Hired to Quit, Inspired to Stay: How Focusing on Employee Dreams Built an Exceptional Culture and an Unbreakable Company with Best Selling Author, Speaker, Army Veteran, Recording Artist & CEO Craig Handley on Episo …

Intro [0:00]
EA Interviews Episode 195. Inspiration, transformation, success stories, and the Imperfect Action Round seven days a week. Join Mario Fachini for today’s Expert Authority Effect Interview.

Mario Fachini [0:13]
Have you ever wanted to build a culture in your business that is top notch? Have you ever wanted to build a multimillion dollar company? How about multiple? How would you like to pursue your dreams on your terms? Well, I’m excited to have none other than CEO, musician, artist, entrepreneur, and veteran Craig Handley, in today’s episode. We’re going to be talking about being hired to quit but inspired to stay. We’re going to bring them back right after we thank our sponsor.

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Mario Fachini [0:58]
Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Craig Handley. Craig, how are you feeling today?

Craig Handley [1:03]
Great. Great. I’m doing well.

Mario Fachini [1:05]
I’m glad to hear that. I want to ask you, what gave you the inspiration to build your first company?

Craig Handley [1:14]
I kept getting fired. Tough going. I don’t know, I guess, early on, I was first reading call center scripts in phone centers for a lot of different companies. And I was traveling around the country helping them build call centers. And at some point, you know, they take a lot of money advice, but not all of it, so I was like, “Why don’t I just build my own company?” And somebody along the way mentioned that U.S.-Hispanic market was growing good crazy and no call center servicing it. And so, ListenTrust used to be called Listen Up Espanol. We originally built the call center to service the U.S.-Hispanic market. And when we built it, within three years, we made it climb 500 fastest growing private companies in America. We were number one on business products and services and number 27 overall on the list with an 7,996 percent growth year over year for those first three years in servicing the U.S.-Hispanic market. So I don’t know I think just over the years just consulting for other people, at some point, it just made sense to try to do it myself.

Mario Fachini [2:32]
Was it easy to get going off the ground? Or would you say there was a level of difficulty?

Craig Handley [2:39]
I remember the first six months, I mean, I was building it with my consulting revenues. And we didn’t have a lot of money. We started with 20 seats inside another call center. And we were leasing basically 20 seats. And a lot of people said to get going, you needed to have money orders in a way for them to pay, because Hispanics don’t have credit cards. So the first six months, we had a lot of campaigns start, but the delivery rate for someone with a money order is less than 30 percent. And so something would start to build and look like there was revenue, the reality was there wasn’t any revenue in the restocking fees and the fact that most people who said they buy, didn’t buy. a campaign would go like this, and then like this, and then like this. And I made a decision, you know, six months in I said, “We’re not doing money orders anymore. This is stupid. And this is either going to sink us or it’s going to allow us to swim.” And as soon as we made that decision, close rates went up from a low 12 percent closure, it was another 25 percent money orders. We were actually closing 25 to 30 percent of all calls with a credit card. And I think it was just because we gave people the option that they took it. And then as soon as we said we’re going to make sure people have credit cards, that’s when it started to really take off. We built the business based on sales principles, you know, being able to sell. There are other companies that also did Spanish, but they couldn’t compete. We were beating them by double digit close rates. And so a lot of our early competitors decided to white label our call center and make us their Hispanic solution. And that’s where we saw that tremendous growth is every call center that we started to compete with, started to refer all that business to us. And so we went from 20 seats to 550 seats within three years.

Mario Fachini [4:39]
How satisfying was that when that happened?

Craig Handley [4:43]
It’s funny. As an entrepreneur, I’m built to celebrate victories but I’m also driven like nobody else. So I think on one level it was good. On the other level, I was like, “Okay. Let’s keep going. What are we going to do next?” You know, what else do we have to do to make our business bigger, stronger? How do we create a give back and help the world? You know, a lot of businesses have that mindset today, that donating 1 percent of their profit back to charity or finding some way to make the world a better place is important. We thought of that 14 years ago, we really wanted to do something with the success we were having. So it felt good, but it felt a little bit like Spider Man, you have a responsibility now to try to help the world and to help other people. So I don’t think we celebrated for long. We want to know how we’re going to continue to make this thing up.

