How To Be A Guru (free advice)

My good friend, Big B (aka Bedros Keuilian), is the guru of creating gurus. He shows you exactly how to become one in this call here: Be the Guru

Here’s a rough outline of what we covered…

Craig: Hey, this is Craig Ballantyne from OnlineSuperProfits.com, Financial Independence Monthly and of course EarlyToRise.com. Now a very special call today because it’s something that we have not talked about ever before and it’s with an expert who is the guru of making gurus in our industry and also all over in different marketplaces in the internet world, from dentist to doctors to trainers. So it’s Bedros Keuilian. Welcome to the call, Bedros.

Bedros: Hey, Craig, thanks for having me, buddy. I appreciate it.

Craig: Yeah, it’s always great to speak with you. Usually, we talk about getting more clients online and offline and we talk about Facebook, YouTube and stuff but today we’re going to turn us on our heads and talk about how you’ve helped essentially create dozens if not hundreds of gurus in the fitness, nutrition, doctor, dentist and personal development space, all these things. This actually could be used in any industries so anybody who’s listening that’s not in one of those spaces, don’t worry about it because you’re going to be able to show us how to do it and it’s because you went through a 9-, 12- or 15-year school of hard knocks certification, which I believe if a normal person went through it, it’d be only two years but because it was you, it was 15.

Bedros: That’s exactly right.

Craig: But seriously, you are the Armenian guru so tell us how it all got started. How did you end up on this path? I know you didn’t start out to be the teacher of gurus but how did you get to where you are today?

Bedros: That’s a really good question and I often look back and see the journey and just kind of laugh at myself about it but it really started off with me trying to figure out how I could attract more personal trainers who are my clients into my marketing funnel and into my machine, that I call it. Now keep in mind, according to the IDEA Fitness Association, there are roughly 110,000 certified personal trainers worldwide so that already makes my market very narrow, very tight. Add to that that—this is my good estimation—70% to 75% of those certified personal trainers are really ones who are just kind of passing through the industry. They might work for a big box gym as a trainer and they’re on their way to becoming a chiropractor, an actor, who knows?

So there’s really a small, finite number of trainers who are entrepreneurial-minded that want to open to up their own personal training gym or their fitness boot camp or going to look for a business coach like me. So I knew real quickly that in order for me to be able to attract the entrepreneurial-minded trainers and for me to kind of make the money that I want, which was multiple seven figures a year, I needed to take the business-minded trainers and get them to buy from me as frequently as possible and to move up my ascension ladder as fast as possible. So I want them to come in at a low barrier such as an email opt-in or a $99 product and then quickly work up the ascension ladder to a $500, $600 or multi-thousand dollar product, coaching such as the masterminds that you and I run, all the way to coming to live events like the Fitness Business Summit and buying into my franchise business model that costs $10,000 and has a monthly franchise royalty fee.

So it’s taking more money from the same person over and over again in exchange for adding tremendous value their life and speed. Now that’s the model for most gurus. You have your list, you have a certain number of people on that list who are going to buy, the rest are kind of spectators and your job as a guru is to move them up your ascension ladder as quickly as possible 1) to buy them speed and 2) to buy them success with the least number of falls and failures as possible.

So my journey to doing this, it took me 9+ years. In fact, Fitness Business Summit which is my big annual event that takes place in a couple of weeks here, we’ve got officially 638 people registered for it. Man, I’ve got to tell you when I did this in 2007, I had no idea had to put on a three-day seminar with hundreds of people. I had no idea that there was a way to make an offer during my weekend so that I could recoup my money. So the first two years that I’ve put on my big seminar workshop, I was just teaching content and didn’t really know about back of the room sales, didn’t really know about how to put on an event that was entertaining and educating, that positioned me as a person of authority and celebrity.

So it took a lot of hard knocks and it took a lot of failures to get to a place where I could teach this to people now in different niches like Dr. Mark Costas who’s a dentist, Dr. Peter Osbourne who is a chiropractor and functional medicine specialist, Michael Parella in the martial arts space, Lori Kennedy in the holistic nutrition space and then the list goes on and on, some pretty big internet marketers as well who are in the make money space. All of these people in less than two years are now putting on events and working those events to massive. I won’t mention their names but some of these people are already making seven figures from a weekend like this. Just to give you an idea, it took me seven years to hit a $500,000 weekend from the seminar but that’s because I did not know what to do and how to run these things. There is no manual on becoming a guru or an expert.

