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UPCOMING CERTIFICATION INTENSIVE TRAINING: December 12-14, 2023
Your Questions Answered
Having a marketing background is not a requirement. There is no question that having the experience and that bank of knowledge will help. But we have worked with many people new to marketing who have committed to the necessary learning, licensed this system, and seen tremendous success.
Absolutely. We will show you how to attract strategic clients and then convert them through a strategic discovery meeting. We also have a 12-week blueprint for you to follow after the 3 day training that is geared towards getting you those first 1-2 clients using this system.
Absolutely not. We have built a repeatable system that will give you a lot of the background a CMO would typically bring to the table. In essence, by licensing this system, you would be able to bring small to mid-size organizations a CMO function with strategy at the helm and then have someone help orchestrate the integration. And that doesn't require having been that traditional CMO role at all.
It varies. We have individual operators who handle 4 - 6 clients, finding satisfaction and substantial income in this approach. We also have larger entities that can manage anywhere from 20-30 clients with internal teams of about 6-10 people and also outsource certain tasks.
We maintain a hands-off approach when it comes to your business operations. Our role is primarily to provide education and grant you the license to market this method. We offer tools, training, and opportunities for expansion and networking if you're interested. However, it's ultimately your agency, and we're simply here to assist in its growth and success.
Yes. We have several options that your advisor can review with you during your Discovery Call. Book your call here to learn more.
Yes. You will participate in monthly masterminds, quarterly planning meetings, and mini-dive training on various marketing strategy topics. You will also join our Fractional CMO Circle community with great opportunities to network and ask questions. We do also offer 1:1 paid consulting.
We have hand-selected and vetted 3rd party providers for things like web design, content, SEO, and paid ads. These partners not only do great work, they know the Duct Tape Marketing system and can often help with processes for delegation. In addition, we have negotiated discounts with many software tool providers that are exclusive to our certified agencies.
About one-third of the folks who license our system are just getting started. Many are jumping from a corporate position or another career. We’ve successfully structured the training and tools to fit wherever people are in their business journey.
Many agencies that license our system see it as a way to bring a different structure to their fulfillment. They have grown to a certain point and now realize they need a repeatable system to scale profitably.
How to Grow A Highly Profitable Fractional CMO Practice Training Transcript
John Jantsch - Duct Tape Marketing (00:00): Hey everyone. Thanks for tuning in today. This is John Jantsch. I'm the founder of Duct Tape Marketing. I may talk a little bit more about myself in a bit, but I know you want to get right into this, but we've got a lot of people jumping on today, and I always, one of the fun things for me is that we attract such a global audience. So take a moment here, learn how to use that chat function, although I see some of, you're already doing it so you know how to use it, but tell me where you're calling from. I'm in the mountains west of Denver. I've got snow on the ground. I'm about 9,000 feet. Winter is here until, I don't know, next July or so, Guatemala. It'd always go so fast. Toronto, Canada, Orlando, St. Petersburg, Florida, Houston, North Dakota, San Diego, North Carolina, south Florida, big Florida Group, Costa Rica, Grenada, Arizona, NYC, Chicago, west of Boston. Hey Louis. All right, it's true to form pretty international audience. So welcome. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for playing along.
(01:15): Here's what something that I would like to, I would like you to hold me to. So I'm going to offer this right from the beginning. I think in the next 40 minutes or so I'm going to try to show you, I am going to show you an approach that I believe could be worth at least 50,000 or more over the next six months to your business, regardless of where you are, whether you're just getting started or whether you are one of those folks out there that has been grinding and doing this for a long time. That's what I believe, that just what we're going to talk about today could be worth to you. And I'm going to come at the end and I'm going to ask you to maybe tell me if it was. So here's what we're going to talk about today.
(02:01): I'm going to show you a repeatable system that is the absolute fastest way to make pretty much any business, but certainly a service business. Like many of you're in both scalable and profitable. I'm going to show you how we attract and close only ideal clients. There's probably nothing worse than you can chime in if you've got some more stories there. There's nothing worse than working with a client that wasn't a good fit, isn't a good fit. You learn four or five, six months into it that you dread actually working with them. So we're going to focus on really that process that allows you to attract only of those clients you'd love to work with. And then lastly, how to create a long-term recurring revenue roadmap based on retainers.
