Duff Gardner on Startup Thinking | PoP 456

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Duff Gardner on Startup Thinking | PoP 456

Why is it important to make sure that your business is investable? What is is the idea of resistance and how has the education system failed us? How can you create a minimum viable product?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks with Duff Gardner about start-up thinking.

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Meet Duff Gardner

Duff Gardner

Duff Gardner brings Startup Thinking to the Transformation World. Duff draws strength from his Modern Family. And, as an award-winning 7-figure marketer, startup founder, and Silicon Valley educated digital executive, he helps Impact-Driven entrepreneurs create Offers that Sel

Duff lives on the West Coast of Canada in beautiful Victoria BC, he is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon – Silicon Valley with an MSc. in Learning Sciences and Information Technology, and in his free time, he is a passionate advocate for his 2 adult kids, pitbull rescue and adoption, and LGBTQ rights

Visit Duff’s website, and connect on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

In This Podcast

Summary

  • Lifestyle design
  • Idea of resistance
  • Startup thinking
  • 5 step influencer system
  • Minimum viable product

Lifestyle design

If you’re going to create your life, you want to have it in such a way that things are flowing for you, it’s easy, its congruent with what you want to accomplish in life.

10 years ago life for Duff looked very different. He was moving between work, co-parenting his kids, doing his grad degree, and living a very busy life. He ended up having a series of panic attacks and he made a choice to slow things down and look after himself better. The life he lives now is one where is only travels once a month and he lives in a place that he loves.

Idea of resistance

A lot of this resistance we have built up is based on the education system that we’ve grown up in. The system itself was designed to turn us into factory workers. This is the reason why we struggle in life, in our business, and in our marketing. We are taught to fear mistakes, choosing information over communication, and trying to chase abstract goals.

Startup thinking

When you start marketing your practice you need to make sure that you become investable. Make sure that people know, like, and trust you. These are some things that people are looking to hear from you:

  1. Start with the end in mind – have a sense of where you’re going
  2. Understand how are you unique
  3. How do people see you as valuable

5 step influencer system

You have to meet people where they’re at in order to shine a light where they can go.

Think about why people follow you online and focus on:

  1. Knowing your avatar
  2. Figuring out how clearly you articulate the transformation
  3. Do you have a really compelling story?
  4. Is there a really specific system you follow or have in place?
  5. Have a premise, have a provocative statement that captures people’s attention

Minimum viable product

This is the idea that you create an experience for people at the early stage of your product design, you will collect some feedback and then use this to grow into something that is scalable.

Click here to get your personalized score card here to help you assess where you can make incremental improvements in your business!

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Meet Joe Sanok

private practice consultant

Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners that are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.

Thanks For Listening!

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Podcast Transcription

[JOE]:
This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 456.

When you’re in private practice, it can be tough to find the time to review your marketing efforts and make improvements where needed. Whether you are a seasoned clinician whose current website needs to be revamped, or a new therapist building a website for the first time, Brighter Vision is here to help. By first understanding your practice and what makes it unique, Brighter Vision’s team of developers will create you a custom website catered to your specific marketing goals. Better yet, they provide unlimited technical support to make sure it stays updated, and professional search engine optimization to make sure you rank high in online searches, all at no additional cost. To get started for $100 off, head over to brightervision.com/joe. Again, that’s brightervision.com/joe.

Well, I am so glad you are here. Thank you for letting me into your ears and into your brain. I hope that your day is going awesome. I hope you’re feeling healthy. I hope you’re feeling inspired. You know, during this unique time in our world’s history, I think there’s going to be a tendency when it’s all over to try to just, quote, get back to normal. And I would actually challenge that normal wasn’t really that great before all this, that we lived in a highly consumeristic culture, where we social distanced all the time, on our phones and without being around people and now that we’re being forced to social distance, it’s like we want that human connection. And I hope that we look at the environment. I hope that we look at the way the world is when humans step back from the constant pressures of keeping up and moving forward and being productive and all that, that we realize there’s some really important lessons from this time of rest, in a way. Now, I do understand that that’s a very privileged way of viewing it. But I feel that we have to think through what is the world that we want to design? What are the experiences with other people that we want to have? And what’s the legacy that we want to leave when we’re done? And a lot of us during this time have taken time to reflect, have taken time to think about what education means for our kids. Even us, we’re planning this road trip around the United States in an RV, and we’ll see how all that plays out. But even to have a glimpse into what homeschooling with our kids could be, I’m actually more excited about this road trip because, honestly, our kids, at least right now, are really enjoying the creativity and the ability to go after their curiosity and all sorts of really unique things. Like the other day, we jumped on a plane to Egypt, and then to Tulum, Mexico. We learned about the Mayans, we learned about the Egyptians, we learned about pyramids, we did an art project and it was just amazing. And our girls really loved the idea of taking a virtual tour of these countries and using Google Earth to walk through their streets. And it just, it’s something that maybe we were lacking before all of this.

