Donald “Don” Miller is an American author, public speaker, and business owner. He is the CEO of StoryBrand, a marketing company. He is also an author of personal essays and reflections about faith, God, and self-discovery. His first New York Times bestselling book was Blue Like Jazz and his latest book is called Marketing Made Simple.
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Resource
Business Made Simple – On-Demand Courses to Help You Grow a Business.
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3 Value Bombs
1) Here’s a formula for creating a mission statement: “We will accomplish X by X because of X.”
2) Wealthy people think that the company exists to make money so they can buy something that makes more money without working.
3) As you create new products, know its profitability. Also, ask if it will confuse the audience on what problem you’re intending to solve in the marketplace.
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Show Notes
**Click the time stamp to jump directly to that point in the episode.
Today’s Audio MASTERCLASS: The Simple Checklist You Can Use to Grow Your Business.
[1:22] – Don shares something that he believes about becoming successful that most people disagree with.
- An enormous driver of individual success is on health. Mixed motives could also be a driver of success.
[4:55] – Don talks about the reasons why we should think of our business like an airplane…
- The cockpit is leadership, the guiding principles and mission statement, and all about identifying where you’re going.
- The wings are your products or services. The wings need to be strong and light, which translates to being in-demand and profitable.
- The body of the plane is your overhead, or your ongoing business expenses, like rent. Like the body of an airplane, you want to keep that small. A giant overhead would make the plane crash.
- The engine is your marketing and sales. They have to create enough thrust to get the product off the ground and lift the overhead with it.
- The fuel tank is the cash. Without cash, your plane is going to crash.
[9:28] – Creating a mission statement for your business.
- Mission statements are worthless because they lack statements and a mission.
- Here’s a formula for creating a mission statement: “We will accomplish X by X because of X.”
- Anything that you’re working on that doesn’t benefit the mission of the organization, stop doing it.
- Missions must have deadlines. A deadline increases the urgency of the story.
[14:10] – A timeout to thank our sponsors, HubSpot and BetterHelp!
[16:30] – The step-by-step process to create a profitable product.
- Audit your existing products and get rid of dead weight.
- As you create new products, know its profitability. Also, ask if it will confuse the audience on what problem you’re intending to solve in the marketplace.
[21:02] – Don talks about his online platform Business Made Simple.
- They offer everything that you need to know to grow a business.
[23:36] – Cashflow is the lifeline for most businesses. How can we manage our cashflow to set our businesses up for profitable and sustainable growth?
- The first checking account is for your operating expenses. All the money for the company goes in and out of this account.
- Two more accounts that sit next to your checking account are taxes and profits.
- Once profit reaches 2.5 million – or whatever you need for 6 months worth of overhead – you have another spillover account called investment holding. It is where you look for other assets that you can buy that create money apart from your company.
- The fifth account is your personal checking account. The operating expense account pays a salary to your personal checking account, and that’s what you live off of.
- Wealthy people think that the company exists to make money so they can buy something that makes more money without working.
[29:13] – Don talks more about his book…
- In his book he shares how he went from a quarter million to 6 and a half million in 5 years, with a 60%+ profit margin!
- A one-liner, a lead generator, a well-wired website that gets results, an email list, and a closing sales letter are the basic 5 things that any small business needs to grow.
- Go through the process step-by-step with the book Marketing Made Simple.
Transcript
0 (2s):
Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation, JLD here, and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by HubSpot today, we'll be focusing on the simple checklist you can use to grow your business, to drop these value bombs. I brought Donald Miller on the mic. He is an American author, public speaker and business owner. And as the CEO of StoryBrand a marketing company, he's also an author of personal essays and reflections about faith God and self discovery. His first New York times bestselling book was Blue Like Jazz, and his latest book is called Marketing Made Simple and Fire Nation. Today. We'll talk about why you should think about your business, like an airplane, the importance of a mission statement.
0 (43s):
We'll also talk about the importance of creating a mission statement for your business. And we'll talk about how to manage your cashflow, to set up your business for profitable and sustainable growth and so much more Fire Nation. When we get back from thanking our sponsors, managing conversations with prospects and customers throughout all stages of their journey can be tough. Information gets lost between departments in your customer's experience suffers as a result. HubSpot wants to change that. Learn more about how you can scale your company without scaling complexity at HubSpot.com. Don say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.