Mario Fachini [5:45]
How important would you say contribution is for a business? Are you drawn to companies who are more – I don’t want to say ethical, because you can be ethical in business, but not care about contribution. But when people are heart centric and contribution focused, does that draw you into a more or is it like a nice thing you just think they’re doing?

Craig Handley [6:08]
I know for a fact that we’re more heart centric and care about their employees more that it creates more revenue. It creates better energy around the business and lower turnover for employees. There’s a lot of positive things that come from being that type of business that aren’t just measured, you know, on a P&L. And so I know for a fact that that makes a huge difference in how you run and build a business.

Mario Fachini [6:39]
And I know you’re sharing that in your book and you talked about inspired to stay, what are the top three things any business can do to, let’s say, attract better teams and staff and also keep them?

Craig Handley [6:57]
So ironing and attracting better people is a function of your culture and your core values. It doesn’t mean you can’t hire a lot of people, if you don’t have great culture and great core values. You can but a lot of those people are going to leave because you’re not hiring people that kind of fit into the right box. So we created a list of core values. And we actually hire not based on experience, but based on your values. You can be a great salesperson, but you’re not going to get a job at ListenTrust if you don’t fit into our values and our core values. So that’s where we start. That’s how you hire the right people. But the other thing that we learned to do is treat every employee like our own child. If you have children – I don’t know if you do – but you probably don’t want to force them to work in your business. And so I look at every employee as an individual who has their own dreams and their own goals. And so we spend three days training our employees on how to quit. And in our business, in their free time, we have a masterclass on how to buy Facebook media, or masterclass on how to do a podcast, or a master class, on SEO, or building a website. And so we put all these tools in place, so our employees could, in their spare time, learn how to live their own dream. And so we actually hire them, and teach them how they can quit working for us. Now, what we inevitably found is that people were inspired to stay because of the type of company that we were. And we also found that the majority of people have three dreams, one, they want to buy a car; two, they want a house; and the third one, they want a vacation with their family. Because most people are poor at managing their money and so they don’t get to take a vacation no matter how much they make. But they always want that time with their family. And so what we do is, we put a plan in place. In our business, the banks offer credit in a different way than maybe we do in the States, because we’re in Mexico and a lot of our employees have lived in the U.S. and speak perfect English. But the way Mexico works is that, the longer you’re with a company, the better your credit. And so because we pay our employees an above average income in Mexico and because we’ve been there for 14 plus years, we went to the banks and said these are our average paychecks and what we’d like to do is we want you to guarantee our employees a car loan once they’re an employee for six months. And we found two banks that would do that. So at six months, you’re an employee at ListenTrust, go get a car. At a year, they’ll give our employees a house loan, so they go buy a house. And then recently, we’re now talking with a travel company and we’ve set up seven levels of vacation property, so that if you’re an employee, at the end of year one, we’re going to just give you a vacation. You’re going to have to go on vacation because we’re not going to give you money for it. So you’re going to go on vacation with your family. And when you’re there two years, it’s a better property. Three years, it’s even better. And so we’re going to up the ante on what you can get from vacation based on tenure and based on performance. And so what we’ve done is we’ve built a program that inspires the people that should leave to leave. Ggo build a restaurant, go build a gym, go live your dream, right? Don’t stick around, if this isn’t what you really dreamed of when you were a kid. But we also inspire people to stay by giving the majority of the people what they really want to have in life, to own and enjoy it. And I think when you do those things, that ties into performance in a big way. All of our employees, they don’t want to lose their job. They want to provide the best service they can so they can keep their job. Well, guess what? If you don’t perform for our clients, we can’t keep you. We have to ask you to leave. And so as a result, our employees put a lot more effort into being trained, into learning our training tools, into going through our training programs, and to be dedicated to learning their craft of communicating with somebody on the phone and providing exceptional service. Does that make sense?

