How To Build A Business You’re Not A Slave To

You always hear “Work ON your business not IN it.” How do you do that? “Small Business Stacey” interviews Terry Ogburn to get the answers. #SmallBusinessInterviews #SmallBusinessSuccessStories

Episode Summary:

How To Work On Your Business Not In It

Hey everybody, welcome! “Small Business Stacey” here – your host for today’s Small Business Marketing Success Show. If you are sick of burning the candle at both ends and want to know how to work ON your business, not IN it, you’re in the right place. Today I have Terry Ogburn to teach us how to do that. Welcome, Terry!

Thank you so much for having me on your show. It’s just going to be a lot of fun today.

We are absolutely gonna have fun. Okay. But before we get into the meat and potatoes, you know, I hate boring bios. So just tell us a little bit about you. You’ve been in business for a really long time, so tell us a little bit about your backstory, how you got to where you are today and what you’re doing.

Okay, great. Thank you. Well, I was far down the car business and if anybody out there, that’s been fired out of someplace, you go start something on your own. I’m just the typical guy that said, okay, I can do it better. And of course I was a technician that got involved in the work and never understood how to work on my business. And to all your listeners, first thing is go out, find mentors, find people that you can learn from and you don’t have to pay them. Now, there are plenty of people out there that are willing to help us grow. So that’s what I did and I was very lucky to have some very, very good people come across my path. And that led me to create the systems and the processes that I’ll be able to share some of those with your audience today.

And that took me into the corporate world. And so I tried my systems in the corporate arena and I graduated there. The next thing you know, I was moved to Miami to do a startup for a franchise startup. Two and a half years we went public. You can imagine the amount of knowledge that you learn going public, right? Because I’m not the guy that’s doing it. I’m the guy in the trenches helping it get there. So we grew 11 regional offices and over 2000 franchises and went public in two and a half years. It was a good group of people making it happen, but at the time too, the chairman of the company was a very wise guy and he saw the internet taking over the travel industry.

So we hurried everything up, cast out and he said, I don’t know what you’re going to do with your money. He says, but I’m leaving.  I said I’m leaving if you’re leaving. So we left because we did what we were supposed to do. So then I was snapped up and asked to join Radio Shack to do turnaround stores with them and some major corporations like T wireless mobile called. Some of the big guys. You get a name, you go out there and you get called on. It’s fun to be moved to a company and I’m sure Stacey you’ve had that happen. Even then with the downturn when I was in real estate at the time, training and teaching real estate in fact I sold a franchise within a franchise, which is remarkable.

So with the downturn of the real estate, I said, well, I should jump in because it’ll be small business owners that make the country turn around again. So I opened my business that December. I’ll start my 15th year this in December. Yeah. So that’s that’s my track record. That’s two companies that I’ve taken past the 10-year mark and one made public.

Congratulations. And what an amazing journey you’ve had. You’ve been in practically every industry, you’ve been the solopreneur, you’ve been in the corporate world, you’ve been in franchising, and now you’re being sort of the consultant role. Wow.

My uncle asked my dad one time, we were up visiting his brother and my uncle says, “What’s Terry doing now?” My dad said, “Well he’s retired.” And my uncle said he hasn’t worked at anything long enough to retire cause in their world you had to work 20 years, you know.

But I told somebody the other day after I got in corporate America, I don’t think I had a job for more than three years. You know, without changing because you take a contract for three years, five, sometimes five years. But I don’t remember taking a five year. So three-year contracts would be my longest-term with a company. Well that’s interesting because it sort of forces you to be really focused in achieving those goals. It’s not like you have 30 years to do it. Right?

Exactly. Exactly. 100%. Okay. Well, Terry, we know about the professional you, but what my audience really wants to know is about the personal you. So I have a few questions to ask. You’re ready? Okay. All right. Nice car or nice house?

A small condo. 1,250 square feet. Two cars. One a Jag, one a Cadillac.

