Jeremy Weisz 15:33
We’ll talk about — you mentioned irresistible offer. So I want to talk about that, but I love what you said about a couple things, you know, obviously having one outcome, you know, figuring out the exact, sorry, the million dollar pain point, whatever that is. And you mentioned also having a strong guarantee. And what’s cool about that is it almost forces someone to choose the right client. Because if you have a really strong guarantee, like you said, like, I’ll give you all your money back, whatever you are gonna bet that okay, I better deliver for this client. That means I have to choose the right client to deliver to right, because I find some problems are, it’s just the wrong type of client, right?
Mandi Ellefson 16:19
Absolutely, and it’s the wrong type of client. And if this is a system of Not, not a symptom. Rather, it’s a symptom of not having a predictable lead source. I mean, it’s a great example. You guys at Rise25 what you’re doing with the podcasting and the partnerships that you’re helping your clients create that’s creating a consistent flow of ideal clients. And what that allows you to do is you can cherry-pick the kind of clients that you want to work with, and instead of just taking on whatever shows up at your door. And a lot of companies, they have grown their company by just taking whatever sad deals show up on their door. And when business is really good, they say no to those. When business is not so good, the company starts getting filled up with where they didn’t get to a point where 80% of their business is not ideal clients, and they need the cash flow.
They got to keep it going, but the problem with that is that you don’t really know what you’re good at. That’s part of it, because you’re like, well, what kind of results do you get for your clients? Well, it really depends. Well, but what does it depend on? It depends on the client on where the client is coming already their cash flow depends on their profit margins. It depends on how many people they already have on their team. Depends on their industry. It depends on all of those things, right? But you actually have control over those things. You could pick and choose which clients you want to work with which takes a very intentional way of scaling. But imagine how much easier it would be to scale if you were only working with your most ideal kinds of clients.
And if you were saying, I’m going to use that chiropractor example, again, you wanted to if you were going to go and instead of offering SEO services to a chiropractor, you’re saying, we are a growth partner that helps chiropractors go from one office to five offices over the next three to five years. How much more can you charge for that? Well, what our clients find is they can charge anywhere from on the very low end, 50% higher, up to on the higher end, 1,000% or higher. 300% is a pretty median number. But we have clients that have million-dollar offers from this now.
Jeremy Weisz 18:51
Let’s talk about the irresistible offer if you’re watching the video, you can see here the scale to freedom process around Hands-Off CEO, by the way, in the Services page and month one hands off, growth roadmap, accountability structures or it. In this case, we’re kind of skipping to month three four here, but let’s talk about Mark for a second and give some examples of irresistible offers.
Mandi Ellefson 19:21
Right? So well, let me share about Mark. He actually already had a nice niche in the banking space. So a lot of our clients aren’t really sure if they have a lot of industries that they’re working with, but in Mark’s case, they actually already had a niche. But most of them, most of our clients, may not have a niche. So, but a lot of the business was coming through his network. It was coming from his speaking. So what would happen is, is that they would bring on these clients. And the clients always wanted him. They always wanted to work with him. So you can imagine that’s a pretty difficult business to scale, especially as you’re building up your team. He had a good team, he had good people, but the clients would trust them. So, along comes Covid and now the banks that were willing to invest the 20 to $30,000 packages, the individual packages that were tying Mark into the business, they said, we’re not doing that anymore right now. We’re stopping all spending.
So Mark now was a lot more open and willing to look at this from a different angle. And what we looked at is like, Well, what do these banks actually want, these small banks and these credit unions? What do they want? Well, there were some very specific, granular KPIs that were really important to these credit unions for as far as, like, the amount of deposits made, and things that were very specific to their industry, that they cared about, and we looked at like, if you did your very best work, they did branding, right? Branding is like, what is that branding? Right? So a lot of companies and branding space, I see this a lot, and I actually have a branding background myself from my previous company, but branding really encompasses a lot of things were, at least it did with Mark’s company.
They were helping on the sales side. They were helping with customer service engagement, and they were helping with — they were driving a lot of really important impact for the company. But just had, just for not articulating it in a way where the banks really understood it well.
Jeremy Weisz 21:39
Articulating kind of more features than benefits type.
Mandi Ellefson 21:45
Yes, there’s features, there’s benefits. And then the next step beyond benefits is actually the outcomes. So, like, if we looked at it and we said, what is the very best result that we could do for these banks, and when we looked at that, and we bundled, and if we created a pathway, and we looked together the services, and we bundled them together in such a way that they could do their very best, most impactful services. Now they go from we’re not spending 20 to $30,000 for these individual services to okay, we’ll spend $120,000 on this.