Mario Fachini [11:02]
Oh, it absolutely does. And it’s inspiring and very innovative. Because growing up the company culture for the few places I did work and just across the board, it seemed like, “Don’t ask too many questions. You’re kind of here, do your job. Shut up. And just don’t rock the boat.” And as time has gone on, the last decade, especially, I’ve noticed that companies are changing to be more contribution focused. And they’re going, “What can we do for the employees?” And I don’t want to say it started with the whole Google culture with, we got good meals, we got beanbags do what you want kind of thing. Because I’ve heard from people that present cases on both sides of the story, it lowers productivity and it highers it. I don’t know what the real answer is. But clearly, it works both ways for both the different companies. And I’ve never heard of a company, though, come up with, not only such a great incentive program within the company, but you’re literally hiring. I’ve heard of the concept, you know, you want to train someone that you do want them to leave you because you’ve equipped them so much. But I don’t know too many companies that practice it. So it’s inspiring to hear that that’s what you’re doing and it’s working. You said for 14 years, what have you found – how long did it take to get going? You know, did it take three, four years to get to that point? And what have you found the last three to five years as a result of that? Did you see a giant drop off in turnover?

Craig Handley [12:37]
It’s always been evolving. We didn’t start with this program, The Dream Trust, they call it. I call it The Dream Trust Program. We also train people on Six Pillars of Happiness. So we talk about relationships, health, wealth, important things time off, we talk about those important things in somebody’s life too. And train them on pillars of happiness, because life shouldn’t be more about work, it should be how to be happy. And relationships are a big deal. If you don’t know how to manage your spouse, your children, that can create a lot of unhappiness. Men and women are different in how they are in relationships. Men has to learn how to be in a relationship with a woman. Women has to learn how to be in a relationship with a man. And those things help lower stress and create more happiness. So we do a lot of those things. A lot of that stuff didn’t happen, you know, it started out by coming up with our core values. Coming up with what we wanted our company to stand for. And then what are the values that support that. And the way that we did it, is we got into a room and we said if you could be a company that puts in 100 percent effort, 100 percent of heart. Or, you’re a company that plays hard, you know, believes in happiness. But if you were this company, you couldn’t be that. Where does it fall? We went to 30 values that our employees that thought our company was about, we had to winnow it down to five. So it was definitely an interesting process of going through that. And then you have to set out markers that show you’re living your values. One of the markers that are going to indicate that those values are actually being executed within your company, that takes a few years for those things to automatically start to be put into play. It takes a couple of years. And then from there, we just always wanted things to evolve at ListenTrust. And so The Dream Trust Program was built maybe three years ago. Like I said, it’s been processed though.

Mario Fachini [14:42]
Well, it sounds like a great program and I know Expert Authority World is listening in probably thinking of ways they can implement this in their business. And it just sounds phenomenal. I wish you the best with it and I know it’s only going to continue to grow. I want to ask you about your biggest transformation from one of your clients. Who would you say is your biggest success story?

Craig Handley [15:09]
We’ve had a lot.

Mario Fachini [15:12]
I love that. That’s the biggest problem all my VIP guests have. I asked for one and they’re like, “Man, I got to narrow it down.”

Craig Handley [15:21]
Well, if you go early days, like the one that spurred us the most was a hair straightener. And I forget the name of it. But they were doing better in Spanish than they were in English. And they would, by themselves, driving 40,000 calls a week. And so that in itself was a huge success story. And, again, this is going back to 12 years ago. I can’t remember the name of the product. But more recently, we’ve had clients come in – you know, a lot of people think the Philippines is less expensive. Now, the Philippines is cheaper, but it’s not less expensive. We recently took a lot of seats out of the Philippines for Bosley or HairClub for Men, they’re both two different brands that kind of work together. And they were doing like 12 appointments per day out of the Philippines. But the attendance rate for those calls was around 30 percent. Because — just not a personalizing disarm and build relationships, we were generating around 27 appointments a day. More importantly, our attendance rate for the appointments was around 70 percent. So we, actually, on a cost basis, we may have cost double. But on a value basis, the client certainly learned that we were less expensive than working with another center that was cheaper. And so that was certainly a tremendous success story that we’ve had.

Mario Fachini [16:50]
That sounds huge. I mean, you’re talking for confirmed appointments at 40 percent compared to the 19-and-a-half at 70 percent.

Craig Handley [17:00]
If your math is right, I’m going to agree with you. I didn’t do the math in my head. But, yeah, we did really well. And that’s why they took all of their seats. You know, we now have almost 200 seats with Bosley and HairClub for Men and we started with ten. They were going to test us and now they’ve moved everything over.

