Chris Do (2:43)

Well, I think that's a pretty good place to start where it's not an incremental difference, it's an exponential difference. It's an orders of magnitude more than your typical client. And I think we, when we smell one or we see one, we're like, it's a whale, everybody. Let's do everything we can to bring the whale in. Because here's the shocking thing that a lot of people don't realize. They think, okay, number one, when you have a really big client, you have to do totally different things. Not necessarily true. And that the other thing is that they're going to be really high maintenance. They're going to nitpick every little thing. Completely the opposite. So let's dispel that myth first because although the idea is very attractive to our listeners that having a big client that's going to spend 3 to 5 or even 10x of what you normally get, that would just cause their blood pressure to go up because of those fears. But let's dispel that myth first.

Daniel Priestley (3:28)

My experience with super high end clients is that they're completely reasonable. Small things mean a big deal to them. And actually their ability to get a return on investment is normally so high that even just doing a small thing well will actually get them return on investment even though they've spent so much money. So that probably is a key difference that when you're working with a small client where for them 20 grand is a big deal, you're going to have a situation where they're going to micromanage you, they're going to be really freaking out. And also the underlying business that they have is probably so small that even if you do an incredible job, even if you double their business, it may not even be profitable. Whereas when I work with a business that's super successful, I mean, it's kind of as an analogy, if you could make Lewis Hamilton Drive 1 second faster around a racetrack, that's worth millions of dollars to him. But if you could teach me to drive 1 second fast around my neighborhood, that's not worth anything. So making good go to great is worth a fortune. Broken needs fixing is not necessarily worth a lot of money. So in many cases, hiring clients are not more demanding.

Chris Do (4:38)

Well, you pointed out something that I think is worth highlighting where the service that you provide, depending on who's the buyer and the impact it has on their life and their business, can mean a world of difference in terms of what they're willing to pay. Maybe somebody helps you drive one second faster, gets your ticket.

Daniel Priestley (4:54)

Yeah.

Chris Do (4:54)

Because that's not really your main thing. But for people who are in a highly competitive field, that's the difference between first and second place. And there's all kinds of differences in terms of the reward.

Daniel Priestley (5:05)

Absolutely. I'll give you a real life example of this. So I work with a lot of startups and in many cases we do this thing called the entrepreneur sweet spot and we look at like, where are you starting the business from? And we look at a few different things. We talk about their origin story, their passion, all of that sort of stuff. We talk about the problem that they solve in the world, we talk about the market and how they communicate the value of what they do to the market. And we kind of like just start with these three things and we just explore. And in most cases, at the end of a two hour workshop, a lot of them would describe it as, oh, that was enlightening, that was interesting, that was pretty cool. But they probably wouldn't spend huge amounts of money on that workshop. So I found myself in Tampa, Florida the other day and I was talking to a client of mine who does about 200 million a year in sales and he brought me into the team and he had like 20 of his team members in the boardroom and he said, oh, this is Daniel and he works with startups and he's going to give us a little quick talk about what we need to do. He's going to give us a bit of impromptu talk and I'm like, oh, I don't know why, but I thought to myself, oh, I'm going to do that little talk that I do about starting up and like what it feels like to be a startup. And we'll actually go back to these three basics. So we end up workshopping these three basics for this company with an executive team who are on big money and like 20 people in the room. And this is a company that's established hundreds of millions of revenue and here we are talking about their origin story and their passion and getting alignment to that and their vision for the future. We're talking about what problem they solve and why that's valuable. We're talking about how they communicate that to. And at the end they were like blown away and they're like, that was game Changer. We're going to roll that out, we're going to put that into some assets, we're going to do some trainings on that, going to put things up around the office to reconnect that. So it's funny, that same workshop that I would do for a startup, which maybe they'd pay a couple of hundred for, was probably, if I asked these guys to put a value on it, they probably would have said, I don't know, 50 or 100 grand and it was the same content.

Chris Do (7:03)

So their ability to execute and take an idea and basically find their own return on it is why it's so valuable to them. So if you're listening to this and let me try to make it super relatable for folks, if you design a logo for a mom and pop business that does a couple hundred grand a year, well, that logo might not even matter to them, to be honest, because people are not really shopping or purchasing their services or goods based on the logo. And this is where designers get all bent out of shape because they walk up to a local business like, well, your logo's not consistent and it's not the perfect way. It doesn't follow the Fibonacci grid system or something like that.

Daniel Priestley (7:38)

And they're like, huh, I'm a dry cleaner, right?

Chris Do (7:40)

Yeah, exactly. Or you see this line of customers I've had for the last 40 years.

Daniel Priestley (7:43)

Yeah.

Chris Do (7:44)

They've never once said the logo bothered them. But then you go into a Fortune 1000 company and the logo matters a lot to them.

Daniel Priestley (7:50)

Yeah.

Chris Do (7:51)

Because even changing it a little bit creates all kinds of havoc because of all the touch points and everything that they have to kind of almost educate the team on how to use the new, new logo roll out.

Daniel Priestley (8:02)

It's going to be on digital, it's going to be on print, right? Yeah.

Chris Do (8:05)

Okay. Now that we understand that having one of these really high end clients is desirable, it's good. It's not going to cause you more stress and you don't have to actually even have to fundamentally change your service.

Daniel Priestley (8:16)

Yeah.

Chris Do (8:16)

You might need to change your responsiveness to them.

Daniel Priestley (8:19)

Yeah.

Chris Do (8:20)

And show them a little bit more tlc. But other than that, they might be the best thing that's ever happened to you.

Daniel Priestley (8:24)

I want to add one little distinction here as well. From working with thousands of businesses, the businesses that really take off and really become profitable and really end up selling for millions and delivering huge amounts of financial rewards to the founder. They solve a problem for a client who likes to throw money at their problems. Not time at their problems. And that's a real distinction because I see people, I was talking to some young guys the other day, they're like, oh, we're going to work with students who are struggling to get this. I'm like, these are people who like to throw time at problems. They don't like to throw money at problems. They don't have enough money to throw at problems. And then I talked to an IT services company that works with the biggest brands in the world and they deliver an IT service that these brands need. And these brands don't want to throw any time at that problem. They just want to pay for the solution and just get it done. So there is a huge distinction here that a high end client fits that description. They really just want to throw some money at a problem and get the problem solved and get it done. They don't like throwing time at their problems. So that's one of the very clear reasons as to why they're a good client.

Chris Do (9:29)

That should be a warning signal for some people. And you may disagree with, with me on this, but while designers love to work with nonprofits, like real nonprofits, like there's no money at all, not like the fake nonprofit, which is a whole different classification, or unfunded startups, because all they got is time. They don't have money, they can't throw money at it, but they just love to go there and they find themselves having to pull tooth and nail to get some money from them. And then they like to micromanage everything.

Daniel Priestley (9:55)

Yeah, yeah, well, they've got no other tool. They're just throwing time at it. So. Yeah, so that's why you would want one. So some of the things that you want to do in the lead up to having a high end client is. And you, you know, see what you think on this. But looking at your background, looking at your history and actually I think of your last 10 years as almost like a gold mine that contains all these gold nuggets. And those gold nuggets are stories. It's pedigree, it's experience, it's intellectual property. It's the networks that you've got, it's the brands that you've worked with. And what I find with a lot of people, creatives especially, is they go from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing, and they don't stop and kind of catalog. They don't compile the numbers. They don't say, I've worked on 47 projects with a combined value of X. They don't say, oh, I've worked with brands such as Bentley and Toyota and Ferrari. They just kind of go to the next thing and they don't kind of like bring forward any of this pedigree or this story that they've got from the background. So I think one of the things that is really important in the lead up to approaching high end clients is that you've got to have those stories, you've got to have your numbers, you've got to have your intellectual property, you got to kind of do some digging and compile this stuff. Because I think pedigree and experience is something that these people look for. They're looking for a shortcut. They don't want to do a whole lot of due diligence. It's kind of like, well, if you've worked with great clients, that helps me with due diligence. If you've been featured on these blogs, that helps me with due diligence. If you've won these certain awards, then I don't have to do much thinking about that. So that's great. So awards are excellent for that, big brands are excellent for that catalog of numbers and stories, excellent for that. So those are the kind of things that I want people to do before we even go looking.

Chris Do (11:44)

When you say due diligence, I know what that means. Can you explain it in layman's terms for people like, what do you mean due diligence?

Daniel Priestley (11:51)

So if we think of a high end client as someone who wants to protect their time and they don't want mistakes, they don't want things going wrong. So they're trying to as quickly as possible figure out is this coach, consultant, agency legit? Are they going to do a great job or am I going to have to throw time at this? Is this going to be a drain where I'm going to have to fix it and then get someone else to do it, that's their biggest fear. They want the leverage of bringing in the right person first. So they're looking for clues. What are the clues? That you've done a great job. There's a magic sentence that I love to give people when we go looking at their history. And the magic sentence is, I did something special for a certain type of client and we got a remarkable result. Let me tell you about it. And that magic sentence, what we do is when I work with a client, we'll go through all the years and we'll actually have a little timeline and we'll have the magic sentence, I did something special with a certain type of client. We Got a remarkable result. And we'll say, what's your best story from 2019? What's your best story from 2020? What's your best story from 2021? And we'll actually pull down all of those stories that fit the description of I did something special for a certain type of person. We got a remarkable result, and we just catalog those stories, and that's one of the first things we do.

Chris Do (13:06)

So they have to go into the history and kind of mine those for the gold that you're talking about. So that when they meet someone or someone hits their website and they're checking, basically they're just checking you out. They're checking your resume, they're checking your references to make sure you're not going to waste their time and their money and that you're a credible person, that you are who you say you are. Right?

Daniel Priestley (13:26)

Yeah.

Chris Do (13:26)

Okay. So if we don't tell those stories, we're making it much more difficult for the prospect, the client.

Daniel Priestley (13:31)

Yeah, we're expecting people to be a mind reader, and they're not mind readers. They don't have the time. They're not going to. They want it fast. It's like, if you've worked with Ferrari, tell me you worked with Ferrari. If you've worked on this particular thing, tell me you've worked on that. If you won this award, just tell me you've won this award. Makes my life easier. You're not bragging for your benefit. You're sharing those markers for their benefit to save them time. You're doing it an act of service by making it obvious and easy for people to see that you are the best to work with. I'm not expecting you to be a mind reader. Here's the five things that I've recently done in the same way. If I go to a doctor, if I go to a surgeon and they say, look, I can see that you're a little bit nervous. I want you to know I've done over a thousand of these procedures. It's not a complex procedure. We're going to be fine. They're not telling you that information to say, check me out, I'm an amazing doctor. They're telling you that to put your mind at ease so that you can then say, oh, okay, they've done that a thousand times. No biggie.