(02:54): The fastest way to build momentum and scale a business is to have that monthly recurring revenue. It makes not only business more fun, but it makes your business actually more valuable. Because if let's say for one day you want to sell your business, being able to demonstrate to somebody that they're not going to go out and after a project is done, have to go out and hunt for some more business that you've got that consistent monthly recurring revenue coming in. So those are the main things we're going to talk about today. But I want to start with, I don't know, is it the elephant in the room? Is it the 800 pound gorilla? I don't know what the metaphor is, but I want to start with acknowledging a couple things. And for any of these, feel free to chime in. Yes, no, one, two, whatever you want to use to designate that this idea resonates with you. So the first one is, anybody out there feeling like they're working harder, but maybe not making, not only not making more, but maybe making less. You can put a one in there for, yeah, that's me. No, that's not me. With a two, feel free to chime in. I'd love to get a pulse of where people are feeling the frustration they might be feeling. So you can put that, put anything you want, working harder, working less, whatever we're making less, however you want to acknowledge that.
(04:22): Ah, Louis, that's number three. I'm going to address. Yeah, yeah. I mean people, yep, here they come in working a little harder, making less, or at least not making any more. And that's really frustrating, isn't it? You think, well, hey, look at the revenue number. Look at the clients. Look, we're busy, right? And then you look at the bottom line, you think, wait a minute, I'm maybe making less than I was, or maybe I'm working just to pay the team. So it's an understandable, it's something I see every single day. Alright, number two, in the Chaos Trio, I'm hearing every single day people are either fearful of AI or they're really excited about ai. Let's use one for fearful, two for excited. The fearful part comes because I think a lot of people, okay, well this is a group. I talk a lot about ai, so I'm laughing because there's a bunch of twos coming in immediately.
(05:23): Yeah, there's a bunch of people out there that are like, I'm either fearful of this or I'm cynical about this. It's going to take our jobs. You see those headlines all the time, and I'm very excited about AI because I think it actually presents an amazing opportunity, not just because it maybe makes our life easier, maybe some of you have experienced that, but I think that there are going to be a whole lot of people out there using these tools for things they weren't really meant to be used for to drive prices down. Like I'll do a website for $10 now using ai, and I think that's where the fear factor is coming in for a lot of people. But I think where the opportunity comes in is we've never needed strategy more than ever. I mean now really the only thing left, I believe for us as agencies out there, is to actually lead with strategy.
(06:16): We use these tools. I'll talk a little bit about how we use them. We use them in every facet of business now, and we teach and train and create all kinds of assets and resources around using them efficiently. But I think the real opportunity is marrying these tools with a strategic approach. Alright, and then the last one for the doom and gloom out there, there's a lot of talk right now about recession, and I think that that has a lot of our clients spooked. Maybe it has you spooked. I sometimes think that it's just the media wants fear to be out there because fear sells clicks and fear sells papers as they used to say. But again, I think this is an amazing opportunity. I've owned my business for 30 years and I've been through a number of recessions. I've been through nine 11. I've been through many, many ups and downs in business, and every single time that I have seen that they present an amazing opportunity because people know, not everybody certainly, but the people we want to attract know that investing in marketing, investing more, doubling down on growing their business during this period or these kinds of periods where there's some fear and there's some downturn.
(07:36): The companies that do that come out quite often and there's all kinds of research you could look up. Statistically, they outshine the rest of their markets because they see this as an opportunity to invest. And so I believe that while you may have some clients today that are talking about, oh, I'm going to pull back on my marketing or I'm not going to do this anymore. The percentage of the market out there that now says, no, now's the time for me to pivot. Now's the time for me to think about new ways and I need a strategist to help me do that. I have seen an uptick in our business every single time there's been this kind of fear out there of recession. So that's the chaos that I wanted to address before we really got too far. I tell you just a little bit of my story, I'm not going to tell you my whole entire resume.
(08:32): I started my business 30 years ago, and as I said, I've seen these ups and downs. I have been able to not only weather these storms but actually come out stronger. And that's a lot of what you can rely on a lot, what we teach and transfer from a knowledge standpoint to the folks that join us. I'll tell you how I discovered really what's become my life's work. I got out of college and went to work. I went to work for an agency for about five years. About five years in like maybe some of you. I said, any dummy can run a business. Jumped out, started my own thing, no real plan. I knew I could hustle work, got some big clients, little clients, big projects, little projects. What I found was I loved working with that small to mid-sized business owner. You could have so much impact on their business through marketing, but I also found they were really frustrating to work with.