Mario Fachini [17:16]
So you’re saying it was double, but you’re also talking four-and-a-half-ish times – it’s nearly five. It’s nearly four-and-a-half to five times more the output.

Craig Handley [17:33]
Yeah. The deal is that no matter what our output, if our attendance rate on the 27 appointments was 20 percent, then we weren’t doing our jobs. So we had to cover two things, we had to get more appointments, go ahead to ensure we created relationships with the consumer that allowed them to feel like they could trust us and show up to the appointment.

Mario Fachini [17:51]
See, that’s what I like hearing. It’s why I incorporated the, you know, tell us your biggest transformation and success story is because, you know, business is up and down. I mean, I’ve gone through it too. But when you get it right, it can be really, really right. And, you know, six months or one year doing it right, can smoke the previous decade at a job, or even doing it wrong, or trying to figure it out.

Craig Handley [18:15]
Yeah. I mean, we’ve had clients that are difficult. We’ve had a flower client come in and they ramped up their staffing. And then they decided to negotiate their contract and only wanted to pay for talk time with an agent. But, of course, the reason they wanted to do that is because they had 300 agents that they needed in the center to get ready for Valentine’s Day. But, of course, they didn’t have any phone calls for them until the week of Valentine’s Day. So basically, they wanted us to support their high growth season. And so they were trying to give us 100,000 when their bill was 280. So we had clients like that and they ended up not staying with us, so we help them transition out. And that was, to me, I feel like it was a rough one. We ended up having a lot of negative energy go back and forth in that. But we tried to just end it on a positive note and move forward. So there hasn’t always been successes. There have been lots of challenges.

Mario Fachini [19:16]
But that’s why you get the successes. And it’s not fun to do something like that, but you can’t kill yourself in the company in the process. I tell my clients all the time or audiences, I go, “You got to have a healthy enough profit that when you quote someone, the biggest disservice you can be is out of business in two to three years. Because they’re going to fall in love with you. You’re, obviously, better. But if you’re not around three, four or five years from now, you can’t be killing yourself or suffocating along the way.” That’s quite a gap also. I mean, that’s not even 10 or 20 percent. That’s pretty significant. Out of curiosity, had they just said, “Hey, thanks for your help and all of this.” How much do you think they would have made if they would have not been, you know, nickel and diamond, the whole thing?

Craig Handley [20:06]
I think it would have been a lot better. They were so caught up in how to avoid paying. They actually created a software product where they were hiding the real numbers. Because we had built an incentive for closes and things like that. We had built an incentive for each of our agents, if there were errors made on the addresses and things like that, we would actually lose money on the hourly. But we found out after that we had agreed to these things that they weren’t recording the calls. And we even have one of their customer service managers tell us that they didn’t listen to the calls. They just said everybody was doing something wrong, so they could avoid paying that part of the fee. And I’m like, “So you guys don’t even listen to the calls?” She goes, “We spend all of our time writing up complaints on agents that may or may not exist. But because we don’t record the calls, there’s no way to prove otherwise. So we just don’t have to pay you for that.” So they were just an unscrupulous company. But I know from a performance standpoint, we know how to sell. We would have been able to incorporate upsells and cross sells and create additional revenue for them. And I just think, if you’re a flower company, you know that you have to invest in December to be ready to take calls for February. You have to build that into your model. You can’t expect somebody else to build your business for you. And that was what they did in the Philippines and Honduras. And every year, they would go into a different call center and do that and, basically, take advantage of a company to take their calls throughout Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, and then they leave and move to a different center. That was their model to build their business up.

Mario Fachini [21:41]
That’s a horrible model. It’s like the Traveling Carnival. I mean, I would be going, “Hey, this might take two or three years, but let’s get started here so we can increase it next year and the next year.” But if they had a 280 grand bill, I’m sure it would have been 500 or 600 on the low end of revenue, if not a million dollars. And then you take that and – you know, I have no doubt you’d go back the next year and go, “What can we improve to take it to 1.2, 1.3, 1.5 and keep increasing it?

Craig Handley [22:14]
Yeah. It was too bad. That didn’t work out. But we’ve had our wins and we’ve had our losses. And that’s just how life is.