So, a lot of these podcast interviews were done before Coronavirus, because I batch record things; I’m usually a few months ahead of time. And even my recording of the intros is usually at least a month ahead of time. But I know that the world we want to create, we’re gonna do together, and seeing in our Next Level Practice community and Podcast Launch School, all these communities that were able to inspire you and help come alongside you, we’re so excited about what this next phase is for human history as a result of this. So, thank you for having us be a part of your journey. We know there’s a lot of things that are pulling for your time, during this time of rebuilding and looking inward as to what we want out of life. Well, today we have Duff Gardner who’s going to be talking about startup thinking and there’s so many amazing things he has to say in this interview. So, without any further ado, I give you Duff.

Today on the Practice of the Practice podcast, we have Duff Gardner. Duff brings startup thinking to the transformation world; Duff draws strength from his modern family and as an award winning seven figure marketer, startup founder, and Silicon Valley educated digital executive. He helps impact driven entrepreneurs create offers that sell. Duff, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.

[DUFF]:
Oh, hey, Joe. I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

[JOE]:
I love it. I love that you have your own Modern Family. What is your own Modern Family? Let’s start there – what’s that mean?

[DUFF]:
Oh, great. Well, how do I…? I’m gay and I guess my Modern Family is I have a great relationship with the kids’ mother, and I have two kids who are in their 20s and I have a dog who’s my third kid. Yeah, so it’s kind of just like the television show.

[JOE]:
I love it. I love that you put that in your bio.

[DUFF]:
There you go.

[JOE]:
Yeah, I probably should’ve asked you, I’m gonna dive into that right from the get-go.

[DUFF]:
Oh, sure. Yeah.

[JOE]:
I love your part of North America, you know, up in British Columbia. It’s just so beautiful up there. We were up there on a road trip – this is a long time, a while ago – it was the place that when we kind of looked at our itinerary towards the end, it ended up snowing in Yellowstone and so we scooted out of there early and we’re like, if we had a couple extra days where would we have put them? And it would have been kind of up in Vancouver and kind of that area.

[DUFF]:
Oh, sweet. Well, I live in Victoria, which is just across the pond on Vancouver Island. And as we speak today, we have had a weird… it’s called a winter vortex, which is affecting everybody, and we have snow and I’ve just been shoveling for two hours. So we do get snow sometimes, but we were talking offline about your neck of the woods, and I really appreciate, to me, living in Victoria, it’s very much like where you live, it’s very grounding when I come home. I love living about 10 minutes from the ocean, 10 minutes from the woods.

[JOE]:
Yeah, I’m with you. It’s amazing how that sense of place draws certain types of people, because the people that live here in Michigan, they would have it no other way. Even though we put up with these crazy winters and summer rarely hits till mid-June, but it’s still amazing. We still love it here.

[DUFF]:
Yeah, I think it’s a big part of working at home or being a practitioner is just loving where you live, you know, and it’s a big part of just having success. And for me, it definitely is, I mean, a part of my daily routine, I have a rescue dog named Seamus and every day we go into the woods or we go to the beach, and I just schedule that into my day. It’s a big part of my routine.

[JOE]:
Why don’t we… we were gonna start with talking about startup thinking. But I’d love to start with lifestyle design and having your business reflect that, because it sounds like that’s important to you as it is to me as well. Has that always been the case for you, that your lifestyle was a main part of how you designed your career or was that something that had to emerge over time?

