Have you wondered how to get more engagement out of your email list? Or have you struggled with getting conversions with a new product or service offering?
Our guest today is Luke Charlton, a marketing expert who shares simple and actionable insights on improving your email marketing list efforts.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
Use your skill set and apply it to a better model, such as franchising your business.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- You can visit our guest’s website at: https://lukecharlton.com/
- Attend our Franchise Sales Training Workshop:
- https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/franchisesalestraining/
- If you are ready to franchise your business or take it to the next level: CLICK HERE.
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
In 2013, Luke Charlton (AKA: The Aussie Hermit) decided to quit his comfortable 6-figure/yr government job, move halfway around the world, and start an online business as a Coach. Luke finally discovered the formula for online success now helping over 4,000 Coaches grow their business online.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/ or by calling Big Sky Franchise Team at: 855-824-4759.
If you are interested in being a guest on our podcast, please complete this request form or email podcast@bigskyfranchise.com and a team member will be in touch.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:01):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom Dufore, CEO of Big Sky franchise team, and as we open today, I’m wondering if you have ever thought about how to get more engagement out of your email list or maybe you’ve struggled with getting conversions out of your email list when you’ve launched a new product or a new service offering. Well, our guest today is Luke Charlton, and he shares with us simple and actionable insights on improving your email marketing list efforts. Now Luke, also known as the Aussie hermit, decided to quit his comfortable six figure job, move halfway around the world and start an online business as a coach. Finally, he figured out the formula for success and has helped over 4,000 coaches and businesses grow their business online. He is a marketing and online marketing expert. You’re going to love this interview with Luke, so let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (01:10):
My name is Luke, Luke Charlton. Title, well, I run a couple of businesses, so if you look me up on Google, I call myself an advertising specialist, but technically, I guess I’m a director of two companies. One’s an agency that I run ads for high ticket service professionals, coaches, consultants, experts. And then another one is I have a business partner in the other one. Again, it’s a coaching company. It helps women to create a secure income, like a passive income for their retirement, showing them how to invest correctly. So on that side of things, I do the marketing and sales, and then my business partner, she is the one that actually delivers the program and coaches on it because that’s her area of expertise on the finance coaching side.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (01:52):
Great. Well, thank you so much for being here and really your expertise in advertising is why we wanted to have you on the show to talk a little bit about some of the expertise that you have. One of the things that stood out to me that I found interesting that you have some background in is creating a responsive list with cold traffic. And so the two seem almost opposite to one another. With cold traffic and a responsive list because normally you hear any kind of whether, it’s a cold list, cold traffic, the hardest part is getting any sort of just nudge of interest. So I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about that.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (02:29):
So when it comes to cold traffic, for those that haven’t run advertising before, I mean it’s in the name, right? Cold. So these people, they don’t know who you are. They could have clicked on a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad or a YouTube ad or whatever it is, whatever type of ad, even if it’s come from a podcast, it’s still quite cold. They’re still just being introduced to you for the first time. And that prospect is very different to warm. So warm generally means that they have heard about you before they opt into your list. So that could be a referral. Like if I said, “Hey, Tom, go check out this coach, she’s awesome,” and you go opt in, you’d be a bit warmer then opting into that list because there’s that referral transfer of trust. So you’ll get a better response from that type of lead, but when it’s cold, you really starting at ground zero with the relationship.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (03:17):
So you have to do the right things to build up that trust. Now, this is where a lot of us business owners, we take some shortcuts with our marketing and selling. One of those being, if you want to create a responsive list, it never starts with your solution, it never starts with your product, whatever it is that you’re selling could be an e-commerce product, it could be trying to sell franchise, whatever it is. It doesn’t start with how cool your solution is. It always starts with the market, what the market wants, what they need. So their fears, their frustrations, their desires, what keeps them up at night, and knowing that market better than they know themselves. And then when you know that, then you can create a message that’s going to attract them. And this is where I say we business owners can sometimes take shortcuts in that we don’t do the research properly.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (04:03):
