Robin Robins 12:19
Well, true. But, I mean, I didn’t sit and do a market evaluation of how big is the market and who else is in the market, and where is it going. Is it a growing industry? Is it a dying industry? Like, I didn’t do any of that. I just sort of, like, started and I got it. So there was a God looking out for me in luck, I guess. But, but, yeah, but I was looking for a vertical. I was looking for a niche, and, you know, so I was smart enough to know that.
Brian Kurtz 12:45
Yeah. And people should raise their hand, and we’ll get to some questions, but it leads me into my next couple of questions which are related, which is the programs themselves, how you make them because the thing is, and I’m not just saying this to blow sunshine up here, you know what? I’m just you know you are a true results leader. You’re all about results. You want results for your clients. You want results for your business, and you prove it every day. I mean, I don’t know if your boardroom, your meeting room, still has it wallpapered, wallpapered with framed they’re more than just testimonials and endorsements.
It’s basically numbers. Every great client that Robin has, they have. They, they stay, spotlight them, they, they put them in a frame. Thing, you know, we made $130,000 the first year we had a marketing technology toolkit. And then this story is told on these I’ll call them plaques, but they’re just amazing. And the whole, the whole room, is just covered with them. That’s good for display when people come in and all that. But it’s what you’re all about. If you want them to get those results, or they’re going to be Riff Raff, they’re not going to be useful to the rest of the group.
So talk about that program of celebrating wins for your clients, and also the accountability groups. These are two separate questions, so it’s the results and then the accountability groups within your groups where you have like a captain, and you have them broken out into groups, you need to monitor them, because they you can talk about the troublemakers that can happen, people that have left you and tried to start their own thing, all of that. So talk about those separately or combine them. The results piece to make people accountable, and then within the groups, making them accountable by having sponsor groups that you supervise.
Robin Robins 14:51
Yeah, so I think we, I think we actually use our client testimonials better than anybody else I’ve ever totally agreed with. Very, very intentional. So. For example, one thing we just started, I had to, you know, we should have been doing this before, and we could talk about why, whatever. But, you know, like, one of the things we just started doing is, at the end of these, we call them rapid implementation workshops, which is for one of our programs, people are really thrilled. I mean, they’re like, because they’re, they just, they come up to me and they say, this is the best investment. I mean, I know now, not everybody’s thrilled. I mean, there’s always one, I gotta say, always one, but there’s one occasionally, that’s, you know, you know, I’ll tell you a funny thing. We had one.
There were three brothers who came into this workshop, and they were only generating about $200,000 in total revenue for their business. And I have a slide, and this is a marketing lesson too. What is Robin? Robin’s marketing? What are we? What am I trying to teach you? And one of the things is I said we’re not timid about sales and marketing, to quote Zig. You know, timid salespeople have skinny kids, and that set them off so bad that they left the event right? So anyway, you know, but most people are thrilled. Most people are excited. So what we started doing is on a very one on one basis, is, hey, if we if you love it, would you mind going to Google and giving us a five star review if we’ve earned it? And because you don’t want to flood Google, you don’t want to do one campaign and a bunch of reviews come in, so we’re getting these reviews set up now. The other thing that we do is we run contests, which I got this from Joe, yeah, better your best, right? Do your best. But now we run contests all over for everything. So every new batch of customers coming in, we have them competing against each other. And we have a 30 day contest. We have a 90 day contest. We have an annual contest. You don’t call them challenges.
Brian Kurtz 16:44
Good, good. No, I think that’s good, because everybody calls them challenges and you their contests.
Robin Robins 16:51
And we tell them they’re, you know, who’s going to win this? Who’s going to be that?
Brian Kurtz 16:55
I mean, you give away, like, cars and things like that, right?
Robin Robins 16:57
Yeah, watch his cars. But, you know, the thing is, you don’t even have to give away a whole lot of stuff. Sometimes it’s just the recognition of their hard work. And, you know, this is like a Mary Kay principle of, you know, how she built her organization was in giving away ribbons and badges and awards, you know? So sometimes just recognition for small wins will encourage people. So we do this all the time. And so then we take all those case studies and we highlight them as the marketing genius of the month, if you get to be that’s like, what? And we create one of those wall plaques, and we have them all in the walls of our office. So when clients come to our office, which, by the way, Brian, we moved to a new office, so we have way more wall space.
Brian Kurtz 17:38
You move. Yeah, wall space.
Robin Robins 17:42
We have 147 employees now. So we had to, we had to move to a bigger place.