So the only way you’re going to move people up that ascension ladder, Craig, is to be an authority and a celebrity to these people. If we just come to them as a generalist, you’re not going to have that passionate fan and follower who wants to buy all your products. If you come to them as an expert, they might buy a product or two from you and then go on and look for other experts as well. If you’re an authority in the industry, a force to be reckoned with, then you are going to make more sales and see more people go up your ascension ladder. Finally, if you can combine the power of authority and celebrity, well now you’ve got something really magical where you can take a niche market such as, like I said the dental world of Mark Costas. He’s now the expert dentist who wanted to grow his dental practice and then sell it. It grew quickly in two years. This guy is running massive events.

So it takes a formula, a tight niche market plus authority and celebrity positioning plus social proof equals you becoming a guru and when you become that guru, you are going to make more money from more people. The limiter of how much money you can charge for your coaching, for your products, for your seminars and for your workshops is removed. There are at least that you and I know four, maybe five people in our fitness industry who somewhat do what I do, coach and consult personal trainers. Every day, I get offers from people who want to join our coaching programs. No one bats an eye at our $25,000-a-year fee to get in yet most of my so-called competitors are charging between $5,000 and $8,000 for the year.

Now what’s the difference? The difference is I position myself as a person of authority and celebrity in that niche market but I’ve gone one further. I’ve demonstrated my proof. I’ve showcased the proof over and over again through many different success stories, social proof and because of that, I’m where I am today.

Now a great example of that is Diana’s book. My wife, Dianna, recently wrote a book called The Recipe Hacker. She got a publishing deal. I helped her get a publishing deal by simply going through bookstores, finding all of the different books in her industry and her niche and writing down the names of the publishers and the titles of the books. So she had 20 publishers and 20 titles and what she did was she sent the first three chapters of her book, like actual printed versions of her books to the publishers in addition to the application from their websites. So she filled out the application on their website, hit Send, printed it out, put it in a FedEx envelope along with the first three chapters and sent it to all these publishers. Within about a month and a half, she had 2 of the 20 publishers reach out to her and then she chose the one that was the best fit for her.

Now what we needed to do then was to prove to this publisher that she’s not just a one-hit wonder and she’s not a typical first-time author. Just to give you an idea, a first-time author in most niche markets according to this publisher will only sell about 1,600 copies of their physical book in one year. So this publisher really looks for you as the author to drive the sales. They want to know how many people do you have following you on your Facebook, how big is your email list, what kind of influence do you have with the others in your industry because they’re not about to go and invest in you since they know that the typical author will only sell out of the gate 1,600 units in a year.

So we had to show them that she’s not the typical author. What we did is we spent a couple of years ahead of time with her blog, building an email list, as you know, with Real Healthy Recipes. She had at the time it was being published about 55,000 fans on Facebook and a great relationship with those fans. With those fans, she did a lot of guru positioning in her industry as someone who takes kind of comfort food recipes and hacks them by removing the dairy, the soy, the sugar and the grains. She kept putting up sexy photos two to four times a day of recipes she did. Some of the recipes, she put up the photo and the recipe right on Facebook. Others, she would put up this photo of the recipe and then a link to the actual recipe that goes to her blog where people would then be active on her blog and then have a chance to opt in for her free recipe book that she had in the upper right-hand corner, kind of a PDF version of 25 Best Healthy Fat-Burning Desserts I believe is what it was.

Now that she had this following and the book came to fruition, we reached out to friends such as you and all the other kind of big guys and gals in the fitness info space and we set up a launch at the end of last December, a couple of months ago. The launch was real simple. It was to sell as many books as possible on the front end, physical books of her published book so that she could end up not only as a New York Times bestseller but as someone who proved to her publisher that hey, I can really move units.

Here’s why: Unless there’s someone really famous and popular and you already have this celebrity about yourself, you’re not going to get an advance from the publisher. They’re not going to give you a million-dollar advance or half a million-dollar advance or even a hundred thousand-dollar advance for your book. It’s you. It’s going to cost you money to even publish your book and get it out there.

So what we did then is we got all of your affiliates over a four-day period to mail out for the book, Recipe Hacker, and the offer was just pay $5.95 and you’ll get the book for free. Then once the people on their list paid the $5.95, the book was in the mail. Once they paid the money on the credit card, put it in their shopping cart then they saw three one-click upsells and those upsells were all digital. I believe it was a $17 upsell, an $11 upsell and a $9 upsell, three one-click upsells and it ended up making our affiliates a nice chunk of change or takeaway, just to give you an idea, on the free front end book, free book, just paid for shipping was like 32% on average.