Oh, interesting. Okay. So that’s kind of a nice car and a nice house.

Actually. Just living a minimalist.

Exactly. Perfect. Okay. Then an airplane or train?

First-Class. Oh, airplane. The only way you get me anywhere in this country, if you want me to where you are, I’m in the front of the plane.

I love it. Well we just need to get you so you have your own. Wouldn’t that be perfect?

Actually that’s a great story. Not from me, but that’s how NetJet was formed was two people coming together with an idea and they sold it to Warren Buffet. Timeshare. You get that you don’t really own it, you just own pieces of it. Two guys come out with that. Marco Island, Florida. That is a great business model.

One more question for you. Concert or Broadway play?

Both. I can be in flip flops and then in a t-shirt I can put a tux on and do that as well. So either one. And I love both of them.

All right, well I love you because you’re just so well rounded. All right, well thank you. To get into some meat and potatoes of working on your business. What does that mean and why are small business owners not doing that?

Company Vision

They get trapped in the day to day operations. They start out with a vision of opening their company and having grand ideas of what they’re gonna do. And then they put a few things together like the copier, telephones and get this stuff that they need to go and then they get settled in, into that day to day grind. And it’s hard to get out of that.

And that’s just normal. It’s just a gravitational pull that pulls us into it. What we should be doing is spending two to four hours a week working on the vision of the company, focusing on where we want to be, what goals we’re gonna set in place and things like that. And then we need to manage that, through about six to eight hours a week managing the reporting and decision making data, decisions rather than off the gut. You’re using that. And then 40 to 48 hours a week is for the technical stuff, the day to day, the sales and that kind of stuff. But you need three buckets of your time and, and hold yourself accountable for putting those time boxes in place and doing that each week.

So how did you figure out this magical formula of how to break up the time?

Well, it comes from the different books that we read. They’re all out there. One of the best books out there is for this purposes, the E myth Revisited. So please, every one of your audience, please go get that if they haven’t already gotten it. This is a study by Michael Gerber on why the success of McDonald’s. And so if you, like myself, have been through franchising, you’ve learned that the Federal Trade Commission says that you have to put these things in place in order for them to allow you to sell the business. So we as young entrepreneurs, we can go out and just follow the same guidelines the Federal Trade Commission sets up because they’re not gonna let anybody buy a business that’s going to fail or they’ll at least make you warn them that there’s possibles of failure. So better to pattern after the good, something that’s already been done.

So do that. We need to put our ego in check. That’s another thing that I find with small businesses. They think because they, it’s their baby, but the more people they hire, the more people that they bring around them and delegate and learn to delegate and not micromanage. Empower your people and empower them to make mistakes. It’s okay. I tell my people all the time, you can make a mistake because we learned from it. You know Edison is credited to developing the light bulb, but he also failed at it 10,000 times. And a reporter asking said, well, you know, you failed that at 10,000 times. He goes, no, I found 10,000 ways not to do it.

Your Mindset

Yeah, mindset. Right?

Right. It’s all in how you position. Another thing is work with an attitude of expectancy.

Get up every day expecting the best, not the worst. And then you’ll train your brain to look for new signs and new ideas. And these little roadmaps and posts come to us. We just have to, we just have to accept them when they get there. We have to see them hiring the right people. In today’s marketplace, we should be using a profiling system. I don’t care if you’re using Colby, are you using DISC method? Are you using whatever is out there? But make sure you’re matching the profile of your worker with the job they’re doing. Not all personalities are a fit for the right job. Like for sales, you would never hire an amiable personality for sales. Do you know why? Because they don’t like rejection. So I mean, you’re setting that personality up for failure. Analytical wouldn’t be a good person to hire in sales either because they’re going to ask you, why do you have to do it this way?