(09:22): I mean, they had the same challenges, same needs as much larger organizations, but certainly never the same budgets or even attention spans. Everybody, anybody experienced that with some of their clients. And so I literally on a whim said, the next client I walk into or prospect I walk into, I'm going to say, look, here's what I'm going to do. Here's what you are going to do. Here are the results we hope it gets. And by the way, here's what it costs. And to my amazement, the next three or four prospects that I said that to said, when can we start? I found out that in trying to address my great frustration, what I did was really tap into the greatest frustration today, and I think it's actually gotten even harder for businesses to buy marketing services. Everybody was selling a piece of the pie, the idea of the week, the new platform that was out there.
(10:13): And so business owners are extremely frustrated. So the fact that somebody walked in and said, look, we're going to start with strategy before tactics, we're going to install a marketing system was actually music to their ears. Now, I believe that this approach offers probably the greatest opportunity since I've been doing this is really upon us right now because of all the changes in the market, and it comes with a big, if you can master, what I'm going to show you is kind of the three pillars of success for this type of approach and what makes it so unique. The first one is, if you are going to thrive and grow a business today in this marketing arena, you have to be able to package yourself or whatever it is you're offering as significantly different from what everybody else in the market is doing. You have to have a very specific message that solves a very specific problem for a very specific person in a very specific way.
(11:17): If you don't want to just get lumped into the agency consultant that's selling the tactic of the week. Now the second piece of that is you have to then price your offering in such a way that you can create a profit margin in the neighborhood of 60 to 70%, because a great deal of our model depends on delegating and outsourcing a great deal of the work. You have to have the margin to be able to do that. The worst mistake I see people get into this business and they go out and they hustle some work, and then they do the work themselves. They price it at a price they think, I think the market will bear that. And next thing they know, they're working harder than ever and making less than ever. So the idea is that this package is going to attract the right client that is going to be willing to pay a premium for what you have to offer because that message is so tailored to solving their problems.
(12:15): Now, those two together are not enough. You also have to have a third piece of this puzzle, and that's the ability to fulfill in a repeatable, systematic manner. A lot of people get in this business and they think the first milestone, I want to someday have a million dollar business. Well, they neglect to realize that that means they have to have the ability to fulfill somewhere between a hundred and $150,000 a month worth of billable services. And that takes a repeatable system that takes the profit margin to delegate, and that takes the package and the message to attract the right client. The sweet spot is right in the middle of bringing those three things together, and that is what we have been doing for several decades. So let's talk specifically about the fractional CMO component. So I'm just going to define it. I know just because I know a lot of you on this call, this is a very smart group.
(13:16): You probably don't need me to define this, but I'm going to make sure that everybody's on board. CMO, chief marketing officer fractional is basically I'm going to hire that person for a fraction of the time, right? I'm a five, a fifth of their time, a fourth of their time. I mean, that's kind of the concept. And again, here's textbook definition. Marketing strategists brought into an organization, part-time to help set strategic direction and orchestrate marketing implementation using internal and external resources. And this in the small mid-size business world today is what the missing ingredient truly is. So let's talk about this name fractional CMO. And I'm curious from this list here, those of you on the call, if you would like to chime in, I'd love for you to, how do you identify, what's the name you call yourself when you go out to the market?
(14:17): Do you tell people you're a marketing consultant, a marketing agency, a fractional CMO? And then I've thrown a couple new ones in. If you're not feeling CMO ish, there's fractional marketing manager, fractional marketing department marketing strategist. I'm curious, consultant and strategist, fractional, CMO, unicorn, I should put that on the list there. Kyle, all the above. Fractional CMO or consultant fractional CMO consultant, fractional product marketer. Even more specific. Here's the thing. To some degree, I suppose it doesn't matter what we call ourselves, but the positioning of this title of fractional CMO is what I think is creating the most significant opportunity today. So let's talk a little bit about why now, because frankly, I've been doing this for, I've already mentioned three decades, but certainly I've been licensing this and training folks on this for two decades and three decades ago, if I'd have gone out and told a small business owner, I want to be your fractional CMO, they looked at me like they didn't know what I was talking about frankly.