Chris Do (14:24)

So if we put ourselves in the buyer's mindset and say, I'm looking to spend a lot of money with somebody, if they make me work too hard to find it, exhaustion, fatigue, frustration might set in and you've already mentioned a couple different things. So if a big, your dream client, one of these high end clients wants to hire you, there's a couple of things that you can do already. Number one is you can mine those stories and be able to tell them. What was the other thing you said earlier?

Daniel Priestley (14:48)

Collect the data. So like, how many clients have you worked with? It's funny too, because a client often doesn't necessarily have a reference point for what's a lot or what's a little. But just being able to say I've worked with 47 clients across the last three years doing these types of projects. Oh, wow, okay. You've said that in a way that makes me feel like you've reflected and thought through. So okay, that must be interesting. That's good. You might say, collectively, my clients have had an uplift of $750 million due to the projects that we've done. So you might aggregate who are the clients that you've worked with? What is the uplift that has happened as a result? You might say I've coached clients who have combined revenues of $280 million a year or something like that. I work with small, fast growing startups with combined revenues of X, whatever it is. So it's like finding the aggregate kind of numbers. You might also say I've worked with highly funded startups. I've worked with fast growth companies that have won awards. I've worked with a family office that has over 3 billion worth of assets under management. So you kind of want to be able to list off. These are the types of companies that I've worked with. These are the headline numbers, the headline awards, the headline brands, the headline aggregates that make me go, okay, not your first rodeo.

Chris Do (16:13)

I think you're hitting head on the mindset that a creative person has in terms of a, they're addicted to new and next. So they're never looking back and so they can never catalog these things. When you see it seems so obvious. And I'm thinking, why have people been so slow to do this? Because they're just excited. And there's a phrase that is spread within creative circles which is, you're only as good as your last piece of work. So they're always chasing that next thing because now like, but that thing's starting to fade in my memory or that wasn't good enough and I can always do better. So they're addicted to that at Chase. So don't look back. And that's a big mistake. Number two is I think they think of talking about their projects and who, who they've worked with as some form of bragging, which you've already said. And the reframe on that is just make it easier for clients to figure out if you're a good fit or not. Don't make them work so hard because if you do, they're going to go somewhere else. So it's not bragging if it's true and if you're really trying to highlight certain things that will help them to determine what Seth Godin would say. People like us do things like this. So I guess the social proof that you're able to collect lets them know you're too big, you're too small, you, you're too expensive, you're too cheap, whatever it is. So they kind of understand.

Daniel Priestley (17:21)

Yeah. So let's bring it all together with an idea that in the lead up to meeting with a high end client, you want to position yourself as what we call a key person of influence. And that key person of influence positioning is that you either head up an agency or you head up a firm, or you are a senior consultant, gun for hire coach. But the personification or the, or the identity that you want to adopt is that I'm a key person of influence in this industry or this field. And there's a harsh piece of truth that I share with a lot of people around this idea that when you talk to people, they judge you and they're putting you in one of three buckets. They're saying, this is a newbie who needs more experience. This is a worker bee who has an hourly rate that is in line with everyone else's hourly rate. This is a key person of influence who is in demand, charges whatever they like and people line up to pay it. Now when someone says, oh, the client just offered me experience, you know, I could come and do this thing for experience, I'm going to say, that's your fault. The way you communicated, the way you showed up led them to believe that you're a newbie and that you needed the experience and that they would be doing you a favor by giving you the experience. Some experience that's on you. That's your problem. It could be Mark Knopfler showing up and saying, hey, I can. I love learning about guitar, you know, I just love learning, you know, new chords. And it's like, well, I don't know, you're Mark Knopflers, you know, so have some experience. Let's get you to play at my birthday, right? So people aren't mind readers. So if you position yourself as a newbie, you'll get treated like a newbie. How do you know that you're positioning yourself as a newbie? People are offering you experience. Worker be is that whenever clients just purely and simply want to know what's your day rate, what's your hourly rate, and they're judging. Is that at the high end or the low end, etc. Etc. You've communicated worker B status. Worker B is, I'm a trained professional, I'm good at what I do, I'm qualified, I have clients, I don't need experience, I get paid what people in my industry get paid. I'm in the middle to upper range of what people in my industry get paid. So you've communicated. Our agency is accredited with this and we do this and we've been established for this long and blah, blah, blah. You've just given all of the credentials that would say worker be. So key person of influence is different. Key person of influence typically is someone who says, we've won awards, we've got a niche, we've got something that we're super specialized in. We're considered to be the best at this particular, very narrow thing. I've written a book on it or I've written content, created content about it. I'm followed for this. I've got followers on social media. So these are the types of things that point towards you being the key person of influence for X, Y and Z. When it comes to blank, there's only a few names that keep coming up, mine included. Right. So that sort of thing. So that's what we're trying to embody.

Chris Do (20:21)

That sounds wonderful, but I know the people listening to this who are going to say, well, easy for Daniel to say, easy for Chris to apply, but what about me? Maybe I'm not even close to that. Does that mean I'm excluded from being considered this way?

Daniel Priestley (20:34)

A big part of it is how you pitch yourself. I once worked with a woman in a workshop and she said, I've been a financial planner for 23 years. I'm accredited by the financial planning body, I've helped place assets of hundreds of millions. But the way she shared this really just made me feel, she's a financial planner. That's great. So I asked her about five minutes worth of questions in front of the group and we rewrote the pitch. And she says after the five minutes, she says, for the last 23 years, I've been helping rural families that own farms to plan for the Next two generations. I help spouses who are marrying into the rural farming family to assimilate into farming life and into agricultural life and to understand the values of that farming business and to become one with the family. I help people who are the grandparents who have aged out of being hands on with the farming equipment and the farming thing to find their purpose as the elder members of the farming family. I run family team retreats where we get everyone together, all the family and extended family, and we align to values. And I also do the financial planning for these families as well. And she said, I speak at the rural women's conference. I write for, for the farming newsletters. Now, as soon as she starts pitching this, she was just in New South Wales, in Australia. She ends up picking up clients in New Zealand, Japan, California and Brazil because they're like, you're the best in the world at farming families, like families that own farms. So she just owned this positioning. She stopped trying to get everyone and be a generic financial planner. But it was funny because we asked the room in that moment, tell me, how much do you think her time is worth when she's a qualified financial planner versus how much do you think her time is worth when she's the best in the world at helping farming families to plan for two generations? And it was an order of magnitude. It was like something like $500 a day versus $5,000 a day was the perception in the room, the average perception in the room. So it had gone up at 10x the value of her time just by. And this was, by the way, this was not inventing stuff. This is actually what she'd been doing for 23 years. So she just wasn't talking about it. She was pitching as a worker bee versus pitching as a key person of influence.

Chris Do (22:51)

Okay. There's a couple of critical things you said there though, for the last 23 years. Okay. So you looked at your history and so that's got to say something. And then you helped her articulate her niche and to demonstrate use cases which if you're in that space, it's like either you're going to fit the first, the second or the third, or something like that. I help farming families plan for multi generational something. Right. And then I help elder people transition out of this and I also help spouses are marrying into this to adjust to the culture. So it's like now I get the clear picture that comes from picking a niche and knowing that someone has done something repeatedly. You automatically assume expertise that she could be the worst person doing this, but she articulated so clearly that you think by the specificity of her language that she must have done this many, many times.

Daniel Priestley (23:41)

She must be good at it.

Chris Do (23:42)

She must be, yeah.

Daniel Priestley (23:43)

She's got a passion for it. So she's got spark, she's got vitality. She breathes life force into this. So what we want to do is just look for the last five years, like even if you've got a case study where you really brought your aame, and even if it was small, just start there. What's the intellectual property? There's this idea of intellectual property. Intellectual property in a legal definition is copyright, patents, these kind of things. From a philosophical point of view, it's more your unique know how the know how that you've got that other people don't really have. It's your experience in the world, your contacts, your connections, your insights. And it's bringing that to the table and just packaging it up well and showing people. This is my body of insights and I've given it a name and I've given it a process and, and I'm bringing that to the world and I place a value on it. And I think others should too. And if you don't, that's fine. It's not for everyone. So it's just this different way of showing up in the world. I've seen people who don't have 23 years experience do this as well. I've seen 24 year olds who look like key people of influence in their industry. The other day I was with a young guy and he said my background prior to launching this podcast is working with the LA Lakers to help them to double their social media accounts. Now immediately. Now obviously that's a big brand and all of that, but if you know anything behind the scenes, LA LA Lakers don't have one person doing that. They've got dozens of people doing that. Right. So. But he's the way he puts a value on his experience with that brand and what they achieved. And he actually said while I was there, we went through this kind of growth, we did this sort of thing, we went through this process. That's all of the insights that I bring to the table when I work with my clients. So this is someone who's young, has a few years with LA Lakers, but is leveraging it.

Chris Do (25:27)

Yeah, this is the five or five podcast.

Daniel Priestley (25:29)

Yeah. Yes. Yeah, that's the five by five.

Chris Do (25:32)

I recognize the bio there. Let's get back to the lady who was the financial planner who came to this workshop after she said what she said, which you already knew, fell flat. What were you thinking by that moment? And I'm curious what you literally asked her to do so that you can then help her reshape her pitch.

Daniel Priestley (25:49)

The first thing was judging when she opened her mouth and explained. Like I said, tell me a bit about who you are and what you do. And immediately my brain says, do you sound like a newbie who needs experience, a worker bee who's on an hourly, daily, or monthly or annual salary rate? Or do you sound like a key person of influence, someone who should be on a stage, someone who should have a book deal, someone who should be on a podcast? Where do I position you? Because I know there's really only those three positions, so. So she sounded like a worker bee. So immediately I'm like, red flag this person. And just judging by her age, I knew she's got stories. Of course she's got stories. Everyone over 25 has got stories of some degree. So I asked her the magic question. Tell me about a time where you did something special for a certain type of person and you got a remarkable result. She immediately tells me about a farming family where the son had moved out to the city and got a job with one of the big farmers. Four accounting firms had met a city girl, and then she had married into the family, and two years later, they were looking at getting a divorce, and she was brought in. And in that experience, she did some conversations with the family to help them to understand city girl mindset, and she did some conversations with the woman who was in the family to understand farming mindset. She slowed the game down. She talked through the values. They did an alignment workshop. They actually did some understanding about how expectations. She calibrated expectations. So she explained what she went through this process. The whole room's, like, in awe. Everyone sitting there is like, what happened next? Right? So she's telling the story, and I'm like, immediately, I know she can be a key person of influence. So then I asked her the question, have you done this before? She's like, oh, well, I was that girl 23 years ago. I married into a farming family, and I had this experience, and I was in finance, and I married into a farming family, and I became a financial planner, and blah, blah, blah. So she tells me all these stories, and then I'm like, oh, okay, right. So this is easy for you to be a key person of influence in this, of course. So we just repositioned the story. I then applied a framework, and the framework was name, same, fame, aim in a Game. So what is your name and your business name? What are you? The same as that? I already understand what makes you famous or different. What is your aim? What do you aim for and what's your big game that you want to play? And we got all of that into a 30 second pitch and that immediately recontextualized her and repositioned her as a key person of influence. So name same fame, aiming a game.

