John (00:00): On chance with Duct Tape Marketing. Thanks for joining me. Today. We're going to talk about, as the slide says there, how to grow a highly profitable fractional C M O practice. So hopefully that's what we're expecting to hear today. I'm going to go for 30 or 40 minutes and then I will stick around to answer questions if people have it. A bunch of you're logged in today. I always love to start with where you're calling in from. I tell you what, we'll leave an add a dynamic, where are you calling in from and what's the weather like today? Put that in the chat and we'll get a little sense of who's here and where you are and what kind of weather you're experiencing today. Arizona, Chicago, rainy Denver, New Jersey. Rainy. It looks like there's a lot of rain around the country. Puerto Rico, it's going too fast.

(00:50): Sweden, Ohio. Connecticut, New Zealand. Oh, must be late Chicago. Wow, it's going too fast. Well, I'm in the mountains west of Golden and it's probably 70 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny today. Zero humidity. It's absolutely beautiful. South Africa, Detroit, Los Angeles, Croatia, as always, a very international audience. So thanks for playing along. I'll ask you to drop in there to chat. Vancouver's rainy house, sitting in Golden next week. Well good. We'll keep the weather good for you then. Alright, so let's jump into the content. I appreciate you playing along and hopefully there'll be a couple more times. I'll ask you to jump into chat as well. So now you know how to do it. Alright, so here's what I'm going to do. Today's training for the next 40 minutes. I hope you hold me to this, but I'm going to try to show you an approach. I am going to show you an approach that I believe could be worth at a minimum $50,000 or more in revenue over the next six months. So if I was able to accomplish that, would that be, I guess put a one in for yes or a yes or a no? Does that sound interesting? Put a yes in, if that sounds interesting. If no, well then maybe you can get off now because that's what I'm going to spend time doing. So awesome. Bunch of yeses of courses. Yeah, I know that was an obvious one, right? Alright, here we go.

(02:24): Here's the road I'm really going to cover. I'm going to show you how a repeatable system, I think is the fastest way to make your business scalable and profitable. How to attract and close only ideal clients and how to create long-term recurring revenue with what I call a retainer roadmap. All right, so here we go. Little about me first and my discovery story. I'm not going to tell you my history from the second grade on or anything, but I started my

(02:58): Agency about 30 years ago, and quite frankly, I say agency loosely. I basically jumped out of corporate ad agency world and decided to start my own thing. No plan whatsoever. I knew I could hustle work and that's what I did. I got some big clients, I got some small clients, I got some big projects, some little projects, but I pretty quickly found out that it felt like I was spinning my wheels. I was working harder. I found that I loved working with small business owners, but they were really frustrating because I couldn't work with them the same way I'd seen in the big agency. And so literally one day it felt like I just decided I was going to make a change. I was going to complete the next person that wanted to talk to me. I was going to completely change my story. I wasn't going to be, Hey, we do marketing, what do you need?

(03:54): I went in and said, I am a fractional C M O. I start with strategy before tactics. Here's what I'm going to do. Here's what you're going to do. Here are the results we hope to get. And by the way, here's what it costs. I basically created a package that had in my view, the right message to solve a very specific problem in a very specific way for a very specific company. And to my delight about the first three or four people I said that to, they said, where have you been? That was actually addressing a frustration that they'd had because somebody who's going to come in and do strategy before tactics install a system was music to their ears. So I got clients, I got busier and busier, which created another problem because I really wasn't making what I needed to make to be that bus.

(04:47): So I, yeah, I got busier, but I was kind of spinning my wheels. I was attracting people with the right message, but I wasn't charging enough. And so the second lesson was I needed to charge a lot more for what I was doing. And what I found was that I maybe initially increased it a little bit and then I doubled it and then I tripled it and eventually I quadrupled what I was actually asking for this service. And so I was now attracting the right client. I was getting paid a margin that allowed me to make a very profitable amount on implementation, but it was also allowing me to now start thinking about delegating the work and hiring people to do the work. And so I did, and what I found was I was again, making less and working more because in many cases we'd get a new client and make it up.