(15:33): But I think that this whole idea of a fractional c-suite across the board or fractional virtual hires outsourcing mean, I think all the things that we do in business now, I think makes this makes sense. But I also believe that the hunger for strategy has never been in my entire career, has never been greater than it is right now. I hate to keep blaming things on the pandemic, but I think that had a lot to do with it. A lot of businesses got caught without any strategy at all. I think there's a real hunger for that out there in the market. Statistic from Chief Outsiders who primarily works with CMOs or other fractional officers, the adoption of fractional CMOs has increased by over 60% in the last five years. Now that's not just big companies doing that. That's a lot of small and mid-sized businesses that are realizing, hey, I can get that experience, I can get that expertise, but I can do it at a fraction of the cost.
(16:34): This is a little, I dunno if you're familiar with Brian Dean's exploding topics, but this is just taking search trends over the last couple years, last five years I guess, or so, and the interest in this category and this positioning, regardless of what you really call yourself, this is a tremendous differentiator because there's a real hunger for it right now, and I don't think it's going away, frankly. Alright, so here's what I'm seeing out there. The typical business from a marketing department, a marketing hire, marketing leadership, whatever it is, they're doing an agency. I mean, they need strategic planning, they need brand management, they need marketing campaigns. They need somebody to analyze the data, what's working, what's not working. They need somebody to at least advocate for a budget. We need budget whether they're managing it or not. And in some degree, they've gone out and they've hired one or two marketing related people, but nobody's managing them. There's no thought to what a marketing department might look like. But here's what the typical agency, and I'm knocking the people out there, not anybody on this call, but here's what the typical agency is offering it's marketing campaigns. What do you need? Sure, we do that or we have a package to do those five tactics so we can do that. All of this other business is either being done, hit or miss or not at all.
(18:03): What people need is a fractional CMO plus an implementation team. And that really is our approach is that we are going to come in strategy first, but in the end, especially a small mid-size business needs or wants somebody to orchestrate that. I spent about five minutes on Dolly today using a little ai. I'm sure some of you have used that tool before. And to me, this is the metaphor that makes a lot of sense. Have you ever gone and watched an orchestra tune up and get ready? I mean, nobody's playing music. They're all just like doing their own thing. They're all just riffing. I mean, it's just chaos. And that's what I think a lot of what happens in marketing today in a lot of small businesses. But then there's that orchestra with the conductor. Everybody's on the same sheet of music, the conductors, keeping them on time, keeping them sections here, raising it here, lowering it here, orchestrating.
(19:04): And I think that that is such an important word because that's what's missing with most businesses. They don't necessarily need CMO level advice and expertise every single day, but they definitely need somebody who is telling them what to do, when to do it, what not to do, and how to stop doing it. And that's the role that I think is significant that we can play as orchestrating marketing today. Maybe some of you have seen this, but selling tactics today without strategy is an absolute race to the bottom. Just about everything we do as marketers, websites, content, SEO, social media, almost all of it can be done if you're buying it a la carte for next to nothing. But if somebody is orchestrating somebody's bringing value, somebody is actually amplifying the value of all of those things, that's where being the fractional CMO makes such a difference.
(20:08): Let's talk a little bit about the numbers of why this model works too. The average salary of a chief marketing officer is 2 0 8 to 3 75. That comes from salary.com. And that's not even mentioning. I mean, if you hire ACMO, you're not going to say write this email, right? I mean, they are going to actually need implementers as well. So who knows what the cost ends up going to if they're really putting together, even if they're just outsourcing and hiring all the folks to do all the work, the cost is significantly higher than that. The average fractional CMO cost is about $60,000 a year for fees. Plus what the typical fractional CMO can do is bring an implementation team on demand. I mean, they generally are not brought in to say, well, here's what we think the strategy is. Good luck, right? I mean, there's some sort of orchestrating whatever the strategy is going to be. Now, the question I always like to ask people when we start talking about this model is could you land one client a month? If you had a proven lead generation conversion and fulfillment system, I'll just ask you all to chime in. Does that seem like a big task, a tall task to think in terms of growing your business by landing one client a month?