Chris Do (28:19)

You did this when we were in London and you had everybody try to introduce themselves that way. That was a tricky thing to do, kind of on the fly. But I can see how if you sat down and worked through it, you.

Daniel Priestley (28:27)

Can do it even if it took half an hour and then you rehearsed it into your phone and like got comfortable with it, it would be a game changer for most people.

Chris Do (28:36)

Now when you said something you did special for some type of person, a specific type of person, with a remarkable result. I don't think of financial planners as somebody to come in for relationship therapy or anything therapeutic like that. So why would she even brought in and what kind of area of expertise? Because you don't think like you think numbers, how to grow an investment portfolio, how to reserve capital.

Daniel Priestley (29:00)

That's what I call the functional layer. The functional layer is the stuff everyone has to do anyway. Of course, if you've got a design agency, you gotta be able to do design. You gotta be able to understand brands and understand like. Like there's just the functional layer, the bread and butter, the vital layer, the life force layer, the icing on the cake. That is where you, you're doing something special, something unique that goes above and beyond. The functional layer that changes the course of the future. Right? It changes the direction, it puts us on a different timeline. The thing about a key person of influence is that they're committed to changing someone's future state that if they don't show up, something's not going to happen. They know that their job in the world is bending reality. They bend reality towards a different outcome. That wouldn't have happened had they not been in the room. So when we discover that we're a key person of influence, it's actually a discovery of our ability to bend reality. And to say, hey, when I'm in the room, this project goes really well and if I wasn't here, it would not go that well. I know that anyone else can get you a 30% uplift, I can get you a 300% uplift because I bend reality that way for this particular thing. And I can't bend reality for everything, but I can bend reality for that. So she knows that she can bend reality for farming families, that they're on a timeline that leads to a divorce or a breakup or the parents farm being sold off because the kids don't want it and they're not aligned to it. She comes in and she bends reality back towards where her clients want it. So that's kind of like it's taking ownership of that, of power.

Chris Do (30:35)

I see. So the functional layers kind of what's expected. If you can't meet that minimum level for requirements, then you're not going to be. You shouldn't even be in business. But what makes you unique and special is how you're able to go above and beyond that and do something remarkable. Okay, that's pretty cool. Now I have to ask you this question because I feel like our audience is going to feel this. Is everyone a key person of influence? It can't be true, can it?

Daniel Priestley (31:02)

There's a process of discovery and there's early stages in the journey and then there are late stages in the journey. And when you compare yourself to someone who's in the late stages of being a key person of influence, it's not going to feel like it's on the same scale, but there's going to be a feeling, there's going to be a tingling sense of energy around you. What will happen is that you'll stumble across a new perspective around your history and your story. You'll realize that you've got valuable intellectual property. Steve Jobs talks about, you connect the dots by looking back. So you will do some of this work. You'll connect the dots by looking back and you go, oh, I'm really good at this. I've got a talent when it comes to this. I've got some experience at this. I've got these unique ways of doing this. And the initial phases, what will happen is you'll feel renewed sense of awareness. You'll feel awake to the experience. You might sit up late till 2, 3 o'clock in the morning, making notes, journaling. You might be less distracted by the things you're normally distracted by. And suddenly you get this almost rush of energy where you start to identify as a key person of influence for something. You've had some sort of identity shift. And the results for that will probably take years to turn up in a big way where other people start to notice. But what will happen almost immediately is one to one interactions with clients will be noticed differently. So you'll probably sign your first High end client, and that might be 50 grand, which means you're not living in a different house, you're not living in a, in a different reality, but you've just signed a 50 grand client when you used to sign five grand clients. So something shifts. Right. So this is like this identity shift that happens. Obviously, there's early stages and late stages.

Chris Do (32:37)

Okay, so the way you answer that question, I think I know what you're saying, but let's be clear. So are you saying even if you're early in the game, there's still stuff you can mine from your past to make you different and remarkable? Is that what you're saying?

Daniel Priestley (32:50)

Yep. And if you're really, really, really early in the game, you can leverage your mentor, you can leverage your vision for the future, you can leverage an intense knowing about your current mission. But for the vast majority of people, let's say over 25, we want to leverage a story or an experience that we've had in the last five to 10 years.

Chris Do (33:10)

Okay, that's very good. So it's your belief that almost everybody, maybe not everybody, but almost everybody, if they did the work and they reflected, they can be some kind of key person of influence. And what you're talking about is a, a game of positioning where you're able to find something that makes you radically different and then you can just own that lane.

Daniel Priestley (33:28)

Yep. You can own that lane.

Chris Do (33:29)

Yep.

Daniel Priestley (33:30)

And in this world that we're currently in, if you own. I work with people who own families that want to transition for two generations, there are literally thousands and thousands of people who'd be interested in that. And you can find them because of the Internet. So you don't have to be a generalist like we used to have to be 30 years ago.

Chris Do (33:48)

This is wonderful because what you're talking about reminds me a lot about how when I was able to connect the dots, I found my own super secret superpower. And so I'm going to coin a term here. There's a need for us to reflect on the things that we did. Not just always looking forward, because we like to like, oh, we're present and looking forward. Never in the past, but sometimes that's very helpful for us. And we'll call this the aaa, because when you look back at your history, you can gain an awareness that you didn't have before, and that's very important. And then you start to align the things that excite you, that fill you with passion and joy, so that then you can be really alive. So Those are the AAA's AAA battery.

Daniel Priestley (34:28)

You plugged in, then you had to.

Chris Do (34:31)

One outfit there. Okay, very good. Okay. So this means that everybody here has some hope that if you put in this work, you make this commitment. And I'm just going to say this because it needs to be said to our audience. A lot of times you're going to listen to guests that we bring on. You can get really excited about something, and then the next new exciting thing is going to come along, and a month, two months, six months later, you're going to totally forget about this thing until you hear from another person again. I want all of you to be super successful at doing what it is that you're doing, because it's part of our bigger mission to help you make a living doing what you love. But here's the thing. I don't think you need more information. You need more action. You have to go and apply this stuff. Otherwise it's not magic. It's not going to work by itself. So sit down, re listen to this part where Daniel breaks it down. Ask yourself the magic question. Look into your past and start to figure this thing out. And then make that commitment today. You don't even need to listen to the rest of this. Make this commitment today. Because the next time you present yourself could be the time that everything changes.

Daniel Priestley (35:31)

But even still, there's going to be even more in this podcast.

Chris Do (35:34)

There must be. It's like an infomercial. Wait, there's.

Daniel Priestley (35:37)

There's more. Once you've positioned yourself as a key person of influence, here's what we want to do. And this is a little bit tactical.

Chris Do (35:43)

Okay, I'm ready. I got my pen.

Daniel Priestley (35:45)

So super high end clients, even though they want you to be available to them once they're a client, they don't want you to be available before they're a client. People want what they can't have. So I'm going to share with you something that's tactical, that actually leads to high end clients, and it's going to be counterintuitive. And the counterintuitive thing is you need to officially basically say, I can't start with any new clients anytime soon. I've got a waiting list, and if you're interested, I'd love to get you to fill in an expression of interest or join the waiting list. So the official position as to how someone works with you is not that they can just join, that they can sign up, they can register, they can join the waiting list if they'd like to be part of the client. Now, the reason that you have a waiting list is because you're highly protective of your capacity. So you're protecting your ability to serve other clients. You're protecting your ability to do great work. So because you're so protective of your ability to do great work, you can't just be available to anyone and everyone when they want to start. There has to be a starting point that is a managed starting point. So I was talking to a guy who runs a video production company and he says, oh, it's four or five months until next year. I really want to get some high end clients. How do I do it? I said, well, officially you're closed for this year. There's no more clients for this year. What you want to do is reach out to people. And I said, here's how I would reach out to people. I said, you've already got LinkedIn, you've already got like emails, you've already got plenty of people who are in your circles. Reach out to people and say, this year we did something special with a certain type of client. We got a remarkable result. So share the story. The magic sentence story. I said, just letting you know that we now don't have any capacity for new clients till the end of the year. But if you're interested in doing something similar in the year ahead, let me know by just either responding to this message and I'll give you the link to join our waiting list or our expression of interest form. And I said, your job is between now and the end of the year is to get 40 names on that list so that there are 40 people who have filled in the expression of interest form. And the only thing you're allowed to do up until having 40 names on the on the wait list is get more names on the waitlist. You're not allowed to take on clients until you've got 40 names on the waitlist. That's it. So until you've got 40 names on the waitlist, you are closed. Can't take on clients. I don't know how you feel about this strategy, but he was like, oh, that's a bit different. Haven't thought about doing it that way. So this was basically you can only join the waitlist.

Chris Do (38:24)

Why 40 though?

Daniel Priestley (38:26)

Well, for his business he was hoping to get between four and six high end clients. So I said, let's go for 10 times that number as a list to work with. I used this thing called the Cinderella principle. Cinderella principle is that the prince wants to find his future wife and he only wants one. So what he does is he throws a big ball for like hundreds of fair maidens, and then he identifies who Cinderella is, but he loses her. So then he has a rigid criteria called a glass slipper, where he goes around and refines her by applying this rigid criteria and saying, this is the glass slipper that I can now identify Cinderella. And the way it works is that for the vast majority of the fair maidens in the land, they got a nice free big dinner party and dance. But for Cinderella, he was able to identify Cinderella out of the group, and then he had a rigid criteria so he could refind her again. So what I'm talking about here is that we get a group of people who have joined the waiting list or the expression of interest list. They've in some way signaled that they're interested. They're all the people who are showing up to the ball. And then we have a rigid criteria about who we're going to take on. And this is where we tell people, we say, in order to take you on as a client, I've got some key criteria that I would want to check in with you on. I don't take on all the clients. I can't help everyone with everything. But for the types of clients that I can add the most value to, I've figured out five questions that we can ask, and then that tells me whether I can add massive value to you or not. So now we've got the glass slipper. And do you fit the glass slipper or not? It's a complete reversal of the typical way people go about winning clients.

Chris Do (40:08)

Okay, if somebody is debt broke and they want to move on this plan, it's going to be very difficult to say, I don't have a whole lot of money or a whole lot of Runway. How do they apply something like this?

