Business RadioX ®

The Wrap Podcast | Episode 057 | Don’t Freak Out: Reasons You Shouldn’t Fear an IRS Audit | Warren Averett

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Wrap-Episode-58
Birmingham Business Radio
The Wrap Podcast | Episode 057 | Don’t Freak Out: Reasons You Shouldn’t Fear an IRS Audit | Warren Averett
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The Inflation Reduction Act appropriated $80 billion of additional funding to the IRS, which includes funding for tax enforcement activities. For the average person, this sounds like increased potential for an IRS Audit.

So how do businesses navigate complicated tax issues and proactively prepare in case they are chosen for an audit? What are the best practices to keep an IRS audit from becoming too burdensome?

In this episode of The Wrap, our hosts welcome Ronald Levitt and Gregory Rhodes, both Shareholders and members of the Tax Practice Group at Dentons Sirote, as well as Warren Averett’s own Will Aderholt, CPA, CCIFP, to discuss how business owners and high-net-worth individuals can best prepare for a potential IRS audit.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • How increased funding to the IRS through the Inflation Reduction Act could lead to increased audits
  • Potential roadblocks to the IRS’s expanded capabilities
  • Areas the IRS is most likely to focus on in the near future
  • Why you shouldn’t fear an IRS audit if you’ve planned ahead, kept proper documentation and worked with a professional CPA.

Additional Resources:

BRX Pro Tip: When You have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

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BRXmic99
BRX Pro Tips
BRX Pro Tip: When You have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail
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BRX Pro Tip: When You have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

Stone Payton: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor, Stone Payton here with you. Lee, I have heard this before and it is so true and it’s definitely worth revisiting. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:17] Yeah, I see this kind of come to fruition on LinkedIn all the time. I can’t tell you how many people connect with me on LinkedIn, and their first move is to sell me something in the literal second message after we’ve connected. It’s because I fit some profile and they have some solution. They don’t know if I have that pain. They don’t know if I need that solution. But because I’ve met some kind of criteria, they assume I have that solution that they have.

So, they’re not gathering any information to see if I’m a good fit as a prospect. They’re just making assumptions because they have a solution that solves problems for people that sometimes look like me. So, they’re assuming that I’m a good fit and that they’re saying I should buy their service. So, they don’t know me, they don’t know if I’m a good fit. They don’t even know — it’s not even the appropriate time to make a recommendation yet.

So, what they think they’re doing is, you know, prospecting to leads. But what they’re really doing is creating a negative connotation between their brand and me. So, if you’re not a good fit, you should tell people you’re — they’re not a good fit for you and help them find the solution that can help them. But you won’t know that until you have a conversation with them to determine that. Don’t make assumptions and don’t move too quickly to recommend before knowing what a person’s problem is.

So even though you might have a great solution, you can’t skip the step of getting to know someone first to see if your solution is right for them. So, the clearer you can be regarding who is a perfect fit client and who is not will help you sell more. And don’t prematurely assume that someone is the right fit before having a conversation. So, when you have that hammer, everything looks like a nail, but not everything is a nail. So, you’ve got to get to know people before you can make a recommendation.

WBENC 2022: LaKesha White with WBENC

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GWBC Radio
WBENC 2022: LaKesha White with WBENC
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Lakesha-White-GWBC-WBENC-National-ConferenceLaKesha White, Vice President, Certification, WBENC

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, it’s time for GWBC Radio’s Open for Business. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:18] Lee Kantor here live from the Georgia World Congress Center at the WBENC National Conference 2022, inside GWBC’s booth. We have LaKesha White. Welcome.

LaKesha White: [00:00:30] Thank you.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:31] Now, you’re one of the big shots at WBENC, right, LaKesha? Rumor has it. Probably, one of the founding mothers of the organization. Now, really, talk about your work at WBENC.

LaKesha White: [00:00:46] So, my work at WBENC spans almost two decades. I started within the WBENC family back in 2003.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:59] Before it was cool.

LaKesha White: [00:01:00] Before it was cool. Before anyone knew what certification was. At our regional partner organization in Louisiana. And then, because I am a military spouse –

Lee Kantor: [00:01:14] You might travel a bit.

LaKesha White: [00:01:15] … prior military, he is actually retired now. So, clearly, I had to leave.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:22] Periodically, that happens, right?

LaKesha White: [00:01:24] Yes. Just a little bit. So, no one can keep up with where I am. And, luckily, I was able to land in the hands of Roz because I moved to her territory in North Carolina. So, I spend a couple of years there, and then I had to move again. So, you know, that’s the life of a military spouse.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:48] A little nomadic.

LaKesha White: [00:01:49] Yeah. Sometimes you have to start over. So, I had to leave Roz. I moved back to Texas, to San Antonio, Texas, and actually did some things for the RPO in Houston because they covered that territory.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:06] So, you collect all the RPO –

LaKesha White: [00:02:08] Pretty much. I almost call myself, like, the RPO stepchild because I go all around.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:14] You’ll get there. You get a punch card, right? You get at all 14, you win a prize.

LaKesha White: [00:02:17] Yes. So then, finally, there, I got a call from the national office, because WBENC had been approved as a third party certifier for the WOSB certification and they were looking for someone to pretty much launch that, and offered me a position. So, enter LaKesha into the actual WBENC staff in 2011. So, this year will be 11 years of being with the national office.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:50] So, how is this event? I know you haven’t had the event for a year or so because of the pandemic, and now you’re doing this event here in person. And it’s pretty exciting to have everybody all together like this, right? It’s kind of like a reunion.

LaKesha White: [00:03:02] It is. I think it exceeded our expectations because, you know, with COVID, you don’t know how comfortable people are going to be. So, to know that we have over 3,000 attendees, clearly we’re doing something right. They wanted to come.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:21] People are so hungry for this, right?

LaKesha White: [00:03:21] Yes. And they just want to be together. And I’m shocked because I just didn’t think I would ever see this again in one space.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:28] This many people.

LaKesha White: [00:03:29] But that’s been our number one priority, is, you know, trying to make it as safe as possible, which is why we changed the entire structure of the conference. You know, no longer having the workshops kind of in closed in rooms. We’re just in this big open space so people can feel a little more comfortable moving around. But it’s been great.

LaKesha White: [00:03:57] And, you know, we’ve seen each other over the last years in the squares, like I call it Hollywood Squares. So, it’s so nice to see people. And some people just walk by you because you may look a little bit different than you look in that square.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:10] You’re a lot taller in real life.

LaKesha White: [00:04:12] So, thank God for the the name badges. Like, “Oh, that’s really you.”

Lee Kantor: [00:04:18] So, over the years of seeing the evolution kind of WBENC, do you feel positive about the trend of women certified businesses? Is this something that you feel optimistic about?

LaKesha White: [00:04:31] Absolutely. It’s funny to say that I think it’s in to be a woman, like, it’s finally our time. And I’ve seen that kind of transition over the years. And I hope it’s creating more opportunities for our WBEs. And I’m so glad those who made the decision to come, I’m sure it’s going to pay off for them. So, I’m like, “Use it to your advantage.”

Lee Kantor: [00:04:59] Sure. Now, is there a story you can share or maybe something impactful of a woman that you helped certify or got certified that, you know, it changed maybe the trajectory of their family or their life or their community?

LaKesha White: [00:05:15] I have one. So, from my first RPO in New Orleans, her name is Teresa Lawrence. She’s the owner of Delta Personnel. And she started the process. You know, I was the certification manager. And it was all in the midst of Katrina. And so, clearly, after Hurricane Katrina, we were all displaced. Like, I was in Texas. I’m from Texas, but evacuated to Texas for a month. And then, even when we moved back, working from home. That was my first experience of working from home way back in 2005 because of Katrina. And I just kept after her, because people’s lives were in shambles. They’re trying to figure out how they’re going [inaudible].

Lee Kantor: [00:06:06] [Inaudible].

LaKesha White: [00:06:07] You know, forget about this company. I don’t know where my family is.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:11] I have to eat tomorrow.

LaKesha White: [00:06:11] And things like that. And so, you know, just kept after her. And I’m sure she had some choice words for me, like, “She keeps bothering me.” But she’s like, “She changed my company because if she wouldn’t have kept after me, I wouldn’t have had all these opportunities.”

Lee Kantor: [00:06:33] She wouldn’t have done it. Right.

LaKesha White: [00:06:33] And so, that is my joy in all of this is to see, you know, small business when they’re sponsoring events and things like that, they’re up on the panels giving that advice and being the mentor. So, that makes all of this work that – I always say – back in 2003, I answered an ad in the newspaper job interview and it turned into a career.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:01] Yeah. And the passion. It’s a life’s work. It’s almost a calling.

LaKesha White: [00:07:05] Yes. You know, it’s like you feel like you are are changing the world.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:12] Well, you are one business at a time, one business person at a time. It’s true. I mean, it sounds silly in some ways, but it’s real. I mean, to that person, their life changed, their family changed. They have a better tomorrow because of what you did yesterday.

LaKesha White: [00:07:27] Yes. And it makes it all worth it. And people ask me like, “Oh. Does it inspire you to be a business owner?” And I’m like, “Oh, well.” Like, Look, we all have our place.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:38] We got our lane. I’m helping you.

LaKesha White: [00:07:38] I’m going to be the champion for you, but I like taking vacations. So, that’s what my calling is, you do the hard work and you inspire me, but I don’t know if I want that seat.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:52] So, the conference has, you said, 3,000-ish people here.