Mario Fachini [22:24]
But you keep getting back up and moving forward.

Craig Handley [22:28]
Business is doing great now. Since the COVID, hit with 30 percent up from where we were before and things are going great. We’re actually looking at some other opportunities to partner or sell the business. And I’ve built three other businesses during the whole COVID thing that are all doing really well.

Mario Fachini [22:45]
Yeah. I actually wanted to ask you about one of those. Because with the success stories, I know you have one of your own with Social Close. Tell me about that.

Craig Handley [22:54]
I stumbled into it. I wrote a book, the bestseller list in five categories. And I wrote down all the things I did well. And then I made a list of all the things I wish I did different. And kind of created a book launch, you know, in my own way. But what I realized is that for someone to do all the things they need to do on social media, you need to hire a company to go through all your old content and to create micro-content, so they can put it out on a — basis. That alone, depending on how much content you have, can cost – for me, the quote was $20,000 to go through my content. And then they wanted 7,000 a month on an ongoing basis to continue to grab my content, go through it, and create micro-content, thumbnails, turn my podcasts into streams for other streaming services. And so they were going to do all those things for me for 7,000. But then I needed someone to post and manage my communities. And someone else will do that for five grand a month. And someone else will run my LinkedIn and create leads, delete them for five grand a month. And then someone else is going to put me on podcasts for five grand a month. And then someone else was going to – and by the time I was done, it was $30,000. And I’m like, how does anybody? I haven’t even bought media yet. I haven’t even started to buy programmatic or Facebook media to try to improve my presence. So I built it myself for me. No idea that it was going to turn into a business. And so I’ve had a friend post on Facebook, he was looking for something similar to what I built. And I was like, “Huh.” And then as I saw other people posting, the only thing we said was following, following, following. I’m like, “Maybe I built a business here.” So I put a package together and threw a note up on Facebook. And within 24 hours, 12 people have reached out. And within 48 hours, six people have given me money to do it. And I’m like, “All right. Let’s try it.” And then while that was going, I was consulting. Because I’m no longer really involved in the call center on an operations level. And I would charge some $10,000 for marketing ideas. And as I looked into what they were doing, I realized that a lot of companies I met with didn’t have the execution team behind them. And so I kind of looked at how Social Close with working with the six clients we had and I went, “You know what? I bet the basis for almost every great marketing campaign is having daily content and good social media. People look you up on Instagram. They look up on Facebook. They look you up on LinkedIn. Or they look at your YouTube. That’s where the basis of good marketing is.” So if I can create a base for low cost, and in my business, I’m basically providing 30,000 for value for about five grand. And I’ve got cheaper packages and more expensive packages. But it’s really a low cost to kind of build that base. And then I give people the ability to have additional revenue that they can spend on programmatic media, or Facebook media, or SEO, or whatever else. I’ll look at them and I’ll say, “These are some of the things I think you need to do.” But what I did was, instead of consulting with people and charging them 10 grand, I’m going to consult with them for free, because most of the services that they need could be pushed through this new agency I built. And so I started pushing small businesses, and other entrepreneurial ventures, other needs, like I got my agents now doing – the big secret has been direct messaging. So a friend of mine had a book, he wanted to sell 2,000 copies. And he only had two days to do it, to make the New York Times bestseller list. And so we basically created a series of videos to direct messaging through all his social platforms with the videos. And we ended up selling 3,000 books in two days. He made number seven on the list. Another woman, we had it for three weeks. We sold thousands of books through our process. She also had several podcast requests. And she got several people offering to write about her book. And she got picked up by Good Morning America to go online and do a Good Morning America spot. And a friend of mine, he’s got a documentary he did, we’re booking seats to see his premiere for $20 donation to a charity. And we’re now filling up the seats to watch this with him. And then he’s going to do a Zoom call after, a one hour Zoom call the answer questions after. And so we’re using our direct messaging service to create an audience for his movie. And we’re working with a restaurant, we use our direct messaging to let people know that they’re a fan of the entertainer. The entertainer is going to be there Friday, can we book a reservation? And we’re selling out restaurants weeks in advance when, through this COVID, a lot of these restaurants lost a lot of revenue. So for five grand a month, I’ve got restaurants doing an extra 50,000 in revenue through my processes. And as a result, over 60 days, I think we’ve grown a business from zero to over 20 people and from zero in revenue to almost 600,000 in revenue annually. And it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. A lot of people are very interested in what we’re doing, and how we’re doing it, and how we can help them. And so that’s exciting.