So we got 32% of the people that hit the sales page to buy the book for the cost of shipping. Then some people bought all three upsells, some people bought none of the upsells but this ended up being almost half a million-dollar gross revenue that was generate. Of course, our affiliates made a nice chunk of change. We ended up selling 16,000 copies of the physical book. We made a total of 21,000 sales on the front end just to give you an idea. But the publisher ran out of books. They couldn’t print books fast enough for us because they had no idea that we could sell so many. Quite frankly, I didn’t think we would sell so many. I thought we would sell maybe 5,000 to 8,000 copies of the book but it was an amazing offer. And the script that I wrote for her that she recorded for the VSL, video sales letter, was real killer and stars in a little of the lines and before you have a 21,000 front end sale launch.

So what we did since we couldn’t more than 16,000 books from the publisher without waiting eight weeks is immediately during the launch on day 2 ½, we switched from the physical version to the digital version of the book and believe it or not, the take rate the same. So we had to change the offer to hey, the book goes in the mail to now there’s a digital version and you can get instant access to the digital version of the book but it worked just as well. The take rate did not change. Our affiliates were happy and at the end of the day we sold 21,000 front end sales which made the publisher very happy. Now she’s in the process of negotiating from a position of power with her publisher because they were blown away by how this woman came out of nowhere and instantly became a guru in her industry.

It’s the same with Mark Costas in the dental space. It’s the same with Michael Parella in the martial space who just ran his version of Fitness Business Summit which was the Martial Arts Business Summit. It ended up selling 34 people into a $17,000/year coaching program and ended up having 18 sponsors at $5,000 apiece for his live event, never mind all the other—and he’s got a franchise like I do called I Love Kickboxing. He ended up selling a handful of his franchises, each at $39,000. So you could see how quickly a three-day weekend, and you and I of course spoke at his event, like that could turn into a lot of money if done right and if you position yourself as a person of authority and celebrity, as a guru. That’s really it. That’s the formula to it.

Craig: All right, so let’s recap that formula as niche market plus authority positioning plus social proof to get that guru status, correct?

Bedros: Correct.

Craig: Yeah and then in addition, that position of power is so great. What you did is even in the book name, you did the authority positioning with the Recipe Hacker.

Bedros: Yes, in fact the book was supposed to be called Real Healthy American Comfort Foods and I cringed when I saw that. Apparently, the publisher had a board meeting every Thursday about the book titles and this is what all the great minds came up with. Now keep in mind, they’re not marketers. They’re publishers. They don’t understand what the market needs. They kind of take a guess. It’s no different than being in the dark and throwing it randomly towards a dartboard whereas you and I can take that dart and aim it towards the bull’s eye, pretty darn close to hitting it because we know our market, we understand marketing and we understand the need that people have and the pain they need solved.

As Diana was kind of pumping out these recipes over the last couple of years, I’d say dang, you’re really a recipe hacker. You take these recipes and you hack them and make them super healthy. And I also know that Tim Ferriss was known as a life hacker. We also know because we study the internet because that’s where people are these days, on social media and different media lists that the word “hacker” is a trending word. So what do you do? You ride on the trending phrases that are happening.

So it’s easy enough for me to just kind of pick up the phone, call the publisher and say, “You don’t know who I am but I’m your author’s husband and I would like to propose that you change the name of the book to The Recipe Hacker” and it was sheer silence as though the good Lord Himself had spoken. They were like gosh, that’s brilliant. But the reality was it was just common sense for me to call it The Recipe Hacker yet it was something so profound for them. So picking a name for the product, which really speaks to the hook of the product is really important. You can’t just have this bland name that doesn’t identify who you are and the problem that you solved.

Craig: Great. Rounding that up again: book name gave her that authority positioning, the social proof was in the launch and really the niche market she created on her own several years ago and then that made her a bigger guru and that gave her a position of power, which is a really incredible formula. Now somebody who’s listening who’s not in the nutrition industry is saying, “No, but my industry is different, Bedros. This is not going to work for me.” So what about someone who’s a real estate agent? What about someone who is in the finance world? What’s your argument? I know that obviously it’s not different and it will work but what would you say to that person?

Bedros: What I would simply tell them is if someone like me can pull this off in the personal training space because if you remember about four years ago, I had a DVD entitled The No Title DVD. In fact, the DVD case was just one DVD inside a little case that looked like there was a plain white paper stuck on the outside of the cover with a question mark. My sales video was very similar to the sales video that I had Diana make. By the way, Diana’s sales video was two minutes and one second long and my sales video for the no title DVD was three minutes 14 seconds. So this doesn’t have to be a long video when you’re giving away something for free in exchange for the cost of shipping.