(05:44): We certainly had a promise and we charged 'em a price and told 'em what we were going to do for them, but it felt like we were making it up with every new client. So that's when I developed the real key last piece, and that is how we're going to fulfill with a system. So if you think about it, any of you that are out there thinking about being a million dollar business, you have to have the ability just to be close to a million dollars in revenue. You have to have the ability to fulfill a hundred to $250,000 a month of recurring revenue. And as nice as that million dollar business sounds, that's harder than it sounds. And so without creating, or when I did create a repeatable system that I could teach aspects of to others, it no longer was dependent on me doing all the work and the work getting done brilliantly.

(06:34): So we actually we're delivering now with this kind of sweet spot of right package, right price fulfillment system, we're actually not only making more, we were delivering far better results to our clients. And that's really the key to the entire repeatable system than I'm going to outline today. So I mentioned that we positioned ourselves as a fractional C M O. So let's start with the definition of, it's pretty obvious. I think it is a marketing strategist primarily that's the implication brought into an organization part-time to help orchestrate all of their marketing starting with strategy. So I'm curious, I think that over the years I've called myself an agency. I've called myself a consultant. I've called myself a fractional C M O. There are people out there calling themselves marketing coaches, and I think the terminology has become very muddled and there's a lot of blurring the lines of what each of these does. I'm curious, those of you on here that have a business established business already or are thinking about establishment one, I wonder if you'd put in the chat, how do you think of yourself or how do you characterize what you are? Are you an agency? Are you a consultant? Are you a fractional C M O? Are you a strategist? Are you a coach? I'm curious what terminology you are finding you've either chosen or you're finding really resonates with the people you're trying to attract.

(08:09): Yeah, agency, agency, consultant agency. But it's just me, consultant, creative agency, agency, all of the above. Advisor, fractional C M O with agency backing, right? So just in this small little sample here, you see the different terminology that's out there. So imagine to some degree how confused the market is, I suppose out there. But I will say this that I think that there is a major shift going on in the market and why I think now really is the perfect time to be adopting the fractional C M O positioning. Frankly, I say I've been doing it for 15 years, but I didn't use that terminology 15 years ago because it just didn't mean anything to the small business owner. I mean, it's essentially what I've done all these years, but I think there's a major shift that's going on. First off the whole fractional category of business, fractional just about everything can be acquired now or somebody's doing now.

(09:15): And so I think there's a lot of recognition of what that concept means and the success of that concept. But I also think that we had a little thing happen a couple years ago, some of you might recall, 20 20, 20 21, a lot of businesses got caught with a harsh realization that they had no strategy. And so the idea that they needed to change their business, pivot the way they did business was not just a reaction to the fact that the world had changed, but it was really more of a realization that that strategy is rather than tactics, or at least before tactics I should say, is so crucial that there's this kind of marrying now of a whole lot of people in the agency world saying, you know what? We have to lead with strategy. And a lot of businesses who are saying, yes, I want that, I will pay for that. I'll invest in that.

(10:14): One of the challenges that I've found with people that aren't really leading with strategy is that this is really what a business needs out of marketing. Whoever they work with in marketing, they need strategic planning, they need brand management, they need marketing campaigns. They need somebody who's going to analyze the data and adjust, obviously manage budget, even manage a team, whether that's orchestrating internal or external resources. But here's the problem with most marketing agency approaches, most consultant approaches is this is what they're getting. They're getting marketing campaigns, or at least they think that's what they need to move the needle when in fact they need all of this. They need a fractional C M O and an implementation team. That combination of small to mid side businesses now realize that they have to work from, and I don't know any of you that are out there selling packages of tactics, but increasingly tactics being seen as a vendor is an absolute race to the bottom.