We kind of like, oh yeah, I know my market and we’ll just leave it there without, actually, I’ve had some conversations with them, but we don’t actually do the elbow grease, all that work to really find out all about our market, including all of our competitors and what messages our competitors are using. And I say, this is actually where the money is made because this is where your prospects will give you the language that will convert them with your campaign, whether that’s advertising or whether you’re doing a JV promotion, email promotion or whatever. So you start there, and that’s really critical. So when you go to write your email campaigns, you can craft a message that is in alignment with what they’re telling you that they’re struggling with and with copywriting, email copywriting, sales letters, whatever it is, VSLs, webinars, all you’re really doing is just reflecting back the same language to the prospect.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (04:53):
Your prospect will literally give you the words to convert them in your emails to get them on an appointment or whatever the goal is for your email or whatever copywriting you’re doing. They’ll literally give you the words to use in your copy to get that action that you want them to take. So in terms of creating a responsive list, the first thing is know your market better than they know themselves. And the next thing is have a base level knowledge of copywriting. Study it. Even if it doesn’t come naturally to you, as a business owner it’s… I’m hiring at the moment in that other company with my business partner, we just hired some salespeople and we’re bringing on appointment setters. And one of the things that I realized, employee attraction, attracting employees to your company to come work for you is just the same as client attraction.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (05:38):
I had to write the ad for this setter position and sales position. Like as a sales letter I’D to write all the benefits, and I had to think about, okay, what would an appointment setter, what was this dream employee that I would want? So think of dream client, dream employee, what would the market want in terms of this position? What are they struggling with? And I wrote all the benefits like you can do it part-time, you can work your own hours. Here are the good commissions. We’re a growing team, great culture, all these things. The point is, from my copywriting experience, I could create an “Ad” to attract employers. I had 80 women, I think it was, apply for this position, we only need two people. So that was from two emails that I sent out. Two emails I sent out to our list, 80 people applied, and that was from my copywriting ability.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (06:25):
And so I was thinking, learning copywriting will help you in so many different areas of your business and also life in negotiating with your kids or your spouse is one of them. But yeah, so knowing a baseline level of copywriting is very helpful to create a responsive list and then getting a mentor is also really critical. So we can’t see our own blind spots. Even I have mentors look over my own copy because sometimes we’re too close. It’s the curse of expert knowledge. We are so deep in our own solution that we sometimes can’t see the blind spots. We can’t see the best angle or headline for that particular campaign that we’re doing or copy. So even myself, after all these years, I still get people to look over my copy. Now in terms of strategy, which is probably what you’re looking for, I always like to set the context there because I feel like people always ask, “How did you become successful with copywriting and advertising?”
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (07:21):
It’s what I just discussed. People are always looking for like, what’s the secret email hack or what’s the secret Facebook ad hack? What’s the new placement? It’s not about that. It’s about those fundamentals that I just went over that people they’ve heard before, but that really is where the money is made. Now in terms of creating a responsive list, you do all that. You start writing messages that your list actually wants to receive. That’s number one, write a message that they want to receive. One of the ways that I do that is I tell stories in all of my emails. I say 95% or more of my emails is story driven. I love stories for a few reasons. They’re naturally entertaining. All of us can tell stories. That’s how we were brought up. That’s how we communicate to our friends, our family. We’re always telling stories.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (08:04):
So it comes naturally to everyone. Stories are also a really great way to illustrate your points. If you are trying to talk about a certain principle or a certain strategy that you help with or whatever, telling the story about how you discovered this or a client or telling a story about, Hey, I read this news article and this was really funny, but what I really learned from this news article was LMNOP. So a story, it really illustrates the point in a really natural way. So I tell the story and then I transition to the call to action, but again, that call to action is an offer that I know that my market wants because done the research.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (08:40):
On that story idea that you’re talking about there. We’ve had guests on that talk about writing or crafting in a story narrative type when you’re writing messaging. And so I want to be clear that you’re actually suggesting, including in the copy, an actual story that a client had or something like you were saying. So could you maybe just give a quick example of what that might be or one you’ve seen in the past?
