One of the things I’ve been enjoying recently is Mindvalley emails and videos. This was something that I didn’t really pay much attention to in the early days because originally I kept confusing it with Mindmovies, and then it gradually crept into my consciousness that there was something really exciting going on over at Mindvalley.
First up, they have gone into partnership with someone whose program I invested in and loved – Andre Chaperon’s “Autoresponder Madness”. I thought they were based in California, or San Francisco, or Silicon Valley, somewhere. But it turns out that they are actually based in Malaysia, in Kuala Lumpur. How cool is that?
Anyway, it’s run by this very visionary guy called Vishen Lakhiani. He didn’t have any VC start up money , I think, he started up with $700 and he just has got this very clear vision about creating a business that helps humanity move forward but particularly around entrepreneurship. They have an incredible blog called MindvalleyInsights.com and I would highly recommend you go in and check it out and subscribe to it. They also have a great YouTube channel which you can subscribe to too.
It’s very professional, their operation, but is also very human, very genuine and authentic and you can tell that the minute you start watching any of these videos. They are all quite short, I’ve just watched “How to avoid entrepreneurial ADD and pick the most viable ideas to pursue“. They attract an amazing team of people and their office is very modern and very Google like. They’ve got this sort of theatre thing, which is where they record video stuff and presumably being based in Malaysia, they are able to really have a fantastic standard of living, have a fantastic standard of office living and hire amazing people who are happy to live and work there. They are all very young. It astonished me! So go and have a look at Mindvalley.
They’ve also got a yearly event called Awesomeness Fest and they are doing it in two places around the globe, the Dominican Republic being one of them. That’s an amazing thing because I’ve been looking for things to do now I don’t feel I have to work quite so 24/7 . ROAR’s really starting to get going now and I’m starting to feel a little bit more relaxed about everything. I don’t feel I have to work every night and every weekend on my own business as well, although I do want to keep that ticking over.
I’m now investigating ways I can have fun. I’m not one for going and laying on the beach for two weeks in the South of Spain but I really would like to travel more. I think the way to do that is to do what Tim Ferris, in his book for our work week calls “Purposeful Vacations”.
So purposeful vacations would be going to the Dominican Republic and spending a week or ten days, three of which would be attending Entrepreneur’s Fest, which MindValley run for one day and then going on to spend the next couple of days at the Awesomeness Fest, which I think it’s a bit like the Burning Man festival but for entrepreneurs and internet marketers, in comfort. So that’s something I’d really like to do some day.
I have just booked up to go on the Internet Marketers Cruise in January, which is in the Mexican Caribbean. I think it’s the 12th of January, so deep midwinter in the UK and I usually go into Christmas and the New Year feeling a bit “Arggghhh”, quite looking forward to two weeks off. Usually get a bit sick obviously, because that’s what happens to entrepreneurs when they have a couple of weeks off.
However this year I’m going to keep my spirits high and my energy high with the idea that I’m going to be going to Heathrow to get on an airplane to go to South Beach Miami, stay in the Eden Roc hotel on South Beach for a couple of nights, have a party with the other Internet marketers, and get on a cruise ship to go around the Mexican Caribbean where I will be networking, chatting, playing poker in the casino and going on amazing day trips every other day as well as attending the events that Captain Lou puts on for us. I’m really looking forward for this, because the last time I went was in 2009 and it has been a tough few years since then so it’s going to be awesome to go again.
What else has been happening? We are just about to launch our ROAR Local Business Consultant webinars. We orginally thought they were going to be a seminar, but so many people contacted us and said “ Can you do webinars instead?”, which was interesting for us because a lot of our clients at ROAR are still trying to flog the seminar horse to death and apart from the lucky few, it just doesn’t work so well any more!
People do not want to go to seminars any more, they do not want to schlep across the country or even internationally, they do not want to seat in a hotel room for day or two, pay overpriced hotels for dinner and accommodation. They want to do webinars and it was a really eye opening experience really because Neil used to do incredibly well with seminars. He was one of the most successful people I knew filling a room but we is actually quite relieved that so many people preferred webinars because he doesn’t have to come from Australia, although I think he was quite secretly looking forward to that.
If you want to know more about it, its going to be six webinars of at least an hour and a half each. Then there will be three Q&A sessions and we have also set up a private Facebook group so that people who join the program can not only support themselves but get support from Neil and I in between the calls. We’re really looking forward to doing that. Find out more here – we have webinars planned for various days to suit your diary..