Mario Fachini [28:14]
That is very exciting. And congratulations on that. Because what I’m hearing in your voice, I know you have background in musician, you’re an artist, and it sounds like you’re having a lot of fun with it, which is important also.

Craig Handley [28:28]
I’m a marketer, right? I’m a musician and a marketer. Like, if I had passions, those are two things I love to do. I love to help people. And so I love to get on a phone call and then just put them in the hot seat and find out what their problems are and then give them solutions. And, now, I’ve built a team that can solve almost all of those problems by giving them the solution at a low cost. And then from a music standpoint, I mean, I do have records right now. One with Alex and Drew of The Chainsmokers. And I’ve got some producers that have worked with Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande and John Legend. They’re helping me with some songs I’ve written. And I’ve got a whole comedy selection of songs where I’ve kind of put comedy [unintelligible [00:29:10]. So I’m doing some live stand up with some music as the base of comedy, which is kind of nice. If people Google me, they’ll see Craig Handley, the businessman, the entrepreneur. And then I’ve got a song that’s up there that’s completely off the wall. And people are like, “I don’t know how those two personalities coexist?” You’re serious, and you’re a marketer, and you’re businessman, and then you’ve got a song up there called – God, what’s one of my songs? – I got one called Maine, that’s all about the State of Maine. That one’s pretty clean and pretty funny. But for COVID, people asked me to write and I wrote a song called Paperbag Day. And I call it the new Hallmark Holiday, the $1 Roleplay. And the idea is if you’re stuck inside with the same partner, one of the best ways that you can make this COVID experience fun and exciting is to put a bag on your partner’s head, male or female. Now, you’ve got multiple partners. So silly, stupid, but it’s funny. And I’ve created all these little music videos that are all comedy based. But I love being creative. And my brain, it’s beautifully broken in ways where it thinks completely different thoughts than most people. And the path to success is so clear in my head as I’m talking to people. And now I’ve got a team that I can kind of try to leave that path out. It usually a 90 day to a six month plan. And when I’m talking about it, I think the one thing I got to work on is making sure people know that my 90 day plan isn’t going to happen all next week. You know, some people, the expectations are a little high. Because in my head, I’m like, “Okay. We can do this. We can do this. We can do this. We can do this.” And then I’ll just put it all out. But the timing has to be laid out a little bit better, but everything’s going well. Knock on wood.

Mario Fachini [31:00]
Well, I’m happy to hear that. And congrats again. And I have no doubt that’s why we connected and why we connect so well. Because I know, you know, growing up playing piano, and alto sax, and marching in band, and doing all the creative stuff, there’s certain things I look at and it’s just like common sense to me as far as marketing and promotion and business and certain things. And it’s like, how do people not get this? And on the other hand, it’s just like, where the heck is that coming from? It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t fit business. And it’s is a perfect segue into more proof as to why I created this. I mean, it really has no rhyme or reason with business. I call it the Wheel of Whatever. And it always ends up on the question I need to ask you at exactly the right spot . It goes into that fun aspect of it. And your question is – do you see that, Craig? It’s right there? Who’s a musician you’d like to work with that you haven’t yet?

Craig Handley [32:02]
I’ve been trying to get Jae Cash up on a call. Well, people don’t know who Jae Cash is but he’s a writer for Charlie Puth and he writes for Maroon 5. And I’ve done a few Instagram Live for them. And he says, “I love your music, send me a DM.” But then he never replies to the DM. So I keep trying to get him on. But I’m working with a lot of people in his circle. And so I’m hoping I can kind of – I love to write with him. I mean, it’s funny, a lot of the most successful music on the planet, people don’t really know who wrote it. Like, Evan Bogart, I spent a couple hours on a call with him and he wrote Halo with Beyonce. I mean, a lot of people don’t know the name, Evan Bogart, but he’s written a ton of other hits. And I had a two hour call with him and he’s got four of my records now. And he thought one will be great for Black Eyed Peas. One would be amazing with Eminem. Another would be great with Pitbull. And then another record with J.Cole. And so he requested those records and potentially he’s going to help write a little bit on them and get them to the right people. So I think I’ve written good songs. But I’ve learned one of my shortcuts is letting other writers who already have won Grammys change up 20 to 30 percent of my lyrics and get some writing credits, and then it becomes their record. My record becomes our record. Evan Bogart called me Jingles. At the end of the call, he goes, I’m going to call you Craig “Jingles” Handley because of your hooks. He goes nobody’s ever written – because every song you play me has an amazing hook. He goes, “It just needs a little work on the lyrics leading into the hook.” And part of the reason for that is I write four-and-a-half minute songs and everything has to be two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half minutes today. So I never really thought about how I need to keep my songs to two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half minutes because I come from the ’80s where every song was four-and-a-half minutes.

