Turning Browers Into Buyers
Billy Bross has an MBA and turned into an independent marketing consultant. He specializes in helping experts scale their online education businesses. So far, Billy has helped experts in more than 30 different niches ranging everything from 3D printing to German language learning. He has such a great personality. We’ve become friends over the years. He’s mentioned in my book Better Selling Through Storytelling because he has the ability to analyze something and decide if something’s a smart business move. His laser focus is one of the many things that I’ve learned from being friends with Billy.
I always want to ask my guests to take us back to their story of origin. I know some of yours. I’m completely fascinated that your dad was a dentist, you have a lot of brothers and everyone in your family has perfect teeth. That’s only me. I want to hear your own journey of what lessons did you learn? Many medical professionals, dentists included, are entrepreneurs in a way but you went a different way and decided to get your MBA. Tell us your own little story of origin. You can go back as far as you want.
It’s cool that you brought up my dad. You’re right about the teeth. It’s funny, in his office, he has a picture of the four kids. We’re all tan because it was the summertime and we’re smiling and we all have good teeth because my dad got us free braces. Everyone always comments on the photo. It’s hilarious. I’m definitely a hybrid of my dad and my grandfather. I’m actually the third. My dad is junior and my grandfather is Billy senior and I’m the third. My dad is more of a craftsman, whereas my grandfather is more of an entrepreneur. He started his own company. I am split down the middle and I’m not the typical entrepreneur. I always say I’m more entrepreneurial than I am a pureblood entrepreneur if you want to call it that.
I’m like Gary Vaynerchuk. He is a pureblood entrepreneur. He always tells a story about when he was ten years old and he was selling baseball cards on the weekend. He was hustling and making money. That wasn’t me at all. I was playing baseball on the weekends when I was ten years old with my buddies and goofing off. I didn’t follow that typical path of the entrepreneur where they usually drop out of high school or don’t go to college and start something right away. I took the traditional path. I love school and learning. That’s why I love working with online courses. Even when I got my MBA, I had no intention of using it the way people usually use MBAs, which is to go to a top school, go to some big management consulting firm and rise up the corporate ranks. I got it more so because, one, I wanted to stay in college and I was able to do that and get my MBA in my fifth year. I wasn’t quite ready to leave yet. It’s also for the learning, the education and my company paid for it too, which helps. That wasn’t bad.
I did that and I had a great and interesting career working in renewable energy. I was working on these big projects. If you think of those big solar installations out in the desert near Las Vegas or the big wind farms in Kansas, it’s that kind of a thing. I was doing finance and financial modeling for those projects. I like it and I loved the people who I worked with. It was interesting work. I’m entrepreneurial and the first day that I sat down at my desk for that job, I knew that I wasn’t going to be there forever. I said, “This is cool for a while but I’ve got to start a side hustle. I’ve got to get something going here. What can I do? I’ve got to have a project.”
I thought about what I could do and I was thinking, “What am I into? If I leave this, I want to make sure it’s something that I’m passionate about.” What came to mind was brewing beer, of all things. Back in college, my buddy and I got into brewing beer because we were drinking a whole lot of beer. We thought, “Maybe there’s a cheaper way to do this.” Which by the way, it turns out, it doesn’t save you a whole lot of money to brew your own beer when you factor in all the gear you’ve got to buy. As I tend to do it, I geeked out on it and went deep into it. I started learning the science behind it, entering competitions, creating my own recipes and winning awards for those. I studied for a year to become a beer judge, which most people don’t believe is actually a thing, but it is.
That was the obvious choice for me. After that corporate job, I would go home, fire up the beer website, start writing reviews about what I was drinking and posting tutorials. The next thing I know, fast forward a few years and I’m doing as well financially from that website as I was from my MBA job. It got to the point where I was ready to jump ship. I was ready to leave and strike out on my own. That’s when I put in my two weeks, said goodbye to everyone and became self-employed. I haven’t looked back since.
Was that a transition, because it seems like that’s a logical thought out and a non-risky way to do it. It’s like, “I’ve made as much money in my side hustle as I did. I’m not going to suddenly not have a lot of money. In fact, I’ve been able to save since I’ve got two sources of income.” You’ve told me in the past that there was a little bit of sticker shock trough of despair that we talk about sometimes on this show. It’s something that entrepreneurs go through where the newness is exciting, fun and you’ve got proof of concept. Was there something that was unexpectedly difficult when you made that decision to go full-time that you learned?
Absolutely. It was not all smooth sailing. There were a lot of failures along the way. I’m still failing all the time but I try to fail forward. The toughest thing for me was, I had this great business background, but the thing that they don’t teach you when you get your MBA is how to sell that you know you are a master at. I was not. What they teach you is how to manage the money once it already comes in but they don’t tell you how to make the money come in. I’m running my beer brewing course and selling these courses over my website. I had to figure this part out.
I had to figure out how to sell the courses. When you’re selling things online, I wasn’t selling things in person. I wasn’t doing face to face. I wasn’t doing things over the phone. It was, “Go to my website. Go to the sales page. Click buy now and check out.” Through reading about online marketing, I discovered direct response marketing and specifically copywriting. Copywriting has been the most valuable tool that I’ve learned in my whole life, to be honest with you. It teaches you how to communicate, how to sell things, and it teaches you a whole lot about psychology, which is something I’ve always been interested in.
Copywriting is essentially salesmanship in print. If you want to sell someone through the written word, copywriting is what you want to study. I got some advice a long time ago that if you want to learn something, go hire the best person because amateurs are expensive. I went out and I found the best copywriting coach in the world. This guy named David Garfinkel, who’s a legend. I paid him a whole lot of money to mentor underneath him for a year. He’s the one that taught me copywriting. It was the best investment I ever made and made all the difference in my business.
Let’s look at that. The willingness to invest in learning from someone is crucial. I had to do that launching my podcast, finding someone to edit it and promote it for me so I didn’t have to try to spend time doing something that’s not in my expertise. You can either hire someone to train you or you can hire someone to do it for you. You made the decision of, “I’m going to invest in myself to learn how to be a better copywriter because I’m going to need that skill for my own course.” Ultimately deciding that your real niche is to help others. What gives you such credibility and expertise is you have been in the shoes of the people who hire you.
I see this time and again from people I interview. Whether it’s an entrepreneur pitching an investor to fund them, when I’ve worked with clients, when I give keynote talks to big organizations, whether they’re an architecture firm or an executive search firm. When they go in and they have some time to pitch on why they should be hired, when they can tell a story where someone says, “You’ve been in my shoes,” or “You’ve helped someone who’s been in my shoes.” It transforms the concept of selling into, “Thank God you’re here.” My question to you is, did you know when you were going through this beer brewing business and developing an online course that your ultimate end game was going to teach other people how to sell their courses? Was that a nice a-ha moment after you decided you weren’t going to keep doing your own course?
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