LaKesha White: [00:07:58] Yes.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:00] When you were drawing this up on the chalkboard of, “Okay. We got Atlanta.” And I know you had to go higher, River Valley was the one before this, and then that got postponed, and they combined the two host committees for this one.

LaKesha White: [00:08:14] Well, no. It was always supposed to be combined.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:17] Oh, it was supposed to be combined.

LaKesha White: [00:08:19] Yes. So, we were coming here and because of kind of the territories bordering, you know, decided to combine it. So, it wasn’t a missed opportunity. We came back.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:27] So, they just made sure that they hit them and didn’t skip them.

LaKesha White: [00:08:32] Yeah. No skip.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:33] So then, it’s here in Atlanta, so everything was kind of touch and go for a while almost to the last minute.

LaKesha White: [00:08:40] Yes. We didn’t know. And you have to fill it out.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:47] You have to be bold. It’s the theme, right? You have to be bold.

LaKesha White: [00:08:47] And, look, we just had to go with it because after a certain point, you have to commit. Like, we had a very small kind of boutique event in November to where we could fill things out, and it really was depending upon the corporate members, because for a long time they couldn’t travel and that’s the concern.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:08] Budgets were cut.

LaKesha White: [00:09:09] Yeah. The WBEs, we absolutely promote doing business with one another, but they also want to meet the corporate members.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:16] Right. It’s an ecosystem here that every part has a role.

LaKesha White: [00:09:21] Yeah. So, the November meeting, it was nice and definitely the WBEs were all in.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:28] Yeah. They’re in no matter what was happening.

LaKesha White: [00:09:30] And then, when we got kind of the green light from the corporate members like, “Yeah. I’ll be able to travel.” We’re like, “Okay. We’re full steam ahead now. We’re going to make this happen.”

Lee Kantor: [00:09:40] Game on. So, now, what’s kind of your view of next year, like next conference? Is this just bigger and better? Is that the plan?

LaKesha White: [00:09:49] I think so. We’re going to Nashville next year. So, yeah, it’s always a little competition. Like, each year, we want it to be bigger and bigger and bigger. And then, the RPOs, because they host, they have a little competition going, so it makes it interesting. But we’re always going to top it going forward.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:15] So, one action step before we wrap, for a woman business that isn’t certified, what should they be doing to think about to get ready to go through certification and why should they be doing certification?

LaKesha White: [00:10:25] So, I say, certification is a marketing tool for your company. It’s not a guarantee for business, but it can possibly give you the leverage that you need to get that opportunity that you want. And it’s really about having all your ducks in a row. Clearly, we know the process is a little intrusive. However, it really is a learning experience for a number of our WBEs to see that, “Oh. I didn’t realize I needed that in place.”

LaKesha White: [00:10:57] So, reading your bylaws, making sure you have those things in place to protect you, and to ensure that it mirrors your actual operations of the company. And if you have all the documents together, you’re operating according to our standards, then absolutely apply. And if you have questions, we are available to answer them. Don’t assume, because that could be a waste of your time.

LaKesha White: [00:11:24] So, contact us, email us. We are very responsive. I hear that some organizations aren’t. So, I pride us on having excellent customer service, gold standard customer service. So, please, we will respond to you. We even have someone responding now. We’re here at conference and a couple of our team members had to stay back because of COVID, but still operating.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:50] Because customer service is important.

LaKesha White: [00:11:51] Yes. It’s customer service, so we don’t stop.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:54] Right. And that’s the thing, you don’t want to just think that you fill out a form and this is going to take care of itself. If you have a question, ask the question. There’s no dumb questions. It’s important. And be bold. Take the steps. Be certified. You can catapult your business to a new level if you just do everything right, and play by the rules, and be at the standard that’s needed in order to get certified.

LaKesha White: [00:12:19] Yes. And get involved. The people here are involved. That’s what it takes.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:25] You got to show up and do the work.

LaKesha White: [00:12:26] Yes. You can’t just think that you’re going to have the certificate and then everybody’s going to want to do business with you.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:32] It doesn’t work like that.

LaKesha White: [00:12:33] It doesn’t work like that. We do business with people we know.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:35] Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. What’s the website someone can go to for more information?

LaKesha White: [00:12:39] It is wbenc.org, www.W-B-E-N-C.org.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:46] All right. Well, thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

LaKesha White: [00:12:50] Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:51] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll be back in a few at WBENC’s National Conference 2022.

 

About WBENC

The Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) is a leading non-profit organization dedicated to helping women-owned businesses thrive.WBENC-Logo

We believe diversity promotes innovation, opens doors, and creates partnerships that fuel the economy. That’s why we not only provide the most relied upon certification standard for women-owned businesses, but we also offer the tools to help them succeed.

About GWBC

The Greater Women’s Business Council (GWBC®) is at the forefront of redefining women business enterprises (WBEs). An increasing focus on supplier diversity means major corporations are viewing our WBEs as innovative, flexible and competitive solutions. The number of women-owned businesses is rising to reflect an increasingly diverse consumer base of women making a majority of buying decision for herself, her family and her business. GWBC-Logo

GWBC® has partnered with dozens of major companies who are committed to providing a sustainable foundation through our guiding principles to bring education, training and the standardization of national certification to women businesses in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

BRX Pro Tip: Are You Burning Out?

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BRXmic99
BRX Pro Tips
BRX Pro Tip: Are You Burning Out?
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BRX Pro Tip: Are You Burning Out?

Stone Payton: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you this morning. Lee, today’s question, are you burning out?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:10] Yeah. A lot of folks are suffering from burnout and stress and anxiety. And you might be, too. You just may not be realizing it. A sign you might be burning out and a quick way to reset yourself are what we’re going to share today.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:25] So, a sign you’re burning out is if you’re feeling like life is like the Groundhog Day movie, where you’re doing the same thing every day, you feel like you aren’t making any progress. You might be in a rut. And that usually comes from trying to control things that you really have no control over and you’re feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. That’s usually a symptom of burnout. That’s usually what burnout is.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:47] A quick fix is to re-evaluate your goals and make sure they’re still aligned with what you want to be doing. And, really, is your true north still your true north? Is that really the direction you want to go? Is that objective still the most important thing? And then if it is, and maybe it isn’t, but if it is, then just try to take a baby step in that direction.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:09] What is the smallest, easiest activity you can be doing today to get you going in this new direction or this maybe slight alteration of the goal? When you can identify a baby step to begin, just take that action and kind of reboot a little bit and then go boldly forward. But a lot of folks are feeling a lot of anxiety and stress because there’s so much uncertainty, which there has always been uncertainty. But if it’s affecting your day-to-day life, it might be time to reset yourself.

Joe Coppola with Premier Business Brokers

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Joseph-Coppola
Buy a Business Near Me
Joe Coppola with Premier Business Brokers
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Joseph-CoppolaJoseph Coppola, with Premier Business Brokers, is a serial entrepreneur and has owned several business ventures since a young age.

He has spent the last few years as a business broker in the Saint Louis Metro area and has been providing small business consulting services for the last decade.

Joseph also has a deep passion for education and has been teaching both business and marketing courses since 2013. His combination of experience as an educator, business owner, and business consultant provides him with a unique perspective.

Connect with Joseph on LinkedIn and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • Buying A Business 101 (Tips for First-Time Buyers)
  • Financing Your Purchase
  • Transitioning into Ownership
  • Exit Strategy (Preparing To Sell Your Business)

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Buy a Business Near Me, brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador program, helping business brokers sell more local businesses. Now, here’s your host.

Stone Payton: [00:00:32] Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Buy a Business near Me. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with Premier Business Brokers Mr. Joe Coppola. How are you, man?

Joe Coppola: [00:00:49] I’m wonderful, Stone. How are you today, sir?

Stone Payton: [00:00:51] I am doing well. Really been looking forward to this conversation. Delighted to have you on the program. I’m thinking probably a good place to start. If you could articulate for for me and our listeners mission purpose, what are what are you and your team really out there trying to do for folks? Man?

Joe Coppola: [00:01:10] Well, I’ll keep it very simple. We are here to help people buy and sell businesses and we work with people every day doing just that. We guide them down the path and show them a lot of different opportunities and kind of give them a different way to look at things from a different lens. Sometimes on both sides, both buyers and sellers for that matter.

Stone Payton: [00:01:31] So I’m operating under the impression that you probably find yourself quite often working with first time, only time kind of kind of buyers. Is that the case? And if so, what kind of counsel do you give them and might you give some of us who are thinking about it?

Joe Coppola: [00:01:49] Well, I’ll tell you, I would say probably 90% of people who do come to us at some point, this is their first rodeo. So and, you know, with that being said, they have a little idea about what I do, but a lot of times they have no idea about the benefits. And really the the reason why they would start with working with a business broker and kind of part of that is just to help them put a plan together and then kind of help guide them through those steps.

Stone Payton: [00:02:20] There’s just so much that we don’t know, right? I mean, you need someone that has experience, expertise, can lean on other people on the on the team as well to provide, you know, examples and precedent of what they’ve seen, what they might run into. There’s so much we just don’t know. What we don’t know.

Joe Coppola: [00:02:37] Right? Oh, absolutely. And one of those things, too, when you go to a firm that’s got a team of brokers like my company premier that I work for, you know, I’ve got 15 other people that I can bounce ideas off of and they’ve got 15 different points of views as well as 15 different Rolodexes. So when we list a business, when a seller comes to us to list a business, you know, that’s 15 different people working for you. And likewise, when people come to us buying a business that’s 15 people out there looking for those opportunities for you. So, you know, you get a team and a lot of times it’s like anything, you know, 15 heads are better than one, right?