But basically my offer was hey, I’ve done something that I’ve never done before. I’ve filmed one of my private seven-figure formula mastermind meetings and you can be a fly on the wall, watch the video and get the information to grow your personal training business absolutely free. All I have is one favor to ask of you. I will send you this DVD for free for the cost of shipping only. I charged $4.95 because $4.95 we didn’t actually cover the cost of making that one DVD and shipping it. So I charge $4.95 for the DVD and I said, “All I ask of you is you watch this no title DVD” which had a question mark on it because it needed a title, “and help me name it. If you help me name it then I will send it to you.” So watch the video, name it, email me what name you think I should title it so that I could sell this thing for a few hundred dollars and it’ll be an info product.

Now keep in mind I’m in a very tight, small niche. We ended up selling 2,500 copies of this for $4.95 and we put people through three upsells. Upsell #1 was my Close Clients product which is $97. Upsell #2 was the Art of Selling Fitness which is a $597 product that we discounted for that at $297. And upsell #3 was try Fit Pro Newsletter free for 30 days and if you decide to say I’m for it, we’ll simply bill you $69 a month. It was a recurring product.

So this one simple DVD that I filmed inside of the mastermind that I gave away in exchange for them—and you always have to have a reason why. Diana’s big reason why was: my mission and purpose is to help as many people as possible in 2015 because keep in mind the launch was December of 2014. So for me to help so many people, I bought a limited number of copies of this book and I want to give it away in exchange for you reading it and reviewing it for me. So you always have to have a reason why, as says in his book Influence. My reason why was to help me name the DVD. Man, you can watch the DVD for free and use it, use the information and then I’ll have a name that I can eventually sell this product with.

Anyone in finance or make money or any kind of industry, all they simply need to do is 1) create a following of people. You don’t need to be following. When Diana had her book launch, she had great affiliates and she had an email list of about 10,000 people and 50,000 Facebook fans. So as long as you can have a blog or platform of some kind, you can build an email list. It can even be a YouTube channel that just drives people to a squeeze page or you build an email list and a fanpage. Then you can make an offer like this to these people who want to then improve their finances, improve their health, improve their wellbeing, and learn to buy homes with no money down. The formula is the same.

If you think about what Dean Graziosi did, it was this formula. He’s a friend of yours and mine and he’s a bit old school so he did it on television which is a great medium. He was essentially selling his book, How to Buy Homes with No Money Down through infomercials and when you called, you would go through some upsells. One of the upsells if I remember correctly because I remember talking to him at Joe Polish’s [phonetic 00:23:16] mastermind was, “Would you like to expedite the shipping for an additional $19?” It wasn’t just three upsells for him. “Do you want to try our coaching program?” It cost something like $3,000 for the year and it was like this big mass group coaching program. So one simple $19.95 book that he hawked on an infomercial on television ended up getting him I believe something like $1,200 per sale which was amazing.

So the formula works from real estate to finance to personal training to nutrition. The problem is most people fail to realize this model and to realize that for it to work you have to position yourself as a person of authority. So let’s just kind of take a moment to look at how Dean did it. He didn’t just do a normal infomercial where, “Hi, I’m Dean Graziosi. I bought all these homes with no money down and here are some of these students that have done that” because he’s just a pitch man if he’s doing that.

See, nobody wants to buy it from the pitch man. Instead if you remember if you go back to YouTube, and everybody listening to this should YouTube some Dean Graziosi infomercials, he was being “interviewed” on a talk show about this man who discovers this way of buying homes with no money down that could give the average American an opportunity to own property and create real wealth. So he was being interviewed on this makeshift interview show and now because you’re being interviewed, you’re at least an expert and very quickly because you’re being interviewed and you wrote a book, you’re now a person of authority because he did write the book. Then of course, guess what? He’s being interviewed on TV and if you’re seen on TV, you’re a celebrity.

That’s the magic formula – authority, celebrity, being spoken to a list and the list is obviously the viewers, the watchers of that particular infomercial, and then the offer. So it was a very low cost of I believe $19 for his book. Then once you call, you don’t even go to a website. You were going through some upsells and I think that had up to like five or six upsells he said. And Dean Graziosi is a guy who runs a hundred million dollar-a-year company so this definitely works in every space.

