Coaching vs Consulting Understanding the Difference and Finding the Right Fit with Paul Lemberg Ep. 611

Howdy, welcome back to another episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. I have a special guest for you today. We're going to be talking about some business coaching, business consulting, how to grow your business through maybe some thought leadership. I want to quickly read a review. I always forget to do this. And so I apologize. But let me read this review right now. This is from one of our longtime customers and clients, David Hunter. It's a law firm. I've been working with EWR Digital Marketing Agency for over 10 years. And I am confident to say that they've been instrumental in the success of my solo crime defense practice in generating business online from Google and other search engines. From the very beginning, they treat me like family and have always prioritized my needs going above and beyond to ensure my business thrives. So thank you, David Hunter, for that. Got a lot of reviews on Google and business, try to spread them around, too. So if you like this podcast, please leave a review on whatever platform you're close to and can get on. Sometimes they're doing two factor authentication for all kinds of stuff. So I want to jump into this today. I have Pablo or Paul, he goes by both, Lemberg from Lemberg.com. He's a high ticket and consultative business coach. He's been doing business coaching for a long time. He's worked with some big names, been on stage with a number of really high profile people that I definitely follow, Tony Robbins, etc. And so it's a pleasure to have you on, Paul. Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. For everybody that's listening, this is going to be a pretty open forum conversation. And remember, if you do have questions, just comment on the different platform. Or you can go to bestseopodcast.com and submit your questions. And we will ask them on the air when we have a topic with the expert with the right kind of guest. So yeah, Paul, I am

excited to have you on. I want to first say for all those longtime listeners of ours, we had a program back in the day. And this is when AdWords wasn't like the thing that everybody knew about and did. This is when AdWords first started and Pay Per Click just started. We started a program called Instant Leads Guaranteed. Instant Leads Guaranteed. And it was a landing page and PPC and people didn't know what it was and we were describing what it did. Since then, we've shelved that, but we still own the domain. And then one of your taglines is business coaching or business growth guaranteed, right? Growth guaranteed. Right? Business results guaranteed. Yeah. Sorry, I need to get your website pulled up here right in front of me. And I just thought that that was a kindred spirit in a way of kind of the same. So tell me kind of a little bit in your own words what you've done, maybe your own introduction and also how you came up with that slogan. Well, the slogan was really easy, which is that you give people what they want. And one of the challenges with people buying business coaching is they have no idea how long it's going to take for something to happen. And are they going to get the results that they were looking for? And I'm like, people are always talking about results. Let's just give them results guaranteed. And when I started my own coaching practice, that was how I started it. I guaranteed that people were going to get the results that they wanted. I still do that. I actually, that's part of my agreement with my clients. Yeah, we used to be called E-Web Results. So EWR was kind of the KFC version of, we shortened it, right? And yeah, it was all, we had a one year guarantee if they advertised with us. We still do have that. And I think really being a student of direct response, you always got to have some kind of irresistible offer as

well as like guarantee that becomes a no brainer for people. And so I personally love it. I know I was telling you pre-interview that if people listen a couple podcasts back, I had somebody on and I said, hey, I'm trying to think of a business coaching name. I don't have a lot of bandwidth to like kind of invest in a brand, figure it out, but he's a big brand guy. And I was like, hey, I got this domain instantly to guarantee, like, I think I'm just going to throw it up on that. Like, what do you think? And like on air, he was just like, no. I'd love to know what his logic was. You know, it seems to me that if you're, see, if I'm guaranteeing results, it's pretty broad and vague and it'd be like, okay, whatever results we're talking about here. But if you're talking about instant leads guaranteed, you better be selling leads, right? And it's going to be like, if like, so I, I, a lot of people that are listening, I am going to be launching this, this coaching program. I've already, you know, people that know how I work, I read like three books on how to do it before I do it. Like I've, I'm there, like I've already built the landing page, launching a one for actually like a, a mastermind group for oil and gas professionals as well, through our, our network OGGN, Oil and Gas Golden Network. And, you know, a lot of the same concepts we're talking about with like CROs, CMOs, like in-house marketing teams that we're training, can be applied to small business, right? Like the methodology is the same, it's just the application of that methodology. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to clone that site and I'm just going to, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to take that content and kind of, you know, tweak it. But I think that, you know, small business owners and, you know, even potentially other marketers and marketing agencies, which again,