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (09:04):
The story that I’m about to read off? So the thing you have to understand with email is like the medium of email, it’s a little bit more casual than a proper sales. It’s a personal kind of medium. It’s not like you’re writing an essay or it’s a conversation really. And so you can kind of get away a little bit more with email. You can be a little bit more casual even, and I get this all the time, it’s like, well, my prospects are CEOs or executives of these companies or whatever, or my prospects are professionals, but they’re human beings. They like to laugh. They like to be entertained. It doesn’t mean you have to be unprofessional, but tell stories, you can make them laugh. That’s totally fine. The framework that I use and I teach my clients is just story-lesson-close. So what’s the story? Literally could be any story, and I’m going to give you an example in a second, and then what’s the lesson from that story?
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (09:54):
So the story can come from a news article you read. It could be a personal story, like a high school story, it could be a story of a client. There are all these little stories all over the place, and you’ll see that as you go just being on the internet. They’re all over the place. As you’ll see when I’m going to give you this example, so you tell the story, then what’s the lesson from that story? And obviously the lesson is related to the topic that your businesses or if you’re coaching, if you’re an expert or if e-commerce or whatever your business is based on, and then the close or the call to action story-lesson-close. And that’s just like what do you want them to do? What’s the offer at the end? And every single email has an offer as a call to action.
When I say offer, it just means call to action. It could be a call to action to watch another video, but generally for my clients, it’s like to book an appointment because that’s where the sale happens, but for an e-commerce store it might be to go buy a certain product, right? Okay, so this email’s called The Fart That Broke The Internet. For whatever reason today, by the way, I call myself the Aussie hermit. You hear me say that here in just a second. For whatever reason today, the Aussie hermit had the urge to type into Google the fart that broke the internet. I have no idea why. I thought in my mind just said, you’ve got to search this. And so, because I never questioned such thoughts, search, I did the results. Security guard filmed all his farts for six months and went viral, not what I was expecting, honestly, not sure what I was expecting, but I was interested nonetheless.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (11:15):
So I clicked the link and here’s what the beginning of the article said. The Internet’s next viral star is a security guard at a Florida hospital who spent the last six months publicly logging his sonically perfect farts on Instagram. Now the 31 year old is poised to turn his flash in the bedpan success into a lucrative brand that can be summed up by his Instagram bio as a fart authority. Not going to lie. I actually found this pretty interesting. First because I never knew there was such a thing as sonically perfect farts. A second, because this guy’s videos have amassed millions of views on YouTube, millions. And third, because it teaches us a sobering lesson about what people actually pay attention to these days. And that’s pretty sad for us coaches. Here’s why. Us coaches have incredible content that transforms our clients’ lives. Even our free content is life transforming, whether it’s our email content, blog content, podcast content or video content.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (12:05):
We give advice that really helps. And yet many of us struggle to hold the attention of even just a few people. Let’s take email for example. Most coaches I speak with have great email content. Content they spend a lot of time creating. However, they get barely any opens from that content, even though it’s truly helpful, their list tunes out after just a week or two. So what’s going on here? Why is it so hard for us to get people to tune into our helpful content, but also easy for the far authorities of the world to get millions of views on their content? The answer is obvious. Their content entertains. This is what gets attention these days. It’s an unfortunately reality that the world would rather watch Netflix or YouTube or fight videos than consume our content. But hey, it is what it is. The Aussie hermit says it doesn’t matter anyway.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (12:44):
We don’t need to fight this. Instead just go with it. No, I don’t mean to say you should start filming yourself doing the one cheek squeak. That’s missing the point. What I am saying is that while it’s important your content teaches and adds value. What’s also important, if not more so in these times is that it entertains. Take the Aussie hermits emails, for example. It’s not all teach, teach, teach. Sure, my emails add a ton of value, but I also make sure they entertain. I wrap all of my content in something entertaining. That way my prospects look forward to my emails, they open my emails when they hit their inbox, they read my emails, and of course they buy from emails too. But that being said, the good news is you don’t have to be a comedian or late show host to send great emails.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (13:20):
Anyone and I mean anyone can send entertaining emails. You don’t have to come up with the content, your, family, friends, colleagues, and internet and more will just give it to you. You’ve just got to know where to look. And that’s what I teach inside my program. Go ahead to learn more. So that’s actually a bit of a longer email than what I would typically write, but you can see how it works, right. Story, what’s the lesson from that story? And then there’s a call to action at the end.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (13:41):
Oh, thank you for sharing that. And certainly in this case is definitely entertaining, got the point across, and hopefully a few chuckles. Is someone’s thinking about this and maybe they’re saying, “Okay, Luke, this sounds great. I’m interested, but I don’t know maybe the first place to start.” So what might be some things that they could do to improve the responsiveness of their list or get better results with email that they might be able to start with today or tomorrow that they could do pretty quickly?
