Ask Frank Kern

The money is NOT in the list, the money is in the MATH.  It doesn't matter what business we're in we're really in the math business. 

I say this all the time, and I don't think it goes over well, because it's not sexy. 

Let's bring the sexy back to math. 

FrankKern.com/Class - Do the math - claim your next million - faster.

I haven't talked about this much publicly yet so I'll take the time to do it now.

Link to the video version of this presentation - https://bit.ly/2KXg6X6

Earlier this year, I took a volunteer position on the board of the ERA/ERSP, which is a non-profit organization that works in cooperation with regulatory bodies like the FTC, BBB, and state AGs to help make the direct response industry more compliant.

The job I've volunteered for (in addition to "normal" board member duties) is to help educate the online direct response marketing world on the single biggest threat to our existence:

COMPLIANCE.

As many of you know, I was sued by the FTC in May of 2003.

It was my fault because I was violating all kinds of regulations that I didn't know existed.

Despite my telling that story as much as possible - and doing my best to let my fellow marketers know about the regulations out there, the majority of online businesses I see are NOT compliant with the law.

I believe the reason for this is because people aren't aware of what the laws are.

Here's the deal: WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW *CAN* HURT YOU.

Yesterday, I attended a summit where I was able to hear important issues directly from members of the FTC, state AG offices, and national BBB offices ...as well as from some of the leading compliance attorneys in the country.

Here's a video summary of some of what was discussed - and some things you need to be aware of.

NOTICE: This is NOT legal advice. Seek counsel.

Here are some links you might find useful:

FTC Guidelines: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/advertising-marketing-internet-rules-road

ERA/ERSP: http://www.retailing.org (Everyone reading should join this.)

Venbable LLP's Advertising Toolkit: https://www.venable.com/files/upload/Advertising_Tool_Kit.pdf

BBB: http://www.BBB.org

I was able to record some interviews with Former FTC Deputy Director Lee Peeler, the VP of PR for the BBB, and with Peter Marinello of the ERSP.

I'll release those as soon as they're edited.

Meanwhile, I hope you find this helpful! I wish someone would have shown me a video like this back in 2003.

Also - if you have questions about these issues, I really can't help. I'm just giving you a summary of what I took away from the meeting.

I strongly suggest you retain a firm like Venable, join the ERA, and get accredited by the BBB as some good first steps towards compliance.

A discussion of "Funnels, Feds, and the Future" with Hawk Mikado of Funnel Magazine.

Frank explains among other things, why this year is his most profitable year yet. 

FrankKern.com/Class - claim your next million - faster

A process you can use to make big decisions in your business and life - designed by Frank Kern. Grab the worksheet/workbook here - http://FrankKern.com/6

In past episodes, we’ve come up with a number of processes for selling and for finding your clients, but making decisions are just as important as those things and requires the same consideration. Frank wants to help you figure out how to do less in your business while making more and having fun.

Key Lessons Learned:

Making Big Decisions

• “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.” -Tony Robbins
• The first thing to think about is not the thing you are making the decision on. The first step is to clarify your big picture goal. Be very specific on what the goal looks like and the details of your vision.
• Write down the purpose of your business. What are you trying to achieve with your work?
• At this point, we start to consider the thing we are actually making the decision on. Write down the details and options you are thinking about.
• The fourth step is to ask the question “Will this thing move me towards my big picture goal?” In the case of a ‘no’, the answer is obviously to choose not to do that thing. If the answer is a ‘yes’, we have some more work to do.
• List four things that will indicate your decision has been a successful one. Put down the goals you want to achieve by making this decision. Success criteria are crucial to know if you’ve made the right choice and are on the right path.
• Making your sales process helpful to everyone who goes through it, whether or not they buy, will generate tremendous goodwill. If your ads and your sales process actually help people, your long-term success in business will be much greater.
• These five steps will give you a filter for achieving clarity on your decisions. The next step is to write down when you want your success criteria to be met. You have to set a deadline for success.
• What are the short-term benefits of your decision? What are the long-term benefits of your decision? Do the benefits match up with your goals?
• Once you’ve got those details established, it’s time to look at what could go wrong. You should write down what costs you are willing to accept that are associated with your decision. Write down the things that could wrong that would take you further away from your goal. Let your mind go nuts and write down all negative possibilities and things you’re afraid of happening.
• At this point, you have to compare the benefits to the likelihood of the risks of your decision. Essentially, what you are trying to find out is “is it worth the risk of all those things going wrong to achieve the long-term benefits.”
• If your answer is no, you have just saved a lot of time and money! If the answer is yes, you need to identify the three next steps to make your decision a reality.
• Any major decisions in your future should be run through this process to make sure you are making the right choice for your business and your clients.
• Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Links to Resources Mentioned:

FrankKern.com/6 for your decision-making worksheet worksheet

FrankKern.com/Class - claim your next million - faster

Dean Jackson joins Frank Kern for a conversation about the important difference of the how and the who, why it's 100% about doing less, the "Self Milking Cow," embracing your bovinity, and more.  