Jeremy Weisz 22:26
And as they’re talking about an outcome like, oh, if you give me that outcome, I’m happy to spend whatever amount of money.
Mandi Ellefson 22:32
Right? And it was all about looking at it from the client’s perspective and offering them a vision that they couldn’t even see themselves. They thought that they just needed to hunker down. But he showed them a pathway and a way for them to actually create growth from it and this is the opportunity that we have with our clients, is that when we come as the experts, not just the experts to say, to answer questions that they bring us, but the experts to be able to show them a whole new vision for their company, for their lives they didn’t even think was possible. And when you do that, clients will pay a lot more, a lot more than they even realize they will pay.
Jeremy Weisz 23:22
In that situation, really, the foundational piece was that irresistible offer. But then that relates to the pricing part, right?
Mandi Ellefson 23:33
So the irresistible offer the way that they packaged it, in such a way where their clients could see they were willing to invest in a long-term solution. So what they actually found, Mark found that they were actually able to increase profit as they were scaling. He thought that was going to go down, but he had that actually increased profit even as they were hiring more team. And what that actually did for him is now, instead of having these one-off projects that he had to go and, like, upsell to the next thing, because he would have to be involved in it, now they have longer-term relationships, he would call them retainers, but these longer-term relationships that allows them to actually project out their cash flow months in advance, what allows them to be able to hire more people? It allows them to have predictability in their business. And what it actually did is it allowed Mark to be able to step back from the business, so him increasing his fees 600% or he commanded 600% higher fees. It allowed him to actually be less involved in the business.
Jeremy Weisz 24:39
So we talk about, we’re going to jump around for a second here, but the irresistible offer thanks for sharing that’s really helpful to think about, because when I think about it. So some people are just talking about features, some people are talking about benefits. You’re talking Okay, go from benefits to outcomes to painting a greater vision, which basically is the foundational stuff I want to go to the first part, which is the growth roadmap. Because you talk to a lot of companies stagnate, and they come to stagnate. And I know Tom talked about this in your book. So talk about Tom for a second and how that relates to just stagnant growth.
Mandi Ellefson 25:31
Yeah, absolutely so. Tom Shapiro, he actually wrote the forward to my book, because we’ve had a great relationship over the years. He came to us at a place where they’ve been stagnating for three years. And the thing about a lot of companies is they actually don’t realize they’re in stagnation, because they’re not actually looking at the trends over the years and saying, oh, well, you know what? We have gone up and down growth the past four years. Profits have gone down like they’re not noticing that, but, he was aware of that. It was aware that what happened is that they scaled up to a certain point, and what was happening is this, that if he wasn’t in there, hands-on, on every project, those projects just didn’t get the same level of results.
This is something he shared on our podcast. The clients weren’t as happy. So as a result, he’s like, I can’t grow a company like this. So he actually scaled back his company a little bit because he wanted to feel good about the results that they’re providing for their clients. But even with scaling back, what happens there is now he actually has less bandwidth, because if you can’t afford as many people, right? If you win, you scale back. So what ended up happening is him scaling back actually meant that he was working more hours. So he thought that scaling back would actually make it better, but it actually made no difference at all. So, it actually made it worse. So we, after going through this and finding that he was working, you know, well over 50 hours per week, he came to us and said, you know what, what can we do here? So we took him through this hands-off road mapping process, and we walked him through our 42-point scalability assessment, and we looked at what’s actually going on in your business, and how do you be able to break free from this? So we helped him be able to find some opportunities within this business, and at this stage, this is where we help our clients be able to find 10 extra hours per week to focus working on growth. Because here’s the thing is, is that you’re already working 50, 60, hours per week. Like, how are you going to work on your business?
We can tell you what to do all day long. You already know what to do. You actually need to be able to empower to do it. So that’s what we do, is we help them, help them find that time. Because this takes some time, scaling takes time. It takes changing the way that you’re operating within your team, it takes revamping your offers so that they’re more profitable. But within this process, we helped him find the opportunities where he could be generating more growth with less impact. And so then we started rolling these changes out into his company, and what happened was, very shortly within this process, he actually had a family emergency where someone close to him and his family he had to just drop everything and run to the hospital, and that’s what it looked like, and he was out for almost an entire month.
Keep in mind, for the past three years, like the business would have been in a really bad situation if it wasn’t for the work that we had done to help him be able to get the right leadership in place, so that they actually could step it up, so they were able to step it up while he’s gone. And within a short amount of time, even with him being gone for almost a month, they were able to double growth. They were able to double growth after three years of stagnation. And this is really what comes down to, is having the right people in place and also having the right price mark that the right profit margins in place to be able to hire those people and to have the right offers, so that you can actually scale it too.