Stone Payton: [00:03:20] Absolutely. So what’s your back story personally, man? How did you get into this line of work?

Joe Coppola: [00:03:26] Well, what’s kind of funny, a lot of brokers come become brokers from actually being buyers or sellers. And that was kind of my story. I was a buyer looking to buy a business, and that’s kind of how I even found out about brokers. I honestly thought, you know, you would just find a guy selling a business in the paper or online, you know, nowadays and you just buy it from them. But working with the broker actually opened up my eyes to the process and I thought it’d be a great opportunity. And I found a place that was looking for brokers and I’d actually worked with them on buying a business. So it was kind of a perfect match.

Stone Payton: [00:04:01] So I suspect you find probably buyers and sellers alike if they’re first time buyers or sellers, there are probably some misconceptions or myths or they maybe they go in with with some assumptions that just really aren’t the aren’t the case. Is that accurate and or are there a couple of those kind of things that maybe you could set the record straight for us?

Joe Coppola: [00:04:24] Well, and one of the things and it’s just like, again, one of those old sayings, you got to do your homework. You really do. But what you can also see is you might look at five businesses. They could be five of the same businesses on the same busy street, but they all make different amounts of money and they all are ran differently as well. All of them have their warts and bumps and some of them have they’re great pros versus their cons, but you have to really look at each one individually to kind of gauge if the opportunity makes sense for you. One of the biggest things I can tell people is, you know, it doesn’t necessarily you know, not every business needs somebody to have a 20 year track record of success in that industry. But if you like it, if you’ve been doing it, if it’s something that speaks to you sometimes, maybe it’s an opportunity that you’ve never, ever thought about. But based on your background, say, your guy that’s done sales or even a guy that’s done operations and all of a sudden you see an opportunity to where, well, hey, I could do that based on my background, but I’ve never thought about selling this type of product or this type of service. I have a true story where I had a gentleman that had worked in the automotive industry for 20 years running cruise and running a large facility, and he got laid off and he didn’t know what his next opportunity was going to be. And he was sitting in his backyard kind of depressed and bummed out watching the neighbor have a tree cut down. And he was watching the crew leader run the cruise. And he said, you know, I could do that. And he started looking for a business and he found us and found a tree cut business. So it wasn’t something directly in line with what he had done, but it was something that he could wrap his head around and say, hey, no, I could run cruise. I know how to do that. I know how to do this.

Stone Payton: [00:06:13] It sounds like incredibly rewarding work to me. What are you enjoying the most at this point in your career? What’s the most fun about it?

Joe Coppola: [00:06:21] Well, so a lot of what we do is a very linear process with regard to paperwork and documentation, and there’s checklists that you have to go step by, step down. But when it comes to, say, the deal itself, and once you have two parties that want to work together, everything’s kind of open at that point. And it’s a very malleable thing at that point as well, where, you know, if you’ve got two parties, if the seller is in love with the buyer and the. I was in love with the business and the seller. You can get a lot of things done. It’s just that’s the fun part is where you get two people on the same page and they want to work together and you know, things pop up and you know, there are roadblocks and obstacles that come along. It’s trying to figure out how to get through those and showing both sides, you know, the different opportunities again, and maybe how to mitigate this, this obstacle, how to get around it and so forth. So that, to me is probably the most rewarding and fun part of the business.

Stone Payton: [00:07:21] Well, let’s talk a little bit about deal structure, because since I started hosting this series, I’m learning that I guess it was one of the misconceptions I had going into this. My picture was, you know, I hand you a check, you hand me the keys to the business, and there’s just so many different ways you can get really creative in how you structure the deal, can’t you?

Joe Coppola: [00:07:43] Oh, absolutely. And you know, the two biggest differences. I tell clients that my business is different than real estate is. Number one, we always work confidential. Very rarely do we ever list a business with its name. Every once in a while, depending on if it’s a legacy business or a real well known brand or something along those lines, people might say, Hey, let’s use the name because it might attract the right attention or more attention. But 99% of the time we don’t list the business. And for instance, we don’t put a sign out front saying for sale. The second part that is pretty different is usually when you sell a home to somebody, you never see that person again unless it’s a family or friend or something along those lines. But with this, there needs to be some transition period between the buyer and the seller. And again, depending on the buyer’s background, if they’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years and now they’re just going to buy a business to do it for themselves, they may not necessarily need quote unquote training, but they do need a little transition. I sold an automotive shop to a guy that had a background running shops. He was a regional supervisor for a big company. And when the seller looked at his resume, he said, Oh, this guy doesn’t necessarily need me to show him how to use an impact gun. And the joke ended up being, No, we just need to know where the coffee filters are and how to turn on the lights at the end of the day.

Joe Coppola: [00:09:07] And, you know, and that’s what it can come down to. I’ve had we usually do like a mandatory two weeks training. We always ask the seller, can you do at least minimally like, say two weeks? And we’ve had cases where three days in the buyer looks at the seller and goes, you know, I don’t need you anymore. I think I got it figured out. And again, it’s really based on the buyer’s background and then obviously to just kind of depending on what the seller’s goals are, a lot of times we have guys that they want to stay on and maybe do one thing. Maybe they love sales. I’ve had a couple of those instances where the seller wanted to focus just on doing the sales and maybe letting somebody else do the back end of the business and control the day to day and the operations. And we had a buyer take it over and basically say, Hey, if you want to go out and work four days a week, 4 hours doing sales, that’s great. I’d love to keep you on. And that seller was in his mid fifties, so, you know, he felt like, Hey, I’m still young enough to get out here and pound the pavement, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to work six, seven days a week like I’ve been doing. So.

Stone Payton: [00:10:11] Well, and you can get pretty creative, or at least there are a number of options available to a buyer in terms of financing the the purchase as well. Right.

Joe Coppola: [00:10:21] Absolutely. In a majority of first time buyers will use the SBA program, which is a great program. But again, you’ve got people that you know, they can be cash buyers, they can use conventional means, they can refinance. There’s all kinds of different options in that place. But a lot of people do come in using the SBA program.

Stone Payton: [00:10:44] All right. So you’re helping people market their business on the seller side. How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for you and your business? How do you get the new interest, the new clients?

Joe Coppola: [00:10:57] Well, and again, that can be a challenge as well. But for the most part, we sell I’d say 80% of the businesses we sell are the people that we sat down and talk with, buyers that have came to us. Maybe they’ve looked at a business and it wasn’t in the right area for them or just wasn’t the right fit. They’ll see maybe an email blast that we do internally, or maybe they’ll see a listing even on a site like Biz by sell and see our name attached to it and go, Hey, I talked to Joe a couple of weeks back about a business that’s similar to this. Just be a great opportunity. And then myself and my fellow brokers, we always keep a Rolodex, if you will, of what buyers are looking for. And if I’ve got a guy that says, Hey, I’m looking for an automotive shop and X, Y, Z area, and if I run into a guy looking to sell, well, there you go, You go, Hey, you’ve got a guy looking to buy a business in this area. Are you interested in selling? And you kind of start with low hanging fruit, if you will. And then as you kind of branch out, we use social media, we use sites like I mentioned biz by sell, and you get a lot of people from all walks of life and all backgrounds. Those means as well. And you kind of start the process over with them. You introduce yourself, you meet them, you walk them through from the buyer’s side with the buyer process looks like. And one of the biggest things that we always do is make them sign a non-disclosure slash confidentiality agreement that states that any of the confidential financial records, anything that we disclose to a buyer, they obviously don’t disclose to the general public.

Stone Payton: [00:12:33] Well, and it sounds like you’ve had the benefit of one or more mentors probably very early on when you were making this pivot and getting in this into this arena. But yeah, you’ve had the benefit of one or more folks to help you navigate this terrain, haven’t you?

Joe Coppola: [00:12:51] Absolutely. And that’s been key to the success that I’ve had. Also, having a background, I’ve been a business consultant for almost 20 years on some level. So I’ve worked with small business owners, I’ve spoke their language, I know their pain points. And when I go in to sit down with them, you know, I don’t obviously know everything about their business, but I try to do as much research as I can. I try to get an idea of of what their business model looks like, what some of the challenges are in it, what some of the problems that we can obviously talk about and figure out right away, because there’s a lot of challenges with selling specific types of businesses. If, for instance, a guy needs a background in it, you know, it’s like you’ve got to find the right person with that right background then. So you’ve got to advertise it and obviously market it to that type of person or try to find that type of client. And that can be a big challenge.

Stone Payton: [00:13:45] Well, And I believe I saw in my notes that you have a passion for teaching. You actually teach both the business and marketing courses and have been doing this for some time now, haven’t you?

Joe Coppola: [00:13:56] Absolutely. That’s kind of one of those things where sometimes it doesn’t feel like a job. You know, you’re sitting around with a group of like minded individuals talking about business. I mean, what what more fun can you do? And you’re getting paid for it. You know, I’ve taught people from every age range, every demographic, every background. And when you get a group of people with ideas that want to share them openly in that format, I mean, I’ve been able to teach students at like the 101, the general, how to write a business plan. But I’ve also had those students later on in the 201 or the 301. Type of courses where now you’ve got to know their business model, you know, what they’re looking to do. And in that group setting, you can have more of a conversation and you can say, Hey Steve, this is a great opportunity for what you’re looking to do with your restaurant or Hey, Stone, this would be a great thing to market for your opportunity. And again, it becomes a much more open conversation versus your structured traditional. All right, guys, let’s go over chapter one, page one out of the book, etc., etc..