Grab Your Next Million faster by taking this class - http://FrankKern.com/Class.

Frank wants to help you figure out how to do less in your business while making more and having fun.

Links to Resources Mentioned

FrankKern.com/Class - How To Scale Your Successful Business To Eight Figures And Beyond

DeanJackson.com - Dean Jackson Online

FrankKern.com/Five - Episode 5 notes

The idea of your best process. Discover which method of acquiring customers will allow you to grow your business faster, with more profit, while also generating goodwill with your prospects.  Worksheet at FrankKern.com/4.

Frank wants to help you figure out how to do less in your business while making more and having fun.

Key Lessons Learned:

Acquiring Customers

• A core process is a fancy way of naming a dependable and predictable way of acquiring customers. Most businesses have lots of ways that they acquire customers, but we’re talking about your number one go to process.
• Take out your worksheet and write down every process with which you have gotten a sale in the past. The process you’ve used to make a sale of product A may also be applicable to selling product B. Create a vertical list of all the ways that you’ve have sold something, these are the processes that you have deployed to get a sale.
• Next, you will go through your list of processes and figure out how much each process generated in sales. Don’t let your actual profit generated from each process, but score them on a 1 to 5.
• You also have to assess how easy it is for a prospect to enter into your sales process. A live webinar will have a very high score, it’s easy to access and easy to leave. Compare that to a timeshare presentation which is virtually impossible to get someone to sit through.
• You also have to score how much goodwill each of your sales processes has generated in your database of prospects. Will they like you more or less after going through the process? The amount of revenue you generate in your business is in direct proportion to the amount of goodwill you create. The more value you create in your prospects lives the more likely they are to do business with you.
• Next, you score each of your processes on whether or not they are sustainable, can they be automated, and can they be replicated. Brendon Burchard's 7 Day live launch is an example of a process that is very profitable, easy to enter, and created a lot of goodwill, but isn’t very sustainable.
• The next category is energy. Does the process energize you when you utilize it? Product launches are an example of a process that can be exhausting and would score very low.
• Once you fill out the worksheet, you will have a list of ways that you have ever done to acquire customers. Which process scores the highest on the categories listed, whatever scores highest is your best process.
• Your best process can be used to convert leads that were acquired using your best bait, and those people meet the criteria of your best buyer, and allows you to sell your best payday. This will allow you to provide maximum value and goodwill to everyone that participates in the marketplace, regardless of whether or not they purchase from you.
• The secret to growing a successful business is to always deliver value and goodwill to the people that meet your best buyer criteria, if you do that, chances are you will acquire those customers at some point in the future.

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Links to Resources Mentioned

Frankkern.com/four for your best process worksheet

You can’t catch a whale with minnow bait.

What are you looking to catch?

In the third episode of “Your Next Million with Frank Kern,” Frank shows you how to find your best bait and how to grab your copy of Frank’s exclusive Best Bait Worksheet (FrankKern.com/3).

Want faster access to your best payday, your NEXT million, and the gems Frank isn’t putting on the podcast? Visit http://FrankKern.com/Class.

You’ve made it this far, so you know you need to subscribe to this podcast to get every episode, when released, without that spam nonsense. Details and options at FrankKern.com/Subscribe.

Transforming Your Business Isn't About Doing A Million Different Things. It's About Finding ONE BIG THING and Then Leveraging That.

Frank Kern has been advising entrepreneurs like you all day, every day, to do just that since 1999.

This is his podcast.

Summary:

In this episode of Your Next Million, Frank Kern talks about identifying your best bait that you can use to magnetically attract your perfect clients into your business. Building on the lessons learned in episode one and episode two, Frank shows you how to discover the bait that will draw in your best buyer and why getting them results up front will lead to an even greater payday.

Frank wants to help you figure out how to do less in your business, while making more and having fun.

Key Lessons Learned:

Recap

• Your best payday is something you sell and deliver that is very profitable for you and gives you a lot of satisfaction while doing it, among other things. Your best buyer is the person who is the perfect match for the product or service that makes up your best payday.

