Reeling in Your Ideal Client by Teaching Your Business to Fish with Michael Rager on Episode #0159

Intro [0:00]

EA Interviews Episode 159. 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]

You have your business and you want it to grow. But how do you increase the profits? How do you reel in new clients? I am super excited to have Michael Rager here today because he’s going to be teaching you and your business how to fish and reel in those new clients. I’m going to bring him up right after we thank our sponsor. 

SPONSOR Acorns [0:36]

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Mario Fachini [0:53]

Here he is ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Michael Rager. Michael, how are you doing today? 

Michael Rager [0:57]

I’m doing great today, Mario. How were you? 

Mario Fachini [1:00]

I’m feeling great. I’m excited to talk about reeling in clients with your specific proprietary system because so many people can benefit from it. 

Michael Rager [1:12]

You know, we try to make things fun on this end. So that’s why we came up with the Teach Your Business To Fish. We love two things. We love fishing and we love business. So let’s see if we can help some people out today. 

Mario Fachini [1:24]

How did you decide to incorporate both of those and build a business around it? Because I think it’s fascinating and impressive what you’ve done. 

Michael Rager [1:33]

Well, I wanted other people to pay for me to go to really cool fishing places. And one of my favorite things to do is coach and teach. And I really like to do it outside of the classroom. I’m pretty good at doing in the classroom. But I like doing it outside of the classroom. And I just thought that, “Hey, I love to fish. I love businesses. Let’s put it together.” I’ve heard other people have done it with golf. I’m not that good of a golfer. I’m a pretty good fisherman. So I figured let’s go put it this way and see what we can do. 

Mario Fachini [2:06]

So do you do most of your teaching out on the boat or over the phone? 

Michael Rager [2:12]

Most of my teaching is over the phone. The boat is – a couple things that I do, Mario, is I take either teams of people out on trips to get them away from the office. Because we get them away from the office, they start thinking and they start thinking differently. Or else I take groups of people who should actually know each other better and get them out of that introductory trip. So let’s get out there and let’s go do some things. So I kind of do both ways when it comes to that. But when I’m doing my coaching and training with my clients, it’s kind of just like this, you know, 90 percent of it is Zoom meetings, Skype meetings, some of it is one to one if they’re actually in Houston. Not all my clients are in Houston. 

Mario Fachini [2:55]

What is your favorite aspect of helping them? 

Michael Rager [3:01]

Seeing them get that aha moment and start getting out of their own way. One thing I know that when I started my own business, nobody taught me how to do it. You know, I was really good at what I did. The first company I was a partner in was an environmental inspection firm. We used to do environmental inspections on big pipeline companies. You know, my background is fisheries biology. And that’s what I was, I was a fish biologist doing pipeline inspections. Me and a friend started a company. He was way more of a business guy. And we just figured out how to do it. We weren’t really good at it. We were able to sell the company. We did that well. We sold it right before the Enron fiasco. So we got out of it just the right time. But it was actually, for me, and seeing that that aha moment with business owners saying, ” I can really do this.” 

Mario Fachini [3:55]

What are some of the common problems you see in most of the businesses that you’re helping? 

Michael Rager [4:02]

Number one is they have no idea who their client is. They do what I say is fishing with hot dogs. They just go out there and they try to catch anything. And one of my big teachings is that, as you know, I grew up in Detroit. So I grew up where you did. When I was young, nobody in my family fished. I knew nothing about it. I grew up in Algonac. And we used to go over to Metro Beach. We used to go take our boat over to Metro Beach and we stay for three or four days. And my mom is like, “Look, you can bring your fishing gear. But dude, you’re not bringing any worms on my nice new Bayliner.” You’re going to have to think of something else. Like, “Mom, what am I going to fish with?” And she goes “Hot dogs.” And I’m like, “Okay. Crap.” You know, I was nine. And yeah, I caught fish. I did. I caught carp. And I caught bullheads. And I caught suckers. And all kinds of crap. And that’s what business owners do. They go out they fish with hot dogs. They go find clients who are not really their good clients. Because a lot of times they’ve got that mentality that any business is better than no business at all. But they don’t really realize that any business is keeping them from getting the really good business. 