(11:20): There are people that ai, of course, I'm 10 minutes in to our presentation here and finally mentioned ai. AI is driving the price down or at least the perception of what can be done for free or next to free. You can get WordPress websites designed for $500. Now we can argue all day long whether or not they have any value, but as long as people are out there selling those tactics, the price or the pressure on price is just going to continue. We have to get out of selling tactics. That's just all there is to it. They need the tactics, but we have to sell them strategy first. Here's why the model works financially, the fractional cmmo model works. The average salary of a chief marketing officer is 2 0 8 to 3 75. I mean that's from salary.com plus then the implementation, right? You're not going to hire a M O and say, go write that email copy, right? I mean, that's not part of the job. So why the financial piece works so well for business owners is because the average fractional C M O costs about $60,000 a year, plus they have the flexibility to bring an implementation team kind of on demand as needed. You don't have a person sitting in this seat and a person sitting in this seat all day long. It's all on demand.

(12:40): So let me ask you a quick question. If you had a proven system, and we can go ahead and in fact, I'm curious, throw a number in here. If you had a proven system, like what I've started to reveal here, you don't know everything yet. I mean, could you land one client per month? So put yes or no, maybe, I don't know, put five, what would your answer be? Some pretty strong yeses right out of the gate. Yes, delegation resources. Absolutely. Hey, Phil, I would be poor. One would be poor. Yes. Not sure. That's why I'm here. Awesome. Yes. Okay, so it doesn't sound that daunting, but if you start doing the math, and this is just math taking from our network, the folks that I've licensed this system to, the average retainer in our network is $5,000 a month. So just starting to do the math.

(13:41): Then over a course of a year, if you had two clients at $5,000 a month, it adds up to X revenue, four x revenue, six x revenue, right? Pretty, pretty simple math, not getting really exotic here. For some of you on here, one client a month didn't seem like a real stretch. So obviously I think you believe or you're confident that this is certainly achievable. But here's one of the challenges with the fractional C M O model that I see a lot of people practicing, and I think that's talked about a great deal out there is that what they really are doing is selling their time. They're basically working for maybe four clients a fourth of their time without any scope necessarily. It's basically just, yeah, I'm going to come and be your fractional C M O and we'll see what you need and I'll adjust to what you need and I'll meet with your team here and I'll do, they're essentially being paid for their time.

(14:36): Now, in some cases, you can be paid pretty well for your time, but it's not a business that will scale under that traditional model. Now, in our network, we teach people how to be fractional CMOs in a way that they can actually scale. The average licensee in our system manages 10 to 13 clients at a time. The average retention, and again, I'll get to why this is, but the average retention in our network is 19 months. So just quick math, that's how you get to seven figures with your agency. Now, you may want to go way beyond that, and that's certainly a possibility as well. We have people that are way beyond that, but that's the math that gets you to that kind of mythical seven figure agency, and it's doable using this model because we've found a way to scale it. So I'm going to spend a little time talking about just how you create your own fractional C M O system.

(15:34): So one of the things that I set out to try to solve was the traditional project-based, agency-based path, and that is today we all put out free content leads to a sales meeting. Hopefully they ask for a proposal, then three weeks later they respond to the proposal and you get a project and then maybe you do the work for a while and start over again. And this was really what I did in the beginning, but this was actually the thing I was trying to solve for because I couldn't figure out how to make this work not be profitable and not work the way I wanted to work. So the system that I created, this fractional C M O system as we're calling it, I mean we certainly have to generate leads. We actually move people to a strategy session. It's not a sales meeting necessarily at all.

(16:20): It's not a what do you need? We will write a proposal. We run them through something we call the marketing hourglass, which I'll reveal in a minute here. But it is essentially our customer journey. And what it does is it immediately reveals to them all the gaps that they have in their marketing. But our whole goal in that strategy session is to sell them into something we call strategy first. It is an absolute productized approach to creating a potent strategy for a small to mid-sized business that takes us about 60 days to do it. Nobody passes go. We don't take on a website or we don't take on this project or that project. They go through strategy first. 100% of those folks just using the last few years data, 100% of the folks that go through strategy first then want a long-term retainer because we deliver so much value in that initial engagement.