Brian Kurtz 17:46
I gotta, I gotta come visit. I gotta come visit. It’s awesome.
Robin Robins 17:48
So we put them on the wall. Now, what good does that? When people come to the office, they go look for their poster, and they take a picture of their poster. We send a copy of it to their office, and you’ll see it. They’ll hang it up behind them. They’ll be on, you know, proudly displaying that. We put it on social media. We put it on our website. We put it in presentations. We we we have a magazine, MSP Success Magazine. We feature them in MSP Success Magazine. So when we get a client success story, we use it in many, many, many ways.
Brian Kurtz 18:18
Most people have, like a success panel at once, one live event. You make you run that success story throughout their membership, I think.
Robin Robins 18:29
Yeah, well, we use it in a lot of different ways, like so there’s like, you know, 1012, ways we’ll use a single Client Testimonial. And so I think, I think so to you we were asking about just the results and stuff, and we ask them to track their numbers. We have them doing that so that way we can actually get data. Because a lot of clients will say, Well, I’m not getting any customers, okay? And then when you really drill in, they are but they’re just, you know, so by getting numbers, numbers don’t lie and well, unless they’re fake numbers, but numbers take the drama out of things like, like sales. This is kind of a Kevin O’Leary thing. You know, it’s business is very binary. You’re either making your quota or you’re not. You’re either making a profit or you’re not. It’s not this.
There’s no gray area. And that’s what numbers provide. They provide a very quantitative way of measuring success. So I think, you know, even in our organization, we have KPIs that we say, what are the goals we have to get, performance wise, to get for our customers, and that’s our internal team’s goal. Like our digital marketing team, okay, if they’re on this program, what are we? What is our commitment to try and get them from leads, customers, sales, profitability, etc, you know? And then everything aligns around that, because we want to help that customer get that result. Okay, so I think that’s important.
Brian Kurtz 19:51
So what about groups like that? You have captains like the people inside the group, and then how do you supervise that? To. Know that if there are troublemakers, and is that where you get them to be committed to giving you numbers?
Robin Robins 20:06
Yeah, that. So we have four different memberships, yeah.
Brian Kurtz 20:10
What are the price points of those memberships?
Robin Robins 20:12
So the bottom toolkit membership is $397 a month for these two years, right? MSP launch, which is for small MSPs that are under half a million in revenue, that’s 997 a month. And again, I’m giving you two years. One year is going to be about $200 more than this.
Brian Kurtz 20:31
So, like, so it’s like 20 that’s like 11 9000 a year.
Robin Robins 20:36
Yeah, but we don’t really publish it. It’s just looking at my salespeople on a call, and someone’s like, I’m not signed for two years. Okay, you do one year, but it’s 1197 not 997 so that kind of thing. But, then we have accelerators. And accelerators is 1997 so 2000 and then producers Club, where is where? It gets a little weird, because we have so many members that have been grandfathered in. There’s not like, you know, so the list price is 2800 bucks, but by then, they have so many other things bundled in that.
You know, like, Hey, if you have a map and you have our celebrity and you have this, then you know, so our average produce so let me give you these numbers instead, our average producers. Club members spend 41,000. I wrote these down just to make sure I had $41,785 a year. Okay, so that’s not just membership. That’s all the add ons our accelerators spend 22,419 MSP launches is 10, is 9500 and a toolkit members about 4000 a year in AR. So that’s what they spend on average, product, service, memberships, etc. So that’s why we’re always trying to send people, because the more they ascend, the more valuable they are.
Brian Kurtz 21:51
Now the producers club is where you do the subgroups. Is that right?
Robin Robins 21:55
Yes, well, it’s, well there. So there’s two–Xcelerators, and then producers so producers club and this is kind of an interesting story. So when I got the idea producers club in my IT industry, they had peer groups, but they didn’t have anything like what we run, right? And their peer groups were groups of about five to seven CEOs that would get together and have discussions, and that’s the way it ran. And my goal was, hey, I’m going to have this big, massive group, like, right now we have, we have about 470 I’m sorry, 270 producers club members, right? And I said, we have this big group of producers club members in one group. I’m not doing these little, itty bitty peer groups. And I was told over and over again, you’ll never make it work, because peer groups have to be small. Blah, blah, blah, blah, all the things.