[DUFF]:
You know, that’s a great question. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that specifically. I think it just comes a bit naturally, but I can tell you about just over 10 years ago, I had a bit of a crazy life. I was co-parenting my kids, I was living in Victoria in my home here, I had a position in Vancouver, which is, if you know, it’s about four hours away by transport to get to Vancouver, so I had an apartment there and I was taking my grad degree in the San Francisco Bay Area. So I had this crazy life that was like a triangle where I would go between them all and I would coparent my kids, and I would go to work, and it was a pretty high pressure job, and then taking my grad degree. And in the middle of that I ended up having a series of panic attacks which, if you’ve ever had a panic attack, it just kind of feels like a heart attack. It’s not feeling nervous, it’s just all of a sudden somebody asks you a question and you don’t know the answer and all of a sudden your heart starts beating; I had three of those. And I think that was a big reason why I chose the life that I do now, is just I realized that I can definitely create any possibility in my life that I want, and that possibility has to include looking after myself. So, I think that’s a big reason why I do what I do today. And I work out of my home. And I do travel about once a month for about a week. But yeah, I really appreciate where I live. It’s a big part of my routine.

[JOE]:
Yeah. And I think that for me, I had to kind of deconstruct what I had been told where, you know, you work hard, you go to grad school, and then someone hires you and you’re blessed to have a decent job. And to realize that I don’t have to do therapy, if I don’t want to, I mean, in fact, last year I sold my counseling practice and so… I have my license still, but I’m not really practicing therapy and to be able to say, well, what to me is what I want to do and to define that direction myself, and then obviously, you have to do the work to make that happen. But it’s a huge shift to go from having two parents that worked for the public schools, two in-laws that worked for the public schools, and their motto was you work for someone, you get a pension, you retire.

[DUFF]:
Yeah, absolutely. That makes me think a little bit of something I like to talk about. I have this premise that you probably… obviously, practitioners are a big part of your world. This world resistance has been super interesting to me, more as an entrepreneur and as someone who’s geeked out on cognitive science, that was my master’s degree. And I have this idea of where that idea of resistance comes from. And I think that that’s kind of the basis why lifestyle design is so important. Like, if you’re going to create your life, you want to have it in such a way that things are flowing for you. It’s easy, it’s congruent with what you want to accomplish in life. But what I was gonna say is, like, this idea I have is that a lot of this resistance we have built up is based on our education system that we’ve grown up in. And that system of education was designed to, you know, not specifically teachers, but the system itself was designed to turn us into factory workers. And it’s evolved over time and it keeps evolving and keeps getting better. But if you look at some of the reasons why we run into resistance and why we struggle in life, and why we struggle in our business, and why we struggle in our marketing, I believe it’s grounded in the system of education that has us fearing mistakes, choosing information over communication, you know, trying to chase abstract goals, all these kind of things. And I actually talk about that with my clients as well, quite a bit. To me, that’s kind of a foundational element in lifestyle design, is understanding where some of this resistance comes from in our lives. And with my business clients, that’s a big part of what we talk about when we get started as well.

[JOE]:
Yeah, yeah. How does that connect with your teaching around startup thinking? Because you know, having been someone who’s done startups, Silicon Valley, I’m sure there’s some overlap with therapists who may feel like the startup world, you know, having a ping pong table in your… you know, that kind of classic movie version of a startup, sleeping under your computer. What is actual startup thinking? Maybe define that for us and tell us about some of the elements of it, and maybe we can then relate it into private practitioners.

[DUFF]:
Right? Well, it starts with having a Volkswagen RV. I’m just kidding. No. So, startup thinking is grounded in my experience in business. I kind of come from the startup world. So, the story of how I got into startup thinking or why I teach this stuff is, again, from personal experience. I’m 54 years old and when dotcom was happening I was super jealous; I had all these friends who were having all this success in the startup world I kind of dove into the startup world. And my first startup had some really incredible success. So, what I teach my clients comes from that. I think that what happens with a lot of us, when we step into learning how to market our practice, is that we start kind of looking around and copying what we think we’re supposed to be doing. And when you’re in the startup world, there’s a rigor to the process of growing your startup that you don’t actually tend to see with self-employed practitioners. And so I try to kind of glean those ideas that I learned from that experience and definitely, when I got into my first startup, I was not a business savvy person particularly, but I learned as I went, and we had some success, and I try to transfer those lessons I learned to my clients.