Well, the reason you do it this way is because it works. You need a driver or an expressive personality to be in sales. Yeah. If you need a support person, you get an amiable personality because they’re going to sit in their little room and they’re going to work very gently on the work that you give them. If you need data like figures and data compressed and evaluated an analytical person would be the right person for you. So that profiling it works in hiring the right people. Other things stem from making sure you have processes and policies. I was with a client today and he said his boss wanted the proposal to go out and then he wanted him to follow up a couple of days later, see if there were any questions they can rectify or fix the proposal.

I said, well, let’s take it a step further. Let’s call the day before the proposal goes out. Tell them the proposal is coming, it’s on its way. And you set an appointment to go over it with them in the next week or the next few days. Now you’ve got an appointment, now you’ve got it all set. So now you’re setting yourself apart from the rest of the people.  So little things like that have make a big difference. My thing is about studying what others do and find ways to do it better.

Yeah, that’s a good point because I agree with you. There really is nothing new. It’s taking what’s already out there and putting your, your own unique spin on it.

Your Exit Strategy

Exactly. I want to back up for a minute. Some of the people in my community are aspiring entrepreneurs. They haven’t yet started their business. I have other people who are long term business owners 20 plus years. The day somebody starts their business should they be coming in with their exit plan in mind so that they’re then intentionally building a business around getting out of their own way or what do you recommend? Either somebody new coming out or somebody 20 plus years. Is there a difference?

You approach the business, you approach all deals the same way. They need to have the attitude of the exiting strategy. You go into the business with the idea of how I’m getting out of it. Most people make a mistake like naming it Stacey’s marketing. Right? Now you have a beautiful name. Small biz marketing. So that’s what we do. But you don’t have to be with the business, if you ever sold it. With my air conditioning company, it was called Buccaneer, a refrigeration air conditioning. So I, Terry didn’t have to be a part of the business to be sold.

That’s a really good point, right? If you create a business that’s personally branded around you, then it’s really not sellable because nobody can buy you.

And it’s hard to scale it too because when you’re trying to attract new people in and they see it’s your business, it’s labeled, they get to walk in every day seeing your name on. So they have no career path. That’s another thing that I would advise all your team. I have a client in Chicago, we’ve got his system down, been with him for almost nine years now and we’ve got his system down to where all he has to do is hire laborers and look in the labor pool for potential winners. Now we have a career path that takes them to superintendent to then project manager and then they can go anywhere else in the company they want to go.

We got him knocking on doors out there. Stacey, this is a great story. It’s a construction company in Chicago that has the trouble during the winter months, you know, up and down, a lot of work during the summer, no work during the winter because the ground is frozen. So I flew up there and we drove around his area and he had a lot of these little office parks, you know, little industrial parks with all these little build-outs and little signs that say we will build to suit. I said that’s a for sale by owner for you dude. That guy right there is telling you that they want business to come. So you need to be the person getting business for them when they could do it. So we started a program where they go out and knock on door. This guy, Nick goes out and knocks on doors.

Stacey, we’ve been doing this for one year. It took nine months I mean three months of training. And then we worked at it for nine months. He has generated $360,000 this year in fresh new business that was not there before. And he was a draftsman turned salesperson, but he had the right personality. So he adapted to it and he goes out and he has $1.3 million on the books that could close over the next six months. I just sit back and kind of nurture them along a little bit. But I would never want to take anything away from anybody that’s getting rejected as much as these guys do. I have, and I can take that same system and adapt it into the boat world where another one of my clients is Marine Max, a big client, a big boat dealer throughout the United States. But these guys set themselves apart from the salespeople and they become sales consultants and consulting is it, if you look it up in a dictionary, you look up salesperson and sales consulting. Two different people. Two different people. One is a facilitator. The other is basically about commissions. So I teach them how to become sales consultants.

Are You The Chief Everything Officer?

Well, the small business owner, when they start out, they, they’re so excited because they have this title called CEO, which I say is nothing more than chief everything officer. They’re doing everything. They are doing the sales, they’re doing the accounting, they’re doing the HR, they are doing it all. But you cannot, as you alluded to scale and grow. And I don’t think anybody has the magic pill yet to clone yourself. So I think people get that they need to hire people in order to grow. Do you have a recommendation on where they start? Like is there a certain type of position they should do? Do they hire a sales person? Is it HR? Like what kind of person, if they’re going to scale, how do they figure out how to do that?