Mario Fachini [5:14]

That is such a vital point and I want to dive deep with that. That was not a pun. I say dive deep often. And I just realized – 

Michael Rager [5:25]

It’s all right. It’s all right. 

Mario Fachini [5:26]

I do want to dive deep with this because I’ve heard similar analogies. When you’re working on your customer avatar, the marketing messaging is so important. And this is a perfect opportunity to really go what is the difference between using worms versus using nightcrawlers, cracked crab, hot dogs, fish flies? There are so many different things. You can say, “Well, here’s the best thing.” But I think it’s like, “Well, what do you want to catch?” 

Michael Rager [5:57]

Exactly. When I started switching this around when I started – my grandparents took me to Ludington. And I wanted to go salmon fishing. And I had to learn about salmon fishing. And I know that being as a fish biologist then I was a salmon biologist [unintelligible] [00:06:13]. And I knew salmon and trout lived in 56 to 70 degree water. And in Lake Michigan, that was 80 to 200 feet down. And they weren’t going to eat hotdogs, dude. They were going to eat smelt. And they’re going to eat alewives and a few other things. But that was primarily it. So you had a fish with exactly with what they wanted. I could drop a hot dog down to 80 feet and chances are I wasn’t going to catch a salmon. No matter here could be thousands of them there, it just wasn’t going to happen. So why not do it with your clients? Why do you do that with your clients? 

Mario Fachini [6:49]

So I’m going to be a little contrarian in here and say, “Well, what’s the best thing to fish with?” 

Michael Rager [6:55]

It depends with your client. It really does. The type of client you want. I was on a call this morning and we were talking about, lead times and stuff like this. It all depends on the type of client you’ve get. If you’re a restaurant owner -you know, I saw a restaurant here in Houston recently. It went out of business because the guy said, “Look, I make good food so people will come in.” And I’m like, “Bullshit. It ain’t gonna happen.” You had no concept of who your real clients are. And I would go in there a couple times because I knew the guy’s girlfriend and I was friends with her. And I’m like, “Look, you guys, if you look at who’s here in the restaurant right now.” Who was in the restaurant was 28 to 40 year old women mainly. It’s an Italian restaurant. If you think they weren’t doing anything to help them come in. I had another friend that owned a wine bar and he used to have Tuesday night $10 pizzas and $10 bottles of wine. The place was packed constantly with women. It was packed constantly with women. What else happened? Guys came in on Tuesday. It was packed every Tuesday. He knew that that was his crowd. And that’s what he catered to. This other guy tried to cater to everybody. You like good food. Guess what? That ain’t enough. 

Mario Fachini [8:13]

He was trying to fish with hot dogs. 

Michael Rager [8:15]

He was fishing with hot dogs. He thought just because he had good food that was it. And he was out of business in seven months. He lost his money. He lost his investors money. He lost everything. 

Mario Fachini [8:26]

And that’s unfortunate. I don’t want to downplay the reality of it. But when you’re talking about the marketing message and knowing your avatar, it’s vital. 

Michael Rager [8:36]

Oh, it is. It’s not just your avatar. It’s where you put that information now as well. Dan Kennedy, you know the famous sales guy and marketing guy, he always talked about your medium. Where’s your medium? If I want to catch a blue marlin, I’m not going to fish for blue marlin in Lake Michigan. I’m going to Cabo San Lucas I’m going to where they are. And you’ve got to be able to once you create your avatar. I struggle with avatars because there’s two things with avatars.  I get told a lot by marketing people, “Oh, create an avatar who’s the perfect client you have now.” Well guess what? I don’t want them now. They’re crappy. I went better ones. Don’t make a Frankenstein of other other avatars. Put them all together. But you know –

Mario Fachini [9:24]

Yeah. Who’s your ideal customer or client. It might not be who you have now or had in the past. 