might have to be a little bit different, you know, content course, but it's all the same concepts, right? So if you're looking for digital market, if you're looking for SEO, you know, if you're looking for leads, I mean, that's, that's what, that's what we're founded on is, you know, top line revenue growth, right? Like that's, that's why people, that's the number one reason why people come to us. They say, hey, I need to grow my business. Now, what we deal with and, and, you know, business coaching is a good kind of partner in this is we, I can't tell you how many times we've got, we've overwhelmed somebody over the course of like a year, 18 months. And we say, hey, you need to get ready to scale up. Right. And then they can't handle the growth and then they have to stop marketing because the small business is not structured to grow. And so we have to then start vetting our clients a little bit better and asking more questions. And also I tell the account managers to say, hey, you know, this could be a six-month like engagement. This could be a year engagement. Like it might not be forever because, you know, SEO, once you kind of get them to the top three spots, it kind of gets in a jet stream a little bit and the marketing stays there organically. And we've had a couple of clients like in non-competitive industries. I mean, it'll hang out and generate leads for, you know, I don't know, a year, 18 months after. And that's the difference between paid versus maybe SEO. And we certainly build like a holistic program. But back to your point, instant leads guarantees. Well, look, you buy ads, you know, you have good copy, you know, you have good offer or call to action. You're going to get leads like there's leads guaranteed. Now, getting the cost per lead, fitting into the business model, there's a lot of other things that go into it. And but you can get

demand generation is, hey, if you can spend money, you can do it. And also, I have not seen a better top of the funnel growth driver, even middle funnel, lower funnel two. But SEO, I mean, when you qualify for those long tail key phrases like, you know, the algorithm finds the most interesting people that are doing the most interesting searches that are absolutely ready to buy. And it's just it's just it's completely powerful. Right. One of the things that you have on your site, it's like, why hire a business coach? And so I think I want to talk just in general about maybe business coaching versus consulting and like, what are the differences and why would someone like need either? And then like, you know, everybody today, this is the thing, everybody's so skeptical today. But then everybody else that's trying to make money is saying, like, I'm a life coach, like, I'm a business coach, like, you know what I mean? Like, how do you do that? And like, how do you hire the right business coach? So I want to kind of get into that conversation, then we can take it down some different route. In my opinion, the way you hire a business coach is based on the questions they ask you. You know, so if you look at it, it's like, what's the difference between coaching and consulting? You know, coaching is where they tell you what to do, you know, find out what you need to do, tell you what you need to do, and then keep you accountable for doing it. That's the big distinction, right? Consultants, consultants may tell you what to do, but then they go away or consultants may actually do the work. They're actually, you know, get their hands dirty and and then implement for you and take, you know, take take fractional ownership of the actual implementation of the results, right? Like that kind of thing, whereas the coach is like, no, what you need to do is this and tell me now tell

me what you're going to need to do. So I guarantee results. That's why I have results guaranteed as a, you know, as a slogan. And and it's really simple, which is that let's spend a year together. You do and I say 85 percent of the things you said you were going to do. I don't expect perfection. But if you do 85 percent of the things you said you were going to do, then you'll get the results. And if you don't get the results, that's my fault because I told you to do the wrong things. Whereas if I tell you to do something and you do it, you're going to get the results that I promised you. And that's so that's where coaching, you know, that's like coaching. Whereas if it was consulting, it's like, all right, well, give me this project. I'll do it and you'll get what you want from it. Right. And those are very different. You know, the big difference is consultants. Consultancy doesn't leave you with the go forward strategy, whereas the whole point of coaching, I walk in there and I say, well, what do you want? You know, what do you want out of your business? Do you want to sell your family business? Do you want to take over your family business? You know, are you looking to to expand? Are you looking to duplicate? I helped a dentist go from two million dollars a year to something that was sold for one hundred million dollars. Wow. And and that was really simple. That was duplication. I helped a pharmacy go from two locations to 15 locations, you know, and each one of those was worth a million bucks in terms of profit on an annual basis. So if you figure out the duplication strategy, then you get them to implement the duplication strategy. You get you get tremendous growth that way. Whereas consultants are usually not in it for the long haul. You know, coaching, I work with people for as much as five years at a