The first thing that I would suggest to them is define the positions within their company. So there’s an accounts payable accounts for single bookkeepers, whatever they’re going to be needing and all of these things that they’re doing then go out and Google their job descriptions. And then start formulating the job description that you want, that you need to build your business. Like Legos. We need all these Legos to put it together. So then when you’re hiring, you can hire two responsibilities or what do you expect them to do? What are the roles and responsibilities? Not just hiring a friend. So you hire the person that’s going to do this. Now, one of my mentors taught me that the place for the person to be is [inaudible]. The pivoting point. We call it a pivoting position.

My world, I’m the coach. So this is the pivoting I get. This is where I belong right here. Now I have other people making sales. As you know, my assistant contacted you, she puts this all together. That’s her responsibility. Mine is to be on the show and coaching with people. The next thing is find out what it is that you like to do. This guy told me he was a printer and so he created four color printing stuff and he was at the cutter, Stacey, he and I met in a networking meeting in a suit and you know, that type of thing. And I will stop by his office, you know, several times in the evening and get a little juice for myself. And one day I asked him, I said, “Dick, when do you change clothes and come back here?”

He goes, “Oh as soon as I get back from the meetings,” he says, “This is where I stay all day long. I can watch my product go out the door.” So he’s cutting it and everything. If somebody else packages it, somebody else does all that. Somebody else was coming and he’d have all his people coming to him at the cutter. Find your position and then you hire people that to do the rest of this stuff. So if you’re not good at CEO, hire a CEO. When I’ve interviewed people on it and I say, you’re the CEO of the company and what’s coming to mind is as a client I was working with and she said, I got my website up, I got my desk, I’m going to order my cards.

“What should I put on my card CEO or president?” I said, “Neither.” She said, “Why?” And I said, “Well what I’m afraid of is if you put CEO or president, somebody’s going to ask you a CEO or president question. You’re not going to have the answer and you’re not going to look good.” Just don’t put anything on your card. They’ll figure it out, you know? So you can leave that to them. And when I’ve asked people to describe what their roles and responsibilities and claiming themselves as being a CEO, do you know what job description they give me? Hmm. Oh, like you said, chief operating officer, you’re doing it all. Yeah. Okay. You’re not a CEO. CEO only has two responsibilities and most people don’t know this. And I’ve learned this after carrying some pretty heavy big briefcases in my time.

Okay. And there’s only two, there’s only two things that a CEO’s responsible for, the vision of the company. They get that from the board. They get if from the board, they communicate it to their people. That’s it. That’s one. Number two is solving problems. And if the problem isn’t related to the vision it is not their problem.

Well, you alluded in the beginning, I think you said to spend about two hours focusing on your vision. Do you have tools that you recommend or where should somebody start? How do you consistently work on your vision? One of the things I’ll give your listeners for things to do right now today, is just stop and take a moment. Don’t hurt yourself, you know? But, but if you do these four things, okay, first of all is you have to commit.

So you have to all in. Just be into it. And that means anything. If it means being committed to be the best time manager in the world, commit to be the best time management person in the world. Commitment. That’s that. Then the second step is you need to put disciplines in life. So you set your goals with your commitment, those are the things you want. Then you discipline your life to get you to those goals. And the best thing to do is write out your goals. 3% of the people only write their goals out. 97% don’t. Harvard business school. Your audience can go look this up.  What they didn’t teach you at Harvard business school is written by a guy who, James McCormick, I believe it’s a book.

