There’s one for coaching and there’s one for general success stories.
Constantly people posting the results, pictures from their cellphones of the chart, of the numbers, of their sales. Inevitably, it cracks me up every single time someone posts one of those, someone else would come along and say, “Well, why don’t you ever post the margins and the returns on investment? No one ever posts that. You only post the sales data.” Actually, that’s not true. Someone says that every time and then we post the sales data, the facts, the margin, the return on investment, that’s posted pretty quick on 95% of those posts, the person who posts it comes back in if they don’t include it immediately. They’re happy to share it. I mean, on average, it’s around, on the low end 20%, on the high end 40% margins, something like that. Then you’ve got expenses and maybe you bought a brand new $2,500 computer this month, that’s going to affect your margins for that month, but overall, in general, we’re teaching people how to sell things at a profit and you’re making around 20% to 40% margin, around 40% or better ROI, up to 100% or 200% ROI. That’s the strategies we teach.
This group is growth oriented, meaning, and this kind of goes along with the last one, we’re newbie friendly, we’re growth oriented. We want the group to be bigger. Now, if you want to form a small little mastermind and share your secrets and not tell them to other people, that’s fine, tweak each other’s businesses, share product ideas and stuff that you don’t necessarily want out there in the public. None of us are going to say, “Hey, here’s my entire product list. Here’s everything I sell, exactly what I sell it for. Here’s where I find it. Here’s my supplier’s name. Please, come compete with me.” We’re not talking about that, obviously, because on Amazon, having your unique sources and strategies, that matters, but it’s about relationships at that point. I would argue even for most of us because of the relationships we have, you’d have a really hard time duplicating our product lists, even if you saw them.
Actually, like Rich and Shelly Potter, for example, one of the offers we have right now, they’re highly successful, multiple seven-figure, got a great team, they’re having people come out to the warehouse, look at all their products, look at all their ASINs, look at everything they do, open book, in the interest of teaching you how to do it. You can look at their stuff and you can try to compete with them, I suppose, but good luck, because they’ve got the relationships. They’ve got a lot of that locked in. They’ve got their sources and their products all locked in, and it’s not private label, either. I’m talking Replens and wholesale. Great offer. We’ll stick a link to that in the show notes, too, by the way, if you’re interested in that. You actually go, it’s near Phoenix, Arizona, and you sit in and you just dive deep into their seven-figure business with their team and ask them all the questions you have. They did a great job presenting at our conference, by the way. A couple of new speakers this year. We’ve never had them speak before, but they’ve got an awesome offer put together.
Let’s see. Have I missed anything on my list? Ten, yes, we’re an innovation incubator is my number ten reason why this community is so different and special from what else I see out there, an innovation incubator, if that makes sense. That means there’s always room for more leaders. There’s always room for new good ideas. We’ve left plenty of room on the stage for new leaders to emerge, for people to come out. At this event, we had a handful of people. They’ve never presented in front of a group before, but it went phenomenally, not because they’re just some random person that our conference committee happened to like. No, these are people who started out in our community, they grew a business, they stubbed their toe, bonked their head a few times, and now they’re building something special. They have a unique strategy to share. They’re succeeding in an interesting way that we’ve never heard before or combining two different strategies together in some way that was of interest and we put them on stage. Not professional speakers but there’s room there.
What does the future hold for these people as they’ve now stepped out? Because remember, you’ve heard me talk before about the path of leadership as your business grows. It’s a leadership journey, meaning you’re going to be creating content. You’re going to be speaking. You’re going to be stretching yourself, perhaps uncomfortably so, getting out in front of people more. That’s the journey. Growth and business always involves those things. The next step in your leadership journey, in your business growth journey involves getting in front of people, speaking, speaking more fluently perhaps, learning to be comfortable with a microphone in your face and a bright light in your face and talking to people. Those are skills that you’re going to need to acquire over time for your business to be all that it could or should be. That, by the way, is a biblical principle. Not going to go into how or where I got that necessarily right now but 100% could back that up and show it. Success never involves you getting quieter into a darker and darker corner avoiding people. It’s the opposite. It involves you getting out there in front of people in increasingly uncomfortable ways. That’s the success journey and it’s the same for all of us.
That’s my list. Hopefully, that resonated with you. If I left anything off, again, I’m going to have a link to the discussion that was in our Facebook group for this episode. It was fun doing this. I’ve only done this a couple of times. We’ve got over 370 episodes or something like that at this point, and only two or three occasions have I done an episode where I went live in front of the group. This was really fun. I enjoyed it and I enjoyed getting some feedback from everybody who was hanging out with us today.
God bless all the business-building warriors who are out there who are hanging out in our community, especially enjoyed seeing and meeting so many great people at our event in Tampa that just wrapped up. Remember, the videos from that event, it’s a couple dozen great sessions, cutting edge, phenomenal content. Plenty of stuff for newbies but I had a good number of people come up to me today as well – not today but this week, a few days ago and saying things like, hey, thanks for putting so much out there for those of us who have been around a while. Those were some really advanced techniques and strategies at this event so we had a little bit, or a lot, for everyone. I think we really did a good job of spreading the content around. Next time we do a live event you’re going to want to be there. If you weren’t at this one, we got the videos for you. We’ve got a great deal at theprovenconference.com. If the deal isn’t there yet, it will be very soon. You could snag those videos at a steal compared to the people that came in from all over the place and spent a few $1,000 in flight and airfare and registration. Get the content and benefit from it and then be there next time.
We’re in your corner. God bless you, business-building warrior. I love doing these podcast episodes. If you’ve got a story that you want to share, we’d love to hear it. We’d love to get you on the show if you’ve come up through our community and succeeded in some creative way or even if you’re just getting your feet under you and you’re excited about what you’re learning shoot me an email, [email protected]. We’ll get you on the show, love to hear your story. We’ve got many great episodes lined up as a result, by the way, from the most recent event because I told people a few times, “Hey, I want you on the podcast.” We’ve got some great people coming up in the coming weeks and months. We’ll do this again real soon. Thanks for hanging out with me. We’ll talk to you then.
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