[JOE]:
So, what are some of the elements that you would say is startup thinking?

[DUFF]:
Sure. Well, first of all, I think what happens to folks when they step into marketing… So, your audience is primarily practitioners, or they’re growing a business around what they’ve created with their practice. So, when you step into that, the common wisdom is often… I call it the irresistible rabbit hole. And the irresistible rabbit hole is this idea that you need to create perfect messaging with your marketing. So, when you start thinking about marketing your practice, coming up with the perfect messaging, what tends to happen is you get the marketplace dismissing your offers. It’s because you’re trying too hard; people can smell it. And so, what happens then is that this next thing happens, is you start to build this internal resistance to what you’re creating, and that becomes a vicious cycle.

So, one of the key concepts I teach is to become investable. When you’re standing there and you’re trying to market your practice, you really want to be known, liked and trusted. It’s particularly important for your clients that they’re trusted. And so, this idea of being investable is one of the key concepts I teach. What I learned through the process of being in the startup world is there are eight things that people are looking to hear from you. And if you can speak to those things, then they will know, like, and trust you. And two really important concepts in that eight steps are the idea of being unique, like understanding how you’re unique, and also understanding how you’re valuable, how people see you as valuable. So definitely, when I start working with people, those are two key concepts that we really dive deep into. Yeah, and I can talk more about those for sure.

[JOE]:
Yeah, what are the other eight, or the other six of the eight?

[DUFF]:
Well, I guess first of all, you obviously need to know, usually starting with the end in mind is a good idea. So, when you’re starting to market your practice, and you’re starting to be in front of people and grow it and scale it, have a sense of where you’re going. So, when we were talking offline, we talked about a group of people I’m currently teaching right now where we’re teaching them to go from a practitioner to thinking about having a larger platform. So for example, say that you’ve had a ton of success, maybe you’ve had 10, 20, maybe even 30 years in practice, and what you’ve been helping people with, you see it as a huge opportunity to get into the corporate realm and maybe to do some… maybe a licensing kind of a situation, or a certification program. And so, you want to step into the corporate realm with your teaching. That would be an example of planning, as a startup, towards some kind of a goal and then sort of describing your business in such a way, structuring your business in such a way, that you’re moving towards that particular goal. And so, the distinction between someone who’s doing that, and someone who’s just kind of in the client conversation is that they’re just strictly thinking about, okay, where’s my next client coming from? How am I improving my client retention? Those kinds of questions. So that’s kind of one of the distinctions. That would be one of the other eight things that you focus on when you embody this idea of startup thinking.

[JOE]:
Awesome. What are a couple more?

[DUFF]:
I like to dive into how you’re unique. That’s my favorite one to start off with people. And then, how are you valuable is another one; those are my two favorite ones that I like to dive deep in with people. So, let’s start with the idea of how you’re unique. I think that what happens to a lot of people if they’re moving their practice online somewhat, versus offline, like say you’re stepping into trying to figure out online marketing to grow your practice. It’s really easy to lose your confidence, you know, because you get a lot of people who are quite successful telling you what you need to know, what you should do. And you can be a really smart person and understand and have had a lot of success, you can have a six-figure practice. And then you step into trying what you think you’re supposed to be doing online. And suddenly, you know, seven people are opening your emails out of a list of 1500. And you’re like, what the heck is going on? So, it’s really easy to kind of lose your confidence and lose your grounding about who you are.

So, the concept of how are you unique, goes like this, is there’s five ways that people will evaluate you when they see you online. It’s a very different experience, meeting someone online than it would be if you went to, say, a meetup, or if you just happen to meet them in a social situation. And so, there’s a lot of old school marketing concepts that float around this idea of uniqueness, like, what is your niche? What is your target market? And so, what I say to people is this, I ask them, who do you follow? Who do you love to follow online? Who really excites you? Whose TED talks do you listen to? What television shows do you watch? Whose articles do you read? And so, when I ask them that, the next question is, okay, well, why do you follow them? And so, if you kind of break that apart, parse it out, what you’ll discover is that we follow people based on five different things.