Stone Payton: [00:15:04] You obviously have a lot of irons in the fire, a lot going on at any given time. The teaching, the working with the buyers and the sellers. And you clearly have a real passion for the work. And I know you’re a human man. Sometimes the tank has got to run a little bit low. The batteries need charging. What do you do? Where do you go? How do you get how do you recharge, man?

Joe Coppola: [00:15:27] Well, you know, again, even when you when you’re talking to business owners and you’re talking to people that are passionate and like minded individuals, again, you get recharged on the daily sometimes. Now, again, you know, you get beat down from the battle of the day to day, there’s no doubt. But when you sit down even something like this and have a conversation, it recharges. You get you back out there, get you back in the fight, and then, you know, you’ve got a disconnect sometimes, too. I see that a lot with people that have been doing this for a while to where they go, Hey, you know what? For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to unplug and try to get back to some of the fundamentals and then re approach their attack. You know, you can you know, you can spend hours cold calling, knocking on doors and trying to get things going and just not get any progress. And that can be frustrating. Sometimes you need to just recharge, take a week to kind of figure out what the next steps are and then go back to the to the program.

Stone Payton: [00:16:23] All right, before we wrap, I’d love to talk a little bit about exit strategy. Maybe a couple of pro tips on helping someone get prepared to sell their business because there are some you got to get your ducks in a row to do this the right way. Yeah.

Joe Coppola: [00:16:39] Well, I’ll tell you, the number one thing I can say is have one, right? Number one thing I can recommend is have one and you’ll be again. As you can appreciate, there’s a huge percentage of people that come to me that they didn’t have one. You know, a lot of business owners, especially if maybe an older demographic, don’t necessarily start a business to exit it. Now, you know, you’re meet more people nowadays, especially maybe in the younger demographic that actually think that way and they run their business in order to sell it one day. But there’s definitely a difference between a person that starts a business to run one and a person who starts one to sell one. And that’s going to be key because when you exit, we tell people it can take up to a year to sell a business and the average is nine months. Now, personally, I’ve seen them sell within a month or two, but I’ve also seen them take nine months, ten months, a year, a year and a half. So the further out somebody calls me is better. I always tell people the guy that’s 2 to 3 years out or even 3 to 5 years out is in a better position to have a conversation with me to build that exit strategy and to build that long term plan versus the individual that says, hey, I need to move in six months or I want to sell a business in less than a year.

Joe Coppola: [00:17:56] A lot of times we tell people up front that we can help you as much as we can, but we can’t guarantee success in a short timeframe. It’s just something that we can’t control. Now that being said, the more together person has an exit strategy, yeah, the sooner that business will sell and the more together the business is, yes, the more likely it’s going to sell faster. But we always say again, give us a little more time because you just never know how long it’s going to take to find that right person. And we also always say to a client, it only takes one. So if we can find that right person, it may take some time. But if we find that right person, that’s all we need.

Stone Payton: [00:18:36] All right, man, where can our listeners get in touch with you? What’s the best way for them to connect with you? Tap into your work, whatever you feel like is appropriate. Website, email, LinkedIn. I just want to make sure that that they can if they if they so choose, that they can have a conversation with you about some of these topics. Man.

Joe Coppola: [00:18:53] Well, you can find me and my fellow brokers on premier business brokers, and I can also give you guys my direct email. It is Jay Coppola, Ink jc02 P’s, Ola I and C at gmail.com. Feel free to reach out to me any time and I can answer any questions you have.

Stone Payton: [00:19:17] Well, Joe, it’s been a real pleasure having you on the show today, man. Thank you for sharing your insight, your perspective. You’re doing important work. To me, this is so critical to just the foundation of our of this good country of ours, this great country of ours. So thank you for what you’re doing and thanks for investing the time with us this afternoon, man.

Joe Coppola: [00:19:38] Now, I appreciate you two stone Thank you for your time as well today, sir.

Stone Payton: [00:19:42] All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, Joe Coppola with Premier business Brokers and everyone here at the Business Radio X family saying, we’ll see you next time on Buy a Business near Me.

 

Michael Kohan with The Elevate Life Project

by

Michael-Koham-headshot
High Velocity Radio
Michael Kohan with The Elevate Life Project
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Michael-Koham-headshotMichael Kohan is an I.C.F Certified Life Coach who wakes up each morning with a simple purpose: to help others rediscover their powerful inner strengths and give clients and students the tools they need to make more meaningful decisions, to Aim Higher and Elevate Their Life.

In 2015 he founded The Elevate Life Project, an online community for people to re-discover their true selves and gain the skills they need to move forward and find lasting success. He is the host of the Elevate Life Project Podcast, a show dedicated to helping listeners develop a positive mindset, a rejuvenated outlook for themselves and their future, rediscovering that they are spiritual beings – and any dream a person wants in life is possible. Elevate-Life-Project-logo

Michael is dedicated to helping his clients and students find balance in all aspects of their lives—emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical well-being. He feels his purpose is to serve others through his teaching by encouraging students and clients to become steadfast in their practices while integrating spiritual and mindful living into their day-to-day lives, to achieve their goals, live their dreams, and achieve the impossible.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • What can Eastern Philosophy teach us about living successfully in the modern world?
  • What is success?
  • How can mindfulness help one live a better life?
  • Why do we suffer, and how can we heal suffering through non-attachment?
  • How does a person live life with integrity?
  • What is a holistic wellness and how can practicing it deconstruct negative patterns?
  • Why are change and personal growth difficult, and why do most people fail in achieving their dreams and goals?
  • How do you go from a corporate job to building a health and wellness business from scratch with no initial investment?

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the High Velocity Radio show, where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this morning. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast. Icf certified life coach with Elevate Life Project. Mr. Michael Kohan. Good morning, sir.

Michael Kohan: [00:00:35] Good morning. By the way, I love that sound intro and it pumped me up.

Stone Payton: [00:00:41] Well, good, because we got a lot of questions. I’m sure we won’t get to them all, but I think maybe a good place to start would be mission purpose. What are you and your team really out there trying to do for folks, man?

Michael Kohan: [00:00:55] Well, it’s in my tagline. I basically just work with people to try to help them aim higher and elevate their life. I work with people that are typically 35 to 55 years old, spiritual, nonreligious, who are at a crossroad in their life, and they’re looking to make some changes, but they just don’t know how, whether they just don’t have enough time for their family or they are struggling financially, or they’re just trying to set some goals to take their life to the next level. I just sit with them. I kind of help them work through what’s holding them back, what is getting in their way mentally, emotionally and what changes they need to make to their lives so they can then form their own conscious choices to make their life the best version for themselves.

Stone Payton: [00:01:45] And I think I read in my notes where you do lean on some aspects of Eastern philosophy to help you serve these folks. Is that accurate?

Michael Kohan: [00:01:55] That’s 100% accurate. First of all, all psychology is comes from Eastern philosophy, Freud, Carl Jung, which are the founders of psychology. They took a lot of their cues and references from the Bhagavad Gita, which is a Hindu text on how to live a spiritual life in the material world and for a better part of a decade. At one point in my life, I was contemplating becoming a monk, and I was studying all these texts on Buddhism, Hinduism, yoga, mysticism, and even dabbled in a lot of Judeo-Christian mysticism. And I take those teachings and I try to use them to help people remove those sort of negative predisposition ideas and thoughts that are just not serving them. Basically what I do is I take certain philosophies of like, you’re not the mind, you’re not the body, you’re something more. Well, what’s that mean? Well, that means that you’re not who you are in this material body. Then if we’re not, we are in this material body. Then we could do anything. We can change any aspect of our lives, because that’s not who we are.

Stone Payton: [00:03:02] As timeless as these ideas are, I’m operating under the impression that you believe with all of your heart that you can lean on this to to teach us all about how to successfully live in the modern world. Can you speak to that a little bit more?

Michael Kohan: [00:03:19] Well, like, let’s put it this way. Okay. All right. So from the human condition, we have two minds. We have the fight or flight mind or animal mind, because we are by nature, humans have animal bodies. So it’s either I’m going to kill this or I’m going to run from this. Either I can destroy this or it’s going to destroy me. I’m going to avoid pleasure or avoid pain and seek pleasure, right? That’s our lower selves. Then we have as humans are higher selves are our ability to think beyond our material gains of acquiring possessions just to feed our hunger. So if we understand those two concepts, which comes from spiritual practices, then we can begin to look at our lives and be like, okay, whatever is going on in my life is a choice. What I mean by that is we have that lower mind. In that higher mind. Our lower mind is to avoid pain and seek pleasure, which causes what? Suffering. That suffering is a choice we all go are going to go through struggles in life. We’re all going to go through periods where we have hardship, we have challenges that overcome and today more than we have ten years ago. Right. Look at the American economy. Look at, you know, the conversations we’re having in the public arena.

Michael Kohan: [00:04:46] There’s a lot of fear, a lot of a lot of strife. And that is all about suffering When we look at it from a spiritual standpoint, which is different, where in spirituality, we look at both our the good things we have in our lives and the pain that we’re having in our lives. It’s temporary. Then we can say, okay, whatever I’m going through right now, it’s temporary. If I’m struggling right now and I’m going through a hardship, that pain is inevitable. The suffering is by choice. So then I can look at this pain and say, okay, I know it’s temporary, so then I can then choose to make changes to it. And if I choose to take changes to it, that means I empower myself. And if I empower myself, that means I can do whatever I want in life. Now, some of us will have better luck and have big stages where we become massively successful and we come multi mega millionaires and billionaires, but most of us will not. But when we realize that if we choose to empower ourselves and we choose to recognize that what we’re experiencing is temporary, then we’re going to be successful no matter what. And that’s how spirituality helps us live better lives.