So anyway, prove them wrong. But what we did do, and I didn’t even come up with this idea, okay, so the truth is, this is where your clients really You gotta listen. They give great ideas. So one of the members, it was like one of the first meetings. The first time I was running one of the quarterly meetings, a member came up to me. It was a woman. She says, Hey, Robin, I just wanted you to know there’s three of us over here that are we? We found out that we’re geographically close, but not close enough to be competitors, and we’ve just been meeting on a weekly basis and sharing ideas and numbers and marketing, and we love this. And as soon as she said that, a light bulb went on. And I said, Okay, I want to formalize this in what we call accountability groups. So we get the members, and they are in groups of five, minimum five, no more than 10 members.
We let them name their group. So they came up with the name of the group. They have a logo. So when, when you go to one of the events, you’ll see these stanchions on the table with their logo printed on it, so they know that that’s their flag, so to speak. And then we have them compete against each other in numbers. So we have a quarterly contest. We have an annual contest amongst the accountability groups and then we have the winning accountability group of the quarter and of the year, and we take them to dinner with the celebrity speakers and so forth and so on. So yeah. So the captains are. We have certified and we have lifestyle captains. So certified captains have to run the groups as prescribed. So we say that you got to report your numbers, you got to do our quarterly theme. You got to run it as prescribed.
Lifestyle captains can take creative license, as long as they have at least five members that meet on a regular basis, all right? And so we did that for a couple of reasons. One, we had new members coming in, and they would join a what a lifestyle Captain group, and it was run very loose, and they would be disappointed. They would be like, What the hell is this? I thought I was dealing with the champions of the champions. So we had to have certified captains who played it by the playbook. So we put the new members in with them, that way they’re having a better experience. And then members who’ve been around long, you know, sometimes they don’t want to report their numbers, you know, we didn’t want to force it, so we said, Okay, well, then you can have a lifestyle group where they still meet and they. So, they’re just not as disciplined about metrics and numbers and implementation.
Brian Kurtz 25:06
Is that a new split in lifestyle versus? Yeah, I thought so. I never, I didn’t, I didn’t hear that before.
Robin Robins 25:11
Yeah, because we’re wearing ourselves out. Because there were some groups that were productive, they’re productive paying members. But they’re like, I just don’t want to be that disciplined and so and they’re like, and neither do any of my guys in my group. So I was like, well, as long as you agree, but I did need to have a certified group to solve the problem. As we add new members in, we wanted to add them into high protein groups that were doing it the way we prescribed.
Brian Kurtz 25:36
Is there, is there, like a red flag for when a group is out of control, like the ones. Remember one story you told about the rogue, the rogue captain who went off on his or her own?
Robin Robins 25:51
And, yeah, yeah, I don’t get that as much anymore, because, you know, here’s a couple things that we did, all right. So number one, producers club, you have to be invited in. So you have to either be in an MSP launch or accelerators, and you have to be invited up by, you know, by by. So if we are in accelerators, which is the next level down, we run, like weekly accountability groups, but it’s one of my people running it, right, excellent. So now they know this guy’s good. This guy’s not. This one. This one needs to be moved up. He’s sharp, she’s sharp, she’s growing. She’s going to be good, like we are, so one thing we’ve done is put a better filtering process in place, in putting people in in the first place.
The second thing I do is I have a member of my team now auditing these calls, you know, to hear what’s going on, make sure. And on our dashboard, we take attendance too. So we can also look and see what groups don’t have a high attendance. We could see who’s not posting numbers, and so we can see certain things that we kind of know are red flags, but I haven’t had any knock on wood. You know, I have definitely had clients who’ve now started their own similar thing, and who are directly competing with us. And, you know, I’ve even had ex employees. I have, you know, right now, I got an ex employee, that is, you know, the his two year agreement was up yesterday, and yesterday, a bunch of my clients came to me said he’s texting us all, you know what I mean, like, so it’s, it happens, you know? And that’s, Look, you can’t stop it.
Brian Kurtz 27:27
Yeah, no. And, you know, take it. I guess you don’t want to take it as flattery, but you can, because you’re at the top.
Robin Robins 27:33
Just look at it, it’s just competition. It’s, you know what I mean, and you can’t, the only thing you can do with competition is outperform them. That’s it. That’s all you know you like if I don’t want to like, I noticed the competition, because you never want to be not aware. But at the end of the day, it still comes down to like. I got to focus on us doing the best we can for our members and really providing value. Because if I do that, it doesn’t matter who you know, like, what will outperform anybody.
Outro 28:11
Thanks for listening to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit briankurtz.net, and click podcast at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you’re interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to Briankurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N Kurtz [dot] net [slash] help.