(17:16): They have the trust there that has them wanting to then buy the tactics essentially from us. But here's a couple things that happen in this approach. First off, we're attracting the right client. I mean, somebody who gets the marketing's an investment, it's a long-term gain. They're going to sit still for doing this hard work on the front end because they know that it's not just a quick fix. So we're attracting the right client. The other thing that happens immediately by running somebody, but through this process, a process that quite frankly very few marketers are even about, we establish ourselves as a trusted advisor from day one as opposed to a vendor who's just doing some tactics. And so what that leads to then is a long-term retainer where we can charge far more for the same tactics that people are selling as vendors. There's really almost no question about what we're going to do next and how much it's going to cost and how many hours it is. Literally, I trust you, you're in charge. Orchestrate my marketing for me changes the game entirely.

(18:26): Alright, so let's go through the steps here. Got to demonstrate value with useful content. I think that that's just the game that we're playing today. Obviously referrals, networking, those are certainly ways to get people on your radar as well. Frankly, for a high ticket sales, which basically strategy and retainer is a high level of trust has to be established. We do it through tons and tons of content in the form of teaching and education and webinars like this. We do it in the form of tools and checklists and all the things that we know people are looking forward to capture leads.

(19:09): So then as I started to mention, we show what it's like to work with us, and that's what you have to do. Don't think in terms of your meeting with a prospect as a sales meeting, think of it as a way to demonstrate how much value you could bring to them. We use a tool we call the marketing hourglass, and I'll just go over this pretty quickly. This is a framework that is probably the most important thing I've ever developed. What our belief is, is there are behaviors that people want to go through with the businesses that they do business with. And that does not stop once somebody says, yeah, I want to buy. So often the traditional marketing funnel, that's really where it ends. The idea behind the hourglass is it borrows from the shape of the funnel, but then it turns the funnel over and says, Hey, after somebody, or when somebody's becoming a client, that's the most important place to start building your business with repeat business and referral business.

(20:06): And so we literally walk somebody through these seven stages. And the idea behind this is that we want to look at what does their journey look like today? First off, they're hearing the term marketing or customer journey, but they're not really sure what it is. There's a lot of confusion about what it is. And so when we actually lay this out to them and say, look, here are the seven stages. What are you doing in each of these stages? What it pretty quickly reveals is that they have major gaps and those gaps are something they want to solve. They start on. I think it's, instead of talking about strategy all the time, which for many people is a little bit vague and misleading, what it actually means, we're actually revealing gaps and pain that they have in their marketing. And using the tools that we've developed, we're able to pretty quickly write up what looks like a plan for them of, well, here are all the things we could do.

(21:02): So they immediately start thinking about how do we fill these gaps? So I won't go over each of these one by one, but the game is what are you doing to get people to know you? Okay, once they know about you, what's the next thing they're going to do? What's the first impression? Elements that are going to say, yeah, I want to go farther. And then obviously trust. I mean, trust is such a huge thing today. In fact, it's probably the biggest piece of the puzzle today, but what are people doing to intentionally build or demonstrate or communicate trust? And then the bridge to long-term success as far as I'm concerned, is how are people trying you? How are they experiencing you? And that can be low cost trials, but it also can be some sort of evaluation meeting. I mean, those are all trials.

(21:50): And then of course nobody thinks, I mean, everybody gets up to where they get the order and then they stop thinking about that being marketing anymore. But how the transaction goes, the onboarding, the orientation, on and on is a big part of whether or not somebody's going to actually buy again or whether or not they're going to tell their friends and colleagues. So when we get to this slide, they're like, we have none of this. You ended the conversation at buy. In fact, most people have you come to know about us, then we'll try to sell you something. I mean, that's pretty much their customer journey. So when they start seeing the various elements that are involved in all of these to make intentional handoffs and to make these intentionally great experiences, the question they're left with is this, what would it take to build this?