Stone Payton: [00:06:01] Okay. I got to know more about the back story, man. How in the world did you get into this line of work?

Michael Kohan: [00:06:08] All right. So I guess you could say I grew up in that classic American Northeast lifestyle. You know, both my parents were college educated, so it wasn’t a matter of me. If I was going to go to college, it was I’m going to college and I’m 45. So I went to college 25 years ago where college was not very expensive and my parents were also very affluent, so they were able to pay for my college. My entire four years of college cost less than a year at the same school now. And I was going to I was going to Rutgers and I was studying to become a therapist and I was getting my master’s in psychology. And 911 happened. And if you lived where I lived, we all went through, you know, the Northeast. If you lived in the Tri-State area, you had friends and family, you knew somebody. And I just kind of like had that like I give up moment in my life and I just sort of dropped out of grad school. I had an associate’s degree in business from community college also, and I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do with my life. And my parents were like, Get a job. And I was like, Well, I wanted to do I guess. So I ended up getting a job working in corporate America, and through the course of about a ten year period, I found myself at 30 years old working for a real estate investment trust.

Michael Kohan: [00:07:34] I was making 175,000 a year +22 biannual bonuses, so I was making well over $250,000 a year. I had a great apartment in New York City across from the park. I had enough money to enjoy whatever I wanted to do, but I felt very empty inside and I was basically functioning. In a way where I would basically wake up in the morning do do, you know, do cocaine work all day? Come home exhausted at the end of the day, at like 9:00 at night, take a bunch of Valium pass out. And I did this for years until a friend of mine was like, You need to change your life. You’re going to die of a heart attack. You’re killing yourself. And I started seeing a therapist and the therapist started introduced me to yoga and the yoga studio that I went to, I just fell in love with because there and I just started just changing my life and studying spirituality and yoga and mysticism. And this this became everything for me. So on Tuesdays, I studied the Bhagavad Gita. On Thursdays. I went to a Buddhist class. On Fridays, I went to this very progressive Orthodox synagogue on Fridays for Shabbat dinner, and on Saturday they studied the Torah and Saturday afternoons I did more yoga and that’s all I did for about five years, or to the point where I decided to quit my job.

Michael Kohan: [00:09:07] I shaved my head and I was aspiring to be a monk. At one point I took what’s called first initiation, where you take the initial vows where you kind of step into monastic life. And then I met my wife and then I decided to change directions and with my wife and I started teaching yoga full time. And I loved it. But I was broke. I was poor, I was living off of me and my wife were living off of like $3,000 at one point. And the Northeast, that’s not a lot of money in north. In the Northeast, that’s like very poor. That’s like, I would say in Georgia, $1,500 a month. And I asked myself, like, what did I like about teaching yoga? What do I like? And it was about helping people. And then we realized I had this master’s in psychology sitting there. So we decided to go back and become a life coach. And that’s how I got into this. And I took those ten years of studying yoga and Jewish mysticism and Eastern philosophy and combined it with psychology and incorporated coaching techniques to start this business. And it just took off.

Stone Payton: [00:10:15] Well, I mean, you’re clearly finding the work incredibly rewarding. What are you enjoying the most? Do you and your wife both at this point in your practice?

Michael Kohan: [00:10:24] Well, I you know, I just love I just love I just love helping people. You know, there’s always one or two clients that just don’t work out for whatever reason either, and they just get really upset. But by and large, most of the clients I feel that I work with, I really do help them. I mean, I just help them just take their lives and make them easier. I don’t do these, like, programs or like sign up for my 12 week goal setting course and I’ll take your life to the next level. I do that, but mostly it’s just it’s mostly it’s just about my clients having somebody to talk to. Where they don’t need therapy, but they just need somebody to help them get better clarity and better perspective on how to handle their situations. And that just makes my life better because I get to earn a living. I make a good salary now, but I also get to make the world better. I’m leaving the world better than I got it. And I try to do that with everything now. Every time that we go somewhere, my wife and I are always like, How can we be better? People treat people better, How can we be better to the people that are working in the restaurants or the person that’s like picking up our garbage? That’s this. And that’s why I love what I do. And I think when I’m coaching people, I get to instill those values into people because that’s what’s missing. I think today that just that, that decency.

Stone Payton: [00:11:49] Yeah. So help me and our listeners help me get my arms around this term that I’m hearing more and more often now mindfulness speak to that a little bit, if you would.

Michael Kohan: [00:12:01] Mindfulness is, by and large just an easy way for individuals like myself to incorporate spirituality into your life without it being offensive. What we found was a lot of people became very triggered when you would bring in Buddhist or Hindu teachings into their lives because they thought it was going against their upbringing. So that’s where mindfulness comes from. It’s an adaptation of this idea that your thoughts and emotions affect your environment and your environment affects your thoughts and emotions. And through techniques like breathing properly, like learning how to breathe better. Because if you breathe shallow, your mind is very shallow. If you breathe deep, your mind is very deep like this. Think about that one. When you get into an argument with somebody, you watch your breath. It gets very short so that you react very threateningly. But if you’re in an argument and you learn to breathe deeply, you learn to become so those are the basic teachings of mindfulness. And then through meditation, we’re able to go into our subconscious mind to understand what’s going on beneath the surface so we can kind of clean out the garbage. And through other techniques like diet and exercise and what your environment, your home looks like all affects the quality of your of your life.

Stone Payton: [00:13:32] Another term that I’m running into is attachment. You know, I guess more accurately, it’s non-attachment to talk about where that applies.

Michael Kohan: [00:13:42] All right. It’s obviously viaggio pomodoro. It’s a Sanskrit saying through the practice of non-attachment, one attains enlightenment. What enlightenment basically is from a material standpoint is Uri. So we all have two lists. You and I have two lists. You want to like for those who are driving, don’t do this, but for those who you are not driving. Take a moment and flip your palms or turn upward like they’re facing the ceiling or the sky. And then look on your right hand and imagine you’re holding a piece of paper. And on that piece of paper is everything that you like about your life, who you are as a person, what you do for living your narrative. Everything about who you are that you love. Now look at your left hand and imagine a list of things that you don’t like about your life. All the struggles you’re going through, all your hardship, where you’re from, your narrative, your life, everything you don’t like about yourself and everything you do like about yourself are on two lists. Now we all have these two lists. When we are attached to something, we cling to the list of the things either we love about our lives and we ignore our problems, or we think there’s something to overcome or something that’s wrong with us. Or we cling to the negative list of all the things that we don’t like about our lives. And we feel that our lives are in despair when we don’t when we’re not attached to either or list.

Michael Kohan: [00:15:14] And we look at our list of the things that we like about ourselves with gratitude, like, Wow, I’m lucky I get to live in America. Wow, I’m lucky I’m I’m healthy or I get to I wow, I’m lucky. I woke up this morning and I look at my list of the things I don’t like about my life. Now there’s things that are wrong with me, but as opportunities for growth. Then we’re no longer attached. Because when we are attached, that means we try to cling to the things that we like or dislike and we try to run away from everything else, and that leads to suffering. There’s nothing wrong with driving a nice car. There’s nothing wrong with having a nice house. There’s nothing wrong with with having a nice life. But we have to understand that that’s all given to us temporarily. They’re not technically ours. Because when you leave this body, because the one absolute truth in this world is we’re all going to die. Right. You and I are going to die. So the house that we live in that we might be paying a mortgage to isn’t really ours. It’s a gift given to us. Because when we leave the body and we go on to our next state of consciousness, the house is still going to be there and someone else is going to have it.

Michael Kohan: [00:16:29] So it’s not really ours. And that goes with everything so that when you have your your high, your peaks, like we’re like, Yay, life is great. I just got a paycheck and life is good and I’m going to go to the mall and I’ll buy a bunch of crap that I don’t need, and you’re attached to that. Then you’re going to then be the next on Monday, be like, Wow, life sucks. I got no money. Now I’m attached to misery. When we understand that neither, we’re going to have both the highs and the lows and we’re not going to be attached to either or. And when things come will be grateful. When things leave, will we understand that that’s temporary also, and we just go through life with the ebbs and flows? I saw this during COVID, right? I saw this with a lot of my colleagues during COVID who who were motivational speakers and life coaches who when COVID happened and things shut down, they crumbled because their entire identity was revolved around. I’m a motivational speaker and I get to go on stage and travel across the country. And that all got shut down and they crumbled because they were attached to that identity versus other people I saw like myself were like, Well, I can’t do that anymore. That’s not who I am. I’m someone who helps people. So how else can I help people? That’s basically how non-attachment works.

Stone Payton: [00:17:46] So I’m sitting here palms up, trying to breathe more deeply because I want to make a little bit of a movement towards some of what you’re describing. And, you know, change is hard. It’s hard for me. I’ve seen other people struggle with change and fall very short of, you know, what are noble intentions. Is that your experience? And if so, why do you think change is so hard? Hard for people.