Jeremy Weisz 29:30
They all kind of go together. Talk about the leadership piece for a second, and I don’t know if that relates to kind of the accountability structures, but what are some of the things that you’ve found that helps with putting the right leadership, like you said before the beginning, people say, I can’t find good people. So what are some things that help that you found help with finding the right leadership, or even building leadership within?
Mandi Ellefson 30:00
First of all, I want to just share something that may feel a little controversial, but I know that I certainly can say that this has applied to me in a big way. But if you look around at your team, and whatever you got on your team, the level that your team is, is the level you are as a leader. So in order, if you want better team, you need to have a better vision. If you want an exceptional team, you better have an exceptional vision. Because they want to come for a lot more than just a paycheck. And the people who want to just come for a paycheck, they’re the ones who are, they’re not going to give it their all. And if you want people that are really bought into your mission, you have to have a mission. And so you have to start with leading by that and that’s where a big piece of that vision is, who do we want to be in this market? What are we taking a stand for? What kind of problems are we solving?
And because that is a very big part of the vision there, and that’s one of the things that we walk our clients through in the irresistible offer that as a byproduct of that helps them be able to expand their vision. Because now, when you look at it, I’ll give you an example here with Jamie with when we walked through the ears of spill offer process like he, got such a jolt of energy from seeing how big of impact that they could make for their clients. They went from doing affiliate marketing to we’re a growth partner that helps beauty and skincare brands be able to add ten million in three years. And they actually guaranteed that, guarantees aren’t right for every business but, or that those type of business, it’s not right for every kind of business, but, there are safe ways that you can use them, but that offer, what it did is that allowed them to be able to double their price points they doubled their lead flow with the same exact channels they were already using.
And also they were talking to prospects. They actually got referrals from prospects to other people, so that now he has this whole business that he is rallying the team around this new vision. And what it allowed him to do is it allowed Jamie to show up in a whole new way where he was able to take a whole year worth of work and be able to lead his team to get it done in a quarter. That’s what he shared on our podcast. So it starts with the vision, what it is that you’re the impact that you’re making in this market. And when you are clear on that, when you’re clear on what your actual offer is, now you can actually hire people to implement that for you, but without the vision, what do you want them to execute? What are you having them bring to life? They can’t read your mind.
Jeremy Weisz 33:17
No, I love that, because people always I’ve heard many times, is vision mission, just kind of fluffy stuff you do because someone says that’s what you should do.
Mandi Ellefson 33:32
I think that’s how most people approach it. I think a lot of people approach it that way. Maybe most is in that. I think a lot of people intend for it to be more than that, but when you look at the real execution of it within the company, is the company actually living its mission. I certainly know that there’s been times in the business where we have not been like I have not been. I want everybody else to be living by the vision and the core values. And I find that like those are parts that I’m not living up to. So,, it’s one thing to set a vision, but it’s a whole other thing to live it.
Jeremy Weisz 34:11
The other thing Mandi we talked about was typical growth methods. Typical growth methods that can trap the CEO, right?
Mandi Ellefson 34:29
So the typical growth comes back to that cycle that I was sharing about the entrapment cycle. So that’s the typical growth and what ends up happening. And if you happen to find the slide on there. The further on it shows like, how it impacts the income growth. Yeah, you add it right there. That’s right there. So what ends up happening is, is, like, there’s that, that blue dot on the screen represents the amount of time that the owner. Is actually willing to spend in the business, and that’s where they’re at right now, and that’s how much money they’re making. The green dot represents, and if you saw the slides all the way through, there’s a better animation for it, but the green dot represents your growth goal. So what ends up happening is that the only way for you to be able to get from that blue dot to the green dot and to be able to increase your income, if you’re seeing on the graph, it’s showing that the income is increasing, is to work more and more hours.
That’s what the entrapment cycle does, is that it forces the CEO to work more hours, so you basically have a time-for-money model. It’s just a few seconds before that. If you’re looking you’re looking at that, but you have a time-for-money model, if you have that entrapment growth model. And so that’s the typical way of growth. But the problem is that not scaling growth means that you’re generating more growth with the same level of resources. And when you grow that way, you actually can find the profitability will actually decrease as you continue to grow. But what we want to do is actually be able to go into the scale mode, which is a different type, which requires you to step into a different space, like when we’re talking about that seven-figure slump, this is what’s going on here. You actually have to step into a different, there is a growth stage that you have to step into. And you need to move from the place where you’re playing the monkey in the middle game and you’re throwing the ball at everybody, and everybody’s throwing it all back to you and right at you, where you have to catch the balls, where you actually that to moving to a place where you have a professionally managed company, right where you have a manager who’s actually running the day to day without you, and where you’re putting in place a level of structure that it will allow you to scale with a team and be able to get work done through others, but then allow leaders to get work done through others as well.