(21:28): Easy, yes. Hey, Phil, pretty achievable, right? And that's what makes this model, I think so powerful. Here's the simple math in our network of folks that have licensed our system, the average retainer, ongoing retainer with a client is $5,000 a month. So if you start thinking about that math on one client a month, well two clients generates at that retainer at the end of a year. That's about $120,000 four clients. That's 2 46 clients is 360. If you really went on that model of landing a client a month, which most of you said was very doable, you're knocking through half a million dollar in retainer revenues. Now, there's other things that are going to come into play in that model, but you could see just from a revenue standpoint, it's pretty simple math. Now, the challenge for a lot of people that have adopted this model, and I noticed many of you on here say that you relate as a fractional CMO. The traditional approach to the fractional CMO model is, Hey, I've got fractional, or I've got CMO experience. I know how to do strategy, so I'm going to sell my time to say four companies, right? I mean, it's like you get a fourth of my time, you get a fourth of my time. And what happens is they pretty quickly realize, well, I can work with four clients. I mean, I'm pretty tapped out, and there's actually no way to scale this.
(23:05): The difference with our model is that the average licensee in our system manages 10 to 13 clients with a 19 month retention, which not anybody here but outside of this group is unheard of in the industry. A lot of agencies are chasing clients to, if they keep a client for six months, that's been pretty good. As I said, your mileage may differ, but these numbers are significantly higher than the industry average because we have built a fractional CMO approach that actually will scale. And the real key, quite frankly, is that it has scope. The challenge that so many people run into is they say, okay, I'll be your fractional CMO, let me show up on Tuesday and we'll figure out what we're going to do. Our model is here is a system that is repeatable, that has proven that works, and we can install it very quickly.
(24:04): So I'm going to shift now and just talk about the elements of creating a fractional CMO system if anybody's interested in that aspect. Alright, so the very first thing is, this is what I was trying to solve. The traditional project-based path, we put out free content. That's what we do today. Hopefully it turns into a sales meeting. Sales meeting says, okay, send me a proposal. We wait around six weeks to hear for the proposal, we get a project, do the project, start over again. It's kind of feast or famine. Anybody experiencing a little bit of that challenge. So what I set out to do was to change this path. I couldn't figure out how to make it scale. And so what I created is our path, the Duct Tape marketing system path, which is sure, we still put out various types of content, various types of lead generation tactics.
(24:57): Some of you're on this call because of that, but what we're trying to get with our clients is a strategy session where we can actually teach them the value of what we do not sell them. And we use a tremendous process that they most of the time come away from thinking, how can you do this for me? As opposed to What do you propose to sell me? Now in that strategy session, our primary, in fact, our only real goal is to sell them something we call strategy first. It is a completely prescriptive, completely packaged, completely repeatable, completely trainable because we've done it many, many times, process that actually gets them a strategy for their business in some cases, most cases for the first time ever. And also lets them see what the first year of a retainer might look like. But again, our goal is to sell them that strategy first.
(26:01): And here's a couple things that happened as soon as we started doing this. First off, we're going to attract ideal clients. That's why the fractional CMO moniker I think is so powerful because if somebody says Yes, I want to hear what you have to say, it's a pretty good idea. They're counting on getting strategy. We all have experienced that client that's like, oh, I don't need strategy, or I've already done that, or I just need some Facebook ads. But the people that want to hear about strategy first are people that have already said, I believe in strategy. They are what I call investors. They believe that they have to invest in their business to grow it. The other thing that it does is during this 60 45 period, we immediately become their trusted advisor. We get into things and ask them things and challenge them on things that nobody has ever done and they love it. And so consequently, when we propose what we're going to do in the long-term retainer, nobody asks why or how much it is, I'm used to paying you for this strategy first that was so valuable. Now I just want to go along for the ride, and as long as you're performing, then I'm going to let you orchestrate as opposed to me telling you what to do.
(27:21): Alright, so I'm going to break down each of those components again. I think one of the best ways to demonstrate the value in services today in B two B is with useful content. Now, content takes many, many forms. It certainly takes written content, but content like this, content on LinkedIn, there are very, very many ways that you can demonstrate and places where you can demonstrate value. We have an entire library of lead capture devices, templates, checklist forms that are all actually part of what people license from us in addition to the ability to actually use our methodology. Alright? The second component that I think is really key is that once you start attracting that ideal client, instead of trying to sell them, we educate them. We actually show them, run them through a process that is so valuable that typically at the end of it they're just asking, how can you do this for my business?