So those five things are, you may be their exact avatar, like you’re exactly the person they have crafted their mission to support. And so, you’re just really dialed in to what they’re saying, who they are, and all that kind of stuff. So, the lesson there is, you know, you should know who your avatar is. However, you don’t have to have it perfect; you can still get started. So, the second one is, how clear is the transformation? How clearly do you articulate your transformation? How clearly do you articulate where they’re starting from and where you’re taking them to? So again, if you think about people that you follow, you may or may not be super clear on that, and it may not matter, you just may follow them for a different reason. So, one of those other reasons could be, you’re super stoked about their personal journey. Something about their vulnerability story; maybe they lived under a bridge, and now they’re a multimillionaire. There’s something about their story that’s super compelling to you, and you follow them for this reason. The fourth reason is they have a really specific system. There’s something that’s super interesting and you geek out on their system. What comes to mind is Gartner Group. Gartner Group is a big consulting firm in the States, and they have something called the Magic Quadrant. So, their bread and butter is the system that they have, that they’re known for. And then the fifth thing that’s part of being unique is having a premise, having a provocative statement that is perhaps counterintuitive, but really catches people’s attention. They don’t have to agree with it. In fact, if they battle you on it, it’s fine, but you’re catching their attention.

So, these five things make up what I call an influencer system. It’s a five-step influencer system. And so, if you flip that kind of idea around – when we started this, I said, like, who do you follow? And why do you follow them? So, then you ask yourself, okay, well, why do people follow me? And so what you want to do as you move your business forward online, is you want to optimize those five different things over time, and for sure, just get started and, over time, improve and iterate, learn more from how people are interacting with you. And just keep focusing on improving those five things. So that’s kind of a uniqueness formula that I teach.

[JOE]:
Wow, that’s super helpful, and I love how content heavy it is. So, what are some ways that maybe someone would enact some of those five principles to kind of grow their uniqueness? So maybe their Instagram isn’t going as well as they want, or their blogs aren’t getting as many reads or their email open rate isn’t great. What might be a couple of ways that they could employ what you’re talking about?

[DUFF]:
Yeah, for sure. Well, one way is… I think a lot of folks who are practitioners, you’re pretty dialed into who your avatar is, but I’ve been through the experience of working with people who have come out of working with people who teach online marketing, and they clearly know who their audience is. But for some reason, when they step into online marketing, and they’re asked the question, what’s your niche? What’s your avatar? Who are you serving? And how that translates into marketing, they completely lose their confidence around that. So, again, the underpinning, or the reason why it’s important to understand that there’s five things behind why people follow you is, it’s kind of like permission to get started. It’s permission to get started in your online journey. You don’t have to have it perfect. So, you know, let’s take the question of the Avatar. So what you can do is you circle back to some of your interviews, you capture some of the exact language that they’re speaking, and you capture that in some kind of a document, a Google Doc, maybe in Evernote. And so, when you’re thinking about your marketing, I have this expression which is, you have to, online, meet people where they’re at, in order to shine a light on where they can go. You don’t want to shine a light on where they can go in order to meet them where they’re at. That’s the opposite. So, meet them where they’re at in order to shine a light on where they can go. So, you go into some of your… maybe you’ve got some recordings of some of your interviews. You obviously don’t want to compromise any personal information, but we want to grab specific language that people are using, you don’t want to generalize it. And so, you grab that language, you capture it. And definitely, you can use it in the front end of your marketing. So that could be Facebook ads, it could be an opt in page, it could be an opt in free gift for some of your services. So, this is where you want to… this would be how you could implement some of the teachings around how to get your perfect avatar.

[JOE]:
So good. So, when we’re thinking about private practice in particular, we were talking a little bit before we got rolling about the idea of a minimum viable product. And this idea of beta testing before you go full scale with something is really new to a lot of my consulting clients, even though the IT world has nailed it in the startup world. And so maybe take us through what the idea is of a minimum viable product and then I can share a little bit about how people often do it the opposite in our world and why that’s probably a big waste of time and money. So maybe just start with what’s the concept of a minimum viable product?

