Jeremy Weisz 12:50
And so yeah, since Shaun, you know, you’re an expert at content, you’ve been doing this for a long time. And you mentioned the education and the entertaining pieces, both are equally, maybe an arguably more important entertainer, they’re not going to listen at all. But what are some ways that you have found to engage people with the newsletter from the entertainment side in the different industries? What has worked well for them, in entertainment? Look,
Shaun Buck 13:19
I think entertainment can be a lot of things, but like it, whether it’s a newsletter, or podcast, right, the personality, right, so you guys, I know for a fact you guys have people who love your guys’ stuff, like the stuff you guys put out and publish, right, your podcasts, your newsletter, stuff like that? They’re fans. Okay, that is entertainment on some level, right? The entertainment can be it could just be people like personal interests, they like to know what’s going on in everyone else’s life. Right. So it could be various personal interests. I like to think about when you think about, like, the old you know, Sunday newspaper, right? You would think about the newspaper, you had the comics. And you had crossword puzzles, right? There are people who got the newspaper for like, years, but that was the only reason I got it was for those things. Right? You know, and so you can put things like that in some of your printed media, if appropriate, like in a newsletter that would be appropriate, right? To have like some funny memes at the end of your newsletter or something like that. Right?
John Corcoran 14:18
Yeah. I love how you do that, by the way, and your people who you know that you get them and you put it at the end on purpose, by the way, right?
Shaun Buck 14:21
Because then they have to kind of skim the rest of the content. Yeah, they go there for the means. They’re like, Oh, that’s a cool, interesting article, I’m gonna want to write about it. So
John Corcoran 14:34
by the, by the way, so how do you go to a dentist and say, here’s what you need. You need a newsletter that has a means of the back. I’m sure you’ve got dentists who are lawyers, law firms or something like that. No, no, no, we’re too professional. Are our clients not wanting to see that that’s why you put that in there?
Shaun Buck 14:52
Yeah, I’m like, Look, we get that sometimes. And I’m like, Look, man, I I don’t know who you believe your clients. But I think we should, we got to have a talk about that because I’m pretty sure that as a dentist, you’re perfect clients like a 40-year-old mom of three who’s married who makes 100 whose family makes $100,000 a year or more, right? Like, what do you think? You know, like, what do you think those people are reading and watching? Like, I mean, you know, like, most women I know who are like in that category. I mean, they like reality TV, they like, you know, they like dramas, they like crime. You know, they like those crime podcasts and stuff, right? Yeah. I mean, uh, you know
Jeremy Weisz 15:37
what, it goes back to reflecting the client Avatar and kind of their interests.
Shaun Buck 15:43
Like, look, dude, no one’s no one wants. No one’s like, You know why? Hot damn, I hope I get an article about Invisalign today, man, podcast on
John Corcoran 15:53
Right
Shaun Buck 15:54
Soul on planet Earth, except maybe the guy who owns Invisalign wants to see that. So once you put that content out, you need their attention. And when there are so many things that can grab their attention. Damn, you better get it fast. And that means you better be entertaining. Right? You better be entertaining. You know, over anything else?
John Corcoran 16:13
Yeah, that’s a great point.
Jeremy Weisz 16:15
I would read the article and ginger vitus. No. Yeah, no, I’m kidding.
John Corcoran 16:22
So you know, you have this great, well honed system. Shaun through your company, honed over many years where you know, you’ve got your book on the front end, people get a package in the mail, I encourage anyone, by the way to go sign up thenewsletterpro.com you can get a copy of your book you want what’s the name of it?
Shaun Buck 16:42
Yeah, the Ultimate Guide to Newsletter Marketing. Yeah,
John Corcoran 16:45
it’s fascinating just to get it in the mail with the package you get, and then you get the ongoing newsletter. But for those who are a business owner who doesn’t have that perfectly set up yet, where do you recommend they get started? How do you get started with this kind of nurture, man?