(22:39): And that is an invitation then to sell them the strategy engagement because you've demonstrated so much more value than the typical person trying to sell them whatever the tactic of the week is that they want to proceed with you, and they're very open to an approach that involves strategy. So that's really the second piece for us. We've done that discovery meeting, now we're going to sell them into a 30 to 60 day strategy engagement and frankly hook 'em for life because that's what it really has. The impact of doing the longest running client I have currently, we have as a firm currently, and we started with in 2004, and it is rare for us to be anywhere under a couple of years with any of the clients that we're working with. When I say strategy first for us, that's not a concept. That is a productized approach, step-by-step approach that has been now delivered and installed several thousand times over the years.

(23:38): And it is everything from the intake form all the way through the final delivery of it is completely. Now that doesn't mean there aren't some variances in businesses, but let's face it, 80% of small and mid-sized businesses need 80% of the same thing. That's not the same as saying cookie cutter. What I'm saying is we've created a framework and a system that can actually get at the heart of what their marketing strategy is and should be because we're using proven processes that we can teach to people who don't even have to be that experienced in marketing to be able to run those processes. 100% of the people that go through strategy first with us move to a long-term retainer because we end strategy first by showing them what the next 6, 8, 12 months might look like. And nobody's ever done that before. Everybody comes to them and says, here's the things we're going to fix.

(24:36): We come to them and say, here's the things that need to be fixed, but here's where we're headed. Here's where we're going. And they want that future. They can't help not buy that future, and they've already paid us a pretty significant amount of money to develop strategy. So they're open to a pretty significant long-term retainer monthly fee. So here's the math from a finance standpoint on how we do it at least obviously free content, free strategy session. We sell strategy first anywhere from 7,500 to $15,000. We then move, as I said, almost a hundred percent of the folks into a long-term retainer at five to $10,000 a month.

(25:20): We've also built, because a lot of people are out there selling implementation packages, but they're really just a series of tactics that go on forever. And what we've realized is that most of the businesses come to us in a certain stage. We develop the strategy, but we also realize that there are seven key elements or channels that we know that we're going to work in, but those channels are going to evolve as we move people out of the foundational stage to the next stage, to the next stage. And so we've built a system really for implementation that goes around that with, and these are just screenshots of tools that we use, but certainly all the milestones and action steps that have to happen in order to move people to the next stage is part of the system that we've built. So another question, time.

(26:18): You could build this yourself only took us 20 years, but you could build every piece of this, or would you like to know how you might be able to acquire this? So I'll put that question to the group again. Yes, I would like to know how I could acquire this. No, I don't really want to know. I want to build it myself. Sounds fun. Getting yeses, yeses, yeses. Take my money. Thank you. Yes, for sure. I don't have 20 years. Yeah, exactly. And the thing about the 20 years is it didn't take 20 years. We've just perfected it over 20 years is how I like to characterize it, because all the input of the people that we've trained on this, all the clients that we've run this through, has really made it evolve into something that is rock solid. All right, so I'm going to tell you how you can license our fractional C M O system.

(27:25): Give us 90 days, and I think we can show you how to master and use the very system we've used. Now we have testimonial after testimonial of businesses, agencies, consultants, where we've doubled and tripled their business hundreds of times. There are about well over 400 agencies, consultants, coaches that we've licensed this system to. We actually have a network also in addition to the licensing. We actually have a network of about a hundred agencies that collaborate and really support each other as well as part of this. The way that you license our program, we do it through a certification training. Our next one is a three-day training, October 10th through the 12th. We do them like this over Zoom. They are small cohorts. We do 10 to 12 business owners or agencies at any one time. We really don't want it to get much bigger than that because we'll just do more of them.

(28:22): We'll do 'em more often if demand is there. But we want to keep those small intimate because we've just seen, and I don't know if you've ever joined a program, there was a hundred people in the program. It's very hard to give personalized attention or to really feel like you're a part of a group that that's big. So we definitely like to keep them small. During those three days, we're going to show you how to attract, convert, and fulfill on this thing we call strategy first. Now, you will get a lifetime license as part of this certification to use all of our tools, all of the content and the processes as well as strategy first. As part of it, you'll get access to our Duct Tape University, which is years and years of training, and you'll also get access to a strategic partner network that we have built.