Mario Fachini [34:00]
Well, it sounds like more great opportunities. And I want to ask you as far as the DM go, have you ever shot a video message? Like, we’re on video now, have you ever shot a video message instead of just the text in there?

Craig Handley [34:14]
Yes. And the methodology that we’re using is the first message is always a picture. And this is less intrusive than a video. And then the second, and third, and fourth, all those other videos, typically, all those other messages are typically videos. That’s only — and part of the reason so — I’ve had so much success in what we’ve done so far that there are videos I need to shoot to talk about some of these other things. And so right now, I know that we’re using just a regular message and some of the Instagram stuff we’re doing. But actually we should be using video, I’m a little bit afraid of the success we’re having. Like, I know that I don’t want to blow it up, right? So I’m like, if I start doing things better right now, we’re going to have more clients. And if I put too many clients in this funnel, it could be a problem.

Mario Fachini [35:15]
You want to make sure it’s balanced and you can keep the quality high for the ones you do have.

Craig Handley [35:19]
Yeah. But I shouldn’t be wasting my time either in just sending direct messages when I shouldn’t be sending videos. I certainly agree with what you said.

Mario Fachini [35:29]
I was actually asking a little bit for when you were talking about connecting with the people on Instagram for the recording. The other thing I was going to say is, if you got a copy of your book and just straight mailed it to them with a note inside?

Craig Handley [35:44]
Yeah. That might be good, too.

Mario Fachini [35:46]
I’ve done that a few times. And I’ve connected with people because of my book. I mean, when you’re dealing with certain people, they just get so many messages. Now, it’s cool that you already did the Instagram Live. But it’s a real issue. I believe you can connect with anyone on the planet, but how do you get their attention, and that’s step one. So, you know, kicking it back to – I don’t even want to say old school because direct mail is still extremely relevant – but it’s one of my favorite things to do is drop some of my books in the mail. And all you got to do is find a mailing address and you can write anything you want inside of it. Ideally, a great headline with some benefits and a call to action at the end like your phone number, just throwing that out there for anyone listening.

Craig Handley [36:34]
For everyone listening, that’s great advice.

Mario Fachini [36:37]
Well, we are going to thank our sponsor and come back for the Imperfect Action Round.

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Mario Fachini [38:13]
And we are back with the Imperfect Action Round. Craig, are you ready to take imperfect action?

Craig Handley [38:19]
I’m ready.

Mario Fachini [38:20]
These are very quick 60-second answers. I got three of them for you. The first one is, what is the fastest path to the profits?

Craig Handley [38:30]
Networking. I think the more you can connect with people, the quicker you can shortcut business success by learning who you should be talking to who’s already done it and already can give you advice.

Mario Fachini [38:44]
Excellent. Love that. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way for them to fix it?

Craig Handley [38:56]
While we talked about marketing, I think for a lot of people, marketing is like chemistry. If I sit in the chem lab and look at chem formulas up on a screen, I’m probably not going to know how to create – I’m not going to know how to solve the whole COVID problem and create a immunization for COVID. However, these chemists know that stuff backwards and forwards. For me, marketing is what I know. And I think a lot of people tend to try to be perfect in what they’re doing in marketing as opposed to testing and allowing the results to create the conclusion that allows them to see the path to success.