Michael Kohan: [00:18:12] Change for change is probably one of the hardest things to do, right? Because that goes back to your identity, back to attachment, right? How do we identify ourselves as people? We identify ourselves in what where we’re from, write our narrative. I’m for me, it’s I’m a white male from North America, grew up in New Jersey. I was born Jewish. I was raised Judeo-Christian, parents, got divorced, had it both apartments and a bat mitzvah or a bar mitzvah and a confirmation. And then that’s my that’s that’s that’s where I’m from. I went to I went to Rutgers. I live now. Who where do I live? I live in New Jersey. I’m married. That’s who I am now. And then what I do for a living. I’m a life coach. That’s how I identify myself. And everybody identifies themselves in those three ways. Where are they from? What do they do now for a living and where do they live? Like their narrative. When we want to change, right? We want to make changes to our lives, then what do we have to do? We have to change our identity. And that’s really hard for people because the other part of that equation is we don’t live in a vacuum. We live by collective.

Michael Kohan: [00:19:32] We as humans are group oriented by nature. We form groups. Right. This is the this is an easy explanation of why bad good people do bad things because it’s about joining a group. We are a part of a group, and in that group our identity is in alignment with other people in that group because that’s how we survive. We thrive and survive by being part of a group. So if I want to change, I have to both change the group I’m part of and my identity, and both of those lead to hardship. And so that’s why change is so hard. And the best way to put it is you’re not happy right now in your life of one aspect, right? And if you have to change, you’re going to have to change how you look at yourself, who you are as a person. And by and large, a lot of times you’re going to have to change who you spend your time with. And that’s going to maybe take a period of very painful period of your life. Giving up friends, giving up maybe some family members that are toxic. Changing your habits, changing your identity. And so we don’t want to do that because we look at where we’re at as painful, but we look at the change as worse.

Michael Kohan: [00:20:51] So we don’t want to go through it. But here’s the truth, though. If you aren’t happy now in one area of your life and you’ve got to go through the necessary changes, that is also going to be painful and you’re not going to be happy, what’s the difference? And that’s what you have to look at it to make those changes. Because if you do enough work eventually with hard with luck also though, because you’ll get to a place where you’re actually happy with your life. But most people don’t want to go through those steps of changing who they are, how they describe themselves, and changing like the people around them. And on the other side of the flip coin, the people around you don’t want you to change too, because that’s part of their identity. So as you grow, they start to they start to they start to push back on that because they don’t want to see you change because then it changes their identity. And so we have these two struggles going on, our internal identity, the necessary to change our habits, our lifestyle, the people around us, and other people pushing back against us.

Stone Payton: [00:21:59] So how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a guy like you, a business like yours? How do you get the new clients?

Michael Kohan: [00:22:09] So I, I do it, which I don’t know why other people don’t do this. So I use a listing service called called BBC.com, where I spend. Between 275 to $500 a month, and I basically pay for leads. Bbc.com is one of the four sort of like high searchable, like life coaching Google searches that people that when you type in life coach will show up and you click on Bach and you’ll type in what you’re looking for and it will go out to people that signed up for this service. And I can click on that lead and give you a call. I get your name, phone number and email address. What makes me so successful versus other life coaches is the fact that I have consistent follow up. What happens is most people, when they click on that lead, they don’t call the client or b only call the client once and they don’t get them on the phone. They never call them again. And to when they click on the client, they tell the client who they are, not how they can help the client. So a lot of times I’ll be like, I’m a PhD in psychology and a life coach. Great. What are you going to do for the client? So that’s how I build my business. I use e-com, I click on the lead and then I call them four times. And after the fourth time, if they don’t call me back, I put them into my email funnel and then they start getting free information from me. I send out a week, a weekly blog, I send out free coaching videos, I sent out free audio, video coaching videos, and then eventually, when they’re ready, they end up coming back to me and signing up for coaching.

Stone Payton: [00:23:57] I am so glad that I asked that. That is really good information. So when a when a relationship with you and a client begins. Talk a little bit about some of some of what happens early. I’m operating under the impression there’s some conversation maybe largely centered around what they’re trying to accomplish. Talk a little bit about the early stages of the work, if you could.

Michael Kohan: [00:24:22] So what I always do with my clients is step one. I do what’s called a discovery call. It’s an industry standard. Basically, you sit on the call with a client for about a half hour to 45 minutes and you just you have a conversation like you and I are having where I ask the coach why they’re looking for a life coach. Get a little bit of their back story, try to figure out, try to pull out what their narrative is and really try to get to see what they’re looking for. I ask them questions like what would be a successful ending of a coaching relationship with me at the end of that discovery call, if if I feel like I can help them and if I’m the right fit for them, I’ll give them a free trial coaching session if I’m not a right fit for them and I don’t think I can help them, I’ll try to point them in the right direction. Sometimes I’d be like, You know, I think you need to see a therapist. So here are two like online therapy directories that you can use, or I think you need this type of coach. I’m not really qualified for what you’re looking for, so I recommend this type of coach you’re looking for and I’ll point them in that direction. But if I can help them, I do a free one three hour trial coaching session, which we typically do a rocking chair exercise, which is a visionary exercise where I’ll have them vision their future self and what they would like their future self to look like.

Michael Kohan: [00:25:42] And it helps me get a good narrative for them at the end of that, that discovery call and that trial coaching session, I’ll typically, unless they’re really not ready, I’ll start with goal setting and I’ll have them start to work with me on goals in four areas of their life Financial goals. Career professional goals, health and wellness goals, and then miscellaneous goals. Miscellaneous goals are things like travel, books, vacations, any sort of major purchases they want to do. And I find that helps me understand a little bit more about what’s going on in their life and where their struggles are. So when I can see what needs to be worked on, once that’s done, then it’s just opens up and it comes up by individual approach where it’s either I’m working on their communication skills, their time management skills, their are their emotional skills, or they have negative beliefs. And I sort of start to tailor it after that goal setting program to really figure out what their own individual needs, because everybody is different. And that’s why I don’t do I don’t put people into like nine session programs because it doesn’t work for them. Some people are like, Yeah, I want to set goals and as I’m working with them, I realize why they’re not setting their goals is because they lack boundaries. And so I have to do a whole coaching on how to develop boundaries or they don’t have good habits. So I’ll have to do a whole coaching series on habits, and that’s basically what I do.

Stone Payton: [00:27:17] All right, man, what is the best way for our listeners to connect with You begin to tap into your work, whatever you feel like is appropriate. Website email that LinkedIn.

Michael Kohan: [00:27:27] This, go to my website. Everything I do is at my website Elevate Life Project. They go to my website, they can sign up for our newsletter. So they go to my website, they can see, they can see my coaching rates, they go to my website, they can take a quiz on understanding their life purpose. They can watch my coaching videos, they can read my blog. It’s all there.

Stone Payton: [00:27:47] Well, Michael, it has been a real pleasure having you on the program today. Thank you so much for investing the time to visit with us and share your experience, expertise, insight and perspective. This has been a lot of fun, man. Thank you so much.

Michael Kohan: [00:28:03] Yeah, man, this is great. I love doing this. Like I said in the beginning, I’m good at talking. I’m terrible at being an interviewer. You were fantastic. So thank you.

Stone Payton: [00:28:12] My pleasure. Man. All right, until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today with Elevate Life Project, Mr. Michael Cohen and everyone here at the Business Radio X family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.

 

Jena Apgar with 2X My Biz

by

Jen-Apgar-headshot
High Velocity Radio
Jena Apgar with 2X My Biz
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Jen-Apgar-headshotJena Apgar is an international speaker, digital agency CEO at 2xMyBiz.com Marketing, Founder and Agency Coach at LeadFlow365.io with the popular 90-Day Double My Agency Challenge. 2X-My-Biz-logo

She’s also the host of the popular videocast, Marketing Strategies that Grow Your Business, which takes you through what it takes to build a 6–8 figure business, to double your business, leveraging marketing strategies, funnels, traffic tactics and more.

Connect with Jena on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • How Jena went from being in the military to running a marketing agency
  • Why 2x and not a Grant Cardone style 10x
  • The number one tip that you would give to every business owner

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High velocity radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the high velocity radio show where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with 2X My Biz, Jena Apgar. How are you?

Jena Apgar: [00:00:33] Hi, I am doing wonderful. It’s always a good day when you closed three clients in one morning.

Stone Payton: [00:00:39] That does sound like a marvelous day. I am so delighted to have you on the program. I know we got a chance to visit by phone a few weeks ago and I knew then this was going to be a marvelous conversation. I got a million questions. We won’t get to them all, but I think a great place to start here is maybe to get a little context, if you would, share with me and our listeners a little bit about niche and purpose, what you and your team are really out there trying to do for folks.

Jena Apgar: [00:01:08] Ooh, mission and purpose. So I probably should do one of those fancy schmancy mission statements, vision statements, but my heart is always going to lie in specifically a smaller business owner and helping them grow a business that’s an asset to them, to their family that pays it affords them a healthy, safe lifestyle. I don’t mean anything extravagant. I’ve had clients that they took the what we helped them build and bought a new polo pony for 100 K, or they go buy a $2 million yacht. And I’m like, That’s no fun. I want to hear about the kid who went to college or you moved into the house in the safe neighborhood. And then where I really get passionate is specifically doing that for moms, because when you do it for a mom, it’s so exponential. So many moms get stuck in some very violent, dangerous spots when they are not making income and they can’t leave the house because they have no money. And then you double down on that. When you teach a mom how to build a business, she grows that. So she’ll teach it to her kids. She teaches it to other moms, to her community, and really spreads that information around. So that is definitely my my heart spot, if you will. And my mission is to help families grow, leveraging businesses.