A Vision Board and Goal Setting

And it was a study that they did. A study of their graduates, MBA graduates. And they found that 84% of the people had no goals at all. And then 13% of the people had ideas and wishes and they did good. But the people that had written goals, they did 10 times better than the 97% of the people altogether. So right there, you know, writing your disciplines, writing out what you want. Vision boards. I love vision boards. You could walk into my condo right now, every picture on everything. I don’t have to have a vision board like most of you have, like some people do. Come into my office on the right side you can see if you don’t want to hang with the ducks, you fly with the Eagles. On this side over here is a lighthouse to remind me of principles and integrity and things like that, but nobody knows that. To them it’s just two beautiful pictures, one of a bird, one of a lighthouse.

But to me they mean something different. So we need to have vision. We’ll get to that in a second. So then from discipline, we need decisions. So I’ll give everyone of your listeners today the the power to procrastinate, permission to procrastinate on anything that’s not taking them towards their goals. We all procrastinate. Just don’t procrastinate on the things that are moving you forward. Goal setting –  people are afraid of it because of rejection or failure.  They don’t know how to set it up. But again, you gotta take a step forward. I have a business plan that I use that’s generic and we just adapt it to the people. It’s a fill in the blank concept. But in there it says that everything we know how to do was tested by what we do not know how to do, the conflict will continue, create our growth.

So we want conflict, we want constructive conflict. And sometimes young entrepreneurs and even older ones, they don’t want conflict. They don’t want it. That’s their ego. We’ve been doing it this way for 45 years. Why do we have to change? We’ll set that aside. Ego is fear-based. It’s all based on you losing. And we shouldn’t. To me, fear stands for facing everything and rising up, rise to the occasion, you know. And then the last thing is visualization. We have to see ourselves in possession of everything. You know if a picture tells a thousand words, what would a video tell? So you look right now and you can see my office, you see all the things behind you. So it’s telling you all kinds of things about me. I’m sure you can see my golf trophy and you can see the things that aren’t there.

So, you know, I like golf. You know, there’s an old man, that’s my grandfather. So you know a little bit about me just looking from watching my picture or whatever. So that’s it. So you take that and you spend two hours to four hours every week massaging that, growing it. If you accomplish something, you you strike that off the list, add something else. I use a five-year dream sheet with the people I work with and I want them to lay out five years, what their movie would be like, I get them to write a movie, what would their movie be like five years from now, how would they be living? And then I do an exercise with them and I say, okay, how much money do you want to make Stacey? And you would say, Oh, I want to make $300,000 this year.

And then I start going downward. I said, okay, well what if you made $270,000? He made $250,000. I was on a call the other day and the guy said, we’re at  $225,000. You can see his whole body language just cringe, you know? And I said, Oh, there’s your pain point. I said, now you want to make $75,000 more this year than you made last year. So why do you wanna do that? Well, I just want to. Well, no, you’ve got to have a why. You’ve got to have a strong why in order to get there. So I used to coach with Tony Robbins team. When they come into Florida, I would coach with those guys. They’re a little evangelist as I call them, cause I go around and getting people into the UPW and stuff.

And so I said to Scott, I said, first thing he wants you to do is we did this exercise. And I said, so if you had $4,000 extra in your pocket right now, what would you do?  I’ll buy a suit. Where’s the suit? At Macy’s. And I said, okay, go to Macy’s, try the suit on, get the guy to take a picture of you in the suit and then make it your screensaver. So every time you look at your phone, that’s your suit.

Anything that we can do picture-wise just gets us going. So anyway, as you grow, you take things off. One of the guys that I was on the call with, he wanted a 56 Ford. It’s on his bucket list of things he wants a 56 Ford truck. I sent him to drive it today. I bet you you haven’t taken your 56 Ford truck off of your vision board. And he says, no. And I said, well, your brain keeps seeing that 56 Ford

Update Your Vision Board

He says Oh, I already bought one. All right, well then you need to change it. You need to get your brain to look for the next thing that you want you. So we have to clean that up. So I suggest that people redo their five year vision sheet every 90 days because we’re moving at such a fast rate today and our technology is moving so fast. We’re teaching kids that for a job that wanting them be there for them when they’re, when they get finished with their degree. So let’s make sure that we keep adjusting like my granddaughter, she went through, she had a full ride to the University of South Florida, but when we started her, her education was at the fourth grade level.