Michael Rager [9:30]

Exactly, exactly. That’s what I looked at. Who is your ideal customer? Who do you want? And then it becomes hard to find a lot of that information out . You get a lot of these marketing people, what magazines do they read? What would do this — with this? Look, they’re out there. Put the message out. As long as you’re putting the message out where they hang out, you’re going to have a good idea to really change things around. We did it with a company here. What’s really funny is they didn’t realize who their avatar was at one time.  And they were kind of a bioidentical hormone company. They did testosterone treatment, stuff like this. And they really thought their main client was premenopausal women. And it was for one of their services. But when we went and really looked at what was going on and what their marketing was bringing in, it was bringing in gay men. And we’re like, “What the heck?” And we really started looking at it. But we’re struggling at where they were advertising, what their message was. It was all about looking better and feeling better. And we found out that the gay guys here in Houston wanted to look good and feel good. And they spent a lot of money on it. We changed the avatar to that. We started marketing in the places where these guys were. And we went from really good business to exceptional business. And with one of the products they had. So it’s really you got to look at it and it changes. 

Mario Fachini [10:56]

And that’s why it’s so vitally important to have the right message because you can have the best product in the world, you can have the best message, but if you’re not going to the right mediums, you don’t know if it’s even going to the right audience, like you were talking about. When you’re helping your clients, how do you know what the mediums are that you want to go out? Do you have a, here’s the top three that pretty much work all the time? Or what do you do when you drill down to five, ten, 15 when it’s really industry specific? What would you suggest? 

Michael Rager [11:28]

It really depends on the industry on where they’re going or the size of business. Restaurants, we’re going to do a lot on the social media. If we’re talking to engineering companies, we’re probably not going to do as much as social media. We’re going to look at more of going into seminar, to events, and stuff like that, and getting in front of your clients. It’s really funny as I’ve got a couple of my clients, I’ve even taken them out of magazines and social media. I get a lot of people – one of the things I think is best is getting out and actually talking, and speaking, hosting lunch and learns and stuff like that. Depending on the industry you’re in, that’s a way more effective use of money. I can do a lunch and learn for 100 bucks. Let me try to do an ad in a magazine for 100 bucks, it’s going to have nowhere near the exposure and return on investment. 

Mario Fachini [12:25]

And let’s talk about the influence and authority of that to just being in front of the crowd. How much of a return do you find it you get just from being the leader or the speaker in the room versus another person on the page? 

Michael Rager [12:36]

Time. Time. Time. Because they actually hear you, they get to ask you questions. Becoming the authority is way better. It’s funny, I do events here in Houston. I have people that speak for me in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When I go to Baton Rouge and they bring me in as a special guest speaker, it’s amazing how many more people we get. And it’s funny is I’m going to give the same message they give. Nothing’s going to be different. But they just think because I’m driving four hours to get there, that I’m something different. And I think it goes back to a man is never a profit in his own hometown. He’s got to get out of there and go do something. So if I was to come back home to Michigan, I’d probably have a bigger audience than I get. It’s hard for me occasionally to draw people in in Houston. It’s just weird. 

Mario Fachini [13:28]

No kidding. You know, why do you think that is? 

Michael Rager [13:31]

I think there’s preconceived notions in people’s minds. 

Mario Fachini [13:36]

Do you think it’s because you’re just so close to everything all the time? 

Michael Rager [13:39]

I think so. It’s because they see you out. I spend more money on going out to events and seeing things, so people see me out a lot when I’m talking to them. And I think you’re more accessible. 

Mario Fachini [13:53]

That normal scene, you know, he’s there all the time. 

Michael Rager [13:58]

Yeah. Yeah. If want to talk to Rager, I’ll go pull him aside and go talk to them. I say, “Yeah. That’s fine. You can do that. But I’m still charging you $300 an hour to do it.” And do those things. I don’t know why it is, but it just is. And it’s always been that way. So it’s just people, you know, we’re funny. 