Daniel Priestley (40:19)

Most of the clients that I would talk to are not dead broke. Here's who I'm thinking about. When I'm thinking about who's watching this, I'm thinking about someone who they've got a great little six figure business. It pays them a reasonable wage. Life's not bad. Things are pretty good. They want to go to the next level. They want to leap up and go next level. So they've got some clients paying bills, they got, you know, some retainers. They got some projects that are decent sized projects. They're going along nicely, but they're not like paying their mortgage down in one hit. They're not having any of those kind of big moments. So I'm talking about how do we orchestrate a big breakthrough moment. Someone's dead broke. I'm a big fan of go get a mentor, work under the wing of someone, do two years working under somebody's wing, go join a team, find someone who's so damn busy because they're so damn good and become one of their regular suppliers at any price point. That just moves you forward so that you're picking up the experience, you're feeding on, the energy you're getting, the key stories you're getting, you know, all of that kind of brand association and you've found one or two and you just become like an apprentice to that master. So, you know, if someone's dead broke, then my recommendation would be become a master's apprentice in some way, whether it be through affiliation or contracting or any of that sort of stuff. But if you're good and you want to go great, then this is a great strategy. However, let's say this, let's say you do need clients, you kind of want clients. Now here's how I might do it. Let's say I get someone to join the waiting list and there's like 10, 15, 20 on the waiting list. I might say to them, get in touch and say, hey Chris, I noticed that you joined the waiting list. I can't take you on till next year, but here's what I'd love to do. Let's do a little test project together and see what the chemistry is like so that we get a feel for what it's like to work together. I can slot that in between now and Christmas. Let's do a small project together and then next year we can ramp it up when I've got capacity. But I'd love to do just a little test project with you so we can test some chemistry. Do you want to have a discussion around that? Or I might just simply make the appointment. So thanks for joining the waiting list can't take you until next year, but let's have a one to one, let's have a half hour to an hour meeting, find out what's going on with you, find out what you're looking to achieve and let's have a conversation. In that conversation, I might say, if I could wave a magic wand. When would you want to start? Now. In most cases. A lot of high end clients, they think three to six months out anyway. So the truth is their dream start date might be three to six months. And you say, great, let's start then. But I need you to pay up front now. You need to put down some money now. To secure that spot so you can go that way. Or they might say, look, magic wand, I would love to start yesterday, like as soon as you can possibly go. So, okay, so if we could make that work, you'd want to get started straight away. Say, let me look into it. Out of curiosity, would you be willing to do some work with me outside of normal business hours? Like if I brought you in and we did some stuff 5:30 till 6:30, or if I could do some stuff with you on a Saturday to get this thing started, would that work for you? Yeah, we could do something like that.

Chris Do (43:18)

Right.

Daniel Priestley (43:19)

So you can say, if I can juggle that around, let me see what I can do. And then you get back to them and say, I got some good news and bad news. I can't start yesterday, but we can start in two weeks.

Chris Do (43:29)

Okay, I like that you seem a.

Daniel Priestley (43:31)

Little conflicted about this.

Chris Do (43:32)

I'm not conflicted at all. I'm actually thinking about a different question I want to ask you.

Daniel Priestley (43:37)

So you dig this?

Chris Do (43:39)

I dig this.

Daniel Priestley (43:40)

Yeah.

Chris Do (43:40)

Absolutely.

Daniel Priestley (43:41)

Yeah. Fantastic.

Chris Do (43:41)

I'm trying to think like all the angles that they're going to come at me with, which is like, no, literally, somebody mentioned in a video on our YouTube video together. It's a great advice. Daniel Priestly, easy for Christo, but what about John Doe? And then I'm thinking about this person, right?

Daniel Priestley (43:55)

Easy for Christo. What about John Doe?

Chris Do (43:57)

Yeah, and I wrote back, like, what is it specifically that you can't apply or give me some more feedback so that I can answer.

Daniel Priestley (44:04)

Well, the first thing I would do is I would. The first thing I would say to John Doe is, you've just given me an incredible pitch. We get what we pitch for and we're always pitching great sense. You get what you pitch for. You're always pitching. Easy for you. But what about someone who's just a loser? Nobody like me? Now that's a pitch I just pitched you. I'm not special. What about someone who's just not special and doesn't have any coolness about them? That's your pitch. You just pitched it. What about, you know, this, the other guy? Well, easy for you, but most millionaires are born into money and inherit it, which actually isn't true. Like 10 to 15% at most in any country is born inherited wealth. But it's like, dude, that's a pitch. You just pitched that the only way to become financially successful is through inheritance. That's your pitch. You're going to live into that. You're going to pitch that into existence. So great sentence. You get what you pitch for. You're always pitching. If you're going to put a shitty comment into the, into the comments below, you're basically saying, that's my pitch to the world. My pitch to the world is it won't work for me. Okay, you pitched that great. Come back to me when you want to change that pitch.

Chris Do (45:12)

Okay, well, I have to bring this up. You're a remarkable person. You've done lots of things and still relatively young. And I have had the good fortune, the foresight to get into what I got into and win awards and do work at the very highest levels and highly competitive market. And then I realized there are not that many people that fit those descriptions. And there are more people out there who didn't find their path into whatever it is they're doing today, didn't go to school for it, kind of figured out on their own. So they have massive amounts of imposter syndrome. They weren't raised by entrepreneurial or forward minded parents. In fact, they're raised by parents who kept telling them, you can't do this. Who do you think you are? You're nothing special. And so they're working against a lot of limiting beliefs here. And so I've recently came to this conclusion that sometimes the things that I say are really hard for people to process because they keep thinking and there's some truth in it. Yeah, you went to a great design school, you graduated the top of your class, then you got opportunities kind of just, just dropped on your lap so you didn't have to grind it the way we did.

Daniel Priestley (46:16)

Well, what's interesting is you and I are complete opposites. You're talented and you're technically talented and you went to grade schools. I went to a terrible school. I went to a few months of university and then dropped out. I got no qualifications other than a driving license. I did marginally interesting small things. I built a $10 million business without winning any awards, without having any famous brand names associated, without doing a single piece of work for a big name company that was a household name, none of that stuff. But one thing I did learn, and the way I learned it is I had to learn it, which was because I don't have all of that stuff. I have to make the most of what I've got. I gotta dust off these old pair of shoes and shine them up a little. Right. So.

Chris Do (47:06)

But what did you bring to the table? Let's call it Brooks. Daniel. What did you have that you had to like, dust off and shine up.

Daniel Priestley (47:12)

Well, first I got a job in a startup. And that startup, I was employee number three. We had no name or no bank account. And I worked for this guy called John and for two years we built his startup and it went from three people to 60 people. So when I left John, I leveraged. I've just come off the back of a startup. We went from zero to several million of revenue and we went from zero people to 60 people. So I've just worked on a startup that was successful, but now the way I tell it, and I'm trying to not tell it in a cool, sexy way, but I would tell that in a cool, sexy way and I would tell it like it's the most amazing thing in the world. The truth is there are hundreds of startups every single year that go from zero to several million and that there is an early stage team that get hired and that I was working with what I had. So I was talking about the fact that, you know, there's that. Do you know there was times where I would talk about the fact that I worked at McDonald's and I'd say, look, as a teenager I worked at McDonald's and at like 15 years old, running thousands of dollars an hour worth of product through those bins and producing hamburgers and the team out the front selling hamburgers. And there was a whole system and a process at the time. I couldn't clean my room, but I could run a multimillion dollar restaurant. And it was because of the power of the systems and the processes that I was learning at McDonald's. So I can talk about my McDonald's background. I can tell you stuff about when I was delivering pizzas. That is fun stories, interesting stories, and what I learned from being a Pizza Hut delivery driver. So I'm a big believer that you can look into your background, you can find some stories. You know, take the example that we shared before. Her story was not, I worked at JP Morgan and floated a company for billions and worked with the world's richest people. Her story was, I worked with a little family that had a farm and the son went and got married and then she didn't want to be part of the family. And then there was going to be a divorce and I came in and stepped in and got the family aligned and I helped them not go through a divorce and I helped get that family farm back on track and find the balance that worked for everyone. That's not like some crazy Mark Zuckerberg story. That's just I helped A family go through their, you know, one of their little life's troubles. So we don't need to win an Emmy. Obviously, it helps if you do, but we don't have to win an Emmy to be. To be a key person of influence.

C (49:42)

It's time for a quick break, but we'll be right back.

Chris Do (49:55)

When I started my motion design company blind in 95, there was a lot I didn't know. So I tried reaching out to other business owners and professionals for help. What did I find? Many saw me as competition, and those who didn't weren't able to give advice that made sense for my line of work. Thankfully, I was able to find my first and only business coach, Kieran McLaren, who mentored me for 13 years. I also learned that my story isn't unique. Many entrepreneurs feel like they're left to figure everything out on their own. It's why I created the Future Pro membership, the community I wish I had when I first started. And I'd like to invite you to check out all that we have waiting for you inside@thefuture.com pro.

C (50:36)

And Rebecc, welcome back to our conversation.

Chris Do (50:40)

So you're laying out tools and a way of thinking from very humble background, yourself, and you're saying to people, if you don't want to use the tools, you love this life that's not going anywhere for you, then that's the life you're going to keep getting. And you all have a choice. And that's the thing. I think that's very frightening for people to say. Like, you mean all this time I could have just thought differently and I would have acted differently and I'd have a different result or outcome right now. And what would you say to that question?

Daniel Priestley (51:07)

I'd say that's a great story. I'd say, you should use that story. You know, for 20 years, I just didn't see the value in what I was doing, and then I suddenly started to see the value in it. Cool, right? Have you ever seen the book called Stone Soup? I read this book to my kids every week.

Chris Do (51:21)

Stone Soup.

Daniel Priestley (51:21)

Stone Soup, okay. And these travelers, they rock up in a village, and the village says, oh, we got nothing. And they say, oh, it's fine. You don't need anything. We're here to make some soup for you. I go, really? Yeah, we're going to bring the soup. And he says, all we need is a pot, and then we can make the stone soup. And they go, well, we've got a pot. So he gets these stones and he Puts the stones in and he starts boiling the water. It tastes it, it's delicious. Needs a little bit of salt, but other than, oh, I've got salt. Need some onions. Right, okay, onions. And by the time every villager puts some ingredients in, it's beautiful soup. But it starts with just stones, right? The stones in the pot. It's a great story because great entrepreneurs do it like that. They start with nothing but an idea or a vision and they enroll people. And it can be very humble. It can be a very simple starting point. So look, all I'm saying is that if you're sitting there going, oh, well, you know, if that would have worked up until this point, I would have done it. It's like, well, okay, let's just assume that's now the background of the story. But we're going to change the story. We're going to re pitch it. We get what we pitch for. We're always pitching. We don't need self belief. We need others to believe in us. We get self belief after the fact. So I'm a big believer that it really doesn't matter what you believe about yourself. It matters more what your clients believe about you. You can be plagued with insecurities and some of the best people are, but if the client believes this person can help me, then that's, you know, that's great. So focus on client belief. Focus on enrolling others into believing that you've got their business or their, their timeline will bend.