Shaun Buck 17:03
You know, I mean, a lot of times what you, you’ve got to find someone or a small group of people, right, that you’re going to follow. So you’re going to say, Hey, you know, listen, I really like John and Jeremy’s stuff, I really like Shaun’s stuff. And I like, you know, Kim’s stuff or whatever, right? And then you’re going to follow those, you’re going to follow those people, because they are teaching what it is, whether it’s free or paid. You know, there’s a variety of you know, you guys have free podcasts, free newsletters, things like that, right? But they’re there, you’re going to follow those people to learn that stuff. Or you’re gonna go buy books or courses, like you’ve got to go study and learn it, or you’ve got that’s one way. And most people don’t have time to do that, that is one of the problems, or you’re gonna have to find the experts in the field, right? If you want to do a podcast, seriously is your time in your business as I get better spent trying to figure out how to do a podcast? Or is it better spent hiring you guys so that they have to spend this much time and it actually gets done? That’s the key right? Like our clients spend less than 30 minutes a month to have their newsletter on average. Maybe it’s an hour, maybe an hour for some of them, maybe 15 minutes for others, but you know, on average they’re spending around 30 minutes a month, and they get it done. That’s the important part. And so you look you can you can buy you know time with money you can buy speed with money, right you know, you can do you can do all these things to help improve your business. But sometimes we just get a little we get we either get greedy which is like that’s the ultimate like thing that kills a lot of businesses and ruins people right? greed, right? So we get greedy we’re like, oh man, I don’t want to spend this extra x dollar because I can do it for 10% less and you’re like well first of all, you probably can’t do it as well. Even if you do it for 30% loss you’re gonna make so many mistakes you’re probably not going to get it done which means you’re actually just going to throw that money away . That’s just garbage money right now.
Jeremy Weisz 18:53
So I hired the ex during the time when I tried to fix something the handyman and then I broke it and then I broke it and then into paint. Now I would never do that and my wife knows I if there was a change of a light bulb I’d like to hire someone. Yeah, I don’t even want to do that.
Shaun Buck 19:09
Twice a month honey, like
Jeremy Weisz 19:13
totally you ended up spending more time and money in the end when it comes back around?
Shaun Buck 19:20
Wasted like that’s that’s the power of like, it’s not even that you just spent it it’s that it’s wasted because you don’t get any results because you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re not an expert like I could probably grab that little scraper and clean my teeth.
Jeremy Weisz 19:33
But it goes into you know, it’s sometimes a tough habit to break. And John, I read Who Not How by Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan, which is exactly talking about this, Shaun, which is like, Don’t think of how you’re going to get just to hire the who right to get it done for you.
Shaun Buck 19:51
Well, yeah, it’s Dan Sullivan told me one thing he wants like I know Dan and I were talking one time and I’m sure you saw this before you No, but he said, He’s like, uh, you know, she’s asked me about my workload and adopt, but that time, you know, many years ago, like it was really, really high in that particular moment. And I was like, Yeah, man, I’m working way more hours than I want to at the moment. And he’s like, why don’t you hire someone who wants you to, like, hire a CEO. And, step out of what you’re doing. And I’m like, oh, it probably cost me 200,000 bucks to hire that person. Right? And he’s like, so And I’m like, dude, that’s a lot of money. And he’s like, um, you know, you make over, you know, you guys make over seven figures a year profit, right? And I’m like, yeah, and he goes, so realistically, you could do nothing. Even if you’re just making a million, you could spend 200,000, and then do whatever you want with your time you own your time again. Or you can go kill yourself at 4000 hours, or 3000 hours a year, and, and make an extra 200,000 bucks. Like, that sounds like a very foolish decision. And I was like, Oh, you’re right. Yeah.
John Corcoran 21:09
So hey, Shaun, how did the pandemic affect you? Like, what, right after it happened? What, what kind of decisions do you make in your business? And once the following?
Shaun Buck 21:19
Yeah, well, initially, initially, it was really, really scary. Um, we had, we had for 185 days, from when the pandemic hit. We, because we have our clients all over the country, a few and other countries, but mainly in the US. And for 25 days, we had an average of $120,000 a year worth of revenue per day. Go on hold or cancel. Wow, immediately.
John Corcoran 21:54
And some of the days have an average day, 100,000 per day for 25 days. Wow.
Shaun Buck 21:56
Yeah, I was losing some sleep. You know, um, you know, we were, like, we would still have made it even if none of those customers came back, like we could have survived without it. And what were you doing? Were you calling up these customers or your team calling up these customers and saying us, and then we were trying to get on the phone to save or to, to? I mean, like, if they were close, like we were like, Alright, like, we’ll put you on hold,
John Corcoran 22:29
because some of our dentists,
Shaun Buck 22:30
right, yeah. Or they’re closed, or whatever, whatever their business was, like, we’re like, okay, I mean, we were just, you know, we weren’t being jerks about it. I know, some places were jerks about it, but like, they were put on hold, and then we have some just going out of business. Right? We had some Yeah, honestly, we have some who were jerks who were on hold under contract. And then, you know, what, I was trying to come back. They basically gave us the middle finger. Right, you know, but the vast majority of them all came back.