Mario Fachini [14:19]

Well, I’m glad that you are helping companies refine all this because it is so vitally important. Because you can have the best food in the world, you can have the best message, but if you’re going to the wrong medium, you’re not going to be, like I said, reeling in those clients. So the people you’ve worked with before, what are a couple things that Expert Authority World could do when you’re saying “I want to refine the – ” I don’t even want to say avatar. Ideal customer or ideal client. What are a couple things they could do to refine it right now and start testing what mediums are going to be best for them? 

Michael Rager [14:53]

I think the first thing they need to do right now is go back and look at their last – depending on how many customers there is – 50 customers or last 100 customers. Look at them and start finding the commonalities between them. Are they men? Are they women? What’s their socioeconomic background? How much money did they make? Where did they come from? How did they find you in the first place? There’s the Pareto Principle, 80{d1d47f886dfada3fbec120c845cf21cbf2de07a46032aee93c7c36510b4a5e81} of our revenue is going to come from 20{d1d47f886dfada3fbec120c845cf21cbf2de07a46032aee93c7c36510b4a5e81} of our people. And if we start figuring out, what happens is people try to gather everybody. And they try to get – and again, we go back to fishing with hotdogs. They try to gather everybody and everybody. If you were to go ahead right now and look at your last 25, 50, 100 customers, no matter what kind of business you’re in, you’re going to find out there’s commonality between them all. And start going with that commonality what works. Once you see what has worked in the past, go ahead and expand out from there, and start looking at other other options. 

Mario Fachini [15:50]

I want to set some reasonable expectations. Because some people might think, “Oh, I can do this in 24 hours, a week, or a month.” What would you say is a reasonable expectation when you start diving in and refining this. What is a reasonable expectation for is it going to take 30 days, 60 days, longer or shorter? 

Michael Rager [16:10]

I think shorter. If you really get on it, one of the things – you know, we’ve got this new software called Profit Accelerator. And we go into that. And this is one of the things we look at is, who is my perfect client? Why do we have them? And it allows us to go ahead and start tweaking that and start getting people on. When I coach them, there’s certain things that I have them do based on this stuff. But we’ve got to look at what we’ve done in the past and learn from it. And it’s either going to be don’t do it or continue to do it. And what happens is marketing people get bored with it. You know, “I’ve been doing this forever.” But if it’s still working, keep doing it. We’re in this to make money. This is what we want to do. So we need to keep doing that. But you can increase your revenue. One of the things that I guarantee through the software is I’ll find you 100,000 in new revenue if you give me 45 minutes. So we’ll sit down, give me 45 minutes, we’ll find you $100,000 in new revenue. That doesn’t mean you’re going to get it because 90 percent of the people won’t do the damn work we’re going to tell them to do. And you know that. That’s the whole thing and that’s why people need coaches to kind of kick them along a little bit and make them go. And I think one of my new favorite memes that was out the other day it says, if first you don’t succeed, do what your coach told you to do 30 days ago. You see it out there. So we tell our clients all the time. I got one, they’ve been a client of mine for almost a year. For seven months they didn’t listen. God, they would not listen to me no matter what I said. They would keep doing things and coming to me. And then finally, about November last year, they started listening to me. They’re a home inspection firm and I’m like, “You need to visit people. You need to visit people. You need to visit people.” And all of a sudden, they’ve had their best January, their best February, and they were really on their way to have their best March until the coronavirus thing hit. And they’re still booking people right now. Because they’re at the top of mind. They’re finally doing it and it’s happening.  