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (14:08):
That’s a great question. Yeah. The biggest thing is the offer at the end of the email. So you can still send an email that’s just full of content, and if it’s got a really good offer at the end, you will still get a response. So remember, literally the word response, what does that mean? The response is direct response marketing. That means you’re creating marketing or a campaign to get a response from your prospect. And generally that’s either to book an appointment if you’re in high ticket sales like me or to buy the product, or it could be to sign up to a webinar which then sells the product or whatever.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (14:40):
But you have an email with an action that you want your prospects to take, that’s the response. So how do you increase the response? You make that more appealing. You make the part that, and this is where so many of my clients and coaches, and even I thought this when I was getting going, I thought the reason why they’re not responding to my emails is because I just haven’t taught them better content.
I just need to teach them even more content. Or if they really know this strategy, they’ll really love it. So I’m just going to give away all of my stuff and teach, teach, teach. And it doesn’t convert to sales. So when you teach, your prospect doesn’t go, wow, this is amazing. I wonder what else they have, how amazing is their product going to be? That’s not how the mind works. When you teach in your emails, it could be anywhere in a blog post, Facebook Live, when you really like hard teaching and trying to get them to understand a concept, it’s using a different part of your brain.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (15:31):
So you can think of your brain as the sales side, like getting sold. And then there’s the teaching brain. It’s kind of like the thinking side. And we’ve all had this experience when we jump on a webinar or anyone who’s done a webinar before with the goal of selling a product at the end, and I used to do this so often at the beginning, I would jump on and I would teach, teach, teach, and then at the end, I’d have my offer and it wouldn’t make any sales, and then I would jump on these guru webinars and they would teach nothing, and it would just be all these high level, really broad content that just doesn’t help at all.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (16:02):
And then they’re making millions of dollars, and it’s like, but wait a minute, my content is so much better. The reason why is, the content is not what sells them. Yes, they need general idea of the strategy that you are selling, the general overview of here’s the system at a very high level, highly chunked, if you NLP, high level, step one, step two, step three. And then you have a great offer at the end of that. It could be a sales letter, presentation, email, but the point is your content is to sell. It’s not to teach. Your program or your product or whatever. That’s where you give them the result they want because at the end of the day, your emails can’t really transform their life.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (16:42):
They still have to buy your product. Same with sales letters. So stop teaching in your copy, stop teaching in mediums that are designed to sell. Your email is a sales medium. It’s not a teaching medium. Blog posts are a sales medium. I mean, people use them as teaching. If I was going to do a blog, I’d use it more as a sales medium and write it more like a sales letter each of my posts. But anyway, use your content to sell. Don’t use it to teach because the teaching doesn’t sell, the selling sells, if that makes sense.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (17:15):
Tremendous. Great advice. And I think that that applies no matter what you’re selling. So someone who ends up listening to this, whether they’re the leader of an organization, they’re selling franchises or selling their product or service, this applies across the board to what you’re saying.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (17:30):
Yeah. So let me expand. So when we say selling, it’s like talking more about high level overviews of your product benefits. You can talk about features, but minimally because it’s like what do those features allow the prospect to do? And that should be linked with what they want to do. So if you want to come up with a great benefit benefit, you just look at, as I said, it always goes back to the market. You look at the market and go, here are all their frustrations, all their frustrations, all their fears, all their desires.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (17:57):
And then I go, okay, how many of these desires and frustrations can my product address? Oh, it does this one and this one and this one. And so that’s my copy there. Yes, I can help you with this. Yes, I can help you with this. And they go, oh, now I can see how your product helps me versus here are all the cool features that I have. And then the prospect is left wondering like, okay, you’ve got these features, but how does that help me? And that’s where we get stuck. And this is why I recommend you have a mentor. Your mentor will help you go, “No, that’s a feature you’re talking about. You need to link that with the benefit.”