1 (1m 23s):
Well, it's good to be with you guys. I think that most people would disagree with something. I, I foundationally believe John and it's that an enormous driver of individual success is actually unhealthy. It's it's, it's psychological unhealthy. For instance, needing strangers to applaud for you would be a driver of success, a desire to prove that you are not white trash. That's that's a big one for me because I grew up standing in a welfare line and the healthier I get, the less driven I become.
1 (2m 3s):
Now that isn't to say there, aren't also healthy motives. I believe I'm a strong believer in mixed motives. So I want to help people. And I also want to prove to myself and to others that I'm capable of being successful. So I would say mixed motives as a driver of success are actually, I, I firmly believe that those can be drivers of success. In fact, I recently I watched a documentary about people who had near death experiences that as they died, one woman was underwater for 19 minutes, 19 minutes. And she went to a spirit world or whatever. There's a, there's a university of Virginia. There's a professor at the university of Virginia. Who's, who's sat with more than 10,000 people. Who've had near death experiences and they go to someplace, they're all eerily similar.
1 (2m 49s):
And they experienced this freedom from their own baggage. And they don't, none of them wanted to come back, but somebody told them you got to go back and they went back. And every one of them, according to this doctor at the university of Virginia said they struggled with motivation. They struggled with competition and the desire to succeed. And to me, that's that says something that's amazing, even if there's no afterlife, right? Even if you don't believe in it, the fact that you realized you were being driven and it just wasn't necessary. And it was causing you to not enjoy life, as much says something to me. So I think, I think the desire to succeed is a mixed bag. I am 100% into it.
1 (3m 30s):
I get up early every morning. I, I organize my time, but there's part of me that wonders. You know, if I were, and I'm not unhealthy, my wife, my I'm not a workaholic. My wife and I have a great relationship. I have good friendships, but I do wonder if it weren't for the fact that I grew up in poverty, standing in line for government cheese and having a crush on the homecoming queen, who would never possibly go out with me if I weren't so driven,
0 (3m 57s):
This is why you consume content from Don, because he says it like it is very few people in this world will tell it straight like this. And that's why I love when I hear words coming out of your mouth. Don. Quick question, before we move on, have you ever read the book? The pleasure trap by Alan Goldhammer? No,
1 (4m 16s):
I haven't, but that sounds actually really good.
0 (4m 18s):
You need to listen from what you were just saying. You would find the book fascinating. It's unlocked some of the very things that you were talking about in my mind. And I'm like, Oh, that's what drives us. Oh, it's you go down that path? My man, the pleasure trap by Alan Goldhammer and hit me up with email. I want to know your thoughts on it. It's super, super valuable and foundation today. As I mentioned, we're talking about the simple checklist that you can use to grow your business and who doesn't want a simple checklist to grow your business. And I want to start off in a different direction and talk about airplanes. Why the heck should we think about our business as an airplane?
1 (4m 57s):
Yeah, it's so funny. I just filmed a course called how to grow a business and I filmed it in front of a green screen, but what the audience will see is a triple seven out, you know, with, with my, my company logo on it, business made simple. And then I realized that as I went through the whole thing I realized, one of my main points is keep overhead low. And I'm sitting in front of the $700 million, triple seven. So only your audience will know that I indeed kept my overhead very low. Cause all it is is a big green carpet behind me, but that's it. You know, it, it helped me. I was a memoirist before I started a business, had no business training whatsoever.
1 (5m 38s):
And there was a single analogy, a single metaphor, if you will, that I used, when I first started my business, that has allowed me to go to about $20 million in total revenue in five years with a 64% profit margin, no venture capital, no private equity and no loans from banks, no partners. And, and that was the metaphor of the airplane. I just kept thinking of my business like an airplane. So let me go through it real quick. You have the cockpit and that's the leadership. So that's the guiding principles. That's your mission statement. That's where are we going? Where are we taking this thing? You have the wings of the airplane. Those are your products and services. It's whatever you sell, whatever you decide to sell the wings need to be strong and light.