clip because the five years is what turns into something that's worth one hundred million bucks. You know, like that. I think the the accountability piece, right, of of like you have covering and you have someone looking over your shoulder or helping you out that you're going to be reporting to that you got to get these things done, because I can tell you, I know if you spend 15 minutes a day on LinkedIn, you will generate a ton of business, like just set a timer and spend 15 minutes a day. And I knew that. And I just get busy doing other stuff, you know, and I and I don't do it. But if there was somebody that was like I was accountable to like, hey, did you do your 15 minutes a day or whatever? Then then like you have that that that covering that reporting component, I think, yeah, the consulting tells you what you need to do, but they don't help you implement it. And and I think I don't know. I've seen when the coaches understand who you are and can speak to you and kind of speak to your language and help you reach those goals together where where it's, you know, it's a co-effort because a lot of times like maybe they own a company or they're in charge like, you know, they need you need that peer group to you need that kind of peer group in a lot of ways. You know, one of the things you touched on and we did talk about in the preamble, I want to kind of open it up. There are a lot of. Well, baby boomers that are retiring and they're, you know, taking over the family business or they may not be taking over the family, like the kids may not be taking over the family business and may not have kids or or they may be interested in the business and they got to sell it. And, you know, so even my family, we're we're taking over a family business

as well. And, you know, there's succession plan that happens. But a lot of times the kids, you know, don't all want to get involved in business. Right. And they need to sell it. And they built up a lot of, you know, value and equity. It's not easy to start a company for anybody listening. There's a lot of effort. And once you get something up and going, you know, there's some value in it. And so now there's they're even teaching in school acquisition entrepreneurship. And and I can tell you when when I, you know, just to throw in here, that's just M&A with a new name on it. Yeah, but it's small business, but it's not venture capital coming in. Right. Like from Harvard, this is this is mom and pop M&A. Right. Like this is this is like, let me let me talk to my brother. Like, let me get my buddies over here. Let's raise some money and let's do this thing. And I mean, since covid even right. People want to work for themselves. People want to work from home. I can there's this huge battle. They're like, you know, if they maybe go back in the office, I'm leaving. Right. And and there's so much information out there. It's empowering people to leave. And I'm actually coaching someone that's doing well. I'm coaching the marketing component as a friend that again, this is why I keep getting pushed on this. But he was going to leave his business and take like three. Like so he was working for a small business and he was going to take three of the employees and leave and go start something. I was like, whoa, like that's not nice. Like and you just moved and they just paid you to move and like like think about this and like set it down. And so I kind of like put the brakes on that because he was like, I want to drop all this money on marketing. I was like, well, what? Let's ease into it. Let's

get you some clients on a consulting basis and let's moonlight. Right. And also get a business that is a little bit not directly competitive to what you're doing and different market. Yeah. And you probably won't get in trouble. Right. And so kind of walking kind of through this, but he was just ready to jump, ready to go. Like, I want to get away from this. And, you know, a lot of times people don't see all the things that go into it. Right. Like when you step out on your own to do a business, I mean, you're doing the accounting, you're doing the payroll. Right. Unless you're hiring people and paying money. And if you if you're doing it yourself, then you're doing whatever you love to do. There's a book called The E-Myth. Are you familiar with this? Sure. So so when when I came to you, I was all three of you are. Chris had every single person at the company read that and say, here's what your superpower is. Here's what you're special at. Here are all the other things that need to happen. And here's also the framework of all the hats that people wear. So, you know, we went through EOS, the full training with EOS, with our leadership team as well. And I'll tell you, the difference between EOS is almost more consulting, right? Like so you're paying for workshops and quarterly check-ins, right? But but you don't have this account and they don't tell you exactly how to do it. They give you the framework of how it should be done. But then I guess they give you room to figure it out. But I think a lot of people go through that and they're like, I need somebody to hold my hand and to do this with me and to make sure it's done right sort of thing, you know? I would love to take time to realize how how important the handholding was when I first started out doing this kind of work. The clients would say

to me, you know, it's really good that we have these weekly meetings because the next meeting gets me to do the stuff I have to do ahead of time, right? I don't want to keep coming to these meetings and keep telling you, oh, I didn't do it. Oh, I didn't do it. So the meeting itself creates a framework for accountability. It creates something for somebody to bounce up against, you know, between that. And the other thing people would say is they'd say, I couldn't reach you. So I asked myself, what would Paul Lindbergh say? And then I say something. And they were always right. They were always like, that's what I would have said. And between those two things, there was all this value being created. I was like, no kidding. You know, I didn't. I thought it was just all this stuff that I knew, you know, and it was really as much about the accountability as anything else that. And it's amazing how much value that created for people. It's like, oh, I was tired of getting, I was tired of getting on the call and saying I didn't do what I said I was going to do. No, no. Yeah, a hundred percent. So how did, you know, let's just take a step back. How did you get into this? How did, what were you doing before? That's, you know, put you in the place to, to be at the authority level, to, to be able to help people. And you've done a lot of like, you know, the, the kind of backend stuff, like you've built a business and now you want to, you want to scale it, you know, business ops sort of stuff, which that gets really fun and adds a ton of value, right? Like if you're paying for a business coach to take you from 2 million to a hundred million or whatever, whatever it was like, that's when it makes sense. And then people are not looking at, oh, what does this cost? Because the, the