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (18:24):
That’s number one is talking more features. Again, it’s very simple, but I find that we don’t do the simple things a lot of the time. And I mentioned before about improving the offer. So let me expand on that a little bit more. So when I say improving the offer, that’s really what drives the response being very clear with number one, what you want your prospect to do? Click, literally click the button below, book a spot on my calendar. That’s number one. Be very clear. For some reason, we think that using ambiguous fluffy language, big words and stuff is what is good copy, but no good copy is simple, straightforward, clear language. Be very clear.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (19:01):
And in terms of improving the offer, what’s the big result? I had to start with that. What’s the problem? Not say big result. It always goes back to the market. What’s the main problem that you’re solving for your prospect? What’s that main problem that your solution, whether it’s an e-commerce product, franchising, a coach, if you’re helping with relationships or whatever, what’s the one main problem that you’re hoping? So for me, it’s getting more clients. If you want more clients with paid advertising, click here and I’ll have a look at your campaigns or whatever, but getting more clients or appointments really because that leads to clients. But yeah, the final end result is getting more clients. So what’s that main result? Is it reconnecting your marriage? Is it buying certain cleaning products to clean their shower or whatever it is?
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (19:45):
What’s the main result, the main problem that you’re solving? Yes, there’s going to be lots of little frustrations, but I just start there and explain like, Hey, click here and I’ll help you with LMNOP result. It’ll you solve LMNOP result. Start there. And then you can improve that by saying, “Hey, I can help you get this result in a certain amount of time.” This is how we improve. Actually, everyone’s probably read this book, but Alex Hormozi’s book is a really good overview of how to improve your offer, the a $100M Offers book. So that will kind tell you how to enhance your offer. But basically it’s like what’s the main result? That’s number one. That’s your offer. That’s literally your offer is just like, what’s the result that you are helping them achieve, the main problem? And then you can improve that offer by having a timeframe, “Hey, I can get this result in the next 30 days.”
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (20:32):
You can add a guarantee to that. You can say, “Hey, you can get it for free.” So there’s get it at a discount. So there’s all these things you can do to then take that to the next level. But at the end of the day, in the simplest terms, your offer is just like, what’s the result? And I find a lot of the time my business owners aren’t even just speaking to that clear result, that one problem that our program or product is solving. So if you want to improve your response, get really clear about that problem that you’re solving and start putting that at the end of your emails.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (21:02):
Great information. Thank you for sharing that. And Luke, this is a great time in the show for us to just make a transition where we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. The first question we ask is, have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (21:16):
Yeah, I should pull out my scroll of all the misses. I don’t know how I choose. Okay, so the two big ones. So this month, August, 10 years ago is when I left my full-time job to pursue entrepreneurship, growing my coaching business. And when I started, I basically didn’t get any clients. I got one client in 12 months. I moved to London as well. I’m back in Australia now, but I moved to London and I had had a lot of money in savings, and then I basically came back in debt within 12 months. So that’s how bad it was. So anyway, one of the big mistakes was kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall. I was just doing all this, trying to grow my business by doing all these different things. And so I lacked focus basically. And one of the reasons why I lacked focus is because I thought that the reason why I wasn’t succeeding with my marketing and selling was because I didn’t have that bright shiny object.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (22:09):