Craig: That brings up a very good question. A lot of people can get that. They’re okay, I see how this all works but the biggest first step, I think, is in getting that position of authority in any way, like how the heck am I going to get on TV? How am I going to get interviewed? So what are some of the ways that people can build that using the internet, using local media and all that sort of stuff to get that first foot in the door that hey, I’m at least a celebrity to a small number of people in this niche market? Because that is a really important part of the formula.

Bedros: You’re right. That is and that could potentially be a road block for people because how do I get up on TV? Now the good news is you don’t have to get in TV anymore. When Dean was doing this even a few years ago, he was doing this because the internet was not what it is now. Let’s all remember that internet is so brand new. I mean this thing is new. So it’s so quickly evolving and we can now slice and dice our audience quickly through Facebook alone, never mind Google and YouTube. Even with Google and YouTube now, you can slice and dice the audience that you want to pick, psychographically, gender, demographically, geography. So you can knock it out of the park.

I just did a one-day workshop in Calgary, Craig, for our Fit Body Boot Camp franchise and I took our sales page for our discovery day that we’re doing to do—it’s called the discovery day that we did—and I just said show this to personal trainers in these provinces. I think it was Alberta and BC. We ended up getting seven to eight qualified people there and I ended up selling three of them on a Fit Body Boot Camp franchise. I have a list but my list is a mixed list of trainers all over the world so I wasn’t about to mail out to my massive email list for a discovery day I’m doing in Cochrane, Canada. So what I did is I said Facebook, show this to people who are in these particular provinces. I even drilled it down to a few specific cities that I knew that we could grow Fit Body Boot Camp franchises in.

I had qualified people pay $497 to come to workshop and the idea was it’s absolutely for free. Just pay $495 to secure your seat and then once you show up, I’ll give your $495 back. Of course, my offer was now that you’re here, I could apply the $495 to your franchise fee and therefore you’re going to pay less for your franchise fee. We ended up selling more franchises than I thought to the eight people because one of them ended up buying a territory or what we call a region of three locations.

So the formula works. You can slice and dice. When Dean was on TV, he did not have the access that we do to the internet. Today, you simply have to create a YouTube channel which makes you as good as seen on TV. A YouTube channel is very important for a person of authority. Gone are the days of using a flip cam or your iPhone and making a shaky video. If you’re going to do this guru thing, you’ve got to play up five, six, seven or ten levels. So YouTube video and great video.

And when I say great video footage, you can literally go to Craigslist and find a kid or two who have the camera and editing skillsets to make this super awesome for you where you can make instructional videos where you’re teaching, it looks awesome and you’re showcasing your lifestyle. You’re using your clients as examples. This is how you position social proof without jamming it down their throat. And there are no shadows. There are no audio issues. There are no lighting problems. High quality video makes you as good as seen on TV and because you can actually manipulate what keywords those YouTube videos come up for on Google, you can now say hey, someone’s searching for “how to buy real estate with no money down.” You can position your videos for finance, for how to buy real estate, for nutrition and recipes, for personal training business success. That’s how you become an authority and celebrity on the internet.

Of course, each video then has to end with a call to action. What I typically teach is at the end of every video where you’re teaching, educating and positioning yourself, you just point down and say hey, be sure to click the link in the description box down below to go to my blog or to get my free report. It’s as simple as that. Now you’re sucking out traffic from YouTube and Google, taking them down into your blog or to a squeeze page where they end up on your email list and you start doing more relationship-building, the know, like and trust factor that you and I always teach our mastermind members.

Let’s say you’ve got that. Well, what else do you do? You definitely need a platform, a soapbox and what better place to get this platform and soapbox than on Facebook? That’s another great place for you to get a following because if you’ve got this following, you can now suck out some of these people from your Facebook fanpage again onto your email list. Every now and again, I’ll run a Facebook post that I do with my fanpage. I’ll promote it to my fans. Because my fans are personal trainers, I’ve got 56,000 fans as personal trainers, I’ll promote it and I’ll give a tidbit of information. Let’s say 7 Steps to Growing Your Personal Training Business, I’ll give you step #1 and 2. I’ll also give the next five steps in my free report by clicking the link here. I’ll suck out traffic from Facebook, my fans and I’ll send them to a squeeze page where they can get the entire 7 Step report in exchange for giving me their email address.

This is a great way of taking these fans from Facebook onto my email list. You’re going to give them the know, like and trust factor, exposing them to my YouTube videos so now this is good as As Seen on TV. Believe it or not, man, I’m telling you I’ll walk into gyms and the way I’m greeted by personal trainers these days is completely different from the way I was greeted before when I just had an email list because now they’ve seen me on Facebook, they’ve been in my house, they’ve been in my office and they’ve been in my car because they’ve watched my YouTube videos. So they have this deeper relationship with me and they view me as a celebrity.