1 (6m 20s):
And that translates into in demand and profitable. If you have a product that is not in demand, you're going to fail. If you have a product that is not profitable, you're going to fail. The body of the airplane is your overhead. So that's your rent, your mortgage on your building, whatever that is, you know, the Coke and the Coke machine, the flickering light bulb, the Coke machine here. A lot of your salaries, I would consider overhead. That's overhead. You want to keep that small because if you have giant overhead, it's the plane's going to crash. The body of the plane is too big. In fact, we've all been on airplanes, probably a smaller airplane where they come out and say, look, one of you guys, one of you got to get off, you know, whoever's fattest, get off this plane. That's kind of a thing. And we're taking your bag with you.
1 (7m 2s):
And so we've, you know, because it matters, right? They actually weighing the plane. Then you got the right engine, which is your marketing engine. The sales engine is your engine. Those two engines have to create enough thrust to get the product off the ground and lift the overhead with it. And then you have the all-important fuel tank, which is where your cash is. Because if you run out of cash, your plane is going to crash. And so if you can manage, where are we taking this thing? What products are we creating? How heavy is our overhead is our ride. Engine marketing, working Wells are left. Engine sales working well. And do we have enough bank money in the bank account to keep this thing in the air.
1 (7m 43s):
If you always build your business in proportion, it's going to do okay. If you were at an airport and you walked up to a plane and had a giant body, tiny little puny wings made out of paper, little rubber band engines and gas spewing out the back, you would intuitively know not to get on that plane. And yet we don't have that kind of, they don't teach that kind of common sense in business school. And a lot of people listening to this interview, they've got a really beautiful office. They're paying people way too much money. Their product isn't very profitable, but their business looks really successful. And the reason it looks successful is because venture capital, somebody else is paying for all that stuff.
1 (8m 27s):
Your customers are not. And if you just go back and say, look, we're going to turn this thing thing into an incredibly efficient airplane. We're going to lower our overhead ramp up our marketing engine ramp up our sales engine. The cockpit is going to reverse engineer, a specific destination, and we're going to save up six to eight months of money in our bank account. So that overhead is covered in case we need to circle the airport for, you know, six months until we land. We won't crash and burn this thing. But when I understood and each of, of course has a checklist, the leadership has a checklist. The ride engine marketing has a checklist left engine sales has a checklist and that's what I've created this checklist to make sure your airplane is built. Flight worthy.
0 (9m 7s):
Common sense is not common practice Fire Nation. Something key to think about as we continue talking through this conversation, this simple checklist that you can use to grow your business. Now, some people Don, they rave about mission statements. Some people hate mission statements. What do you think about creating a mission statement for your business?
1 (9m 29s):
I think most of them are ridiculous. They're worthless. They here's what they here's what they, they lack. They lack a statement and they lack a mission. Never noticed that we will increase shareholder value, but with sustainable practices that lawyers wrote that clearly lawyers wrote that. And you know, I was in a C-suite once with a group of executives and I, and I was talking about a formula that I'll share with your audience for a mission statement. That is full-proof, it will impassion everybody working for you. But I said, you know, I said, you know, I liked this formula. They said, well, we, we spent 48 hours at a retreat. We, we sweat blood over our mission statement.
1 (10m 11s):
In fact, it's painted on the wall outside of this conference room and it guides this whole company. So we don't need help on that. Dom, we've done that. And I turned to the CFO and I said, were you on that retreat? Were you on the 48 hour retreat? The CFO said, yes, I was. I said, what's the mission statement? And he couldn't remember. I said, how can you not remember it's painted on the wall outside of this room? You know, most Mrs. Davis are not memorable. It was, let me give you a formula for one. And we use it. It's we will accomplish X by X because of X that's it. We will accomplish X by X because of X. So here's mine at business made simple it's this, we will have 250,000 people in our online platform, 5,000 certified business coaches and 2,500 certified marketing guides by 2025 because everybody deserves the help.
1 (11m 6s):
They need growing a business. It's so specific. And the reason it's so specific, and the reason is because everybody has to defend their job against our mission statement. So if I go to our events, coordinators say, tell me what you're working on. They would say, well, we're sending out these VIP packages to Instagram influencers because we want them to talk about it so that more, the more people will join our platform. And we'll get to that 250,000 number. In other words, anything that you're working on that does not benefit the mission of the organization, stop working on it, don't do it. And maybe we'll go back and change our mission statement, but don't do it. What that does is creates a very lean airplane. So there's not all this waste and overhead of people working on things they don't need to work on.