Stone Payton: [00:02:34] So what is your back story? How in the world did you get into this line of work?

Jena Apgar: [00:02:40] Man, I have one of the back stories. I wanted to be an attorney from fourth to 10th grade. I did mock trials, teen courts, until I learned how much school they have to go through. And I was like, I went to a highly segregated school and city. I went to what was considered the black high school, and we had a great principal who is really a grant writer, and he got tons of technology at our school and we had majors. So I majored in communication, so marketing and I didn’t go to school for it because I couldn’t handle how big the classrooms were. I’m a small class type of person, and all I knew back then was Mad Men style, like cutthroat. And I was just way too nice of a human back then. Did the military because I didn’t know what else to do. My dad did that, My uncle did that, My grandfather’s very military family did. Military intel analysts of all things blood, guts, fun 180 out of that into interior design left after the recession and considered being an investment banker because that wasn’t keeping my brain up to where I wanted to be made babies. That’s not a very baby friendly profession and decided to. I just had all these little side businesses and at some point I realized I built better websites than the website builders. And I did it faster and I did it more conveniently. And I had a process to it and slowly started picking up some clients in the social media space and the website building space learned about funnels, started building those, went to seek out a master’s degree, Realize school doesn’t teach you anything about marketing. It tells you to create a story, knows the metrics, all right, but it doesn’t actually tell you how to do the nitty gritty. Got certified in everything with a company called Digital Marketer, which I love those guys and love it, man. I can do it upside down on a napkin drunk with one hand and a pen. So fun journey that found my little passion, my little niche.

Stone Payton: [00:04:52] Incredibly divergent arenas, military entrepreneurship. And I got to believe. But I’ll ask, are there some some parallels? Are there some things that you feel like you you learned in your military experience that help you serve your clients even to this day?

Jena Apgar: [00:05:09] Yeah. So Intel is all about a consuming massive amounts of information and turning it around and making it usable, right? So marketing, that’s everything, right? But also from a strategic standpoint, the ability to look at the greater picture and decide who are the players, who are the customers and what is the best way to go about reaching them. And for all the little tips and tricks and tools and stuff online and everyone’s telling you what to do, that doesn’t always mean it’s the best thing for you. You really have to look at it from a strategic mindset and take a look at you as a human, you as the business owner, you and the tools and the the assets you have right. And what you’re willing to do for the business and build a system around that. I don’t there’s literally nothing more military about that. Part of Intel, too, was learning how to interrogate essentially. So waterboarding more like we called it debriefing. Just to be clear, that was CIA. I would debrief people. And so part of that you learn how to really get into the other person’s head calmly, Right? This is not like police interrogation. This is like you’re interrogating your own pilots type thing, but you learn to get the information that’s good. And so when I go to do kind of like mini market research for my clients and I call their customers, I’m amazed at the information I pull out that my customers never tell me. Like if you’re if the people listening could walk away with knowing one thing right more than any other thing that anyone else says is go ask your customers what they would tell their best friend why they should hire you.

Jena Apgar: [00:06:52] Because you’re going to come up with all the tech stuff. You’re going to be like, Hey, we should do a podcast. It’s awesome and it increases your leads and blah, blah, blah. It’s so amazing where you ask your customers and you get some very interesting things. Like the one that I noticed the most was one of my first large clients with a daycare center in town that was very different. It’s more focused on music and the arts and developing children in a non test type fashion, right? And they were so focused on curriculum and they’re like, all the parents care about curriculum. And yeah, the parents ask about curriculum. But when I talk to the parent, she’s like, Oh my gosh, and my daughter owns the stage. And I was like, What stage? She’s like, Yeah, they have a stage in the next building. I’m like, What are you talking about? My client didn’t even mention they owned a stage, much less another building. And then I find out they do like three productions each year. On stage and she’s like, Yeah, the first one, my daughter was terrified and she hid. In the second one she was okay, and the third one she like, owned the stage. And I’m looking at like this from a female perspective going, How many women can hold their own on a stage?

Stone Payton: [00:07:58] Yeah.

Jena Apgar: [00:07:59] But when a daughter can own a stage, she’s going to raise her hand in class and ask the questions. She’s going to get her questions answered. For girls, that’s a huge thing because they’re afraid to answer or ask questions because everyone will stay with them. So when you switch the marketing over that direction, suddenly the Google ad spend goes from $3,500 with zero return to 2400 on our best month. And we’re getting clients in the door at $120 apiece.

Stone Payton: [00:08:29] Wow. When you’re working with clients, especially in the early stages, I’ve got to believe you’ve been at this long enough now. Do you see some consistent patterns? And maybe you don’t say it out loud, but do you think to yourself, Yeah, I’ve seen this before.

Jena Apgar: [00:08:43] Oh, yeah. I actually. I just had this this morning. Every person and the number can be different, but every person over 30 is broken. Every single one of them. And how you fix that and how you move forward depends on your success level. So I see so many people who are brilliant. Oh, my gosh, they’re brilliant. They want to serve. They they’re good to their clients. They have great services. They have great products. But because of their emotions, because they’re there’s something broken that has not been fixed or because something that is completely emotional has nothing to do with business. That is what’s holding them back in business. I can build them a funnel. I can build it end to end. We we have a framework of eight stages, end to end. And the very first one is awareness. If they don’t know you exist, they think nothing else can work, right? I can build you the funnel. It handles the other seven stages, right? We can turn on a Facebook ad, we can do all these different things, but you will see the emotional blocks come in when it actually comes to driving that original traffic because things happen because maybe somebody calls you out, maybe they call you a name. Maybe they say that your emails were too aggressive or stop spamming me or you look like a poser. You’re not really that good. And why are you acting like a guru? And just because you’re doing things that business owners do, other people attack them and they can’t handle that. Their emotions, they they don’t want to be in the they don’t even want to test the concept of being called out. So by far, it has nothing to do with what I’m doing. It really comes back down to their individual emotions and how they handle those things.

Stone Payton: [00:10:29] So now that you have been at this for a while, what are you finding the most rewarding? What are you personally enjoying the most about the work?

Jena Apgar: [00:10:40] I So I’m a numbers girl. So I on that Myers-Briggs scale, I’m the INTJ. I am the not only is that the least across all of the different personalities, but for women it’s only 0.5 of a percent of all women. I like my numbers. I like my math. And in business, that’s where you see people win is and this is why men I feel like are better at business in so many regards as they know their numbers. And I utilize a client dashboard for the big picture and I build on a platform that has a beautiful dashboard with all their numbers. I mean, you send an email out, it’s an all in one system, and when you send that broadcast email, it tells you all the basics like MailChimp and Constant contact. It tells you you send it to 2000 people, 1000 people open 500 clicks, but mine tells you you made $300.

Stone Payton: [00:11:32] Nice.

Jena Apgar: [00:11:33] And when you can see these two dashboards, you can start to see the metrics move up those pretty little line graphs and you can see especially that email one man and you can tell exactly, I made money today and you can see their face light up and they didn’t believe they could do it. So going back to that emotional state and maybe the only made $5 in the beginning, maybe they only made $100 the first launch and then all of a sudden it’s 5000 and it’s 10,000. And they can see that in a dashboard. Right. It’s not just this intangible money going through a stripe account into their bank account, paying their mortgage. No, it’s this thing you can see when you get up in the morning and it’s that little dopamine hit and they get all excited and this amazing thing happens. It’s like a gold star for Grown-Ups. No one gives us, like, gold stars anymore, right? There’s no gold star for making your bed. There’s no gold star for getting up in the morning and not biting someone’s head off. There’s no reward for doing the right thing as it any time There’s no reward for being a business owner, ever. You can make $1,000,000. There’s no reward. The reward is in that dashboard. It’s in that money. When you see their face light up and they get excited and they start doing it on their own without you, that’s exciting.

Stone Payton: [00:12:47] So have you had the benefit of one or more mentors as you were kind of making that pivot from the military environment to the business environment? And as you continue to progress some folks to kind of help you navigate that terrain.

Jena Apgar: [00:13:04] Yeah. So normally when people say, do you have mentors, I remember a long time I was like, No, I don’t have anybody I look up to. I feel like every individual along my pathway has given me these little tidbits, right? When I went to digital marketer and I kind of got into their system and we became partners. Definitely. Ryan Dice He doesn’t necessarily teach directly, but I remember I really, really dug down into my business. My ex husband was we were arguing, I just found some inappropriate text messages. I’m pregnant with my third baby and I remember him looking at me and he’s like, I’m going to basically bankrupt you if you leave me. And I’m just devastated. But I’m like, spiteful. I’m still a military person. And I looked at him. I was like, I don’t care if I’m poor. Like, I don’t need the big house. I don’t need all the fancy anything. And he looked at me and smiled and he was like, I know, but you do mind if your kids are. Cool. The man just stabbed in the gut, just just emotionally gutted me. And I remember diving down into all of digital marketers material. And so I’ve got this little guy, Ryan Dice on my screen constantly, and I’m like, upstairs sleeping in my daughter’s bedroom and folding like a mountain of clothes, listening to all this training to get good at what I’m doing.