Now I know I’ve manufactured my celebrity status. That’s what every marketer needs to do if they want to be a high paid guru. You manufacture your celebrity status and I walk into the gym it’s like holy crap, I’ve seen you on TV and it’s as good as them seeing whatever, some TV celebrity walking into that gym. That means if I have that authority power and I have that celebrity power so the authority power comes from me then educating them on my email list on all these awesome things that I’m good at, that I can make them good at, getting more clients, generating more referrals, charging more, systematizing their business, working less hours. I teach all that through my emails and my blog posts but I also teach that stuff in the cool, fun way on my YouTube channel. So they go man, he’s not only teaching this stuff; he’s actually living the lifestyle. Look at him! This is great!

So you educate. You entertain. You have authority for education, celebrity through your Facebook fanpage by showcasing hey, I’m in the back of the limo going. A simple picture I took last week, I was in the back of the limo, the car service. They were sending me a limo instead of just a town car. So I’m in the back of a limo and it’s just me. I take a picture of me and my bag pack in this empty room in the back of a limo and posted on Facebook that hey, I’m headed off to Calgary to run this discovery day for Fit Body Boot Camp owners.

Look at all that one picture says: that this guy doesn’t drive himself. He doesn’t drive himself to get to work. He’s in the back of a limo doing this. I didn’t talk about that I’m in the back of a limo. I talked about wow, this limo is really hauling ass and that bottle of gin right there is about to topple over because the driver is in a hurry to get me to LAX so I can fly out to Calgary to run a workshop.

So it positions me as he’s important enough to be in the back of a limo yet I’m not throwing that out there in everyone’s face. It says that I’m going somewhere important. I’m going to the airport to run a workshop which implies that people are paying to see me, to work with me which is very important. So there’s a lot of guru positioning that happens in one simple post without sounding douche-y or kind of ego-driven, etc. That’s the whole process of manufacturing this celebrity.

Of course, what else can you do? You can easily write a book like Mark Costas, the dentist we were talking about is writing a book for his industry. He’s going to do exactly what Diana did but for his industry, for what I did with the no title DVD. Peter Osborne, the Functional Medicine coaching client that I have, he’s writing a book for his industry. He’s going to sell it for the cost of shipping and then he’s going to put people through one-click upsells and they’re going to buy some of his information seminars, they’ll come to his owners and then he’ll move them into his higher level coaching programs that I’ve taught him to create.

So all of these coaching clients who I kind of taught the guru formula to really do the same thing – a free low-end offer to a list that they’ve built and have a relationship with, an affinity with. The offer leads to upsells that make them more money and positions them further. Some of these upsells might end up leading to a seminar or a workshop of some sort depending on if a person took all three upsells. That makes them far more qualified to come to a workshop. If you took all three upsells, I might say hey, congratulations! I’ll send you a separate email. Congratulations, you and I are going to get on the phone to do a getting to know you call. I want to get to know you better and I want to get to know you better because I see that you are really serious about your success and you purchased all three of the products that I offered you. So I want to get on the phone for 15 minutes with you. You might eventually have a sales rep do that for you and you don’t even get on the phone.

But it’s just a free thing, a getting to know you call and that getting to know you call will take that person who’s super highly qualified and move them into a why don’t you come to a free one-day workshop that I’m doing? Or it’s $2,000, but it’ll just $500 to come to this one-day workshop that I’m doing. You and I run those workshops all the time and we typically have a 50% close rate. So if we have ten people in that workshop, we’ll be able to close five of them into a mastermind of $25,000 per year. That’s effectively the formula.

So a book, a YouTube channel of positioning you as a person of authority, a Facebook following and then of course an email list where they get to hear from you often. Then from there, the sky’s the limit. You decide if you want to run seminars, if you want to run franchises, if you want to run coaching programs and then I could custom-tailor kind of how your guru positioning should look and how your messaging to your list should be to get the outcome that you want.

Craig: Yeah, and you had one more formula in what we had been discussing before we got into this call. It’s a formula to help people take what you just told them, which is amazing information, and do it even faster. So talk about how you can increase the speed of becoming a guru and the formula there.