return on investment's there. But if you're really early on in, in your entrepreneurial career, like, like if you double, triple five extra business, where does that get you? Right. Like on, on a ROI standpoint. Yeah. I had a, I had a guy come up to me at a conference and it turns out he and I had had lunch at another conference. So we knew each other and he comes up to me and he says, I want to hire you. And so, you know, Dan Kennedy says something, he says that it's, it's not, it's up to you to tell people what you're worth, but it's not up to you to tell people whether or not they can afford you. And, and that's a pretty interesting idea. And it's a good one, but it's one that I wasn't paying attention to. And this guy's telling me he's got this half million dollar business and I'm telling him he can't afford me. And, and we're just standing there and, you know, in the middle of this show and he's saying, and then he tells me what his vision is. And his vision is to go from this amount of money to that amount of money. And I was like, all right, fine. So we end up, so he ends up hiring me and we end up six folding his business. And, and we did it pretty fast too. I figured out what the one leverage point is. That's what my superpower is. It's like looking at somebody's business and figuring out where the leverage points are and then getting them to do something about those leverage points. And for this guy, I mean, the real secret to their business was I figured out that he had to sell them more stuff up front that he had to make his packages bigger. And when he did that, all of a sudden the business took off like crazy. And it was, and it was a really interesting distinction for me because he was like, he was like, no, I have

to hire you. And I'm like, no, I'm the wrong guy for the job. And when I finally hired him, you know, when I, when he finally hired me, we ended up making a whole batch of money that really was life transforming. So you asked me how I got here and I started and sold two software companies and we were pretty successful as it turns out, you know, when we sold the first company, I had a hundred programmers working for me. So that's a decent sized business. Yeah, no, that's a good, that, I mean, the payroll clips for me are already starting to get scary, right? The, you know, if you're, if you're carrying stuff, right. Like depending on like, if it's a government contract or, you know, what, what is the net payment? You know, you're, you're floating stuff. Like it, it's our pay, our payroll was scary. And we, my clients were banks were international banks who are always good for the money. But the guys who we had as clients were slow payers. And so I would show, I had a big credit line with Citibank, a personal credit line, and I would borrow the money from Citibank, loan it to the company, use that as payroll, and then pray that my, one of my clients would pay me before the payment was due at Citibank. And I did this for years, you know, and this was, it was scary. It always worked out. We eventually sold that company. And then we, I got fired by the guys who bought it. And then we started another one and eventually sold that one. And so I was, I decided to leave the industry. It was too complicated for me. And I was doing, I was doing market research and strategic consulting for giant technology companies, companies like Texas Instruments, EDS, people like that. Bell Atlantic. So I was doing consulting for these big, giant companies. IBM. I told IBM to lose OS2. IBM came to us. Remember OS2? People don't remember OS2. OS2 was

IBM's competitor to Windows. And people who knew better said it was technically superior, but people weren't buying it. They just weren't buying it at the level that IBM wanted. And they hired my company to figure out what the market wanted from OS2 so that people would buy it. So I went out and did some market research and came back and told the guy who ran software and services for IBM that the market had spoken. And the answer was they should get rid of it. They should drop it. And I gave them the reasons why the market said this. And they decided that was the right thing to do. And they didn't make money off my advice, but they saved, I don't know, billions. They saved a lot of money. So just a funny story of intersection. My mom was one of the first employees of Microsoft. And so I grew up probably on the other side, and I was just in this Microsoft bubble. I was on the Astros field shooting t-shirts of Windows 95. And I was dressing up. I was young. I was dressing up as a mouse. And they used to have workshops on how to use Office at the Astrodome. When people at Astros came, come in and understand how to look at a computer. This is cool. And so, yeah, when you said the world was much simpler back then, there was a couple of choices. It wasn't as sophisticated as everything is now. It was radically different. I came from the mainframe world. And in many ways, it was simpler. I did this work. I'm doing this consulting for these giant tech companies. And literally, one day, I wake up with this voice in my head that says, you're not doing your life's work. You're getting older. And you'd better get busy. That was it. And I was like, who said that? Who said that? And I hear the exact same thing again. And I was like, well, all right. I don't know what that means. But I know