Chris Do (52:47)

I agree with you. It doesn't matter so much what you believe. It matters more what they believe. But I also find that if you don't believe, how can they believe? I have this idea that your mouth and the words that you use, they betray you because they reveal the real you. So when some person comes up to you and gives you their first pitch, it's kind of revealing their own self belief until you help them to reframe it.

Daniel Priestley (53:11)

I feel like that puts a lot of pressure on people that they have to then check in with themselves to see if they believe it. Now let's say we were riding motorcycles. I wake up in the morning and say, do I feel confident riding a motorcycle? Nope. Okay, don't get on the motorbike. But it's normal not to feel confident until after I've ridden it 100 times. So what I have to do is say, do I feel confident about riding a motorbike? No. That's part of the process. Go through the actions. Go through the process. Start the engine, put the helmet on, put the crash gear on. Go through the process that you've been trained. Do what the instructors told you to do and park to the side. The fact that you don't feel confident, borrow the confidence of someone who's already ahead of you. Borrow that confidence. Do what they say, go through the process and then evaluate after you've been through a few repetitions. We are going to feel confident about riding a motorcycle 100 trips in, but we're not going to feel it at the beginning. And same. We're not going to feel like a key person of influence the first time we pitch ourselves a certain way. If we're waiting for that feeling, it's never going to start. We're gonna get it. Never.

Chris Do (54:20)

So you're talking about inertia a little bit here. So if you stay static, you're going to be static. And if you move a little bit, then you start to activate the big mo. Momentum.

Daniel Priestley (54:30)

Yeah.

Chris Do (54:31)

So I think about this in working out. I don't love to work out. I actually am like, oh, God, I haven't worked out. I feel guilty and I'm gonna go do something. So the first thing I do is just change into my clothes. I'm like, I'm not even committed to anything.

Daniel Priestley (54:43)

I'm just gonna put the shoes on.

Chris Do (54:44)

Yeah. And then I'm gonna go to the gym and I'm just going to stand there. Maybe I'll just turn on the tv. And then eventually you're working out. I'm like, well, I'm here. I might as well do something. At the end of it, it's like, hey, I feel pretty good about myself today.

Daniel Priestley (54:54)

Yeah.

Chris Do (54:55)

And who knows what will happen tomorrow? But today wasn't.

Daniel Priestley (54:57)

That's often the case. And you actually, by the end of the workout, you feel, actually, I love working out. So the feeling of I love working out actually comes at the. Towards the end, not at the beginning. I just think that. Go through the process of telling someone that you have a waiting list or an expression of interest list for the year ahead, and just say to them, here's the link. Join my waiting list. I'd love to touch bases with you. Start by just filling in some basic information. I can't take you on as a client in the next three months, but let's start the process. Try that. See what reaction you get. Right. It's going to feel clunky and weird at first. You're going to feel like a total imposter, total fake. But just say, look, I protect my ability to do great work, which is Why? I slowly onboard clients and I double check that they're going to be a great client first. There's a slow process. Here's what we want to do, okay?

Chris Do (55:45)

Now, with your permission, feel free to slap me down on this. I'll make it even easier for you guys. At the end of the year, we don't get a lot of work done anyways. You can even wait until like late October and then announce that you're not going to work until basically January. Can't take on any new clients and you're risking nothing because you weren't planning to work anyways. And I think there's a lot of us are very hopeful. Like December 25, some new clients are going to come in the door and say, we need you now. You're the only person who can do this. Save me, Obi Wan. And that doesn't really happen. So you can say this, or if you're planning a vacation or you're going to take a sabbatical, what a great, true and honest way to say, like, I'm not available to take on any new clients for the next three or whatever months. When I return, I will consider you, but get your, express your interest and we'll see where we go. Totally less risky. Although entrepreneurship is full of risk, we want you to do it the way Daniel says. For the next four months, I'm out. But there are simpler, safer ways to do this. Is that okay?

Daniel Priestley (56:38)

That's brilliant. That's fine. And the other thing too is that the high end client loves that. They love filling in, that they feel that the pressure's off. And also I've had situations where I put people on a waiting list and then I've said a week later, if I can get you in sooner, would you want to start sooner?

Chris Do (56:57)

Yeah.

Daniel Priestley (56:57)

Okay, let me call you back. And then I call back and say we can start in two weeks. And they go, oh, amazing. So no one's upset about this, right? Or sometimes I've said to people, look, the way I work is that I get a lot of people who want to work with me who aren't right. So I put this waiting list or expression of interest list in front to filter most of those out. But you're the type of client I'd love to work with. So if you want to start sooner, we can start sooner. That filtering mechanism was just to kind of like filter the majority of people who want to waste my time or that I just wouldn't want to work with them. But if you want to start sooner, we can start soon. I'll find time for you. Oh, great. So it's not like some big thing that you're like, oh, you know, but if I say that I have a waiting list, then I can't start for four months. It's like, change your mind. It's your business. You make the rules.

Chris Do (57:45)

There's an added benefit to this. Even if you don't fully embrace this, the entire thing, which we encourage you to do, which is creative people have a hard time saying no. But if you were to put on the Internet that, I'm not taking any new clients. When someone who's a poor fit for you calls up randomly, not because you're soliciting them, they haven't signed up any. Onto any wait list, you can just say, you know what, I'm actually not doing this. And I've actually communicated to the world that I'm shutting down for four months because I can't take on any work. That's a great way to just filter out bad clients and you don't have to feel like a bad human being for doing that.

Daniel Priestley (58:16)

Yeah, you can say, I'm so sorry. I've got a bit of a waiting list at the moment. Let me recommend someone else to you because you've now got officially a waiting list.

Chris Do (58:23)

Right. Or you can convert that not a good client into potentially a very good client. They're like, wait, I'm intrigued. What are you talking about? I was just kidding about our budget and our timeline. What does it take to get on your wait list? Right.

Daniel Priestley (58:34)

Yep, exactly. How do I get it right? Yeah. So this is the other thing. One of the things that happens with most of this type of work is you have to set appointments. Appointment setting is a big part of business. In fact, one of the best things at some point we want to talk about is how do you set appointments? Because I see a lot of people with lead generation, they can present once they're in front of someone, but setting appointments is a big deal. So one of the reasons people don't want to set an appointment with you is because they feel, oh, I'm going to be sold to, and they're going to put pressure on me to get started. One of the beautiful things about having an official wait list is that the appointment process feels more like of a screening process or like it doesn't feel like I'm going to twist your arm to buy today. It feels like you're going to have to jump through hoops and prove that you're going to be a Good customer if I want to be front of the line at the waiting list. Now let me talk about best case scenario. Best case scenario, between now and, say, Christmas, you get 50, 60 people. You reach out on LinkedIn, you reach out on Instagram, you say, I did something special with a certain type of client. You tell a little story, one paragraph. Let me try this on. So imagine I message you and I say, hey, Chris, I think you know me through Ali Abdaal. Or I think you know me through so and so. Recently we worked with the design agency and we set up an online assessment for them and we got 513 people to fill in that online assessment. And then they generated 37 really great clients off the back of that. I'd love to unpack that for you and show you how we did that. I'm not taking on any new clients until 2025. If you're interested in learning a bit more about that, let me know and I'll send you through a link that can help with that. Oh, okay, cool. Now mind you, 99 out of a hundred may not even respond. But if I reach out to some people and say, this is the story, this is what we've done. Yeah, I'd like the link. Tell me more about that. Now I'm just sending the process and I'm also saying I'm not taking on clients until this, but I'm letting people know about how we did this thing. If you want to know more, let me know and I'll send you through expression of interest form, something like that. So now we're just creating a little bit of this tension. Now if I can get 60, 70 people on this expression of interest or this waiting list form and then I say, Chris, I've got like 70 people on the waiting list. I'm just going to do a few little touch bases, few little intros. Would it be okay to have a 15 minute chat with you, find out what you're up to, what you're doing, just to touch bases and find out what's going on with you? Yep. Great. So now we're having a 15 minute chat, but it's within the context of this person has a waiting list and they've done amazing things. So you see that we're kind of creating a bit more, more of a balanced energy as opposed to I'm a supplier and I desperately need a client. And we're trying to just turn that around a little bit and saying, actually I'm highly valued for what I do and I select clients who would get great value with what I do. Maybe that's you, but it's maybe not. That's fine either way. So it's just a little bit more like balanced energy.

Chris Do (61:32)

Yeah, I like that. Because a lot of people who need work act in a very needy way and it's going to send that signal that you're a worker or you're a newbie.

Daniel Priestley (61:42)

Yeah, it really is like neediness just immediately turns people off and people can smell it a mile away. Nothing kills neediness faster than having a list. A list kills neediness. Let's say I wanted to raise investment for a company that I'm starting. If I approach one high net worth person, one investor, and all my hopes are pinned on that one person. Let's say I want to raise a hundred thousand dollars, I go to them, I say I'm going to start a business and I need $100,000 and maybe you could put a hundred thousand in and then I'll get started. I've got all the neediness energy. Imagine I spend more time and I build a list and I say I built a list of 80 people, I've gone through LinkedIn, blah blah blah, blah. So then I go out to them and I say I'm raising a hundred thousand dollars. I've got a list of about 80 high net worth investors who I'm going to reach out to. I'm probably going to split this between 10 and 20 people who I'll let invest. Would you be interested in seeing the presentation? So now it's like you're on a list. You may not get through. I've got options. So just having a list, just purely and simply having a list, having a waiting list for 20, 25 automatically recalibrates your brain to like, oh, I'm in demand, I'm not needy anymore. Even if a bunch of the people on the list are not perfect.

Chris Do (62:59)

Right. Because they don't know that. They just know. There are 79 other people.

Daniel Priestley (63:03)

Yeah, there's 79 other people. Some of them are right, some of them are definitely not right. But I've got a little bit of a list. And this is the other thing too. Don't be too picky when you're building a waiting list. Don't be like too fussy about who you're going to approach. Just build the list. It's good thing to have people who miss out. It's really good word spreads.

Chris Do (63:19)

You mentioned tactics. How many other tactics are there? I think you started with the wait list. Are there other tactics or is that like you've.