Mario Fachini [39:33]
That is a great Expert Authority Insight because marketing is a test. And I agree 100 percent, too many people just do it perfect and go too slow with it. You need some data, for sure. Number three, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Craig Handley [39:50]
Take care of you customers. I mean, the best way to maximize that value is to make sure that you know their happiness score on a month-to-month basis. We always want to make sure our customers are at 9.7 or above on a month-to-month basis. I mean, I know John Ruhlin’s book, Giftology is kind of cool on how to make sure you keeping your relationships strong. Our clients have been with us for years and years and years and we do it by making sure that we care about them more than we care about ourselves.

Mario Fachini [40:26]
That’s great advice.

Craig Handley [40:29]
Give value all the time. Give value all the time.

Mario Fachini [40:31]
Excellent. Speaking of books, what are a couple books you’d recommend that have made a big impact on you?

Craig Handley [40:40]
W. Clement Stone, The Success System That Never Fails. I worked and sold insurance door-to-door for years. And that was one of the first self-help books I’ve ever read when – wow – it kind of blew my mind with all the different cool things that were in there. God, I read so many. My friend, Vishen Lakhiani, he’s got a great book, The Buddha and the Badass, just came out. He’s got another book from a few years ago that’s really well. He’s the president of a big company called Mindvalley. And I met him and traveled to 13 countries with him before he was Vishen Lakhiani. He was a young kid with a business of about 10 million in revenue and wasn’t really sure what he was going to do. And, now, if you look at his empire, now, he’s like Darth Vader on the Death Star, only he’s focused on doing good. His business is huge. And I mentioned John Ruhlin’s Giftology. And one of my favorite books, if you’re trying to do selling is a book called Selling to VITO. A lot of people might not know that book. But I thought it was invaluable in how to reach the decision maker in a business and get through the gatekeepers. And so I really enjoyed that book. There’s a lot of books out there. I think when reading books, one of the things a lot of people mistake is they start to read a book and they try to fight their way through it. For me, I think you should read a book and if it catches your attention, keep reading it. And if it doesn’t, put it down and move on. And I think that’s the way that I get through a lot of books. Because if you don’t do that – I mean, I read a lot on my phone, right? If I don’t do that, that book title is just stuck there in my phone. And I don’t even open it up anymore. And so it slows you down in reading. So rather than an individual book, I think advice from an entrepreneur to other entrepreneurs is find books that you can jive with and that kind of flow with you. And then that way you read through them quickly. Because a book should only take a couple of hours to get through. If it’s on your phone for three weeks, shut it down, go to a different book.

Mario Fachini [42:45]
That’s great advice because you’re absolutely right. You shouldn’t be hanging on to it forever. You have given some great Expert Authority Insights. I thank you for sharing them with us. And I want to know where would you like people to learn more?

Craig Handley [43:01]
Well, Craig Handley. I mean, I’m Craig Handley on Facebook. I’m Craig Handley on Instagram. I kind of bought all those domains before people were buying domains because I was thinking it was important to have them. The only other Craig Handley I have seen is an artist, an actor from the Ukraine or from the UK. And sometimes my face comes up with his IMDb bio. But I’m pretty easy to find. And then I got ListenTrust.com, SocialClose.com. And, of course, I have my cell phone and my book. I’m not afraid for people to text me or call me. But if they direct message me on any of those things, then I’m happy to set up calls to help people. I’m not going to charge people for a hello. I’m more than happy to spend time helping somebody.

Mario Fachini [43:50]
Well, you are giving and definitely personable. And one fun question, do you prefer that they shoot you in image, a text, or video messages that first message?

Craig Handley [44:03]
A video, an image, or a text. But I think, a video is great because that way I can kind of see who they are and what they’re up to. So a video message would be nice.

Mario Fachini [44:12]
Excellent. Well, Craig, I appreciate this so much. Thank you for sharing with Expert Authority World. It’s a pleasure having you.

Craig Handley [44:20]
Yeah. Thank you for having me on. It was good, fun time.

Mario Fachini [44:24]
All right. Expert Authority World, we have another great episode here today. I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a great day. And God bless.

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Mario Fachini [45:05]
Hey, thanks for listening to today’s episode. I hope you got a lot out of it. I know I sure did. If you haven’t done so already, I invite you to subscribe to the show. And also be sure to check out EAInterviews.com for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I’ll see you tomorrow.