Mario Fachini [18:17]

Well, I’m glad they’re listening. But it’s interesting that they waited so long to – I mean, seven months is quite a bit. It’s not like a few weeks or anything or even a couple of months. That’s like – 

Michael Rager [18:30]

Ego. It’s just getting the guy’s ego out of the way. And, you know –

Mario Fachini [18:35]

What is a good way to do that? How do you get the ego out of the way? And the other part I wanted to ask you was, when you’re taking people through that process, why do you think people get so bored? Because it’s like, you start the business, you want to do all these things, and scale up, and grow, and profit, and blah, blah, blah. All these things and it’s like, finally you get it working. And I see a lot of people do the same thing. They finally have something that’s working. And instead of doubling down, they’re like, “Let me try something new.” You already did 48 times. Stick with this one. 

Michael Rager [19:09]

Yeah. Exactly. We used to do it when we were fishing. We start catching salmon, left, and left, and left, and right on green. Things got green in Northport Nailers on LinkedIn. And then my buddy would say, “Hey, let’s go try this other thing.” It’s like, “Well, dude. We’re crushing them right now. Wait until they stop biting then we’ll go try something else.” But if you’re crushing them, you got to do it. I really don’t know, business owners are a weird breed. We really are there. They’re usually very driven. They’re used to once people – they tell people what to do. And now, people tell them what to do and not work with them. So it’s really hard a lot of times to get them out of their own way. And that’s where they stand. They get in their own way a lot. And you got to let them fail sometimes. And then you just got to give them that, “See, I told you so.” And you hate to do it. But you’ve got to do it occasionally to let them know. 

Mario Fachini [20:10]

That’s important to note because I think everyone tries to do everything perfect. And they’re afraid to fail. And it’s like how well does your way work so far? You obviously reached out for help for something. 

Michael Rager [20:22]

One of my coaches, his thing was, I want to fail and I want to fail as fast as possible. I want to know the crap does not work as fast as possible. Then I know it doesn’t work, so I know not to do it anymore. And let’s move on to something else. 

Mario Fachini [20:36]

That’s a totally different outlook on it. I like that though. So I want to ask you about your success stories because I know you have plenty of them. But you’ve shared with me before and you know I’ve even told you, you just rattle it off like it’s no big deal. Give me a couple of your biggest success stories. 

Michael Rager [20:56]

One of my biggest was one of my first. It was a bookkeeping company in Houston. They were struggling. They had a great product, great services. In five months, we added a couple zeros to their monthly revenue and helped them sell the company. And it wasn’t a marketing thing. There was not a damn thing we did with marketing. It was operationally. One of the things that people feel is, marketing will change your business and it won’t. It’s the slowest way to change your business. It’s really operations and things. But we went around and we changed pricing and we changed the operations and we did things. My dad at the time told me nobody was worth what I was charging this client. And I said, “Dad, in six months we ended up making this lady almost $300,000 in new revenue.” We sold the company for almost a-half-a-million dollars. And the company that she sold it to, hired her to stay on for three years and guaranteed $115,000 a year salary. She went out. She left. She was out for three years. And she started another competing company again. So she was there. She knows what to do now. She’s replicated and do it again. 

Mario Fachini [22:08]

And how long was she doing stuff on her own before you helped her? 

Michael Rager [22:13]

Eight years – seven, eight years. Most of my clients are like that, seven, eight years. 

Mario Fachini [22:15]

So seven or eight years on your own. And then six months -six to 12 on average, it sounds like. 

Michael Rager [22:24]

Yeah. Turn around and flip the whole thing around. They’re a medical company. One of the big things we had with them – they were very successful. They were very successful before they met us. But we found out that the guy had brought in a doctor to work for him. And here in Houston, it was illegal to offer medical practices unless it was owned by the doctor. And it ended up costing him some money. We had to restructure the company and bring the doctor in as a part owner and stuff like that. So there was a lot of thing that we had to look at operationally. But then we just turned around and flipped out around and started rocking. But the thing was, they could have been shut down. If the wrong person came in and looked at them, they would have been shut down. And they would have been in a whole lot of trouble. So there’s things that people do. They think they’re doing the right thing. They just don’t know. 

Mario Fachini [23:16]

What are some things people can look at for the systems and operations that will help them improve their business? 