what it means I shouldn't continue doing. And I literally quit my job at the end of that week. And I had this great job. I mean, as far as jobs go, I had a great job. I'm not a real long-term employee type. But I had this great job. So I quit it that week. And I ended up that everyone around me is telling me to go be a coach. This is in 1995. And coaching was a new thing then. And everyone around me is telling me that I should be a coach. And I have this saying, which is that if everyone around you is wrong, you're not being coachable. And so and I'm thinking everybody around me is wrong. I don't want to do this thing. And I keep hearing it enough times that I eventually somebody said to me, well, don't coach them, coach their businesses. And I'm like, well, that's something I could do. You know, I understand how to grow businesses. So I stepped into this world. I had no clients. I called everyone I knew who trusted me and told them what I was doing. And I asked them who they knew who would want my support. And I ended up with a couple of clients. And then I did what is now email marketing. And I did it with faxes. I paid... Fax blaspheme. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I can't do that anymore. I paid these people to call software companies and tell them that we were doing this free newsletter and it was going to be faxed to them. And if they wanted it, they had to give us their fax number. And so I built a list of 2000 fax names and I started faxing articles. I had never written anything in my life. And I wrote a piece and faxed it out and did nothing. And I wrote another piece and faxed it out and did nothing. I wrote a third piece that got better and it got me three clients. Nice. And all of a sudden, I

was a writer and I was in business as a coach. And then I figured out that if I got on stage and started speaking, that people would respond to me because I had really good marketing chops. So I started speaking and I was terrible and it was boring. And then I kept doing it and I got good at it. So over time, I got good at speaking and I got good at writing. And that's how you build a coaching business. Speaking and writing. That's pretty much it. I have three published books. But that's how I made the transition was I just realized that I could help Cisco Systems add $100 million to the bottom line and nobody really cared. And I could take, you know, Matt Bertram and add a million dollars to his bottom line and he's going to care a lot. So that's what, you know, I was like, oh, I can help these small businesses. And you don't have to move the needle a lot to make a huge difference in their lives. Now you take somebody who's got a half a million dollar business and you turn it into a $2 million business, which isn't that hard to do if it's got decent products. You turn it into a $2 million business and you've transformed the lives of the owner and everyone who works for them and their families and even their communities. And that's it. I, you know, I want to make a difference in the world and that's how I do it. One of my slogans is changing the world one entrepreneur at a time. And, you know, that's the whole point. Well, it's that's super, super rewarding. Now I'm looking at your site. It's for everybody listening. It's limberg.com, L-E-M-B-E-R-G dot com. And under the programs and products section, you got a lot of different stuff on here, you know, and then, you know, kind of workshops and coaching, a lot of different kind of formats. Could you just kind of high level walk through kind of, I

mean, that that's been over time. I mean, Fax Blasting, I remember Fax Blasting. So like this is a compilation, like especially like even like Dan Kennedy stuff, right? It's like release the vault. It's like, look at all this stuff that I've, you know, rent. What is it? Renegade marketing. I don't know. Like, so like, I mean, years and years of developing this stuff. So I can I can truly see that, like the expertise that that's been acquired over time from from the beginning. And it's super. That was one of the things that super impressed me. I was like, he's got all these different products. I mean, this is years of putting this stuff together and and some of these different names, Formula 5 XL and Merlin Method. And so I was just curious, you could give like kind of an overview of how all these things came into being. Sure. So, you know, different coaches, you mentioned it yourself right at the very beginning that, you know, there's some coaches who focus operationally on the business. My focus is revenue generation. I if I can avoid it, I will avoid looking at their expenses. The only time I ever want to look at someone's expenses is if they're going bankrupt, because, you know, you can improve a business by fixing its expenses. You can prove a business by fixing its revenue or by improving its revenue. If you improve its expenses, well, you can only take those down to zero. There's only so far that you can take those. Whereas with revenue, I can take revenue forever. You know, I can grow someone's revenue for ever. It you know, as long as there's a market there and there's a product that fits the market, we can do we can just keep growing and growing and growing and growing. So my focus is exclusively on the revenue side. And all of my products are all things which generate revenue. And they're all and I would build the product just because that's what was needed next. So