1 (11m 49s):
The other thing is we put a timeline on it. We're going to do all this before 2025, because we know in story structure, a deadline increases the urgency of the story. So a mission has a deadline. We're going to attack this country and take down the dictator by this time. So that's a mission. But if you just say our mission is not to like such and such country, because they're just not very democratic. Nobody knows what to do. That's not a mission. It has to be specific. And you say, well, Don, your mission statement is really boring. You know what? People remember it. They can recite it. They, they filter their job description through it. Everybody in my organization knows the three tactical priorities of this organization.
1 (12m 32s):
You find me an organization where you walk in and say, what are the main three priorities of this entire organization? They'll say, well, excellence, safety. Give me a break, come on. If you're not safe and don't do excellent work, get out. I need to know what are you supposed to be working on? What's the goal, right? A football team. You go into, you go to an NFL football team. See what's the goal. Everyone was going to say win the super bowl. It's exactly. It's not like play excellent football. It's not, that's not a goal. The goal is to win the football game. So I think a corporation's mission statements. Aren't very good. And the other thing is, you know, if you're a nonprofit, that mission statement attracts donors, that attracts resources, cause it's a mission.
1 (13m 14s):
You know, we will, my wife is chairman of the board for an anti-human trafficking organization. So we will free over 100,000 women caught up in sex trafficking by the end of the year. And we will throw this many people in jail because no woman should be a slave to anybody else. You just go, where do I, can you get my checkbook, honey, get the checkbook. We're writing a check to this. But if we just say, look, we, you know, we believe that everybody deserves to be free. And you know, it's just not specific enough for people to get their heads around.
0 (13m 47s):
Mission statements, lack of mission. And a statement Fire Nation, you know, is true. It's across the board. Don't fall into that category. And if you think Don even close to dropping value bombs, you get another, another thing coming. We're gonna be talking about step-by-step processes in creating profitable products. When we get back from thanking our sponsors, sometimes what prevents us from reaching our biggest business goals are things like stress, anxiety, relationships, trauma, family conflicts, even our own self-esteem. And none of these should get in the way of your dreams. That's why there's BetterHelp. BetterHelp is not a crisis line. And it's not self-help is professional counseling done securely online.
0 (14m 28s):
Here's how it works. BetterHelp we'll assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapists. You'll connect in a safe and private online environments, making a, both confidential and convenience and you can start communicating in under 48 hours. Plus better help is more affordable than traditional offline counseling and financial aid is available. BetterHelp is also available for clients worldwide. So you can find the particular expertise you need without having to limit yourself to counselors located near you. I want you to start living a happier life today. And as a listener, you'll get 10% off your first month by visiting our sponsor at BetterHelp.com/fire. Join over 1 million people who have taken charge of their mental health. Again, that's BetterHelp. BETTERHELP.com/fire, managing conversations with prospects and customers throughout all stages of their journey can be tough.
0 (15m 16s):
Information gets lost between departments in your customer's experience suffers as a result, HubSpot wants to change that. That's why they created a CRM platform that makes it easy to align across teams. So how does HubSpot do it with one unified system of record? This means that engaging in things like live chat conversations via your website, sending marketing emails, booking prospect meetings and having access to a document library allows every department to seamlessly work together towards a common goal, a next level customer journey that drives growth in lifetime loyalty, say goodbye to multiple systems that are cobbled together and having data channels and teams that are disjointed. It's time to go above and beyond for your customers.
0 (15m 58s):
And with HubSpot, you can learn more about how you can scale your company without scaling complexity at HubSpot.com. Don, we are back and listen, brother. I'm all about step-by-step processes. I'm all about profits. I've been publishing an income report for 91 months in a row, which by the way, also publishes our net profit percentage to our gross revenue. So I love that, you know, those numbers as well. What is the step-by-step process that we can use to create profitable products?