Bait

• Bait sounds a bit nefarious, but it really isn’t. The word bait refers to the material that you use in your marketing that attracts and is magnetic to your best buyer. As the saying goes “you can’t catch a whale with minnow bait”. Many of Frank’s clients find themselves attracting the wrong kind of customer which leads them to believe that no one has any money and the product or service is very difficult to sell. The key is to attract the right kind of buyer and that means your bait has to line up with your best payday.
• The first step is to write down your best payday that you identified in episode one. The second step is to write down the three characteristics that make up your best buyer that you identified in episode two. What three big things would you do to get your best buyer the results they are looking for? We are looking for significant results in the least amount of time.
• Once you identify the three big things you will do for your best buyer, you can take those and create reports and other free resources that you can use for lead generation. For Frank that means helping his perfect client discover their best payday, their best buyer, and their best bait. As a follow up teaser to the next episode of Your Next Million, Frank also helps them find their best sales process.
• If those three things are extremely valuable to your best buyer, and your best buyer is the most likely to buy your best payday, and they are the most likely to get significant results from it, doesn’t it make sense that they would love to find out how to do those things?
• The question of “how do I attract the right people into my business?” is always going to be answered by “you have to know who the right people are and the right type of bait to put out to attract them”. Deliver them results in advance because the greater you move someone towards the result that they want before you ever ask them for money, the easier it will be to get them to pay you.
• What three steps would you take to get your best buyer the result they want? Once you know what the three steps are, you can create content around those steps. The content that you give away is going to be your best bait and will be magnetic to your very best buyer.
• Your next step will be to identify your best sales process that will help you acquire your best buyer for your best payday, but for that you will have to stay tuned for episode 4!

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Links to Resources Mentioned

FrankKern.com/3 for your best buyer worksheet.

Looking for your best buyer?

In the second episode of “Your Next Million with Frank Kern,” Frank shows you how to find your best buyer and how to grab your copy of Frank’s exclusive Best Buyer Worksheet.

Want faster access to your best payday, your NEXT million, and the gems Frank isn’t putting on the podcast? Visit http://FrankKern.com/Class.

You’ve made it this far, so you know you need to subscribe to this podcast to get every episode, when released, without that spam nonsense. Details and options at FrankKern.com/Subscribe.

Transforming Your Business Isn't About Doing A Million Different Things. It's About Finding ONE BIG THING and Then Leveraging That.

Frank Kern has been advising entrepreneurs like you all day, every day, to do just that since 1999.

This is his podcast.

Summary:

In this episode of Your Next Million, Frank Kern talks about discovering the characteristics and mindsets that make up your best buyer. As a follow up to the previous episode on your best payday, Frank dives into how to locate and identify your absolute best buyers and ideal clients. These are the customers that are going to give you your best payday.

Frank wants to help you figure out how to do less in your business, while making more and having fun.

Key Lessons Learned:

Buyers

• A quick refresher for your best payday is: think of the activity in your business that fits five main criteria. It must have a high net profit, it has to be energizing, it has to be easy to sell, it has to be easy to deliver, and it has to be sustainable. After scoring each activity against those criteria, you will find the one that will provide you with your best payday.
• Once you know what your best payday is, the next logical question is “who are you going to sell it you? Take out your worksheet and fill out your best payday at the top, then figure out your best price. Your best price isn’t determined by a bargain basement approach, it should be the one that meets your needs, it could also be called your perfect price. It’s okay to want to be paid more.
• If you want to be paid more, chances are your brain is going to stop throwing obstacles in your way. You may start to compare your price to your competitor’s pricing and start to really question your decision. Forgot all of that, you should get paid whatever you want to get paid as long as your buyer agrees with you.
• If you could only get paid your best price after your customer got the results they were paying to get, what characteristics would they have to have in order for you to take that challenge? The question has nothing to do with you, it has to do with your client. Write down three relevant characteristics of the client that will help you find the one big lever that will create the most impact.
• For Frank, the first characteristic is the client has to be a successful business owner. He needs to work with someone that can make decisions and be in a position where they can pay the desired price. The second characteristic is the client has to have encountered a ceiling, an obstacle that they can’t seem to grow past. The third characteristic for Frank is the client has to have deployable assets, momentum in their business that they can make use of. These are almost all the characteristics of Frank’s best buyer.
• We’re not quite finished though, there is another question to explore. “What mindsets do you share?” You have to make sure that you and your ideal buyer are aligned mentally or else you are going to have a conflict on your hands. For Frank, his ideal client has to value marketing and advertising instead of seeing it as an expense. He also wants his ideal client to have an abundance mindset, they have to see a world of possibilities, not limitations. They have to want to figure out how to spend more on advertising, not be afraid of it.
• The final shared mindset for Frank is the client must have a love of elegant simplicity and the 80/20 principle. They should be on a quest to simplify their business down to the most effective and vital activities and trim the fat. If Frank found a person that fit all these criteria, he wouldn’t have to worry about them writing the check once he’s delivered the results.
• Your best buyers are not few and far between, you just haven’t attracted them yet.