[DUFF]:
Yeah, thanks for asking, Joe. First of all, preface that by saying a lot of folks in the startup world are not particularly great at implementing minimum viable product either. And so, there’s sort of a new way of thinking about the concept. So, I’ll describe the concept first, and then I’ll talk about the evolution of the concept. So minimum viable product is kind of the idea that you create an experience for people at an early stage of your product design. In the case of practitioners, it might be a combination of product programs, services, what have you, but you create an early stage version around which you glean some feedback. And you use that feedback in an iterative way to grow into something that’s more scalable. In a nutshell, that’s kind of what a minimum viable product is. What happens is that people kind of conflate that idea with things like beta testing, pilot, experiment. And if you go to somebody and you say, hey, I’d love for you to be part of a pilot for a new program I’m creating, you’re going to get one of two responses: you’re going to get people who understand that they’ll probably get a higher level of value, they’ll get a higher touch experience, and therefore they’re going to be super interested in joining you in that kind of early stage iteration of what you’re trying to create. You’ll also get the opposite response of people who think it’s half baked. So that’s just important to know that when you’re using that kind of language. I actually counsel people not to really use the language, just to call it what it is; it’s a program. But in practice, when you’re growing your program, your first iteration of it is you’re going to have certain hypotheses about what will and what will not work. So, the newer concept that’s starting to take hold around this idea of a minimum viable product in a product design cycle, is the idea of simple, lovable, and complete. So, when you’re creating something that’s simple, lovable, and complete, you want to create something that is usable, and something that people can give you really great feedback on.

So, I use a metaphor when I talk about this stuff. The wrong way to create a minimum viable product is to… I use the example of a skateboard versus a car. So, what I say is, like, when you’re building your product, there’s four iterations of it, let’s say. So, you want to build this fancy program. Let’s say you want to build a certification program for corporate, you want to glean all the really cool stuff that you’ve taught people over the years. You want to turn it into a corporate certification program. So, the wrong way to do that, in the metaphor, is to give people a tire and then ask them some stuff about that. And then give them a chassis and then ask them some stuff about that. And then give them some internal pieces of a car and ask them about that. And then a car. The way you want to think about that is creating a small, simple, loveable, complete experience. So instead, the right way to do it is to give them a skateboard; learn some things about how they love the skateboard, then a scooter, then a motorcycle, and then the car. So, each of those second examples are simple, loveable, and complete experiences in their own right. And people can give you useful feedback around them.

So, what I do when I’m working with clients is I create this grid. And along the top of the grid, we have the different stages of product growth, the first being the skateboard, then the scooter, then the motorcycle, then the car. So that product development lifecycle, I find, is really freeing with people because a lot of times they’re like, I want the certification program, I have to do all these things, I have to multitask, and soon they’re doing exactly what they didn’t want to do in the first place, and they’re not having a ton of success. So this way of iterating your way through a product development cycle, starting with your minimum viable product which metaphorically, I refer to as a skateboard, is a super freeing way to step into this realm of building something that you believe can be scalable and can grow over time.

[JOE]:
Oh, that’s awesome. What I often see with my consulting clients is they have already sketched out some giant eCourse on trauma or for couples, and they’re so in love with the name, they bought the URL, and they’ve already hired their video designer and their marketer and they have no audience at all. And I say, well, let’s slow down a little bit, and what can we at least do to build an audience, and then to kind of test things with that audience before you launch it, whether it’s early access, or just some groups to talk about the problem or the pain that they would like to have overcome. Would you say that’s the best way to do it for kind of when we’re looking at launching an eCourse, or membership community, to get to know the audience first, and their pain, and the people, before we can launch that product?