So funnels weren’t even around back then. I mean the terminology was there, but it wasn’t popularized what Russell Brunson has done. So I was just doing all these different strategies and it wasn’t really a funnel thing, it was just like going on to LinkedIn and then doing meetup events and networking and webinars and a podcast. And I just did all these different things. And I thought the reason why I wasn’t succeeding was because I hadn’t found that strategy. But what I realized looking back is that a new funnel won’t fix a weak message or a broken message. So you could change, you go to a low ticket funnel, you go to a high ticket funnel, you go to a webinar, you could do whatever marketing strategy that you want, referrals or whatever, but if you don’t have the right message, it doesn’t really matter.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (22:52):
You bounce around and it’ll still be broken. You need to fix the message, which is kind of what we’ve already spoken about today, which is going to the market and knowing them better than they know themselves, and then crafting an offer that speaks to that market’s desires and fears and frustrations. And then when you do that, you can take that knowledge, that message, and you can put it in any funnel and it will convert. Okay. So that’s one of probably my biggest mistakes back then is just not focusing on the foundations. And another one, which kind of goes a little bit against what a lot of people say is, I wish that I had started paid advertising earlier because I love paid advertising. You can test a message very quickly within just spending a hundred bucks. I will know whether the message that I’m using is going to convert to appointments or not.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (23:35):
I mean, I’ve spent millions, $20 million in advertising at this stage, so I have a bit more experience than most people, but I can tell very quickly whether it’s working or not. And if it’s not, I just turn it off and then I’ll just test a different angle. It’s very hard to find your message when you’re doing organic strategies. You don’t have enough traffic. And it’s like, well, is my offer not converting because I got three people opt into my list for the last week? Or is it because it’s just a bad offer? And so I like advertising, you can test very quickly.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (24:05):
But what I would say is if you do advertising, get a mentor, work with someone one-on-one, ideally not in a group, so they can’t go in enough detail on your offer, on your market to know what to fix, but work with a mentor one-on-one where they can really dive into your… And mentor that’s actually got experience in your industry and ideally your market as well. So they know a bit about the market and the competitors and the messaging because that will allow you to move forward really quickly. And you can test a lot cheaper. People think advertising is expensive. I’m like, for me, waiting four or five years on organic strategies, that was expensive to me. So if I worked with a mentor from the beginning 10 years ago and had him look over my messaging, I would be a lot further ahead now than what I am. So that’s a big lesson.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (24:49):
Let’s look at the other side of that. You’ve had a lot of success as you’ve been operating in entrepreneurship, running your own business and things that you’ve been doing, but love for you to share a make or two or a highlight.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (25:00):
Well, I was able to write copy for Bob Proctor, so that was pretty cool for his advertising campaigns. One of the highlights I think is recently actually, so I have a lot of great client successes. And the second business that I mentioned where I became business partners with her name’s Tracy, I built her system for her funnel to book appointments. So it was about 12 months ago. She came to me and said, “Hey, can you do this?” I said, “Yep, no problem.” So we got it and she started getting appointments coming through the door, like $20 for a qualified appointment, which is still, to this day, this is what we’re getting. And so a few months ago, because she was getting such great results, and I know she didn’t love the marketing and sales side of things. I said to her, “Do you want to become business partners? I’ll do the marketing and sales. I’ll build the sales team and manage that, and you can just focus on what you love to do, which is the coaching side.” She said, “Yes.” And so we joined forces.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (25:47):
And that’s really taking off very, very quickly. And again, because of paid advertising. So we’re only spending I think $200 a day, which I increased just a few days ago. It was a hundred dollars a day for the longest time, and even that is too much. That’s like 20 appointments a day that we’re getting qualified appointments for our program. So that’s good. So our bottleneck is a sales team. But yeah, so we’re about to scale that and we can do that very quickly because again, we’ve got the paid appetite, we’ve got people coming in, they’re applying for the program, we jump on the phone with them, all the sales scripts are there, so it’s all converting. We just have to get the employees to come on. And then once we do, really the sky is the limit. I’ve scaled campaigns to $25,000 a day, some of them. And the numbers that we’re getting here are better than those bigger campaigns. So that’s one kind of success that I’m excited about for the future anyway.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (26:42):