The other thing that is new in ROAR is I am going to London tomorrow to hopefully sign, on the dotted line, a very large finance company as a client, who I’ve attracted through a friend of a friend actually. He just asked me to do one of my website MOT’s on this website for a mate, I had no idea who they were, and I did my usual forthright job while recording myself moving around their website, just talking about my impressions, looking at their SEO and generally just saying how they could improve things. They absolutely loved it.
They even liked the fact that I described the bloke on the front of the website as a prison officer, which made them realise that I was being completely genuine with my feedback and then they asked if I could join them on a Skype call for an hour. They were talking about their current agency charging three and a half thousand pounds for one advertisement, which would go into a magazine with some advertorial they were writing, it was like a trade publication.
I said “Well…before we even get to talk about the ad itself, have you thought about how you’re going to track response from the ad? Are you going to send them to a dedicated landing page in the ad? What is the call to action? Are you going to be opting them into your mailing list?”. As it turned out….
A) They don’t have a mailing list
B). Their website is not set up to do that stuff at all
C) They haven’t even thought about it and I could tell
I was on Skype, so it wasn’t a video call where I couldn’t see them or anything but I could actually tell from the deathly silence that they hadn’t considered any of those things. Then they said to me “What would it cost for you guys to do that? Do you have the team to do it?
I said “ Yes,we’ve got one of the best copywriters, for direct response copywriting in the UK, in our team and we also have a fantastic graphic designer. We’d get the 2 of them to work together on your ad and I’d oversee it. They said “ How much would that cost?” Bearing in mind this other firm are charging them thousands and thousands of pounds a month for not doing very much, as far I as can see. To give you some perspective, the other team were going to charge them £3,500 just for one advertisement.
When I told them what the investment is in our top-level “All Done For You” package, which gets you access to not only a one year marketing strategy put together and reviewed weekly by Neil and I, PLUS all of our team, for whatever you need doing, according to the plan each month, on an average of 40 hours a week, they just completely were blown away.
Just because they are corporate types in a corporate industry, people are just ripping them off…It makes me very very cross!
I think they could tell that I would be able to do a better job than they were currently experiencing, put it that way, so I’m off to London tomorrow to see them. I don’t normally “do” meetings, don’t even do them on spec, but my contact says that they are excited to meet me and the best thing is that I don’t feel I have to be anything different but who I am for this meeting. I just feel I need to go in there and just talk passionately about what I know, I’ve already outlined what we could do for them in the video and it was a very powerful sales tool without being at all sales-ey.
I definitely think that’s the way to go for people. Share with them your knowledge, show them what you can do for them and then, if they’ve got any sense at all and they can afford you… I’m just going to barrel up there tomorrow, draw all over their whiteboards, have a fantastic time, perhaps going for a beer afterwards and I don’t feel any pressure to be anything other than who I am and to share anything other than what I know.
Which is demonstrably more than the so-called “award winning” team that were charging them thousands and thousands of pounds for doing absolutely sweet FA. Looking forward to that enormously.
My biggest personal challenge at the moment? Still to find a way to blog on my own blog effectively. I wrote a blog post about efficient blogging just recently and I think one of the ways forward, is to sit in bed early one morning, as I do wake up shockingly early having had two kids, and just talk into my iPad with its snowball microphone and then send it off to my VA Patricia, who is learning how to be a transcriptionist. Having had experience herself how much people charge you on the Elance and how flaky they all are, she decided that she wants add that string to her bow.
I’ll just send it off to her and she’ll get back to me in a day or two and we can put it on my blog. Because something about blogging in writing is quite daunting when you’re working office hours and then you have to come and write. I love being creative. I love writing, but it’s not very easy to be creative for me, especially when I have done a days work and making decisions about all our client’s marketing.
So that’s what I need do, I need to find a way to become more efficient at my blogging and just to do it more regularly. I started a blog challenge just recently and only got to day 12 out of day 30, which was a bit of a shocking fail, epic fail in fact, but I am going to blog about the fact that it was an epic fail and what I’m going to do about that.
One more thing I’m loving, is WinStreak, an app developed by the Dan Sullivan / Strategic Coach team. Recommended to me by client Christ Barrow of 7connections.com, he’s long been a follower and student of Dan. Every day, you wake up to find a short list of Chris’ wins from the previous day and I might follow suit. Finish the day on a positive note and wake up ready to go again! Yee-har!
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