(28:27): You haven't even proposed anything. So our process is called the marketing Hourglass. And essentially this is something that I created trademarked. It was in my first book, so 25 years ago or so. And essentially it is the model for our customer journey. Our customer journey has seven stages, and I believe that they map to the behavior that people want to go through with the businesses that they do business with. And quite often just by walking somebody through this process, you immediately reveal to them or they reveal to themselves frankly, which is even more powerful, the gaps that they have in their marketing. So those stages for us are no like trust, try, buy, repeat and refer. And as I said, I believe these are the stages that people want to go through with the businesses that they do business with. And so our goal as marketers quite often is to design how can we guide people along these stages?
(29:25): Or are we even addressing half of these stages? So the process of running somebody through this quite often is we'll just ask them, okay, and we have tools for this, but we'll just ask them, what does your ideal client or customer's journey look like? And they say, well, they go to Google. And then so we have a discussion about that, okay, how could you put your marketing on that chosen path in a more aggressive way? And what gaps in the campaigns, content processes do we need to fill? It's quite simple, but when you start talking about what they do, most people go from about me now buy from me. So they realize that like and trust and try are missing. They're doing nothing to retain or repeat business. They're absolutely doing nothing to generate or stimulate referrals. And so just by having this conversation and showing somebody this is the entire journey, they immediately say, well gosh, could you do that for us?
(30:22): Could you do that for us? So this is actually somebody that recently licensed our system and we taught her this process and this was her. She landed her, she had one meeting, landed her first client, it's probably going to be a hundred thousand dollars engagement this year. And she literally came back and said, I hate to sell, but when I use the marketing hourglass, prospects just ask me to do what I showed them before I propose anything. So in addition to having an amazing product or system to fulfill, to create strategy first, we've also got a process that really attracts and converts those prospects to the strategy first engagement. So I won't spend too much time on this, but just to give you a little bit of idea of how our thinking goes, the know, like trust stages are how you create the relationship. We literally just go through this with somebody.
(31:17): What does somebody do to know about your business? Typically we identify a couple gaps there. They're not even thinking about and trust and frankly like and trust is how you actually charge a premium for your services. When you just run an ad, try to get somebody to buy, you're competing on price, but everything that you do to build trust and to create a way in which they can try your business is how they're willing or why they're willing to pay a premium to work with you. So then we'll run through here and say, what does the try process? Well, most of the time they have nothing. What does the buy bypro look like? Well, that's where we really dropped the ball quite frankly. And so yeah, we definitely could use all of these processes. What about repeat and refer? And again, this is where you build momentum in a business.
(32:01): This is how you scale with your clients and nobody focuses on this aspect. Everybody's focused on the funnel aspect. How do you get the phone to ring? How do you get somebody to say yes? But where the real gold is, is after they say yes, after they become a client. And once you start revealing this idea, and this is the idea behind the hourglass, is that once somebody buys in that little middle part, it's what you do after they buy that really builds momentum in a business. And almost everybody we work with or talk to about this process realizes they have gaps here, but nobody's ever actually come to them and suggested ways they could fill those gaps.
(32:45): So as I said, the discovery call meeting typically using this process typically ends with this question, what it would take, what would it take to build this? So then we sell the 30 to 45 day strategy engagement and it hooks them for life. That's what we have discovered by holding to our guns, sticking to our guns. People come to us all the time, say, I need a website. Yes, you do need a website, but you need a strategy to make sure that that website not only works, but that it integrates with everything else that you need. This graphic won't mean anything to you other than it's my attempt to demonstrate to you that we have this. We have now delivered strategy first and taught people to deliver strategy first thousands of times, and we have it down all the way from the intake form through the final deliverable. It is a process that not only generates an incredible amount of value and trust with a client 100% of the time, it leads to a long-term ongoing retainer.