Michael Rager [23:23]

You got to understand how your company works. You got to understand really, who does what, how and why. And what happens if one of those people walk away tomorrow? I like to tell people, we need to look at the lotto scenario. So if your best person wins the lotto tomorrow, what happens if they never come back to work? And what are you going to do? Ninety percent of the companies that I worked in have no written down processes or procedures. They just go do what they do. Everything’s in the owner’s head. It’s in the manager’s head. They’ve been there 15, 20 years and things stay there. We dealt with a company where the owner died. And the daughter of the owner called me in and said, “Hey, would you look at this?” Their operations officer and executive assistant was essentially holding the family hostage because they knew how to do everything because dad never wrote anything down. They ended up going bankrupt. And it’s just sad. You guys got to do it. If you have not written down how the business works, you’re in trouble. It’s not a sellable asset. I recommend every business owner read the book Built to Sell, because you got to build an asset. That’s the whole thing you’re doing is you’re building a sellable asset. Not that you’re going to sell it. But if you ever are forced to have to sell it, it is now a sellable asset. Most businesses take two to three years of grooming, and training, and coaching to get them to become a sellable asset. So you got to start now. 

Mario Fachini [25:02]

Yeah. And I remember when I read it. And it’s a great book. Just learning about having it to a point where it’s attractive enough that someone would want to buy it. It’s your choice if you do sell it or not and exit. But just having it structured in the right way and it’s attractive where someone wants it, that’s a game changer. 

Michael Rager [25:26]

It’s a real game changer. But the other thing is, you as the owner, you’ve got to give up control. And that’s where you’ve got to develop leaders. And I’m a big John Maxwell fan. And I trained under John for six, seven years now. And one of the things that I tell my business owners is, if somebody in your organization can do something 70 percent as well as you, give it to them. It’s theirs now. They run it. It’s theirs. And they’re going to end up running it better than you because they’ve got a different perspective than you have. You built that system and that process from the perspective you were in six, seven, eight years ago. New people, younger people are coming in and looking at it with a different perspective. And they’re going to be able to go change it and make it better .

Mario Fachini [26:12]

Would you say there’s also an element as the CEO where it’s like, “I just want to get this done and off my plate because I got other stuff to do.” Or, “I just want to spend more time with family and friends.” And there’s a degree of, I don’t want to say, you care less. But when you give it to someone to spearhead and champion that thing and then that’s all they’re focused on versus you who has 15 other things you’re focused on. 

Michael Rager [26:37]

Oh, yeah. yeah. I want to get as much off my plate as possible. That’s what I keep telling my business owners. Whatever you don’t need to be doing, don’t do it. Your job is to grow that company. I just brought in a new company at the beginning of the year and the son is buying the dad out. They’re a their carpet cleaning company. A great carpet cleaning company, but they specialize in oriental rugs. And the dad was like, “Hey, you know, I need you to go ahead and learn how to clean this, and learn how to clean this, and learn how to clean this.” And I told the son, I said, “Do you want to be a high end carpet cleaner or do you want to be CEO of this company.?” And he goes, “I want to be CEO of this company.” I said, “Good. Don’t go do that crap. Hire other people that do that. Learn how to be a CEO.” And so that’s what we’re teaching him to do now is we’re teaching him how to be a CEO, how to run that company. He has to know. 

Mario Fachini [27:28]

That’s exciting to hear both for anyone listening and me, personally. Because when you were talking about the procedures, I was working on some just yesterday for my software. And it’s one of the reasons I love helping people publish their business books, because it’s very revealing to go, “Hey, you got all this expertise. Now, we’re going to put it into a process. And it’s got to turn into paper on words – words on paper.” And it’s like, “What do you mean?” If you can’t get it out of your head, you’re done. 

Michael Rager [27:58]

You’re done. 

Mario Fachini [27:59]

Even for marketing. 