Daniel Priestley (63:27)

The waitlist is a great, great one. An online assessment is a really, really good one. One of the favorite marketing conversations, if you're a marketing geek, you know about how they sold toothpaste like the 1920s or something like that. Something like 85% of Americans didn't brush their teeth daily. And then they created this campaign where they said, you gotta see if you're squeaky clean and you gotta go like this. And if you brush your teeth and then you can see if it squeaks. Only this particular toothpaste gives you the squeaky clean thing. So it gave people an assessment. It gave them a way of self assessing whether they needed toothpaste or not. So people are reading, literally reading the newspaper on the bus and they go, oh, I need that. My teeth aren't squeaky clean. And then they try it and then they brush their teeth and then they do it and then the teeth squeak and they're like, ooh, now my teeth are squeaky clean. So this is called giving people an assessment. Giving people a way to self assess or a way to demo something. So one of the best things you can do is create a self assessment for people to self assess whether they need your thing. For example, let's say your specialty is helping family businesses to rebrand. Let's say the business has been around for 40 years, 50 years, and some of the elements you want to hold on tightly to, some of the elements need a freshen up. You could do an assessment. Does your family business need a brand refresh or a rebrand? Answer 15 questions to find out if your family business needs to refresh its brand and go through a rebranding process. So then people can go through and answer the questions and they go, oh, yes to that. No to that. Maybe. Yes, no maybe. Scale of one to five, I'm a five for this one. I'm a three for this one. Oh, one for that one. Right. And then at the end it says, based on how you answered, there's a 78% chance that your business would benefit from getting a brand refresh. You know, rebrand. Oh, cool. Well, that was based on how I answered. So it's me conducting my own assessment, my own test. So having a self assessment, where people fill that in, super, super powerful.

Chris Do (65:27)

How real was the squeaky clean test?

Daniel Priestley (65:29)

What do you mean?

Chris Do (65:30)

I mean, was it something they just invented to do it or was it a sign of.

Daniel Priestley (65:34)

Oh, I think oral hygiene? Yeah, I think there is actually just a film that comes off when you brush your teeth and then it gives a squeak and then it comes back within 10 minutes or 15 minutes. But for most people on that situation, for most people, like 85% of people weren't brushing their teeth at all. There was this huge problem. But it was just a way for people to self assess. There's a way for people to do an assessment. If I said to you, your wife has a love language and there are five love languages and if you don't know what your wife's love language is, you might be wasting a lot of time, energy, effort, money on things that she doesn't even care about. And you need to know which one of the five love languages your wife is. Immediately your brain is like, oh, now I know there's five love languages. I have to take the assessment and find out. So people love these assessments. Right? So we've learned this obviously because we work with six and a half thousand businesses to help them with self assessment tools. But people love the whole, like self assessment, do I need this? Could I benefit from this? Which one am I?

Chris Do (66:36)

Right?

Daniel Priestley (66:36)

Which type of sales manager do I have? Do I have a farmer, a hunter or a gatherer? Which type of athlete am I? Am I a sprinter, a marathon runner or a weightlifter? So like people just adore self assessment.

Chris Do (66:51)

Yeah, it's tapping to this innate human desire to know more about ourselves because it's so opaque to most of us. It's like that whole phenomenon like you can't read the label from inside the jar. Hence horoscopes, astrology, blood tests, everyone's tellers blood tests, 23andMe.

Daniel Priestley (67:08)

Yep.

Chris Do (67:09)

DNA tests, all kinds of things. The Myers Briggs test. What other assessments are there so many.

Daniel Priestley (67:15)

There's so many wealth, personalities, your money, money making style, your IQ test, EQ test. So all of these. So people have an endless desire to learn more about themselves and their needs and their businesses. It's so much easier to sell someone on a self assessment than to sell them on the product. So if I, let's say I'm an amazing designer, it's such a powerful positioning to say, I don't know if you need me or not. Take the assessment and it'll tell you you might be totally fine for another 10 years. Take the assessment, you'll find out, oh, okay, I'll take the assessment. So one of the most powerful sales techniques is to just not sell what you do, just to sell the assessment and to have an ambivalent Persona until you've taken an assessment. It's like imagine you go to A doctor, you say, oh, doctor, doctor, do I need to put my arm in a cast? They're going to say, why do you think you need an arm in a cast? Well, because I've got a sore arm. Let's get an X ray. I don't know, like, let's have an X ray before we talk about putting your arm in a cast. It's like, first we do the assessment, then we do the treatment.

Chris Do (68:23)

Yeah. Here in America, they're not going to send you go next. Right. They're just going to do a bunch of tests before you can actually get the X ray when what you really need is an X ray. But they're going to push that process out.

Daniel Priestley (68:34)

Who knows what they're going to do in America.

Chris Do (68:35)

Yeah, yeah, you might be dead.

Daniel Priestley (68:37)

It's like, oh, here, have this over the counter medicine that you could get anywhere else in the world for $11, but have it for 1100.

Chris Do (68:43)

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So we talked about two things. The wait list, the online assessment, sir. Something else.

Daniel Priestley (68:49)

So we got wait list. We got online assessment. I love introduction events. Introduction events are great. So an intro event is an introduction to blank introduction to rebranding. So once you are someone who's running a workshop, by the way, you're also a key person of influence. That's a really powerful distinction. The person who runs a workshop is a key person of influence almost by definition. So an introduction to rebranding your family business, an introduction to scaling your family business through having a powerful brand. If you're running that workshop, by definition, you're assumed to be. Oh, okay, you like. If you're running a workshop on it, you must be a key person of influence at that. So like introduction workshops are super powerful. You can do them on zoom almost no cost. Super powerful.

Chris Do (69:37)

Well, on another episode we'll probably have to get into how do you architect one of those intro events? Because I'm curious, because I'm sure some people are going to run out there and try this and it's. No one's going to sign up. And when they do it, it's terrible. There's a lot of things to unpack there. But maybe not on this episode.

Daniel Priestley (69:51)

You could do a wait list for the introduction workshops and then tell people, I'm so sorry you didn't get through because we only had one. We only only had one person. He didn't. He didn't get through. But let's have a one to one instead.

Chris Do (70:03)

Yeah. Okay. The intro event.

Daniel Priestley (70:08)

So we got intro.

Chris Do (70:08)

That's kind of like how you got your start in in business, right. You started running My whole first agency.

Daniel Priestley (70:13)

Was my first super successful agency like I was 24 years old. We're doing 10 million in sales. Was just introduction events. That was everything. So that's what we were specialists in. We were the specialists in introduction events. So someone who wanted to roll out a franchise, we ran introduction events for their franchise. Someone who wanted to roll out a financial services offering or financial services financial planning business. We ran the introduction events. So we were specialists in. Rather than selling the thing, sell the introduction event with as much budget as you would sell the thing and you will end up making a lot more sales. And we were very, very good at that.

Chris Do (70:48)

I'm noticing a theme here. Daniel about to try to convert a stranger into a customer. It's a lot of work. There's too much friction, a lot of poor fits this bridge in between low commitment. I'm not looking to sell you anything. I can give you some value. It's the Cinderella principle. You're going to create an event that people feel valuable just participating in that you need to make sure you hold up your end of the bargain. That the survey or the quiz is good, that the intro event is full of information. It's going to really help them understand they have a problem and here some potential solutions so that then you can then cherry pick with the glass slipper the criteria like you feel like you might be a good fit for us. Let's dialogue.

Daniel Priestley (71:26)

So it's building that bridge. You can use these in conjunction. You can actually use these tools altogether.

Chris Do (71:32)

So you can stack them.

Daniel Priestley (71:33)

Yeah, you could stack them. So you could have an introduction event. You could say I'm not taking on any clients until next year but we are doing an introduction event. And then at the end of the introduction event you could say I hope you've gotten value for that. If you're interested in being a client, join the waiting list. And when you're on the waiting list, we're going to give you a self assessment. So once you join the waiting list, we'll give you a link to get a self assessment. And that self assessment will highlight the issues and the needs that you've got.

Chris Do (71:55)

Right.

Daniel Priestley (71:56)

And that's the name.

Chris Do (71:56)

Sounds super incestuous but I get it. It's a good idea. Right.

Daniel Priestley (71:59)

People are like damn, you've got a process for this.

Chris Do (72:02)

That's the thing. It's like you figure stuff out, have on you.

Daniel Priestley (72:06)

Yeah.

Chris Do (72:06)

We've thought through the entire seven course meal for the way that people are Going to arrive at the event, to the end of the event, and the little goodie bag that you get to go with you on their way home.

Daniel Priestley (72:15)

And you have to accept that you cannot do what everyone else is doing and get the different result. If everyone else is just saying, oh, we're an agency and we start whenever you want to start and we don't have any way of explaining it and what do you want? We'll try and do what you need. Whatever you've asked us, we'll just try and do it. If you behave like all the other agencies, all the other coaches, all the other advisors, whatever, if that's how you behave and that's how you show up in the world, you're going to get the market rate. You're behaving like the market, so you'll get the market rate. There's nothing really different about the way you do it. The agencies or the businesses or the coaches that are smashing it, that are super successful, they are communicating to the market. I have figured this thing out. I'm smarter than you are. I know how this all works. I've created some events for you to attend. I've created some assessments for you. I've created some value that's coming in the future. Join the waiting list. And they're communicating. We're in demand. We know what we're talking about. You'd be very lucky to get married to me because I'm Prince Charming and you're going to be Cinderella. It's going to be great. So they're communicating that value in a very different way. So people have to do it a little bit different.

Chris Do (73:19)

Yeah. Is there a fourth thing?

Daniel Priestley (73:21)

Oh, I could go for days, man, I can keep.

Chris Do (73:24)

Should we draw it here then?

Daniel Priestley (73:26)

I think we. Well, otherwise people are going to get paralyzed with too many things. This is three good things. These are things that you can just have running up. You can have these up and running today. But like, you finish the podcast, use a template, boom, ready to go.

Chris Do (73:40)

Yeah. I had this question in my mind to ask you, but I don't want to interrupt the flow you often reference. So there was this person I met who was asking me this question. The financial planner or the video production person or that. Where are you talking to these people? Where are you pulling these stories from?

Daniel Priestley (73:56)

Oh, well, I always just talk about what I'm up to at the moment. So some of those stories are recent. This literally this week. But the financial planning story is actually seven or eight years old. But I've used that as an example Before, And I know it's a good example. And I saw that. I saw her reposition her whole business as a result of that conversation. So it's like, it's just one that is stuck in my mind. But there's hundreds of stories like that. So the client stories I run, client.

Chris Do (74:21)

Would tell me more. Like, this is what I mean. Like, was it a workshop you were running? Okay, yeah, party.

Daniel Priestley (74:26)

Like, what do I do? Right?

Chris Do (74:27)

Yeah, yeah. Like, where do all these people come from? Because somebody's in the audience thinking, how do I get that conversation with Daniel?