Oh, wonderful. Well, let’s talk about a multiplier. We get a really broad response to this multiplier, whether to grow yourself personally, clients you’ve worked with.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (26:52):
This is the question that I’m probably most excited to answer, and that ties into the business that I just mentioned. So with my agency side of things, that’s quite hard to scale because in order to turn paid advertising into high paying clients, which is my skillset, it requires you to be very skilled in copywriting. Like taking cold traffic, turning it into a 5, 10, 15, 25 thousand dollar sale is not an easy thing to do. You need someone with experience. Now I can do it, which is great, but the problem is not many people can do it.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (27:24):
So for me to scale that business is extremely hard because I have to go out and find essentially a copywriter who knows how to do that, who knows how to turn paid ads into high paying clients so that I’m no longer in the cog in the wheel. There’s two ways to do that, is I can go hire a top level copywriter and that would just kill my margins, and they’re usually running their own business. They don’t want to work for someone else, or I can train someone up, and that takes years. And then the problem with that is, once you train up a copywriter to be able to do that, then they leave and they start their own. So it’s just like this forever repeating cycle. The point is it’s not scalable.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (28:03):
And that’s one of the things that I realized about 12 months ago, and I felt quite depressed actually. I was like, man, I’m always going to be stuck in this business. And that’s actually what led me to reach out to Tracy about her business. I’m like, I need a different model. And I had an aha moment. It’s like, Hey, I’ve already built the system with Tracy and we’re already getting great results there. She’s just paying my agency fee. And I realized if I become business partners with her and just focus on scaling that up, I’ve already done the system for her. I’ve already written the copy for it. I’ve already created the system, that’s done. I don’t need to do any more work. It’s more just like I just need to hire salespeople really. So that work is done. And what I realized is in terms of your question is the multiplier is all I’ve done is taken my skillset and put it in a more leveraged model, I guess you could say, a better business model, same skillset, same copywriting.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (28:57):
I’ve just put it inside a better model. So I had a bigger aha moment, it’s like the model that you choose makes such a huge difference. Coming back to franchises, it’s like you can be stuck in your own business and it’s like, okay, I’m going to do this business. And then you could start your next location. You set it up and you manage it, or the model there is you just sell the IP and someone else does that for you. That’s a better model, right? Yes. He may not make as much margins, but you’re not doing any of the work. It’s more just passive at that stage. And it’s also like my dad, he was a plumber for his whole life. He was about 55 and he loved it, and he was a plumber. He however, could have taken those skills and he could have changed the model and he could have started his own business and he could have taught other plumbers here’s how to do it and leveraged his skills in a more leveraged way basically, and made more money.
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (29:51):
He didn’t want to do that, which is totally fine. But the point is, what I realized is, your business model, the way that you leverage your skills or the way that you make money in your business, it makes such a huge difference. One model can really have you be this cog in this wheel where you’re doing all the work and you can never really get out and you never really scale or make it really hard to scale. And then there’s other model, I mean now with Tracy, where literally I’ve got salespeople closing, I’ve got the setters, they’re coming on board now, booking appointments, the ads are all set up. I literally, I work for an hour a day, whereas before it was like five or six hours a day, researching the market, crafting my client’s offers, testing the campaigns, and I would’ve to do that over and over and over again.