[DUFF]:
Yeah, that’s a great question, Joe, thanks. You’d asked me earlier what the eight steps are in startup thinking. So, this is kind of the step that I call execution, which is how to execute on your business that we’re talking about. So, let’s take the example you’re talking about, like an eCourse. I also teach people about something called the marketing cycle. And so that grid I was talking about earlier, if you map the product development along the top, and then the marketing steps along the side, what you end up with is 16 different kind of boxes that you can use to kind of stage your business through, from A to Z. So, in the case of an eCourse, that obviously… When you’re thinking about online marketing, there’s four steps as well. So, there is, where does your traffic come from? For this podcast, like, a podcast is technically a traffic source, potentially, it’s also a piece of content, but what is your traffic source? Secondly, how are you engaging with your clients? Thirdly, how are you converting them into clients? And then fourthly, what are you delivering? So, in the example you’re giving me, an eCourse, that is kind of like what are you delivering? So, then you want to ask yourself, okay, if we’re building a skateboard, in other words a first iteration of this thing, that is what I’m delivering. So then if you work backwards, you’re like, okay, so how am I going to convert people into clients for this course? Like, what is my process for doing that? Is a discovery call system? Is it like a video sales letter? Like, what is it? Third thing going backwards: how am I engaging with those people? Are they coming into my community through a simple lead magnet opt in? Are they coming into my community through some other form of engagement, like organically, maybe through Facebook Lives? I know you’re doing a lot of those lately. And then the first one, which is traffic, like, where’s my traffic coming from?

So, I definitely find a lot of practitioners will build this fantastic course. And then they’ll set up shop and they’ll be like, okay, great. And it feels like… I don’t know, I spent a lot of time in Phoenix, Arizona, and there’s these malls that, a decade ago, kind of went through a tough time and they still stand there. And basically, all this there is a dry cleaner and a Wendy’s, and it’s all empty otherwise. And so, when you have no traffic, it’s like setting up shop in the middle of that mall. And it can be the most amazing store; there’s just no traffic. So, I also set people up to think about those four steps in marketing, and line those up with your product development cycle iterations. And then when you do that, in the example of your eCourse, if that happens to be the first iteration of what you’re offering, then you know, you iterate your way through it and you say, okay, well what comes next after that? What’s my motorcycle? What’s my car? What’s the endgame here?

[JOE]:
Such good advice, and I feel like we could go on for hours. We’ve got to figure out how to have you back on the show soon. Duff, if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?

[DUFF]:
You know, I think that what happens with people – I said it earlier – is you’re super smart at what you do. You have a ton of experience, a ton of experience with clients, and they love what you do. They love who you are, and they love what you give to them. So just make sure that when you step out into the world of online marketing and growing your practice and scaling your practice online, whether you’ve got a big platform in mind, or it’s simply just growing the practice through client acquisition, is to really stand in your value. You know, it’s just that, like, really to remember who you are and to stand in that value of who you are. And just have those moments where you remember that, and that will serve you well.

[JOE]:
It’s so awesome. And Duff, if people want to connect with you more, I know you have a free gift also, how can they connect with your free gift, and tell us a little bit about that?

[DUFF]:
Sure. Yeah. I designed this performance scorecard called the Impact Scorecard. And it’s designed for impact driven folks, practitioners, entrepreneurs. And it’s designed to give them a little bit of information in terms of where they could make incremental improvements in their business. And so, it’s a quick and dirty little assessment. It’s called the Impact Scorecard. You can get it at theimpactscorecard.com and it takes you about three minutes to fill out. It gives you a little bit of information. There’s an opportunity to have a discovery call with me afterwards. And what we do is we sort of map out what that looks like, what that means to your business.

[JOE]:
Awesome. Well, Duff, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast.

[DUFF]:
Joe, it was fantastic to be here. I appreciate the opportunity.

[JOE]:
So how are you taking action on this podcast today? I want you to take some time to think about, you know, what from what Duff said here really resonates with you? What is it that you can take some action on this week from what Duff taught you? Where can you grow in a new way? And also, we’d love for you to go hang out with Brighter Vision. Brighter Vision is an amazing website builder. They do some really cool things and they have a lot of great resources going on during this whole Coronavirus thing. So, make sure you head on over to brightervision.com. Connect with them; let them know we sent you. Thanks so much for letting us into your ears and into your brain.

In the next episode we’re going to talk with Adam and Carrie Anderson, and how they killed their family with business, and they killed their business with family. It’s a really interesting episode and we will talk to you soon. Have a great day. Bye.

Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music; we really like it. This podcast is designed to provide accurate, authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.