Michael Rager [28:01]

If you’re shut down right now for coronavirus or you’re shut down for anything, work on that stuff. Don’t sit home and say, “Oh, woe is me. Nothing’s happening.” Get the important stuff done. Build the guts of your company. That is the internal, that’s the guts. It’s the heart and soul of your company. If you don’t get that stuff built, it’s not going to run the way you need it to run. 

Mario Fachini [28:24]

Yeah. I started thinking about some of this 15 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, last year. Because whether anything’s going on in the world, if electricity goes out, at the end of the day if you even just get sick. Now, these are all negative things, but here’s a reality. I started my company to have more time with family and friends. What if I want to up, up, and away for months and travel, is the company still in business? If you have assets and procedures in place, it is. 

Michael Rager [28:55]

My 32nd speech at networking events is I go around and say, “How many of you people are in business?” And they all raise their hands. I said, “How many of you guys can leave for six weeks and your company will still function?” All their hands go down. I go, “Not one of you owns a business. You own jobs. Very high stressful jobs, quit it. Own a company. Let me show you.” 

Mario Fachini [29:18]

That’s fantastic. 

Michael Rager [29:20]

Yeah. What I found is my business the bigger jerk I am kind of to really call them out. The more response I get, you know, you go in and being nice. That doesn’t help them. My job is not to be nice. It really is. I had one company, they’re rocking. Their company right now is called GermWrap. Imagine right now, we’re talking right now that heat of the coronavirus. They’re rocking and rolling right now. But a couple weeks ago, the owner was like, “Oh, my god. I don’t know.” And I looked [unintelligible] [00:29:53] ] quit. Quit and shut your company down and go get a job.  And his wife looked at him like, “Yeah. Let’s quit and let’s do it.” Now, here they are, 30 days later, so busy, they don’t know what the hell to do. 

Mario Fachini [30:09]

And that’s the other thing, when you get to a point for whatever reason that you get busy and you can scale up and everything, can you sustain the growth? It’s not just staying in business and sustaining every day. It’s, “Okay.” I’ve said that for years, what if I gave you 1,000 times more than you have now? When I had five clients, I looked at some Post-its on the desk and I go, “This isn’t going to work.” And I started thinking through the lens of, if I were to multiply what I’m doing times 1,000, is it sustainable, Post-uts or not? A CRM is? 

Michael Rager [30:46]

Yeah. Well, that’s what – the rug company, I went to their operations manager and said, “Hey, look. If we turn down marketing right now and got really good at it and increased business 25 percent, what the hell would happen?” Well, they got a 16,000 square foot facility. And he’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t think we can handle it.” “Well, good. We got to work on operations. We got to work on operations first before marketing.” GermWrap, we sit there and we talk to them. And what we’re looking at is, what are our bottlenecks? What are the bottlenecks that we have right now? What can we control and what can’t we control? And how will we deal with it? And so they’re really working on that stuff. They’ve gone from no employees to several because they’re so busy right now. But now the owner is like, “Okay. Here’s my next potential bottlenecks, how do I deal with them? And what do I need to do?” And they’re really thinking totally different now. Crisis will make you think different. And wee got one now and it’s going to get rid of some businesses. It’s going to get rid of some businesses that weren’t good. Some good businesses are going to fall out. But if you’re really thinking about your business right now, you can make it grow and get yourself ready for what’s coming. Because it’s going to be a boom once it comes again. 

Mario Fachini [32:00]

That’s what I’m looking forward to. Every time there’s been a downturn for whatever reason, there’s always – and I’ve been telling people for the last couple of weeks, even earlier this year for the brand new year, it was, “Where do you want to be 6, 12, 18 months from now? What are you doing today that six months from now you can thank yourself for? Not just get through the week. 

Michael Rager [32:24]

It’s 90 day. It’s 90 days, Mario. Where I am today is because of what I did 90 days ago. 

Mario Fachini [32:28]

There you go. 

Michael Rager [32:29]

It has nothing to do with what I’ve done yesterday. It’s 90 days ago. 