my newest product is probably Sales Voodoo. And Sales Voodoo is all about how to take a company that's selling whatever they're selling. They've demonstrated they can sell it. In other words, people want to buy it, but they don't have a sales team. Right. Most small businesses don't have a sales team. They do marketing and clients come to them, but they don't have but they're not going out to get clients, which is what salespeople do. So I want to hear some stories from you. I'll tell you one quick story. And again, these names kind of continue to change. I've been doing a lot in the B2B space. And really, content marketing has been how we've generated a lot of business. We have kind of sales, like, like digital strategists that also can answer questions, right? Like, so it's it's more a consultative kind of what is your need? And we know the marketing and strategies that will work with that. But I don't have, like, hardcore salespeople going knocking on doors. Right. And if you work with, like, enterprise level clients, there's this whole sales apparatus. And sometimes I get pulled into, like, these lunch meetings that, like, go for two hours and don't go anywhere. And I'm like, I can't, I'm like getting anxious. Right. Yeah. And so I'm like, I, this is not, you know, and so we, you know, I ended up hiring, like, a marketing director from one of these large companies. We were able to keep, keep the client, make, make, make, make him still happy and work on the account, but work on it from our side of the table. Right. And, and so, and, and so what, what we've been able to do in a lot of cases is generate inbound sales. So we had, we had like $120 million company that we closed, like to call close. We've had a couple, like right at a hundred, a hundred million billion dollar companies that, that again, reach out to us. And I just had a meeting with the $4

billion company. First call, spoke to the board, talk to somebody else that works at like a big publicly traded digital agency. And they're like, we've been trying to get in there. And there, I was like, I don't know, they called me, you know? Right. And, and so again, I would like, I just see, you know, SEO, which we do a lot of paid media, like you kind of put the digital marketing funnels together online and, and, and you build yourself up as an authority, an expert put out the right kind of content for the problems and people come attract to you. I think Dan kind of changed the name, but it used to be called like attraction marketing at one point. Tell me about your program. Tell me kind of what you did. Cause there's a lot of different ways to generate a new business. There's a lot of ways to the top of the mountain kind of thing. So when I work with a new client, I figure out what's going to be right for them. And, and there is no right for, there's no like one size fits all right. Like SEO is not right for everybody. And paid media, I'm a big paid media guy, but to me, paid media is not right for everybody. And even if you're running a successful pay, let's say you're running a successful paid campaign and Pete, which means it's successful. How do you know? Cause people are coming to you based on it. Right. But say, for instance, you want to work with, you have a product that's let's choose IBM. Okay. You have a product that would be great for IBM, a service that would be great for IBM, but they're not responding to your paid media ads, right? What do you do? You pick up the phone. You figure it out. People are afraid of the phone. People are afraid of the phone. You figure out how to get to them. You know, there's, there's like a combination of FedEx and phone. And

if you put the FedEx and the phone together, there's nobody you can't reach. Now that doesn't mean you can close them, but there's nobody you can't reach. And the whole point of having a sales team is to go after the people you want to go after. When I was, when I had my software company, I was responsible for bringing in these sales and our software sales were two, $3 million for the software. And then they typically had to spend another five to 10 million implementing. These are not people who are responding to direct response ads. They're not calling up and saying, hey, we need a new banking system. I was calling them up to say, hey, do you want to talk about a new banking system, right? That's called selling. And it's less common than it used to be. So I created sales voodoo for companies who were selling stuff that was north of $5,000 for a sale. And they weren't reaching everyone that they wanted to reach. And they wanted to create a sales team that would actually reach those people. It's not to replace your marketing campaigns. It's in addition to your marketing campaigns. It's another, it's another, I look at direct sales as another marketing channel. And for the right company, it's a great growth path. Yeah, no, a hundred percent. I mean, I think that one of the criticisms that we've had, which, you know, I can see it go both ways is we never really specialized, specialized until recently. And really I've had every account manager build their book of business and specialize in a different area. So that individual's building their book of business in that kind of category. But with content marketing, that is the problem. It's coming from everywhere, right? Now, if you put content to the right type of people, you're going to get more kind of bait in the water for the right type of fish. But, you know, if you're going fishing for whatever, another fish can still bite the hook, right? So, you