But she changed and adapted all the way through and she thought she was going to be helping small kids and like more of ’em, you know stepping in, you know, for the outside of the family environment type thing. Well, she’s teaching first grade. She never thought she was going to be a teacher. She just knew that she wanted to work with kids. But the way the thing evolved that she now she then as you go, I’ll be, I’ll teach adolescent and then she realized that first the third grade would be her sweet spot. So that’s where she landed. So we don’t want to be so intense on getting from point A to point B that we don’t realize it. Another thing that I would suggest your listeners too is learn to work backwards. Establish your goal, what you want, like for this quarter, you know, this October, November, December, coming up, establish what you want to do between now and December and then, see where you would be 13 weeks, 12 weeks out, 10 weeks, you know, and keep backing it down week by week.

And then each time you get to your checkpoint, all you have to make is a small adjustment rather than trying to wait to the end of the quarter to make this large adjustment, you can make it in bite sized pieces. Another thing is learn to chunk things down. You know, if you have a two hour project, break it into four half hour projects. If you have a a 10 hour project, break it into bite sized pieces so you don’t become overwhelmed and get bogged down. We get, sometimes we get involved in a project and we’ll get tunnel vision. You do it. I do it. We get so locked in. Sometimes you have to get up and just go wash some dishes or go do laundry or go walk for a walk. Do something to get your subconscious mind free at that blockage.

Free Your Subconscious Mind

Terry, you just shared a book’s worth of great business building advice. So I think my listeners need to go back and rewind and listen to this a few times cause you have a lot of golden nuggets in there. I want to know about your business. You have such an amazing backstory, all the things that you’ve done. What are you doing to market your business today? To get new clients? What’s working?

Getting on podcasts. I became part of the podcast movement here in Florida. I’m part of pod fest. I don’t know if  you’ve heard of it yet. Well I’m part of pod fest and so you know, I don’t mind sharing, I’m 68 years old. And if in 2009, if I would have said something like Facebook or social media is not going to be around, where would I be today? I wouldn’t be here. So my business is now again 15 years. Most of my business comes from repeat and referrals. I don’t have to go out as much. When I was first getting started, yes, it was a lot of networking, a lot of knocking on doors. A lot of stuff we have to do and I recommend networking, but when you network, don’t be interesting, be interested, you know, do it the right way.

And then you know, as my business grew, I have to do less and less. Now I want to brand myself. I want to get on your show and other shows. I’ve been on 50 shows in the last couple of years. So I’m getting a pretty good hang of what goes on and I’m getting clients. I don’t get a lot, but I do get clients every now and then, which is fine. But it’s a great way to energize. It is a great way to have fun. It’s great way to meet people. And at the same time you’re sharing this because I really, as you can see, I don’t have a sales pitch. It’s not about that. To me, it’s just about helping people because to me, if you help enough people get what they want, you will get what you need and it’ll always be there.

Absolutely. And I’m so glad you said that because I am constantly pushing my clients to do podcasts and do video. Because when you can create content that can be repurposed, you can produce one good piece of content. So if they do a show like I am, well then that can be video, that can be audio, it can be made into a blog, it can be put on social media. So one piece of content can go so far. And like you said, it’s not about selling, it’s about being a Go-Giver and helping people. And what really, what you do put out there comes back tenfold.

Has, has Bob Burg been on your show? Not yet. Okay. well maybe I can make an introduction. I’m friends with him on Facebook. We’ve never actually met in person, but we have had lots of conversations. So, but when you said Go-Giver, that’s the book. Yeah, that’s the golden book right there. That’s the only book that I’ve ever read Stacey that I actually, I became emotional. I could relate to what he was trying to convey in his fable. That was very touching to me the way that he laid that out.