(33:56): So once that person gets to the end of the strategy first, again, it really becomes can you do this for me? It doesn't become, okay, write me a proposal for a long-term retainer where I'm going to question every aspect of it. Do I need this or not? They are so bought in because of strategy first. As long as you don't screw it up, you've got six months of road there where you can actually say, look, this is what we need to do first. Now this next, now this next. Now we've actually built this process to essentially mirror the model of how many clients you would need on an ongoing basis to get to that million dollar mark people sell and our network sell strategy first, anywhere from 7,500 to $15,000. That is a standalone engagement. It's almost like a product. And the average, as I said in our network, and there are people selling it for more, kind of depends on the size of the business, five to $10,000 a month for an average retention of 19 months.
(35:01): So you can do the math on that. It is a tremendous way to build ongoing recurring revenue and momentum. We've also built the implementation system. I mean obviously after you go through strategy first, every business is sort of different. I say sort of because everybody needs a website that builds trust. Everybody is going to have some relationship with content and SEO and social media reputation management, paid advertising, email marketing, all of those elements arrive at some level for every business that we work with. And this again, won't mean that much to you, but just to demonstrate we've been doing this so long that we've actually built out the stages of what we know they're going to need once their marketing matures. And once we work with them for six months, we know that the next stage that they have to go through consist of specific milestones addressing all of those seven areas Again. So
(36:06): We're kind of at a crossroads now because now I'm going to talk about how you could actually, the system that I just outlined hopefully gave you some insight into something you could build yourself. But I want to tell you now, I want to shift gears and tell you now about how you could acquire this license. This, we've done all the work. We've been working on it for 20 some years. It's been road tested proven thousands of times now. So we have the ability, I think, to give any of you that any of this ideal resonates with the ability to give you a massive, massive jumpstart or headstart. So I'm going to talk about the elements of licensing. Our fractional CMO system, I believe really, and we've done it time and time again in 90 days or less, you could master our system to double or triple your business. We've done it now with hundreds of businesses.
(37:04): We have about 400 agencies that have licensed our system over the years, have about a hundred or so that actually also participated a network mastermind together, do additional training together. Many of them work together and collaborate on joint clients together. And so again, what I'm sharing with you today is not something that we just made up or that we're just trying out. This is something that we have a huge track record on. So the way in which you can license our system, excuse me. The first step is that you would attend a three day certification intensive training. The next one that we have coming is December 12th through the 14th. Not very far away. We do them via Zoom. Similar to this. They are small cohorts of 10 to 12 business owners, and we intentionally keep them that small because I don't know if any of you have been to the a hundred person training. It's very difficult to get hands-on to one-on-one attention. So we intentionally keep these very small during those three days. We're going to teach you how to attract, convert, and fulfill on strategy first. So essentially you will be able to walk out of there if you're just getting started or even if you have existing clientele and be able to position yourself as a fractional CMO.
(38:27): So the next certification training, so the first step is attend the next, the three day certification intensive. Then you immediately go into what we call the blueprint period. It's a 12 week, so an entire quarter where we're going to work with you every week. You're going to have some group meetings. You're going to mastermind with that small cohort where you're going to have one-on-one meetings with various folks on our team. And our goal in that 12 weeks is that you're going to have landed one or two strategy first engagements in that first 12 week period. If you follow our plan, you will completely have recouped any investment that you've made in our program within really the first 90 days. After that, you're going to go into a one year membership in the network. So you're going to these a hundred agencies or so that I described, you're going to now be put into mastermind groups kind of based on where you are.
(39:23): We'll figure out where you are in your business life cycle, put you in a group that makes sense. We do monthly training. We do four events in-person events every year. And so that will become your cohort of people that are not just in the same business you are, but they're practicing the same model. They're using a lot of the same strategic partners. So it is invaluable in terms of helping you go from one stage to the next because the longer you stay in this business, once you master one aspect of it, once you start growing in a certain way, you have new problems. And so now you're going to have a network of folks that have actually gone through those stages and can really help you in moving your business to the next level. You're going to get our entire fractional CMO plus implementation team path, exactly how to do strategy first.
(40:14): You're going to get all of access to tons and tons of assets, a library of content, of checklists, of forms that you can use in lead generation. You can use many of these tools people use in actually working with clients as well. You're going to get all of our proprietary processes, including the marketing hourglass, which is probably the most powerful thing that I believe I've brought to this world to use as a framework. You're going to get our entire strategy first. Not only training, but all the videos and the backup and the forms and the tools to really hit the ground running. We have people that have actually, we have some pre-training that you can go through before our certification intensive. We have people that literally show up to that training with a client. I've got a client tomorrow because I've been able to articulate what it is that I could do for this business.