And it’s stressful because I want to get results from my clients, so I take a lot of that responsibility. I have to worry about that anymore. And all I literally did was just change the model. So that for me is if you’re an agency, try partner up with one of your clients and just do the marketing and sales and they can do what they love, which is the product delivery. That would be a much better model, much less stressful. Yes, you’re 50/50. For me, I don’t really care because as I said, I’m working like one hour a day now and I can scale so much higher. This is a 10 to 20 million dollar a year company where the other one is much more capped because I’m the cog. So that’s probably one of my biggest learning experiences in the last 12 months.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (31:16):
Thank you for sharing. And Luke, the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (31:22):
Yeah, I think it means doing what you love to do. And that’s basically it. It doesn’t mean to earn a million dollars a year or, I mean, that’s great, that’s a side benefit. I think it’s just doing what you enjoy doing at the end of the day. And that could mean if there are certain parts of your business that you don’t like, like the admin, accounting or whatever, or marketing and sales, well, if you don’t like them, then are you successful? Maybe a little bit, maybe half of what you’re doing is successful. Maybe you need to grow your business to offload the marketing and sales.
Or maybe you don’t like the delivery side of things, whatever it might be. I think doing what you enjoy doing is, and then the next small thing is getting paid well to do it. But I think the main thing is are you doing what you really enjoy? That’s basically it. I guess when I left my job 10 years ago, I really liked coaching. I wasn’t earning any money, but I really enjoyed it. I was earning a lot more in my nine to five job, but I would never go back to the nine to five because I wasn’t growing there. I wasn’t happy. Yes, it was a bit stressful in the beginning, becoming an entrepreneur, but I guess I consider that a success. I was on my path and I think that’s it. Just are you on your path is what I consider success.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (32:35):
What’s the best way for someone to get in touch with you to find out a little bit more about what you’re doing and gather some more info?
Luke Charlton, Jumpstart Your Funnel Pty. (32:41):
You can just check me out on lukecharlton.com? I don’t bring on any new kind of done-for-you clients anymore. I am kind of retired on that side of things, agency side because of that business that I just mentioned. But I mean, I will do some consulting on your advertising campaigns if you need help with advertising and scaling that up. But yeah, it’s go to lukecharlton.com. But probably the best place to start is my podcast, which is if you just go to lukecharlton.com, you’ll see the podcast at the top there. Its called The 15 Minute Client. Listen to that. I literally give away everything because I’m not selling any courses or I don’t really do much anymore. I just give it all away. So The 15 Minute Client with Luke Charles, there’s my podcast. So check that out. I think it’s quite valuable.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (33:21):
Luke, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. Let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when Luke was talking about getting a response from cold traffic or a cold list. And one of the things that I thought was excellent is he said, start with what the market actually wants. Market meaning what does a customer want? And he gave a comparison or example of how attracting an employee to come work for you is the same as customer acquisition. And so when you’re going to market to potential employees, very often it’s similar to marketing to a cold list. So he said, You need to craft your message to understand what they want.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (34:08):
Takeaway number two is tell stories. He made that very clear. He said he uses stories in about 95% of his emails, and they’re a great way to illustrate a point and convey something that you’re trying to get across. And he said, the format is really simple. You give the story, tell the lesson learned, and then you close. So story-lesson-close, and the close is just the ask at the end.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (34:32):
Takeaway number three is when Luke talked about the miss that he had, which was not using paid advertising sooner, and I thought he gave a great reason why. And he said that when you use paid advertising sooner and more often, you’re able to figure out very quickly in a short period of time, maybe a week, two weeks, maybe a month or less, which phrases and marketing messages are going to connect with your potential customer. So you’re able to figure that out faster, in a much more efficient way.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (35:06):
And now it’s time for today’s win-win. So today’s win-win is when Luke was talking about the multiplier and to use systems and processes to multiply and take your skillset to plug that into better model. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention what he said about franchising your business, which is what we help our clients do, and really is the title of our podcast, Multiply Your Success. It’s Taking that entrepreneur, it’s taking what you’ve already created and figuring out a way to multiply it out. It’s more efficient and effective for someone else to take what you’ve created and execute, and that’s what he’s done with his business partner where he is taken his skillset and found a new way to multiply it in an industry with a business partner where it’s able to flourish and has a much larger upside potential just because of the market cap or the size of the market that they’re targeting.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (36:11):
If you do that, it’s going to be a win for you, a win for the customers you serve, a win for your team, a win for all parties involved here. And so that’s the episode today folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone might be ready to franchise our business or take their company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.