know, I think that sales, direct sales is a way to supercharge your business a hundred percent. And you can really target whoever you're looking for and then build that target list and go after it. And then you, everything gets clearer once you have that kind of target persona. Would love to hear kind of more case studies of businesses you helped. And maybe someone listening will be like, man, like I have that similar problem, right? Or maybe problems you've solved, stuff like that. I'd love to hear more about that. Well, you know, the problems are always the same. The problems in, you know, when I taught the people who I coach, the problems are always the same, which is that they don't have enough business. All right. So how are we going to grow their business? And there's only a handful of different ways to do it. You know, and you've been talking, you've been mentioned SEO a couple of times. There's SEO, there's paid traffic, there's content marketing, which I think of in, you know, in 2024, I think that SEO is content marketing. And yeah, and social media, like there's this bleed, right? And even direct response, you can, with retargeting, you can build sequences. But man, I'm telling you, the mailbox is coming back because everybody's at home, right? And no one's doing direct mail. I'm just seeing direct mail being super effective. Like it's like a bell bottoms, right? Like it's like everything swinging on a pendulum, right? Direct mail is great because it's harder, right? Everything that's harder is great. Like if it's harder, people don't want to do it. You're not going to go there. They don't want to go there. It's like I mentioned it a moment ago. To me, it's FedEx. But it's not only FedEx. It's like FedEx or lumpy mail, which is my absolute favorite thing. If I think of all of my favorite things to work with companies on, it's lumpy mail because I like coming up with the concept. You know, we did a,

I worked for an agency. I had an agency as a client. And the agency, they asked me to coach them. And I was clear that to get their agency business, we were going to do lumpy mail. So we sent out, each client was worth a million, a couple of million dollars in revenue over the course of a year. So it was worth spending a few bucks to get these clients. And I came up with this crazy idea, which was we were going to send them a bunch of money. And what we did was we took a rolls, rolls of dollar bills. And we rolled up $20 bills and wrapped it in a big fat rubber band, the kind of stuff that they wrap broccoli in. And, and, and so, and the message and it went with a handwritten card. And the handwritten card said, I wanted to have lunch with you. I wanted to take you out to lunch, but I'm tired of paying. So here's money. Why don't you call me and we'll go have lunch. That was, that was basically, and I was like, it's crazy. It made no sense. And we got a hundred percent response rate on it. Which, which simply meant that every single one that we sent out called us for a lunch date. I mean, nothing, nothing gets people's attention by like dollar bills coming to them in the mail. And it was such a goofy message. You know, the message made no sense at all, but it worked like gangbusters. And it's like, yeah, you come up with these ideas and they're, you know, they're not only are they fun to do, they're fun to implement and then they get results. You know, if you're, if I was talking to coaches, you know, if we have coaches listening to us, think about coaching is you don't need a lot of clients. You just need a few, right. To be making a really decent amount of money, you just need a few clients. So it's like, you don't

have to do these big, broad marketing campaigns because they take a lot of effort and they cost a lot of money and they're going out to a lot of people and you don't have a focus message. But if you, if you use lumpy mail and if you pick up the phone, you can reach the kind of people who you're looking for and you only need a handful of them. So the kind of marketing campaign that we want to do when we're looking, when we're cherry picking and we're really looking for three or four clients for somebody is totally different. You know, Chet Holmes used to talk about his dream 100. And the beauty of the dream 100 idea is it frames the market you were going after, right. And it didn't define a market by, well, we're looking for companies of X size and they're in this industry. We didn't frame it like that. It framed it like, here's like the 20 people who you want to go after and you define them however you want to define them. And it's kind of a, it's kind of a neat, neat idea. And then you go after them with these simple strategies, which don't take a lot of ramping up to do, you know, like where's the phone number? Give me a phone, that kind of thing. You know, oh, give me an address. Okay. I can FedEx something. I follow up with a phone call and boom, we're in business. Yeah. I like being a salesman. I've been a salesman most of my life. Man, Paul, I feel like we've just like cracked the conversation and we're getting to time here. I would love to have you back on for a part two in the future. I would love to just hear like for anyone listening, you know, who have you helped most? What kind of, what is your ideal client? Like that, that, that if they, if they found you, you're like, man, this is like, this is home runs, right? Like you're, this