Bedros: Yeah. So we were talking about where you invite your list to a seminar or a workshop, kind of like we were just talking about and you can move people onto a recurring program or send them to higher level coaching. So effectively the amount of money that’s invested by you is how fast you can become a guru. There are two things that happen. One, the more a person spends with you—and I believe it was Derek Halpern that talked about this, recency, frequency, monetary—so the more recently someone buys from you, if I bought from you right now, Craig, and within me hitting the purchase button, I get a call from you from your office or an email that says hey, Craig wants to get on the phone with you and talk to you about a discovery day that you can do with him, well I’m more likely to buy the next thing that you have. That’s the recency.

The more frequently I buy from you, the more likely I am to buy from you again. But one of the biggest factors is monetary. The more money I spend with you, the more likely I am to spend more, basically give you more of my money. Now this is obviously in exchange for value. We’re not just out there extracting people’s money and then taking it to the bank. That same formula works for us as gurus.

So I assume if you’re listening to this call then you have to be willing to spend a nice chunk of change to build your “guruism” I guess is what I would call it. If you want to keep it on a shoestring budget, it might take you a few years to do. But if you are willing to invest in a great videographer, which isn’t going to be a lot by the way. You might spend $1,000 or even $2,000 for a weekend of filming and then maybe an additional $1,000 for editing so there’s three grand invested but in that one weekend, you can pump out 15 to 20 five- to eight-minute awesome teaching videos that are all done so well in different spots because in one weekend, you can do three of them in your house if you’ve got a nice house, you can do three to five of them in your office, you can do a couple of them in your car as you’re kind of driving with your car, you can do one while you’re walking through a park and teaching.

But if you’re willing to spend the money on that, if you’re willing to get a ghostwriter to write a book if you don’t have the time or desire to write your book, if you’re willing to spend the money to get in front of the publisher to get published or to self-publish a book and be willing to buy 10,000 copies upfront, knowing that you’re willing to spend the money to get the affiliates to promote for you. Because in every industry, there are affiliates.

A couple of years ago, we saw Dean Graziosi who has been doing super well with infomercials take things online. In fact, I was one of the first guys that, I think I was the first guy to teach him how to run Facebook ads. He passed it on to his marketing team and they started running Facebook ads instead of just doing infomercials. A couple of years ago, if you remember and I think maybe Early to Rise might have been an affiliate of this, Dean had a big launch for his How to Buy Real Estate product and tons of affiliates jumped onboard. But you have to be willing to spend the money on those affiliates, whether it’s spending the money to woo them, to send them stuff.

I remember Eben Pagan from what I remember correctly when he decided that he wanted to go to the make money space, he put on a massive space for like a hundred of the top internet marketers in Las Vegas. This was only a story that I’ve heard but I don’t know if he offered to pay them $10,000 to attend this seminar that he’s putting on in Vegas that he’s paying for. He pays for their room, their flight, obviously the food and beverage for the seminar. I think the thing was that he would pay you $10,000 if you came to his seminar and you’re one of those big internet marketers who got a special invite, if you came to his seminar, left and said that you didn’t get any value, he’d give you ten grand.

Basically, it was him coming out into that space from the dating niche because he was David E. Angelo. That was his pen name for Double Your Dating, the product that made $25 million a year and he was going to teach this top internet marketers how he did his but it was his way of getting aligned with the top internet marketers so that as his creates his make money online product and goes onto their niche, he would have them as affiliates. So talk about coming to them with the ultimate giving hand. He put on a seminar, paid for their flight and hotel and then to promise them that if you don’t like the stuff that I taught you, if this isn’t life-changing, ground-breaking and it doesn’t help your business, then I’ll give you ten grand for coming out.

Now this probably a “handful” of affiliates that he did this with but all it takes is a handful of really good affiliates to make a giant payday for you. Again, you have to be willing to spend the money just like those of your customers who spend the most money are most likely to ascend up your funnel the quickest. If you want to spend the money for the quality of videos, for creating an awesome book, putting together a killer seminar, essentially buying and building an amazing relationship and loyalty with your affiliates then you will be a guru faster.

Craig: That’s awesome, man. Now we only have a few minutes. Just give us a real quick outline of how the guru gets people into the live seminars and sells them into the higher level of coaching.

Bedros: Yes, a very good question. So there are several ways and I’m going to outline them now. Way #1 is you’re going to build that email list. When you have an email list, you literally have a captive audience. When you have an email list, you can sell them for example a coaching program. Here’s one that we did. We did the Fitness Business Ignition coaching program. It was four months long and it started I believe in December for only like $199 per month. You get a webinar each month where I could teach you how to grow your fitness business and then you get a two coaching calls a month with us. We had something like a couple of hundred trainers sign up for that.