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Links to Resources Mentioned

FrankKern.com/2 for your best buyer worksheet.

Want your best payday ever?

In the first episode of “Your Next Million with Frank Kern,” Frank shows you how to claim your best payday and how to grab your copy of Frank’s exclusive Best Payday Worksheet.

Want faster access to your best payday, your NEXT million, and the gems Frank isn’t putting on the podcast? Visit http://FrankKern.com/Class.

You’ve made it this far, so you know you need to subscribe to this podcast to get every episode, when released, without that spam nonsense. Details and options at FrankKern.com/Subscribe.

Transforming Your Business Isn't About Doing A Million Different Things. It's About Finding ONE BIG THING and Then Leveraging That.

Frank Kern has been advising entrepreneurs like you all day, every day, to do just that since 1999.

This is his podcast.

Summary:

In the inaugural episode of Your Next Million, Frank Kern talks about online business and discovering your best payday.

If you’re like most people in business, you’re probably doing a lot of different things all at once. Between selling, making offers, and coming up with new promotions, the business can become overwhelming and can start to drive you nuts.

Frank wants to help you figure out how to do less in your business while making more and having fun.

Key Lessons Learned:

Online Business

• At the end of every month, Frank’s online business always seemed to have gone well but it felt like he was on a hamster wheel, trying to keep creating new products and promotions.
• Frank has tried pretty much every online business model you could imagine since he’s been making money online since 1999. He’s done consulting in various forms, produced a bunch of different courses, and they have all worked to some degree. But things really changed for him after he looked back through 8 years of data for all the products he had sold since 2008. He dug into the data to find the products that he had paid him the best, were the easiest to sell, and energized him the most to work on.
• After digging through his past sales data Frank discovered a discontinued product called Mass Control Monthly, a physical newsletter that he mailed to subscribers. He initially thought the program was a failure because of the way he started it. Making a million dollars in a day has been a common aspiration of online marketers and this was the mental framework that Frank had with this product as well.
• When he first launched the Mass Control Monthly program, he offered people a trial to get them to sign up and try it. Fast forward to 30 days later and he learned that the retention rate on the program was terrible. After consulting with one of his mentors, Dan Kennedy, he realized that the problem was he overwhelmed the people who took up the trial. So, he believed the program was a failure, even though he continued the program for another 3 years.
• After crunching the data, Frank realized that it had generated over $3 million dollars without him having to do much more than produce the newsletter each month. His realized that his focus back then wasn’t on the people who stuck to it as subscribers but on the people who were rejecting his offer. If he had just continued producing the newsletter consistently, he could have been producing seven figures a month.
• Once he learned that that kind of product was something that he found fulfilling and sold well, Frank decided to take his team and focus on producing another continuity program to the exclusion of everything else. The Kern Inner Circle program now generates over $522,000 a month in recurring revenue. This has become the hidden jewel of his business model.
• Frank discovered the concept of finding your best payday and now he shows other business owners how to discover their best payday. The trick is not just to find the product or service that pays you the best. Having a high paying job you hate is not what you are looking for.

Your Best Payday

• There are a few main criteria to your best payday when it comes to online business. Your deliverable has to have a high net profit, otherwise, why are you doing it? You have to enjoy doing it and it has to energize you if you’re drained every day by what you do you are going to burn out. It has to be easy to deliver and it has to be easy to sell. The next thing to look at is learning if it sustainable. Can you keep doing it every day? The final component is can someone else do it or can it be automated?
• Download the worksheet and go through the exercises involved to identify where your best payday can be found in your online business. Score each aspect of your deliverables on a 1 to 5 scale, your best payday will score high in total. If you do the exercise and focus on the product or service with the highest score, it will change your business and transform your life.
• Frank went from feeling like he was on a hamster wheel each month to experiencing constant growth in his business while feeling energized by what he’s working on.

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review on iTunes!

Links to Resources Mentioned

FrankKern.com/1 for your Best Payday worksheet.