1 (16m 30s):
Well, even before we create a profitable product, I think you need to do a product inventory or a product audit. So this was really eye-opening in my company. We sat down, we listed all of our products that we sell. And then we turned around, we listed them in order of profitability. So that was really eye opening because some of the things that we were spending the most bandwidth on the most energy on trying to grow, we're actually not very profitable. And what we came up with was there's really six things that we need to focus on. And that is business made simple, my online platform. We need to focus on that and renewals because it's an annual fee.
1 (17m 10s):
So two there. Then we certify coaches who go into companies all over the world and help them understand our processes. We need to focus on growing that program and their renewals. And then we have StoryBrand marketing guides and we need to focus on getting more guides and renewing those guides. So each one has a renewal fee associated with it annually. And what that did, was it decreased? This is what's amazing. It decreased the amount of work we were doing as a team. When we focused on three products with three sub products underneath those products, six things is all we sell as an organization.
1 (17m 51s):
So we, we let go of all sorts of live casts that were one-off that, you know, we'd make $800,000 on a livecast. We're not doing that anymore because we say no, the longterm plan or these three things plus their renewals. And we, we believe that over time, that's going to pay massive dividends because we don't want to be known for 23 or 25 things. We want to be known for three things because it's easier to be known when you only are carrying three things with you. Then if you show people 25 things. So that's, that's the first part is just auditing your existing products and getting rid of dead weight. You want to throw baggage out the back door, that airplane. So it's lighter, consumes less fuel.
1 (18m 32s):
The marketing doesn't have to work as hard, or if marketing sales is working hard, the plan goes faster and farther because there's less weight. So that's the first thing. Then the second thing is, as you create new products, there are a couple of questions to ask, how profitable is this for real? And there's all sorts of questions. Are we going to have to hire staff? What's the research and development fee. What's the run-up do we have, how much is this going to cost us to create all of those kinds of questions are the questions that you're asking. But here's one that very few people ask, is this going to confuse our audience? You know, we're known for making this. If we add this, will people get confused about what problem we solve in the marketplace?
1 (19m 15s):
That's a question that very few people ask. And so, you know, you do an audit on existing products and then you also run any product idea through a filter before you create it. I've got a, there's a book I wrote called business made simple, and it's 60 daily videos and 60 daily entries. You almost read it like a devotional. And I spent an entire week just talking about the auditing process for new product creation,
0 (19m 43s):
Product audits, dump the dead weights. And then I also love how you talked about, Hey, is adding this product can add confusion to our business, or is it going to, you know, add to what we're creating right here. And frankly, I needed that book. I needed that knowledge a number of years ago when I launched an incredibly successful journal called the freedom journal. And in 33 days it did 450, $3,000 on a Kickstarter for a $39 journal. I could hit the spots. Yeah, crushed it. But then brother, I made the mistake a year later to launch another journal. And now what did I do? Like now people are like, well, John, do I buy the freedom journal? Or do I buy the mastery journal? They do.
0 (20m 23s):
They work together. And then, and I was like, Oh my God, people are actually asking me this question. But a lot of people are just not buying either because nobody wants to think they just want, Oh, this is John's journalist buy it. Let's go. Let's go home. But now there's like, what do I do? I'm confused. And then they don't do anything. They do. They take inaction. So it's all about like, what is that product Ascension model? So like knowing that Don, and let's not go deep into this because this isn't the point. But like, like what would be an example of something that, you know, you would create as a product and instead of creating something that would be confusing as a potential competitor and cannibalizing your own initial product would actually be a benefit in help that product.
1 (21m 1s):
We have a, an online platform called business made simple. So we have a bunch of courses on negotiation, on management execution, on sales, on mission statement, guiding principle on marketing, on messaging, everything you need to know to grow a business. So my team, and I know that when COVID hit, we did a Donald Miller teaches writing live stream. We made about 800, $800,000 off that we'd come back this year and we're going, you know, we're coming up on March last year, we got an extra $800,000 when we did that live stream. Do we want to do it again? But you know what, John, it's not one of our three tactical priorities. Our three tactical worries are online membership to our platform, coaching and marketing guides.