Mario Fachini [32:32]

I love that. Well, we’re going to thank our sponsor, but before we do, I’ve got the fun Wheel of Whatever question for you. So we’re going to spin it here imaginary while it’s getting painted. And do you want dinner, celebrity, movie, or conspiracy theory? 

Michael Rager [32:51]

Conspiracy theory because I’m not big into them. And there’s way too many of them going around these days. 

Mario Fachini [32:58]

What’s a good one? Moon Landing, do you think that was real? 

Michael Rager [33:04]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I do think it was. Being in Houston now, there’s so many people hired in NASA down here. I can’t think that we would we would fake something like that and keep it going for 60 years. Spend the amount of money that we’ve got going. So I’m pretty, pretty sure that the moon landing was real. Actually, I know some people who worked with people who worked on it. So I’m pretty sure it’s real. 

Mario Fachini [33:29]

Okay. Cool. Appreciate that. All right. We’re going to thank our sponsor and come back for the Imperfect Action Round. 

SPONSOR Acorns [33:36]

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Mario Fachini [34:49]

And we are back with the Imperfect Action Round. Michael, are you ready to take imperfect action? 

Michael Rager [34:54]

Let’s do it. 

Mario Fachini [34:56]

Number one, what is the fastest path to the cash? 

Michael Rager [35:00]

The fastest path to the the cash is knowing your customer. 

Mario Fachini [35:05]

I love it. Number two, what is the biggest problem your prospects make and the fastest way they can fix it? 

Michael Rager [35:14]

The biggest problem they have is they have no structure in getting operational procedures in place. So things can be duplicatable.

Mario Fachini [35:22]

Three, my favorite, what is it the best way to maximize customer lifetime value? 

Michael Rager [35:30]

Customer lifetime value, it’s empowering your staff actually. I think it’s empowering your staff to do what’s necessary and do what’s right to keep those customers around and with you for a long period of time. You got to trust your people. 

Mario Fachini [35:45]

I love that. Having the right team in place. What is a book that has helped your business? 

Michael Rager [35:54]

A lot of them. A lot of them. A lot of them. 

Mario Fachini [35:56]

What are some books I should say? I know you mentioned Build to Sell which is is a great one. 

Michael Rager [36:01]

Build to Sell, of course. Story Branding by Donald Miller, I think it’s great. It’s a great book on telling a story of your company. Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill, I think is the ultimate. If you haven’t read it, you should. So I think those are my top three.

Mario Fachini [36:16]

Excellent. Well, I appreciate you for sharing. Where can people find more about you? 

Michael Rager [36:22]

They can find more about me at TYB2F, so TYB2F.com. We’ll have a new Teach Your Business to Fish website up here in another couple weeks. We just started redoing it. If you want to go on some fishing trips with us, follow us on Facebook, Teach Your Business To Fish. We got a couple coming up. I got one of my big guys right now he said, It’s a whole bunch of cancellations. Come on down south and catch some giant tuna with us.” 

Mario Fachini [36:47]

Well, you definitely inspired me when you said it was 87 degrees.  And I was like, it was 48 and then it was snowing. 

Michael Rager [36:53]

Yeah. I know. I’m wearing this sport coat for you, Mario, and it’s hotter than heck in here right now. I’m dying. So I got the shorts and flip flops on under the desk. I feel like a judge right now. 

Mario Fachini [37:05]

Well, I appreciate you for everything you’ve shared. It’s been an absolute pleasure. And you definitely delivered some Expert Authority insights. 

Michael Rager [37:12]

Well, thanks, Mario. I can’t wait. Hopefully, I’m going to be up in Michigan this summer. Hopefully, we get to get together and grab a beer and get to know each other face-to-face. We’ve been talking for a couple years, we need to do that. 

Mario Fachini [37:22]

Well, that sounds good to me. I look forward to seeing you again. And have a great day. Expert authority World, I’ll see you tomorrow and God bless. 

SPONSOR Business Book Checklist [37:30]

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SPONSOR Acorns [37:45]

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www.EAInterviews.com [38:22]

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.