(29:14): So some of you are probably thinking, oh, this is great. I really want to do strategy, but how do I get all the implementation done? We have built a group of web designers of content folks, ss, e o folks, paid ad folks, and they're all part of our strategic partner network. They've all been vetted and work with many of the consultants that license our system, and you'll get lifetime access to that group as well. So you're going to get our fractional C M O and implementation path. You're going to get the ability to sell and install for a lifetime. This thing we call strategy first, you're going to get actually access to tons and tons of content that you can use in your lead generation. All the tools, checklists, hundreds and hundreds of resources that you'll gain access to are proprietary tools like the marketing Hourglass that I revealed already, strategy first, all the training for how to deliver it, how to fulfill on it, how to really give a client value, everything from intake to final delivery where you then upsell them to the long-term retainer, the complete implementation system built around our strategy first approach, all the tools and templates.

(30:33): We use a community tool called Circle, and all the tools and templates, all the processes, all the training that we do in the live session also exists here for you to consume over and over and over again. Also to bring your team members into consume as well mentioned the Strategic Partner program. We're always adding content folks, design folks, ss, e o folks. And these aren't just vetted. They're working at any given time with 10 or 12 or 20 agencies in our network. So we keep really great tabs on them, but they also are, they understand our approach, our strategy first approach. So working with them is much easier because they kind of get what you're trying to get at. You're not having to train them every single time you try to work with a new partner. So I'm going to invite you now to think about investing in yourself.

(31:30): There is an investment in our program, but I think that, again, as I said, I believe that it's truly an investment in yourself to consider this kind of program because of what we've seen over the years, it has meant for so many of the agencies that we have worked with. So I made this promise at the beginning to show you, I don't know how long, if we took 40 minutes, we took 34 minutes to show you an approach that I think would be worth. I know for a fact, and I'm actually short selling this could be worth every bit of $50,000 in revenue or more over the next six months. So hopefully I have actually made that point that you're assessing this and looking, yeah, if this could work for me, this would be worth every bit of that. I will tell you right now, the investment to license our program and join our network is nowhere near that amount. So if you have come to the co conclusion, and hopefully some of you have, in fact, maybe you could put in there yes, if you believe that I've shown you something that could worth that. I don't promise that it is to anybody, but I've certainly seen it. So I would love a yes, a one, however you want to put that in there if you think that that's a possibility for you.

(32:54): So I'll throw it to you. It's really your turn. If what we shared today piqued your interest, I'd love for you to schedule a meeting and assessment with one of our advisors. There's a link on the screen and we'll put it in chat as well. DTM world slash chat. During that call, your advisor will really, it's really an application process. We want this to be a mutual fit. I'm not going to reveal the price today because the price depends on several factors. As I said, this is an application process so that we make sure this is a mutual fit. Your advisor will work with you on your budget, on your objectives, and really present a couple options for ways that you could make this program or invest in this program and bring it into whatever your goals and objectives are for your business. So I really invite you, we have the next training is October 10th through the 12th, so not very far away.

(33:58): We have folks standing by right now. We have about 20 slots that you can meet with advisors. It's just pure math in terms of how many time slots that'll be available. So if you're interested at all, grab those spots today. We actually only have about five businesses left for the October. I mean, that can join us for the October. We do these frequently. We'll be doing another one in December as well. But if you want to get started now, I will give you the heads up that we're almost full. We keep these intentionally small. We could obviously open up more slots and sell more, but we've just found that this is the perfect way to deliver 10 to 12 businesses at a time. If you have a team member that you want to bring, we will allow you to do that, and you can discuss that with your advisor, how you could actually do. We have, I think in the past done where three team members on a team would join the training. So those are all options.