(41:08): And so I'm here to actually make sure that I can hit the ground running with that client. You're going to get our entire implementation system and stages. You're going to get the assets that we have created over the years in terms of how to run engagements, hundreds of case studies, proposals, process, SOP, library, lead generation, and conversion training. Through the training. We do a lot of lead generation and lead conversion training, but you're also going to have access lifetime to an entire library of training for specifically how to attract this kind of client. You're also going to get, and for a lot of folks, we have a lot of folks in our network that want to remain solo or they have an assistant or two. They don't really want to build a big team, but they want to offer implementation. And so we have an entire library, or not library or a network of strategic partners that offer how to build website or they will build websites for you, your content, social media, SEO, graphic design, pretty much every element of implementation, paid ads, you will have vetted partners and not just vetted.
(42:26): They may be working at any given time with eight or 10 folks in our network. So they fully understand our strategy first approach as well. So you can build an entire bench or team of folks that you can immediately plug into to do the implementation after you do strategy first. So again, the next sort of deadline, if you will, is the fact that December 12th through the 14th is when we are putting together our next cohort of 10 to 12 business owners. As soon as you join us, you actually get access to the entire online portal and training. In fact, there's pre-certification training. So the folks that actually do the best with this and who really, I shouldn't say the best, but the fastest are the ones that actually join early enough to really get in and dive into the material. We do this. I have found that you can't be on Zoom all day long.
(43:27): So we do these nine to two mountain time, so about five hours over the course of three days, but you get recordings and you get lifetime access to it. The license is actually a lifetime one time license as well. So you go through the training, you become a member of the network, but you'll be able to benefit for many, many years after paying just really the one licensing fee. So attend the certification, going to your 12 week program blueprint, support with our team, and then go into the entire network with the other a hundred or so agencies doing the same thing as you're doing. So let's talk a little bit about the investment. There is an investment in this. I've already alluded to the fact that I believe that our goal, our belief is, and we've seen it, we've demonstrated that recouping this investment in the first 90 days is very, very doable because we've seen it many, many times. I want to repeat some elements. The system that we've developed is the process. It is the solution. It is a proven process that has now been done thousands of times. This is not something that I just sat around and made up originally I did. I've been perfecting it now for 25 years with the help of many, many other agencies who have gone through this. You're going to get tools, templates, assets and SOPs, and you're going to get instant access to our implementation vendor strategic partner network.
(45:03): So I'm not going to reveal a price today, a fee today, an investment today, because there is an application process. I mean, this isn't for everyone. There are actually variables. We want to meet you exactly where you are. We want to make sure that this is a fit for you there. As I said, there are levels of investment based on what your need is. So what I'm going to invite you to do is we have a team of advisors that will meet with you one-on-one, they will learn about your business, learn about your objectives, and really be able to recommend the right solution for you. We keep our groups small, as I said by design. We have five or six spots I think in the December is all. So if this is something that appeals to you, I would say I'm going to show you a link at the end of this.
(46:01): I know our advisors are even available this afternoon and certainly tomorrow and the next day. So jump on that pretty quickly to speak with one of our advisors and you'll really get all of your questions answered. If that December date that I mentioned you have some conflict with, they'll be able to suggest kind of the next best approach. There's a lot of flexibility and some things we can do. Remember, those sessions are all recorded and you'll have access to them. So I guess I'm at that sort of question part. Over the course of the last 40 minutes, I have hopefully shown you something that, an approach that I know and I hope that you're starting to realize could be worth $50,000 minimum over the course of the next six months. Here's one thing I will tell you about. The investment is nowhere near $50,000. So that's why.
(46:57): So the value is so strong that we're very confident once you meet with one of our advisors, it'll be obvious to you that this could be the best business decision you make going into 2024. So I'm going to take some questions and I know, Shauna, you've been kind of watching the chat, come in there, but here's the URL on the screen. If what we talked about today piques your interest at all, do yourself a favor and schedule with one of our advisors. It's just DTM world slash chat. And Sean will put it in the chat as well. And that'll give you the ability to grab a spot to have a meeting right away with one of our advisors.
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