Daniel Priestley (74:32)

Yeah, well, you have to join the wait list. There's two main businesses that I run, so I have a software company called scoreapp.com and scoreapp is a lot of the stuff we talk about is I've templated it. These are the things that have worked for me. And we've created templates. And@scoreup.com, you set up a free account and then you can use the template Library and there's 80 templates in there, and that's all there. And essentially this is a software that does online assessments and waiting lists and like all of that. And it collects data, valuable, meaningful data. So ScoreApp is an extension of my passion turned into software. And then Dent is an accelerator that I run where over the last 15 years, we've been taking people through a process to help them with their personal brand. We run the Key Person of Influence accelerator, and every year now we take about 550 people globally through a process of developing their personal brand. And people do apply. They go through a process, they go through an educational and a bit of training that's free. And then if they say, yeah, I want to go ahead and implement that, they apply to go on the accelerator. And we take on about 550 a year.

Chris Do (75:36)

Some of our friends, our mutual friends have enrolled in this KPI accelerator. You said you take on 550 people. So it caps out of 550.

Daniel Priestley (75:45)

Yeah.

Chris Do (75:46)

Okay. And this is an ongoing thing. How does it work and what does the cost?

Daniel Priestley (75:52)

So the way it works, it's an online training, live events every two weeks for about three hours. So it's quite a commitment. Every two weeks, you're doing a three hour training session for at least a year. So we get people to commit for 12 months minimum. And we have an online portal that's AI enabled. So the online portal asks you a ton of questions about who you are and your background and all this. Then it uses AI to rewrite the pitch and to create frameworks for how you would productize more effectively. So then you're doing the live workshops and you're using the portal to reinvent your business. We get our clients often to write a book. We get our clients creating podcasts and being on guests on podcasts. We get them in little social media squadrons where they help each other to amplify their social media profiles. We teach them to re pitch or we rewrite the pitch with them and then we get them practicing and rehearsing and doing the pitching. We do something called a productized ecosystem where we take their intellectual property and productize it across different layers. So all of that happens over 12 months. If someone at the end of 12 months has got it and they're good, happy days. If they want to continue on, they can just continue on and keep going every two weeks. If the environment's really working for them, every two weeks for three hours. Just keep going. You said how much is it? If they're a small business, it's about five grand for the year because we have a startup version. If they're a more established business with at least six figures of revenue, it's about ten grand for the year. Way cheaper than an mba, way cheaper than a coach consultant to come into their business. It's an accelerator environment. It gives you a great network, all of that sort of stuff.

Chris Do (77:23)

Okay, so it sounds like you're using AI to translate a lot of the principles that you believe in that work to help make it scalable for people who are joining.

Daniel Priestley (77:33)

Yeah.

Chris Do (77:33)

Is it a rolling enrollment? Anybody can join as long as there's an opening.

Daniel Priestley (77:37)

We do interview process and then we have start dates throughout the year.

Chris Do (77:40)

Okay, so you, you have to sync up the start date then.

Daniel Priestley (77:43)

Yeah. So you'll interview and then you'll join with a start date. That works.

Chris Do (77:46)

I see.

Daniel Priestley (77:47)

Yeah. And then prior to the start date, you'll have some portal work that you can get started with straight away. So you start the process of going through the portal.

Chris Do (77:54)

Okay, who is it a not a good fit for?

Daniel Priestley (77:57)

We're not really great for like B2C consumer products that are stuff that you might just tangible goods, trinkets, physical things. We specialize in B2B services. Like the absolute home run is B2B services. Anyone who's an agency advisor coach. We do a lot of fitness related businesses, health and wellness. We have a ton of doctors, surgeons, dentists who come through. We have a lot of people who have like got a PhD or an academic. Like they're super talented technically, but they're not great at telling the world about that, but someone who wants to really hide behind their brand where they're just like, I just want to create this like leather pouch and people buy it and it's an E commerce business and I don't want anyone to know who I am. That's definitely a bad fit because it's the key person of influence program. You're repping your business, you're going to be the brand. So we often ask questions like, if you wrote a book and gave away a thousand copies of the book, what do you think would happen to your business? If someone says, oh, my business would go through the roof. Like I'd be speaking and I'd be on podcasts and I'd win high value clients and all that sort of stuff. That's normally a good test that it would be good. If someone's like selling this stuff, they go, oh, I can't see at all how that would work. Or if you were invited to speak at a major conference, what do you think that would do your brand? Oh, that would be amazing. For my brand. Great, let's get that happening. If someone says, oh, I don't really understand what speaking at a conference would do for my brand at all or would do for my sales or my money, then. Then that's a no.

Chris Do (79:24)

Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned there's primarily two companies that you're involved with. Yeah, there's KPI, which we just talked about in depth. We'll include the links to those programs. You can apply and get on a wait list and perhaps go to an intro event, who knows. And then there's this other thing called Score App, which is the online self assessment software that you built based on these principles. You said it's a free to try, but what he's like loves it. What are the price points?

Daniel Priestley (79:49)

Huge. So expensive. It's out of this world, I'm afraid. It's 29amonth. And then if you're a bigger business, it's like 59amonth and then a much bigger business is 99amonth. So it's like between 30 and 100 bucks a month.

Chris Do (80:03)

It sounds crazy reasonable.

Daniel Priestley (80:06)

Yeah, I mean it's. Our business is built to scale. It's a business that has thousand. We're in 150 countries and six and a half thousand people using ScoreApp. And then we have, on top of that we have enterprise level, which is like for bigger companies, they want much more dedicated. So that's like a grand a month. But they're like Household name. They're like FTSE 100 and S&P 500 and those sorts of.

Chris Do (80:28)

Is that coming like with an advisor helping out, is it?

Daniel Priestley (80:31)

Yeah, for the enterprise level stuff, it's largely about the security features, the multiple logins, jumping through the hoops that they want you to do for like onboarding, having dedicated service desk available for multiple people. We also, for those guys, we do like special template libraries that are just for their clients and just for their employees. And then it's like locked down so that they can't edit anything that. So it's a bit, bit different. So we have our enterprise level, but most people are on our like small business.

Chris Do (81:01)

Okay, so for enterprise is more about control, security, compliance, corporate D, kind of.

Daniel Priestley (81:07)

All the stuff the corporates want before they can even like they might love the software, but if you don't have all this like two factor authentication and cybersecurity policy and all that, if they, if you don't have all that and if you're not willing to go through their process. So they're happy to pay a grand a month, provided you've got all of this stuff and you can help them and support them get it working. So yeah, so we have enterprise, but most small businesses, they just sign up, they get a free account, they see how it works and then they, when they're ready, they just go to 29amonth.

Chris Do (81:37)

From the score perspective, it is the enterprise client, the big client.

Daniel Priestley (81:41)

No, my passion. I don't have a huge passion for big companies. I have a huge passion for small businesses. I want small businesses to win. I'm conflicted about big companies. My genuine authentic passion is I want small businesses to win. I believe in the entrepreneur revolution. You know, there's this idea of like by 2030 you'll own nothing and you'll be happy about it. I'm like the opposite. I'm like, by 2030 you're going to own an amazing business and that's going to be your business. And that business will pay for a house and you're going to own that house and you're going to be so damn happy because of all the stuff you own. So I'm like, I want the small businesses to win. I think we're going through a time in history where all the systems that were built for the industrial age are breaking down. But the one thing that's kind of emerging and it's providing a lot of happiness and joy for people is ownership of a small business. So that's what I'm all About at.

Chris Do (82:30)

The beginning of the show we said we're going to answer this one question that came at us from Twitter or X and it was about how to get 10 high end clients.

Daniel Priestley (82:38)

Yeah, the 10 high end clients probably is going to come from a hundred people who engage with the waiting list, 100 to 200. So you think about the fact that they join a waiting list or come to an event or fill in an assessment is already a filter. But by definition an ultra high end client or a high end client is the top 5 to 10% of people who are already filtered. So ultimately if you want 10 clients, you're gonna need 100 to 200 people. So it's the top 10% of the people who have filled in a form. So I would say if you're looking for 10 high end clients across the course of the year, you might wanna repeat this a few times. Let's say you get 50 on the waiting list and then you run the campaign again, do it every quarter. So you're always pushing people out to the next quarter and you say, I'm not taking on any clients this quarter and fill in the waiting list for next quarter or fill an expression of interest for Q2, Q3, Q4. So you can repeat this. And if you're getting 50 people join the waiting list, you're always going to be oversubscribed, you're always going to be able to cherry pick those very top end clients. Now that's the other thing. You want to have a list of people on there so you can select those top clients. So let's say across the course of the year, 200 selected people engage, you pick your 10. Now you've got your top 10 clients.

Chris Do (83:51)

So hopefully if you do this correctly, when you launch your next quarterly campaign, you can reflect back on, hey, we did this, a remarkable thing for this type of client and got this result. So you're updating the narrative.

Daniel Priestley (84:05)

Yes.

Chris Do (84:05)

Which would be very exciting because that's a fresh, fresh victory right there, right?

Daniel Priestley (84:09)

Yeah.

Chris Do (84:09)

Probably make it illusion and then it.

Daniel Priestley (84:11)

Becomes a bit more of a self fulfilling prophecy. Now that you're selecting high end clients, you're positioned as a key person of influence. More people want to join the waiting list, it becomes that virtuous loop.

Chris Do (84:20)

Right. And then you get more qualified people raising their hands, signaling interest and it just gets better and better over time.

Daniel Priestley (84:27)

That's what we want.

Chris Do (84:28)

Now I have a question for you. For your KPI program of 550 people, are you running a wait list? Are you running a Self assessment quiz.

Daniel Priestley (84:36)

So every single week something like 110 people jump onto the introduction workshop. 240 will register, but 110 will show up. And then from that about 25 to 30, once they've heard the introduction workshop and they hear our criteria, about 25 to 30 will then interview for a spot. We'll conduct interviews. We even just on the questions that we asked to get an interview, screen about a third of people where we know in advance that we're not going to be able to take them on as a client. We deliver great value. We do a 15 to 20 minute session. They know that it's only going to be a 15, 20 minute session. Point them in the direction for some content, some books, some pre work, but politely decline. Then the others they will get between 20 minutes and an hour with one of our team and we do a pre screening conversation. And then when we get to the point of saying yes, you'd be suitable for the program, submit a proposal which they can accept or not. The truth is that we probably have something like five to seven thousand people a year who engage meaningfully with us for us to get our 550 where we screen. So similar numbers to what I just talked about. We're probably, we're picking our top 10% from the people who engage.

Chris Do (85:56)

Do you do the same intro event? Is it recorded or is it done live?

Daniel Priestley (86:01)

So there's three of us who do it, myself, Glenn and Mike. So I actually do one or two a month. It's a 90 minute introduction event. I love doing it. It's my finger on the pulse for our clients. And yeah, we do it live. Well, the reason we do it live is because what we're expecting for people over the following 12 months is that they're going to join live workshops and interact with us. So we want to give people a taste or a flavor of what's to come. So we give them a live workshop. So people go, oh, so it's going to be like this. It's going to feel like this. Yeah. So what you just experienced with us here is a little bit of a taste of what it will feel like. But you'll be doing this every two. If we did a pre recorded, then it sets people up to feel like the experience is going to be pre recorded. We do a live workshop because it's going to be live workshops. So yeah.