1 (21m 41s):
Those are the three things we sell. So what we did was we said, you know what, we're going to give up the 800 grand, but we're going to do the Donald Miller teaches writing. But so we don't confuse people about what we do. We're actually going to do it for free if you are a member of the platform. So we're, we turned it to sell membership to one of our tactical priorities as a bonus. Now that's going to cost us probably my guess is about $250,000. We're going to lose, but, but just hear me out. It is worth it to not confuse the audience about what we want them to do because in the long run 10 years from now, we want a million people in that platform.
1 (22m 23s):
And if I keep going, well, you know, I want a million people on the platform, but I want to run over. You get 50 grand here. And I want to go over here and get 75 grand. You are never going to get to a million people in your platform. It's a long form play. So those are the sort of decisions that we're always making. You know, we're always asking, we're checking it against our mission. It does Donald Miller teaches writing. Does that help the online platform? It doesn't, well, how can we make it help the online paper? You know, what, make it an exclusive for people who are in the online platform, it's free for them. And that's how we justify that. And those are the, that's how we make those decisions,
0 (22m 58s):
Willing Fire Nation to take the path of delayed gratification, which is a lot easier to do when you're clear about the actual path you're on now, Don, you're a busy guy. I'm a busy guy. I want to get to talking about your book marketing made simple in a second here. So let's move kind of quickly through this last point. I want you to talk about, because I think this is really important. It's kind of bring a lot of what we've talked about home, which is cashflow because that's the lifeline for most businesses. So share with my audience Fire Nation, how we can actually manage our cashflow to set up our businesses for profitable and sustainable.
1 (23m 36s):
Okay. So go grab a piece of paper, pause the podcast, grab a pen, get a whiteboard, whatever you gotta do. But here's how I manage cashflow. And I managed from a quarter million a year to 16 and a half million a year. And I'll I'll use the same system all the way to a hundred million. It's basically five checking accounts. The first account is your operating expense account. We're all familiar with that when all the money for the company goes into that account, all the money for the company goes out of that account, all your bills, everything. Then there's two more accounts that sit next to your checking account. Imagine them like beakers in a science lab, your operating expense account is there.
1 (24m 16s):
Then you've got an account that's called taxes and you've got, you've got an account that's called profit. Now in Puerto Rico, your account with taxes has a lot less money in it, but I'm in Nashville.
2 (24m 25s):
Yeah. I was just going to say, how does this work? What's this, what's this word taxes you say,
1 (24m 30s):
Well, for those of us who live stateside, you want to do is you want to leave enough money in your operating expense account to cover your biggest bills. And then some, so payroll is going to happen every two weeks. For me, that's between 120 and $150,000, depending on when commissions get paid. So I've got to leave about $200,000 in my operating expense account, but let's say I go online. I check my account and I've got $300,000 in the account. Well, what I do is I take 50 and I put it into taxes and I take 50 and I put it into profit. Now, quarterly, the taxes is going to get mostly emptied. Although 50% is way over what I pay.
1 (25m 11s):
So I always have more money in my tax account that is also profit, but I don't deal with that till the end of the year. And then in my profit account, I want six, five to six months worth of overhead in that account at all times, for me, that's about 2.5 to $2.7 million that is sitting in a profit account. And the reason it's sitting there and not in some better investment, although I'm about to take half of it and put it into a better investment because they don't need that much liquid is because you never know when you're going to need it. You never know when there's going to be a global pandemic. And, and also John, just ease of mine and peaceful.
1 (25m 52s):
Night's sleep is worth a lot. I've got, you know, when, when COVID hit my company where we were 80% dependent on people getting on an airplane, flying to Nashville and sitting in a workshop, I was pacing the floor. But one of the reasons I felt okay is because I had months of overhead before I had to lay anybody off. We ended up with, with that peace of mind and that, that, that nest egg, we re-engineered the company. And we met war mortar, a live stream model. We saw about a 20% increase in revenue and about a 30% increase in profit. But I think if I, if I wouldn't have that money in that account, I might've panicked. Okay. So now you've got, now you've got three accounts, there's operating expense tax and profit.
1 (26m 35s):
Now once profit hits 2.5 million or whatever you need for six months worth of overhead, you have another spillover account. And that is called investment holding. And all the investment holding is, is the extra profit. Now all that profit belongs to you as the owner of the company. But I say, leave it in there cause that's your gas tank for your airplane. And you want to be able to fly and circle the airport for a long time, in case you're missing some landing gear and you've got to figure out what to do, but then you have your investment holding account and the spillover from your profit goes into investment holding. And that's where you look for other assets that you can buy that create money apart from your company. So you're talking about a stock portfolio.