Now the formula was that they’d graduate the program. Basically pay $199 for all four months and if you graduate the program, they get to month #4, you could come to my big live event, Fitness Business Summit absolutely free. In fact, you could come to the pre-event date—so Fitness Business Summit is March 27 to 29 but on the 26th, they get a bonus workshop just for them and free entry to Fitness Business Summit.

That right there, if I got half of those 200 to stay onboard for four months, they’re going to come to Fitness Business Summit and the pre-day. Here’s why the pre-day is important. If at Fitness Business Summit I plan on selling the audience a high-end coaching program, well I’m going to go into the summit with a lot less anxiety and stress if on the pre-day I’ve already sold a dozen or two dozen people into my coaching program. So the 26th is the pre-day. We’re running three workshops for the Functional Aging people, for the Info Mastermind that you and I run and for the 7 Figure Formula mastermind that Cabel and I run. So just on that pre-day alone, we’ll probably end up getting somewhere between a dozen to a dozen and a half people into our coaching programs even before Fitness Business Summit starts the next day. So these are little masterminds and workshops that happen the day before that people get either as bonuses for signing up for these virtual coaching programs that I’ve done or they’re just paying extra to come to the pre-day. So there’s an opportunity to sell them ahead of time and make them an irresistible offer. If they don’t buy then that’s okay. I still have three more days to sell them the next days which is really awesome.

Another way to fill up these seminars is to really make a big deal out of them ahead of time. One thing I like to do is three months before, I tell my whole list that I’m having this big giant event that’s dedicated to helping personal trainers grow their business and I’m going to have two people as kind of VIPs and I’m giving a scholarship to two people who can’t afford to come but want to grow their training business. So on my blog, all these people will write their reasons why they deserve to win that scholarship, that VIP scholarship where we pay for their flight, their hotel and access to Fitness Business Summit. We get hundreds of entries and submissions. Well, two people will win that. The rest of those people we’ll reach out to via email or Facebook and say hey, unfortunately you didn’t win but I’d like to take $100 off of your registration ticket of $397. So here’s another way of filling this up.

Of course, the third way is through affiliates. There are affiliates in my space just like there are affiliates in every space. But really one of the biggest ways is through your email list and through letting them know that this is a non-pitch event, meaning all my presenters are not pitching. The only “pitch” that happens are the offers that I make for my coaching program. I don’t allow my presenters to pitch which is why I pay for my presenters to fly in, I pay for their hotel and I ask them to speak. I always say that I will reciprocate and come speak at their event when they want me to speak and add value. So my presenters are there to add value and to teach, not to pitch their products. I’m the only one allowed to pitch so I have a non-pitch event. This really works out well when people are so used to getting pitched left and right at seminars.

So the formula becomes kind of simple when you can reach out to your email list and have early bird registrations and then of course VIP registration lists where they get this other bonus. It’s not rocket science to build this up. You just have to have these different funnels working all the time to give you reasons to build them up, like I said the virtual coaching programs that ends at Fitness Business Summit so timely so that they can get the access to FBS for free but really they paid for it over the four months when they gave that $199. Does that make sense?

Craig: That is just fantastic stuff. We didn’t get through everything I wanted to ask you about but there’s just a great model here for someone to go and launch themselves from zero to guru, I suppose might be the right phrase for it. But we’ll have to come back actually and go over a few more things. I know I’ll come up with a few questions and I know people listening will have a few questions. But for now, if people want to ask you questions, if they want to get personal coaching from you on this, what is the best solution for this?

Bedros: One of the best solutions is just to find me on Facebook and to send me a private message and I’ll connect with Joan, my assistant, who can then either put them on a call with me or Joan could give them whatever information they’re looking for. But it’s really that. I’m very active on Facebook so the easiest way is to contact me there. Excellent.

Craig: Thank you very much, Bedros. Like I said, we’ll be on another call to finish this off. I really look forward to it. You’re really helped me out and I know that you’ve helped out everybody who’s listening to this call. So thank you, good sir. Is there anything else you wanted to mention before we stop this version 1.0?

Bedros: Well, there is that. I do appreciate the opportunity to have me on this call and I want you to wish your amazing, wonderful mother a happy birthday for me. It’s her birthday today.

Craig: I certainly will. Thank you so much, my good man.

Bedros:

Craig: All right, pal, have a good one. All right, talk to you soon and thank you everyone, for being on the call and for becoming the best guru that you can be in your industry because people need it. All right, let’s get to work. Bye-bye.

Listen to Part 2 of our interview here: How to Be a Money Making Guru