is, it's, it's an investment. And that's what I think people don't look at marketing coaching. Um, you know, anything is like, oh, it's an expense. It's not an expense. No, it's not an expense. It's an investment because the results are guaranteed. Right. And the results are guaranteed and the, and the multiplier on what you spend, it's huge. Yeah. Well, when you can get to the place where you can guarantee results, it becomes an investment. It's not a crapshoot. It's not, Hey, you're, you're a test case for somebody. It's like, this has been done over and over again. And the confidence level is yes. If you're the right fit and we bring you on as a client, we're going to, we're going to have whatever extra business, like it's going to be investment and it's going to be well worth it. Um, I have never, uh, not got something out of coaching where I put the effort level needed in. Right. So it's also how much effort you put in. And, and also I think, um, your mental frame of mind is super, super important. Like, cause, um, I don't know what the study was, but someone was talking about, it was like a, like a flea or something in a jar and they put like, it kept jumping out of the jar and they put the piece of paper over the jar and then it hit the head of the jar and then stopped hitting its head. And it's like, I can't jump out. And then you take a piece of paper where it won't jump out. And then guess what? When it has kids, those fleas won't jump out because they, they kind of are told DNA whatever, you can't jump higher than this, even though they can. Right. And so I think it's really, really important to, to have a peer group, uh, to, to, to have coach, have coaching invest, um, in personal growth because the ROI is, is out of the park. And if you can do that through a business,

you just get more leverage. Like you said, at the beginning of the podcast, you get more leverage. And so, you know, if you have a half million dollar business team for exit, what does that mean to you? I mean, it's life changing. Right. And so, um, I, I just returned the investment really well. Yeah. Yeah, it does. Right. Like people don't look at that. Right. They're like, they look at the expense and it's like, okay, well, let's measure this in 12 months or 18 months. And then you let me know. Right. Like it, it becomes a moot point. Right. So I had a client and the partner, not the guy who hired me, but his partner says to me one day, he says, they ask, somehow it came up like, why are they paying me this much money? And I said, you know, they want to know why they were paying me that much per day and so on. And I said, well, I said, if we do everything that we said we were going to do here, what's that going to mean to you financially? And the guy thinks about it for a minute and then he says, oh yeah, forget my question. Yeah. Like, it wasn't like the return was so much that it was obvious that, that that's why now you asked me what kind of companies I like working with the most. And it's my, I think about who I don't like to work with. You know, I don't like to work with lawyers and the reason I don't like to work with lawyers isn't because I can help them. I can, and I have, but that lawyers feel like renegotiating an agreement is sport. And, and I don't, I don't play that way. So I, so I don't like taking them on as clients. I don't work with real estate agents and I don't work with insurance companies and I don't work with other agency-based businesses like securities or sales and that sort of thing. Mortgage sales don't, doesn't really

work for me because the stuff that I know how to do for them isn't really going to work. It doesn't work for this kind of company, but it works for almost everyone else. You know, my favorites are probably e-commerce companies and specifically supplements companies. Like I love working with supplements companies, you know, and I, I helped a supplement company grow 5X in six months and it was like, oh, that was really cool. You know, in a very short period of time. And I ran a supplement company for a while and I, I really liked that. Those guys are great. See e-commerce companies are great to work with. And then I, because of my background in software companies, any software or SaaS companies, those are kind of my sweetest of sweet spots. But that said, you know, healthcare businesses, dentists and chiropractors and, you know, anybody in the healthcare space. And, you know, I could just go on and on. I've worked with so many different industries. So as long as they're not the ones that don't fit into my, you know, into my sweet spot, everybody else really works because all we're looking to do is to figure out where the leverage points in the revenue growth are. And if we can keep the expenses relatively the same and grow revenue, I can make those owners a whole, you know, ton of money and consistently do. So that's kind of, you know, what's my sweet spot. Paul, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you? I know I've mentioned your site a few times. I didn't know if LinkedIn or is there social media channels where you're posted on that they could follow you? Like what's, what's the best place to get in touch with you? The best place to find me is on my website, which is Lemberg.com. That's L-E-M-E-R-G. And there's a contact page there and I can be found there. You can look at my success stories there. You can look on the blog. There's all sorts of

information there. You know, I'm active. I'm active on LinkedIn. If you go to Facebook, it's just my photographs. But, but my photographs are cool. They won't make you any money, but they're cool to look at. I have a fine arts degree, so I have to do something with that. I have a fine arts degree in MBA. It's a weird combo. No, I love that. I love that. So everybody go, go check them out. It was a pleasure having you on. Stick around. We'll make sure this is gets fully uploaded. But if anybody had any kind of value from this, you got something from it, please share it with somebody. Please like, comment, follow, subscribe, leave a review. Be fantastic. Thank you all again. Until the next time, bye-bye for now. Bye-bye.