John Corcoran 22:59
And so we altered the wheel. Did you recover? Uh, you recover back from that now,
Shaun Buck 23:05
we recovered back. We didn’t recover, by the way we recovered by the end of the year. But, but now, here now, forward, right. we’ve recovered back from that. We’re growing. We’re actually having a good May. We have Okay, April, April’s hard for us. Like, everyone’s, you know, paying taxes and stuff like that, like, yeah, you know, I just find that we just, you know, April and July slash early August, as a as an agency, those are those are the, those are months that like, just we don’t do as well, we actually mark it harder in those months. But, but yeah, we will, we didn’t used to, like in July used to just let it happen. And I was just like, forget it, like, just do whatever we’re doing, don’t you know, nothing special? Let it go. And I mean, we would close a third of what we would normally do in a July. And then we started marketing, like hard, like, we were, I think we increased the budget by like 50% from what we were spending in a normal month. And then we were still down. But we were actually down about 10-12% over a normal month. So we have a lot more to get. But we didn’t go down as far as the numbers work.
John Corcoran 24:17
So got it. Yeah, it makes sense. And you didn’t have people with fear or problems. There wasn’t a problem with people being on vacation and completely missing your marketing messages entirely during July or August.
Shaun Buck 24:32
Oh no, that’s part of the reason that it’s so hard. Everyone knows. Tension, right? Which is why I was so we’re like, Okay, we got to market more. So we try to be smart about what we do like it, like what we’ll do is we’ll put out, we’ll put out promotions, right? And, um, you know, we’ll do our best to find one that we think is going to hit and then you know, maybe if we would normally send you know, five, five emails and two direct mail pieces, you know, Right, we might send 10 emails and over the course of a longer period time and you know, and, you know, seven direct mail pieces, who knows, right? You know, we’ll just increase it or we’ll make more phone calls or whatever happens, you know, whatever, whatever it happens to be for that period.
Jeremy Weisz 25:14
You know, you mentioned something before Shaun. I tried to kick John out, but he came back. But always try to talk to some people that you follow, you follow the people you respect that you like that you learn from, and I’m wondering about some of the people you follow and what you’ve learned from them. You mentioned, Kim Walsh Philips, something that you’ve learned from her that you’ve taken your business and then any anyone else that you follow and respect in what you learn from them.
Shaun Buck 25:41
Sure. Um, look, Kim, I love that she’s amazing. I mean, just like the social media tips that I get from Kim are great. I like those, like we’re just talking or Sarver content, right, you know, but like, some of the behind the scenes stuff, I get to see like, how she does, how she does webinars and stage presentations and stuff. Like it’s just she’s really really, really good. Right? You know, and it’s, it’s really interesting to watch her watch herself, because you just don’t even know you’re being like, you’re not realize that she’s selling anything. And then also you’re like, wow, I’m buying that. So, like she’s amazing at it. Um, you know, another mutual friend of ours is Dave D. Um, and yeah, I mean, there is a guy you know, who does webinars selling from webinars or selling from the stage like, I don’t know if there’s anyone better that I know of? Right. You know, we, you know, so talked about, we talked about them. And another guy who’s also a mutual friend of ours, Oli Bilson, all amazing right out of the UK. Yeah, a great speaker knows his stuff, as well as anybody. And I mean, if you want to build the following basically, right, you know, like a herd or community that is to buy info products from you, like all there’s no one better to help you do that at all.
John Corcoran 27:07
So, yeah, that’s great. Shaun, wrapping things up? Where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you?
Shaun Buck 27:13
So probably the best place to go, just go to thenewsletterpro.com. We’ve got tons of free stuff on there. I mean, we’ve got 10 years worth of content literally up there, you can get one of the books sent to you depending on the type of business you are either physically sent to you or digitally sent to you, and no charge, even if we physically send it to you. And, and yeah, or you can contact us and call us whatever it is. But that would probably be the best place to jump in and say hi, and you’ll get a copy of our newsletter given to the universe.
John Corcoran 27:46
Excellent, Shaun. Well, it’s been a pleasure working with you and your team. Your team did such a great job. And we appreciate you coming on today.
Jeremy Weisz 27:54
Thanks so much. Thanks, Shaun.
Outro 27:55
Thanks. Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com and while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.