Chris Do (86:49)

So you're doing this one or two times a month.

Daniel Priestley (86:51)

Yeah.

Chris Do (86:51)

Presumably at your night because you're eight or nine hours ahead of us and it's American market or am I?

Daniel Priestley (86:56)

No, we're a global market. So we kind of rotate through and there's just different times that there are actually time zones that kind of work for all. It might be morning in LA and like late afternoon in. In London.

Chris Do (87:08)

Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Priestley (87:09)

So we're a global business. We have clients in 40 countries for that business. We have clients for Score up. We have 150 countries represented now and 40 countries that we take on for the key person of influence accelerator.

Chris Do (87:20)

And although the live events are done live, is it following a structure that you've already worked on? Are you changing it all the time?

Daniel Priestley (87:26)

I've been doing these for 15 years. So I'm like Metallica playing a Metallica concert. I can get up and do it. I can just do it. Because I've been doing it almost once a week or once every two weeks for 15 years I've been talking about this stuff. So I put in the reps.

Chris Do (87:40)

Okay, yeah. So very selfish question here for me is to get people to join the Future Pro group, which is $250 a month minimum three month commitment. We run events like this, but we teach them something. But our audience is so broad that it'll get filled with people who are not qualified to be there. So our conversion percentage therefore is not so good. What do I got to do to tweak that?

Daniel Priestley (88:05)

I wouldn't worry about conversion percentage. I would worry about do you onboard the right clients at the right levels that you want? Because if 5,000 people did an introduction workshop but 25 of the perfect clients and you only wanted 25, that's fine. So for me personally, there's a couple of principles that I would, I'd be thinking about here. An introduction workshop should not be be a lesson. Like it shouldn't be a sample. It should be deliberately crafted and designed as a way of introducing people to what's to come if they're accepted. So like for example, if you sat down at a restaurant and they brought out 10 samples of all the meals and you can just eat that, or they say, hey, one of the dishes is cabanara. So we're going to give you a cabanara before you look at the menu. By the time you eat the cabanara say, well, I'm full now, I'm not hungry. You say, well, why aren't you ordering? We gave you a free carbonara because you filled me up. So with an introduction event, you can run the risk of filling someone up and then they go, oh, well, I don't need it and that could be the reason there's low conversions as opposed to exploring the reasons that they do need to join the group. So if your introduction event is more of a deep dive into the awareness of deficiencies, that would be solved later. If we go through the process that serves people more than giving them a starting point, but not actually a full process. So the goal of the introduction is to be an introduction. An introduction to Harvard is not here. Let's start the MBA and give you a lesson. It's no, this is what Harvard life is going to be like and here's how it's going to work and here's what we're going to teach you and here's what people say about it. This is the problem that you currently have and here's how we solve this. Here's our success, success rates. So you're actually giving someone the information they need to buy. I'm happy to look at it if you want me to. And I'd look at it through the lens of does this create hunger or make people less hungry? Is it satiating or is it hunger inducing? And then if you're particular about who you take on as a client, which you should be, then I would use the assessment that the follow up call to action is to take the assessment and only if they answer the assessment honestly in a particular way will they get a link to join. So you're basically saying, here's the introduction, here's what you would get. Take the assessment based on how you answer the assessment. Green light, yellow light, red light, red light. This is not suitable. Yellow light. These are three things we want you to do before you come back. Green light, you're ready to proceed.

Chris Do (90:33)

So I think we're executing the mechanical parts of this, but the devil's in the details. We do have an assessment before somebody can get the link to join it because we don't want it to fill up with so many people, then the right people can't get in because there's a limit. Right?

Daniel Priestley (90:47)

Yeah. I'm also curious about the 250amonth price point because 250amonth is expensive to the wrong person and too cheap for the right person. And that's something that kind of concerns me because like, realistically for the right person, five to ten grand is actually signals that there's value here. But for the wrong person, three grand a year is like, oh, that's a huge, huge commitment. I don't even spend that on my laptop. So potentially this should be starting at 500 or a thousand a month. And it's a lot less people, but they're the right people. And it's a screening process. And it feels like now I'm part of an exclusive group. And for anyone who doesn't want to spend a grand a month, go look at the channel. Right. We've got so much content, but it's like, in here, this is next level. You're networking with the people who are going to get you next level. So I feel like that price point is a little bit, potentially too far in the middle. It's like.

Chris Do (91:46)

I can hear that.

Daniel Priestley (91:47)

Yeah. Too high for this, too low for the others.

Chris Do (91:50)

I can also. I mean, the. The thing that happens with a lot of. When we use the score app, we can see people retaking the test over and over again until they can win. They just keep changing their answers. And Carrie, who runs a score out? I was like, what do you want to do? I'm like, if they wanted to get.

Daniel Priestley (92:04)

In, they want to get in so bad.

Chris Do (92:06)

Who cares what I'm going to do? I mean, because eventually, if you answer the question correctly, you get the link.

Daniel Priestley (92:11)

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Do (92:12)

There's not much we can do there.

Daniel Priestley (92:13)

But they could go back through it. Well, if it flags, you could just have a quick onboarding call. You'd say, hey, look, we noticed you took it three times, which means you really want to be in the group. But we've put that in there for a reason. What makes you think we should move our criteria for you? So maybe just have that little bit of a onboarding call if they flag that.

Chris Do (92:33)

Okay. Okay. Food for thought. I gotta make sure I'm answering this question. Aside from the pricing question, which is, are we feeding them or are we creating hunger? Are we satiating them or the desire to do something? Okay, that's something new for me because I really think of myself as a. As an educator. I just want to teach. And so I'm writing new webinars all the time. I'm like, let me teach you this thing. I'm definitely feeding them. I'm not creating hunger. Because the conclusion is, let me go work on this before I join. So we're not getting the conversion that we want. So I'm messing up here.

Daniel Priestley (93:05)

Yeah, I made that mistake many times. Many times. I'll give you one last little thing that we just found out. We ran an AI analysis of Glenn, Mike and I's last 30 introduction presentations.

Chris Do (93:18)

So you looked at the transcript and.

Daniel Priestley (93:20)

You tried it, uploaded it to AI, we analyzed for trends. We gave it the Numbers. The high converting, the mid converting, the low converting ones. How's this for crazy? It didn't really matter whether it was Glenn, Mike or I, and it didn't really matter. Some of the key topics that were discussed being different. So it didn't have to be the same presentation. The lowest converting introduction workshops had three calls to action. The mid converting had five calls to action and the highest converting had seven calls to action. And that was like the main correlation. So Seven calls to action in 90 minutes. So it's pretty intense. Oh, I see now who is the most guilty of the three calls to action? Me. So the other guys were doing five and seven. I was the one doing the three, which was my why my introduction workshops were actually low because I love fancying myself as an educator as opposed to doing the calls to action. I'm like, oh, they'll come through when they're ready. No, they don't. They need calls to action. So what I ended up doing is I, when I do my workshop now, I draw seven circles and then as I'm doing my workshop, I do tick. I've done 1, tick, 2, tick 3. So I've done that three times now with my little seven circles approach and my conversions are nearly double.

Chris Do (94:33)

Give me example, what you might say during a live webinar as a cta.

Daniel Priestley (94:37)

Oh, so a CTA would be. If you enjoy this workshop and you want to proceed to the next step. The next step is to have a one to one interview with the team. You're going to answer a few questions and then our software system will determine whether it's suitable for you to have a one to one with the team. During that, they're going to find out your vision for the future, your background, your intellectual property that you draw from in the past, your current mission for your business. We're going to put forward a proposal as to how we could do more with your current level of intellectual property and talk to you about productization. All of that will happen on a one to one this presentation. It's general, it's for a group, but a one to one we can drill into your business. So if you're interested in taking a next step and you want to work with us, a one to one is the only available next step. You can't buy anything, you can't sign up for anything. You have to book into a one to one for an interview. So that's available by clicking the link that's in the comments.

Chris Do (95:26)

You're doing that seven times on a call now.

Daniel Priestley (95:28)

I'LL do it in different ways. So that might be in the beginning. So then I might talk about the importance of X, Y and Z. And I'll say if that particular point resonated with you, the next step would be to book that one to one. If you want the link for the one to one, it's in the comments. So click on the link that's just jumped into the chat, into the comments there and we can drill into that particular point. So we just discussed X, Y and Z. And if that's the thing that you feel is the most important thing for you to discuss, make sure that you take that to a one to one. I've got several versions of it, but essentially I was only doing three of those. One of the beginning, middle and end. But the AI said do seven.

Chris Do (96:07)

So now we do seven, her and the AI mine. I'm saying, Chris, you did it twice. Yeah, yeah, barely.

Daniel Priestley (96:14)

Same thing. Because you feel like an educator and just want to serve. I'm the same. My natural instinct, but the true serve is let people know how much value they'll get from the commitment to the process. The purpose of and being upfront. The other thing too is I say this is an introduction workshop. The purpose of this is to show you what could happen to your business if you made a commitment to go through a much longer process. So we take people through a 12 month journey, we get you on a 12 month accelerator. I'm going to give you an overview so that you know, if you made a commitment of time, energy, effort and money to go through a 12 month process, what would we take you through? What would you expect to see at the end of it? What results do other people get? Who's it for? Who's it not for? We're going to go through that kind of information. So I'm being upfront about it. And I also tell people if that's not what you came for, you don't have to sit through this whole workshop. You can leave. I'm big on permission, so I'll say this is what we're going to be doing. You don't have to stick around. If you get 10 minutes into this and you realize it's not for you, drop off. That's not a problem. I won't be offended. Your time's valuable, my time's valuable, you know, that's totally fine. The benefit of doing that, by the way, is the huge upside is the vast majority of people don't drop off. So it actually signals to everyone, oh, everyone's getting great value. Everyone's here for the same reason, right?

Chris Do (97:32)

There's something about a live Zoom call for whatever reason, once you commit to showing up. Very few people actually.

Daniel Priestley (97:38)

Yeah, exactly.

Chris Do (97:39)

Yeah. Okay. Thanks for that as always. I try and remind you for like one nugget that I can apply very selfishly to my own business. And of course you did not fail there. We're going to make sure that we include the links to both Score app and to the KPI accelerator. Daniel, it's been a pleasure. This is so fun. I love how you rocked it and thank you very much for doing this.

C (98:05)

Thanks for joining us. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get new insightful episodes from us every week. The Future Podcast is hosted by Chris do and produced and edited by Rich Cardona Media. Thank you to Adam Sanborn for our intro music. If you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by reviewing and rating our show on Apple Podcasts. It will help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it, visit the Future Dot and you'll find video courses, digital products, and a bunch of helpful resources about design and the creative business. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.