And that’s the point where you can scale, but there’s a transition point, and where we see there’s that within that transition point, a lot of times there’s, first of all, there’s an invest ahead stage of this. That’s that. That’s one of the things you just you kind of have to invest ahead at this stage and really have a very compelling vision. Without the compelling vision, it’s pretty hard to invest ahead. But you don’t need to invest ahead at the same level as you might think, this is oftentimes a stage where people will give up equity and they maybe bring on a partner because they can’t cash flow this in their company. So what we have found is the easiest way to cash flow this in the company is to change what you’re selling so that generates the profits so that you can scale, and that way you actually have a sustainable business that actually scale itself with its own income.
Jeremy Weisz 38:14
Mandi, thanks for sharing all this. I’m gonna have to re-listen to this. This is a lot to think about, and there’s so many subtle things that are really important. So thank you for laying it out so clearly. I have one last question before I ask it. I want to just point people to check out handsoffceo.com, you can check out the book that I mentioned, called The Hands-Off CEO: Triple Your Fees and Profitability at Scale. Last question, Mandi is I’m just curious — some of your mentors throughout the years. It could be distant mentors, meaning a book that you love, or it could be just a colleague, mentor that you’ve learned from throughout the years. What are some of those resources? Whether it’s distant or actual mentors?
Mandi Ellefson 39:18
Okay, I’ve got a few books The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks I really enjoy. And that’s one you want to listen to on audio. I know we were just talking about, how much do you love audiobooks before we started, and that can help you with the human aspect of scaling. Because there’s a system and then there’s a mindset around it. And unless you get both of them right, the systems are worth nothing. And in fact, the mindset is way more important than the system. Because if you shift the mindset, then you will be able to generate the result without knowing how to do it, because you just will naturally figure that. I know this because 12 years ago, when we started this company, I didn’t know anywhere near the amount of skills in the systems, as we did now.
And we were able to create really big results then, is because we were able to shift the mindset. We were able to figure it out together. So that’s one book I really like You Squared by Price Pritchett, I’m holding this book up. I love this book is probably the book that I share the most, and it’s a really quick, short read about creating quantum leaps. And I’m a big believer in quantum leaps and standing in the future and creating your reality from a future state and then just looking at, well, what is so, how do we be able to create that? So those are a couple of them. I give you some more, but…
Jeremy Weisz 40:49
If you have a few more, I have Audible credits. Keep going.
Mandi Ellefson 40:53
How to Win Friends and Influence People, is probably one of my favorite books on leadership. It’s not positioned as a leadership book, but it is a phenomenal book on how to be able to move people and that is a really great book that I quite enjoy.
Jeremy Weisz 41:07
I’m trying to bribe my daughters to read that. Maybe that’s a bad method. I’ll pay you $10 if you finish. I think, yeah.
Mandi Ellefson 41:18
I don’t think that’s a bad idea at all. I totally bribed my daughters to read things and there’s a teen girls version of that book too.
Jeremy Weisz 41:25
Oh, there a teen girls version of that book.
Mandi Ellefson 41:31
Yes, I bought it for my daughters. I’m not sure if they, I think not, by Dale Carnegie. It’s a different No, it’s by a Carnegie, though, like one of the people.
Jeremy Weisz 41:41
I’ll check it out. Okay, I didn’t know that.
Mandi Ellefson 41:46
Yeah. So those are some of the books that have influenced me a lot, that I would reference, reference quite a bit. That’s just the top of my mind right there.
Jeremy Weisz 41:58
Yeah, no, I love it. Any mentors in your business journey?
Mandi Ellefson 42:03
Mentors in my business journey.
Jeremy Weisz 42:07
It could be groups, too. It doesn’t have to be mentors.
Mandi Ellefson 42:14
Earlier in the earlier stage of my company, and this is some years back, I worked with a man named ad or Bansky. His company is Millionaire Marketing. Was it Marketing Millionaires? I think that’s called. And he’s, like, a really brash Polish guy, and he taught me how to become really good at sales. So I have to hand that to him. And he is the kind of mentor that would just like smack you upside the head if you needed it, and just didn’t mind just telling you how it was. But it was also really compassionate too. So that’s definitely someone who’s helped a lot along the way. Sue Watson is someone that has been, has been a long-time mentor for me, maybe a good person to have on the podcast too, actually. And a big believer in breakthroughs. She’s very good at breakthroughs. So that’s another person who I’ve definitely have a great deal of respect for.
Jeremy Weisz 43:16
I love it. Mandi, thank you. Thanks for sharing. Everyone check out handsoffceo.com, more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks, everyone. Thanks Mandi.