1 (27m 17s):
The, although it is a what March of 2021, I do not recommend buying stocks right now. I think the market is overpriced or you can buy CDs. I don't recommend buying those right now. You can buy property perhaps and so forth, but that's a way of diversifying your revenue. If you want to do that, then you've got one more account. It's the fifth account. And that is your personal checking account. And I believe, and have lived like this for a very long time that my operating expense account pays a salary into my personal checking account. And that's what I live off of. So I live off my personal checking account and then I don't get any more money out of the company until it spills over into investment holding.
1 (28m 2s):
And even then I don't want that money. I want to buy something that makes me more money. That's how really wealthy people think their company exists to make money so that they can go buy something that makes them money without working. And then pretty soon you don't have to work. And so that that's those, the five checking accounts. That's how I run the other. The other thing those five checking accounts do is, you know, I've got my dashboard with all my metrics, my leads, my emails that come in, my sales yesterday, sales today, sales this week, you know, all, all that stuff. It's a great dashboard. But when I log on to first horizon bank, which is my bank, I look at the numbers in those five checking accounts. I can immediately tell you how healthy my company's immediately.
1 (28m 44s):
It's it's a real time. These are the actual dollar numbers and it's, to me it's more powerful than a profit and loss statement. Those five checking accounts,
0 (3s):
Fire Nation. You can see why I love the step by step process and the method of how Don's brain works, which leads us to marketing made simple.
0 (29m 3s):
So Don, as we close down here, give us some details about why you wrote this book, who's it for and where Fire Nation can pick it up.
1 (29m 14s):
Well, if you know, if you asked how I went from a quarter million to 16 and a half million in about five years, again, with a 60 plus percent profit margin, it's the answer is the book marketing made simple. I just created sales funnels. Now we all know about sales funnels, click funnels. This is the down and dirty easiest sales funnel to create. If you have a pet store, if you own a restaurant, if you have a grocery store, if you're a financial advisor, if you're a real estate agent, it doesn't matter. The five marketing tools, pieces of marketing collateral that I described in that book, which are a, one-liner a lead generator, a well wired website that actually gets results, an email list and a closing sales letter.
1 (29m 57s):
Those are the basic five things that any small business needs to create. And I go through, step-by-step how to create them in the book. Marketing made simple. It's going to take you a couple of months, but really what you're building. If you build it right, is an ATM machine that spits out money. And so I think that's worth a couple of months work and it's a literally a step-by-step instruction book in marketing made simple,
0 (30m 23s):
Raise my hand, Fire Nation. I want an ATM machine that just makes money. So if you want to join me on that marketing made simple, get the book invest. And I'm not saying in the 20 bucks, the book cost, I'm saying invest the time, the energy, the bandwidth to follow the steps of people like Don success, leaves, clues, follow these clues. So Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And hello. You've been hanging out with DM and JLD today. So you better keep up that heat head over to eofire.com type Don and the search bar. The show notes page will pop up with everything that we talked about today.
0 (31m 3s):
Best shownotes in the bears. Don, thank you brother, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today, for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by Don ans Fire Nation. I have created a treasure trove of free courses for you. I teach you how to podcast run masterminds, create funnels that actually convert and so much more. All you need to do is visit EOFire.com/resources to start learning today. And I'll catch you there, or I'll catch you on the flip side, managing conversations with prospects and customers throughout all stages of their journey can be tough.
0 (31m 43s):
Information gets lost between departments in your customer's experience. Suffers as a result. HubSpot wants to change that. Learn more about how you can scale your company without scaling complexity at HubSpot.com.
Killer Resources!
1) The Common Path to Uncommon Success: JLD’s 1st traditionally published book! Over 3000 interviews with the world’s most successful Entrepreneurs compiled into a 17-step roadmap to financial freedom and fulfillment!
2) Free Podcast Course: Learn from JLD how to create and launch your podcast!
3) Podcasters’ Paradise: The #1 podcasting community in the world!