Jena Apgar: [00:14:24] And here’s this little guy, Ryan, just bouncing around like, Yeah, you just do this and you just send emails and you just. Here’s a customer value journey. And I’m like, Oh, damn. So And Ryan’s sweetheart, now I know him and like, other people will get all giddy around him like he’s like a celebrity. And I’m like, It’s just little Ryan but amazing to work with. I don’t know Richard Lindner as well, but he’s so intelligent. Level is trading’s Roland Frazier. Holy man. If you ever watch any training, I can watch most training on two x speed because it’s just the information. I already know so much of it and it’s just slow to me. Roland, I’ve got to stop every 5 seconds. I’ve got to look up a word in the dictionary. But that man buys and sells businesses. I think he called himself a reformed attorney. Those three guys are amazing. Billie Jean Shaw has been very inspiring to me. Told me to stop my little literally got down on his hands or on his knees in front of me and he’s like six foot a million inches tall on his knees, almost as tall as I am, and begging me not to be a perfectionist. So yeah, I’ve had a lot and even more than that, like I can think of something from everybody that I’ve interacted with.

Stone Payton: [00:15:40] Now you’re in the marketing business, you’re helping people sell and market what they do. How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a person like you, a practice like yours? How do you get the new clients?

Jena Apgar: [00:15:55] So the cobbler’s kids has no shoes quite often. I actually coach agency owners too. Now I’ve gotten to that point in the career and we’re about to actually launch a 90 day campaign just for agency owners with some very large global partners. It’s going to be amazing. But the hard part about marketing a marketer is we’re marketers and so we already know all the tricks. We have the lead magnets, we have the entry point offers and the loss leaders and the beautiful glossy PDF. So in the big scheme of things, how do you stand out? Is the real trick. Like the ad cost to market myself is significantly higher than the ad cost for me to market an attorney or a dentist or anything else. So what I’ve really learned is the art of cold outreach, which I’m so not a salesperson, but I’ve had to learn to be. I we do cold outreach on LinkedIn. We do I have an actual SaaS product that I own to that does cold outreach, leveraging Facebook business pages for my clients. And we offer tons of information. So I try not I cannot do spam as a cold outreach.

Jena Apgar: [00:17:15] I cannot as a human, I just I hate being spammed, but we offer value in advance. That was one thing I definitely learned from Ryan and the team that digital marketers value in advance. So we partnered. We have a beautiful dashboard for our clients and we can scan their business. And so in in doing that, we just provide education. Be like, if you’re ready to see where your business is at and what your numbers are in the marketing world, go scan your business. And so we can provide education. I can teach them about a customer value journey and teach them about building an avatar and be like, Look, go scanned your business. That’s my loss leader. That’s my my lead magnet to get your information and see how it’s doing. And then that every time you add a layer to your business, whether it’s with me or with someone else, you can see if it made any lifts or improvements. So you know your numbers without having to try too hard. It’s hard.

Stone Payton: [00:18:11] As our listeners no doubt discovered early on in this conversation. You are no stranger to the microphone. You host a popular video cast as well. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Jena Apgar: [00:18:25] Yeah, I haven’t I haven’t been like really on board recently, but we have a to my biz over on YouTube and provide a ton of value there. And sometimes I got to dig for my own videos because I don’t SEO optimize them the way that I should, but we were building live funnels for a while. I think I’m going to go back to that this week as we just bought a bunch of new clients in the funnel space, but showing people that building funnels is not hard. And it doesn’t have to be complicated that I can build a funnel in one hour. And I had a great co host, Scott Schilling, who my goodness, that man has been on stage with every large name in the business that you can think of from Sir Richard Branson to less brown. Every every major speaker is Zig Ziglar. I was just trying to create some. I was he was my client for a bit as well. We were doing custom quotes and I was showing them how to do these, quote, social media things for like Monday mornings and do them really fast. And I’m like, he’s like, Yeah, I’ve spoke on stage with Zig Ziglar. And so we made a bunch of quotes with Zig Ziglar quotes on them.

Jena Apgar: [00:19:33] But it’s a picture of Scott and Zig together and there’s like 20 different pictures of different instances. I’m like, sometimes you forget who you’re working with, and he’s so smart. Like, I’m the the nerd in the background of these videos. Building funnels. While Scott is just dropping sales knowledge bombs and keeping the conversation going. And I mean, it was amazing. I really didn’t just start them again. And, you know, I mean, YouTube’s great and be wrong, but YouTube is a little old school now. It’s a little old school like it’s still relevant. I’d be wrong. It is the second largest search engine on the planet for Americans and but reels are the new thing. So I’m at this point taking my old YouTube content, chopping it up and putting it over on Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and even YouTube has gone to shorts, which are technically real. So it’s amazing the places that you can put content now. But yeah, I drop all sorts of information all over the place and the only thing that amazes me is that people don’t want the gems, they want the easy stuff.

Stone Payton: [00:20:45] Yeah. So in just a moment, I’m going to ask you, if you will, to maybe leave us with a couple of Pro Tips or maybe your favorite pro tip on any of these topics. And of course, make sure that we get your contact information. But I had another question. I was curious because I assume that this was I’m operating under the impression that this was a very conscious decision. Why did you choose to go with the framing of of to X as opposed to, I don’t know, you know, like a Grant Cardone style X or something like that?

Jena Apgar: [00:21:14] Oh, yeah. So I mean, I’ve met Grant Owen and he’s a special person. And don’t get me wrong, I like the concept really. His concept of ten X is a mindset shift, right? So stop thinking about building little and think big, right? But the problem with marketing is even doubling a company is really hard. We had one company that was $135 Million in Revenue Company, which seems like a whole lot, but they’re in construction, right? And they’re building barracks and hospitals like tilt up walls really fast. They literally cannot double their revenue. It’s impossible. They do not have the capabilities of handling enough projects to double. Right. So but here’s the thing. There’s four different places that we focus on doubling. You can double in traffic. So how many eyeballs and targets are coming to your stuff? You can double in that of leads you’re getting. You can double in the amount of sales you’re actually making, and then you can double in monthly recurring revenue and returning customers, which is where the real money is. When you if you were able if you were able to double across the board, that becomes exponential. It’s not two times two, it’s two times two times two times two. So now you’re up to 16. So but the reality is you’re never going to be able to double all four categories. You’ll get maybe you can double your traffic. Heck, maybe you can triple your traffic, maybe you can double your leads. But then you find out maybe your offer is not converting as well and you only get a 1.1 lift. Right? So I’m a bigger fan of doubling in the individual metrics so we can measure each one. And as we lift one, we can lift the next one, because when you double the traffic, if you’re already converting at 50% to your leads, well now you’ve just doubled the number of leads you have. So it all works out.

Stone Payton: [00:23:06] Yeah. That’s a that’s a good and and relevant math lesson right there. I’m glad I asked.

Jena Apgar: [00:23:13] It’s whenever you do the math, you can make people smile or cry. So when you show them that one, it’s much better on a visual on on a board so they can see the math on it. Right. And then the other one that makes them cry is they tell me what their goal is and I break it down to how much, how many leads and how many meetings and how much traffic do we need to get to accomplish their end goal. And then that’s when you see tears show up. You’re like, Oh, you.

Stone Payton: [00:23:40] Can’t drive that.

Jena Apgar: [00:23:41] Much traffic. Then like you better start converting higher than.

Stone Payton: [00:23:45] And do you have a go to number one favorite kind of pro tip that you almost would share with virtually any business owner? Do this think about this, read this. You know, don’t do this.

Jena Apgar: [00:23:58] Don’t do this. I would say the absolute biggest one is done these perfect. Just start even if your video quality is poor or it’s shaky or your audio is bad, even if your makeup’s not good. I had one of them. I’ve lost a client this week that I thought I had because she said she wasn’t ready to take on all the responsibility because it required being in the video. And she was £40 overweight.

Stone Payton: [00:24:27] Yeah.

Jena Apgar: [00:24:27] So just get started. I’ve got a sticker on my computer right now. I hand them out to all my clients. I hand out a book and I don’t know what kind of program you are, but it says, Just get done. Nike says, Just do it. I would drop an F-bomb in between us.

Stone Payton: [00:24:49] I love it. All right. Let’s make sure that our listeners can reach out and have a conversation with you or someone on your team. I want to make sure it’s easy for them to tap into your work.

Jena Apgar: [00:24:59] Really simple. Just go to two x, my biz to x and Y by z and right up at the top. Ignore the phone, Don’t call me, Don’t hit my social media. On the top side you’ll see it says, Know your numbers. Put your business in there. If it doesn’t pop up, it’ll give you the resource to says can’t find your business. Click here and put all your information in, get your info in there and you’re like, Oh, she just wants my info. No, I promise I will give you a full dashboard. I usually I used to before I had the platform to work with, we charged our clients $50 a month for this platform and you plug in, you connect your Facebook account, connect your Google Analytics account, get your Twitter in there, your Instagram, and just start connecting your account. And this dashboard is a wealth of information and you never have to pay me for it.

Stone Payton: [00:25:52] Fantastic. And that website again.

Jena Apgar: [00:25:55] To x my biz the is dot com.

Stone Payton: [00:25:59] Well Gina, it has been an absolute delight having you on the program this afternoon. Thank you so much for investing the time and the and the energy to share your insight and perspective. You have a great deal of enthusiasm and, you know, just neck deep in knowledge. I have thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and I know that our listeners have as well.

Jena Apgar: [00:26:21] Well, thank you so much for having me. Happening me. And if your your listeners have any questions, feel free to find me. Dm me on Facebook, LinkedIn and always happy to help.

Stone Payton: [00:26:34] Well, it’s my pleasure. All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, jenna apgar with two x my babies and everyone here at the business radio x family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.

 

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