Well, let’s wrap it up with that. You’ve been, so giving with your time today. Terry, if we could give our listeners sort of one big takeaway, where would they start from all the advice you’ve given today? Where should a small business owner start?

Self-Help

I would start by surrounding myself with good reading materials. Like some of the books I recommend are Think and Grow Rich and Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The E-Myth, The Art of War. There’s plenty of them out there. But the trick here is that when you’re reading a self-help book, as I call them, learn to implement a chapter before you go to read the next chapter. See, we read these books and we agree with them, but we never implement them. So if you take Think and Grow Rich for an example, the first chapter is desire. You have to have a definite purpose, then you have to install the faith. That’s the next step. Well, if you haven’t got your desire, then the faith isn’t gonna make any difference to you because you don’t have what you can’t. But faith in something, you don’t know what it is you don’t want. So that’s why we ended up stopping about three or four chapters in because we’re not implementing the strategies that which we’ll unlock the keys, the psycho game, you know, like a computer game, you got to get to the next level. You’ve got to find the keys to unlock it where the keys are implementing the chapter before that.

So that’s why my acronym is ACTION. You got to get your marketing into action and each letter of that system stands for a way to get it into action literally and figuratively. And so everything you’ve been saying, I’m nodding. Yup. I get it. I get it. And my listeners know I’m constantly preaching about getting their marketing into action.

So Terry I’m going to let you close. Just remember that when business is bad, that we should increase our marketing. When business is good, we decrease our marketing. It’s the opposite of what people think. They think when they get busy, they should do more. No, there’s plenty of business coming swimming. When you don’t have any business then you employ salespeople get your marketing out there. They’re all the little crumbs that are out there, you want them to be yours.

Well, the O in my action marketing system is for ongoing. You should be doing marketing all the time, every single day, doing something to move your business forward, not just when things were slow and not when things are great. You can’t be complacent. You need to be doing it all the time.

And as you’re correctly saying that in the customer’s mind, they like because they’re followers, they’re 84%. So they want to see your ad there each and every week or each and every month because that gives them trust. You run it for three weeks or three months, that’s not enough time to get a person. My understanding, you can correct me if I’m wrong, my understanding is that we have to see something 27 times in order for it to be.

You’re right. Yeah, I’ve heard the same study. The numbers differ a little bit, but a minimum of seven touch points before someone even recognizes and acknowledges your business.

I can give you a website right now that will back up that story. It’s called followupsuccess.com and you read it. And in about the middle of it, you’ll see that that 48% of the sales people will never make a second touch. 25% of the people will make two touches and then quit. Yeah, only 5% of the sales are made in the first two touches. 80% of the area, the percent of the sales are made between the fifth and the 12th stuff, the fifth and the 12th touch. So we need a system that makes sure that we get to my role is that the first three or four steps, are you just building report and learning to, to trust them? And then steps four, five, and six is getting closer to their needs. And then by the time you get to seven and eight, you’re ready to present your product, but don’t present your product into, you’ve built enough value that surpasses the costs.

Great parting words, Terry. So thank you for coming on the show. You’ve provided such tremendous value. I know my audience is going to want to learn more about you and the services that you provide. So how can people get in touch with you?

Well, I have an offer for your clients if they would like. I’m offering a free coaching session with me where we will sit down and, and discuss a challenge that they’re having. They can go to TerryOgburn.com. Go to my website, TerryOgburn.com and it’ll say contact us.

Click the button and just put in their name and their email address and their contact information. I’ll spend a half hour or 30 minutes or 35 minutes, something like that to overcome a challenge that they may have, something they may be going through right now.

Great. Thank you for being such a go giver yourself, Terry. So we’re gonna close out today’s session. Okay. Thank you for tuning in everybody. This is “Small Business Stacey”, your Small Biz  Marketing Specialist here to help you get your marketing into ACTION like we just talked about and help you become a #SmallBizMarketingWiz. Bye bye.