Brian Kurtz 13:29
I think what I heard there was that also I heard step up and like, basically, you get that, you get your people in front of you. You’re stepping up in leadership. You’re having a conversation with them, not even knowing, as you said, not even knowing where you’re going to go, because you got to talk it through, but because, if you’re smart and you’re the person you’re speaking to is smart, that’s one plus one equals three. And so something’s going to happen from that conversation. It may lead to you offering something for free, in my case, that usually, that’s usually what happens. And then I hit myself for doing it, but, you know, but you gotta, you gotta just figure it out, because, like, you don’t, you don’t have to have a plan when, but you got to reach out.
And that was really, I hope everybody wrote that down, that it’s not, I mean, I do broad emails to to Xcelerator, to my mastermind, but during the day, I’m I’m emailing with a lot of you guys, one on one, I’m emailing with my list one on one. When they send me, you know, I reply. I’ve got more time. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. I’m not encouraging all of you to email me tomorrow with a question. That’s not what I’m saying, but, but, but I think that it’s really important to just be connected and not even knowing, because you know you’re going to say something somewhat intelligent, maybe not. I mean, maybe I’m saying nothing that’s intelligent right now, but I’m filling up space, and that’s a good thing and so but the but, the thing is that you’re going to get. Get somewhere, and then where you get to become part of the new plan, yeah, and, but you have to reach out. You can’t, you can’t stay isolated, yeah, not you can’t do. You can’t do it. You can’t not do anything. How do I say that? Yeah, you have to do something.
Kevin Rogers 15:17
Yeah, especially like saying nothing is not an option. Silence is not an option in this, even if it feels like, Oh my God, I don’t want to be one more message in an inbox saying, I acknowledge this is happening and it’s freaky, but we’re here. We’re almost together. Got to say it. Got to say something. And like you said, if you have a copywriter on your side, you’re going to find a way to say it uniquely, invoice in tone, considerately, and maybe even create excitement about something new that’s coming. Share ideas. Here’s some things we’re working on, things like that.
Brian Kurtz 15:52
You know, I’ve gravitated to copywriters my whole career because they’re because I’m not one. I’m but I gravitate to them because they’re the most creative. They’re, you know, they add something to every conversation with a marketer. That’s the one plus one equals three or the entrepreneur. But even more so when you’re in a conversation where you know this goes back, and I’m sure I know you teach this in copy chief that you know, Dan Kennedy, you know, goes to Awai, and he says, you know, if you’re here to, you know, to figure out right for food, I’m not your guy. Yeah, you know, you got to be the you got, not just the trusted advisor, but you have to be a consultant. And I hate the word consultant, because it seems too intimate that you’re unemployed. But no, in the context of this, it’s, it’s copywriter plus plus consultative is, is, is the business now, yeah, and that’s what you have to be in the copywriting world, that you have to be. And the ones who are consultants, I guess I’m a consultant because I’m unemployed, but if I’m, if I’m a consultant, then I want to give people copy platforms. I want to give them, I mean, and then, and then look for a copywriter for them, if, because I’m not going to write it, but I could give them the concept, and then I want to find a copywriter. But I’m, I think, I think talk about that a little bit.
Kevin Rogers 17:16
Yeah, I remember one of the greatest things Carlton ever told me privately was you’ll make the big bucks for making the hard calls. And that’s what he was talking about. It’s like, you got to understand the marketing, and you got and there’s going to be, you know, like you say, Brian, Oh, the other thing I wanted to point out back to the reaching out thing, I love what you always say, what is it? Every interaction is not a transaction opportunity. It’s a relationship opportunity. It’s not a revenue event. It’s a revenue event. It’s a relationship. Thank you. Yeah, it’s exactly that, um, Carlton would say you make the big bucks. They pay the big bucks for you making the hard calls, because they don’t know it’s like, there’s two ways to go with a headline. If there’s two ways to go with a big idea or a hook, they’re going to look at you and go, Well, you’re the copywriter, which, which is better, and you got to confidently go, we’re going with B, for sure, I love it. It’s hot, it’s and you don’t know, but you can’t go on. I mean, you know, I always say I predicted with 100% accuracy every single test in my career after I have the result, amazing record, yeah, yeah.
I have a spotless record, yeah. But, man, you’re exactly right. It is to me. Look the thing I got, you know, rfl behind you, roughly, life is, is my that’s my passion. Brian, like that, program has really grown into the thing I love the most doing in my business. Yes, we talk about freelancing. Maybe I will show you something, if you don’t mind. Yeah, this really cool thing now called the Freelancers journey. And it’s really interesting, man, because speaking as somebody mentioned, Stu, a friend of ours. Man, when I first started copy chief Ryan, I had Stu was nice enough to get on a call with me and just let me, you know, pick his brain and Right, right. The greatest, most people would pick his pocket, but you didn’t. Yeah, I picked, I wanted his brain. And so the big takeaway from that call was he said, You’ve got to bring people into a membership and help them identify where they are on the timeline, and then you’ve got to help them, you know, learn what they need there, and then keep them excited about reaching the finish line, but also reminding them that it’s next step, next step.
And I was like, of course, that makes perfect sense. But then my dilemma was, how do I do that with copywriting? People have such a vast hodgepodge of different experiences, abilities, fears, it’s like, How can I tell somebody?” Me, this is how to identify. Okay, if you’re here, you don’t need any of this. Surely, they’re going to need some things that work. You know what? I mean, I could never timeline, but when it came to coaching freelancers, I started to see a timeline emerge. And last year, the thing we did that we didn’t have before was we created a freelancing course for beginners, for brand new copywriters. It was like, hey, what we call phase zero is where you’re just at that point in life, where you’re like, something’s got to give, something’s got to change. But I can’t live this way. I can’t go I can’t come into this building one more time, I cannot punch a clock, I’m going to kill myself. What should I do? And that’s phase zero, because then you discover something, and that’s when you fall in love with the skill and industry or something. Copywriting is a great example. Could be photography, could be design, could be whatever.
Brian Kurtz 20:59
Freelancers, not just copywriters.
Kevin Rogers 21:01
Exactly at that moment, for every freelancer, right? You either decide the thing they’re paying me at this company, I can do better on my own. But what does that look like? And then this program we have called Escape Velocity is for phase one through two, which is phase one is proving the model. Let me just prove the model that I’m good enough at this that people, and there’s people out there who will pay me to do it right. And then after you prove the model, it’s like, okay, now how to get steady and, you know, keep getting paid so I can transition maybe, you know, out of my full time job, and make this my business. And I was thinking about this earlier, Brian, because I’m actually writing the book, the Freelancers journey book. I’m really excited. It’s gonna be my first real book. I’ve had my pamphlet, my lead magnet, 62nd sales hook, for three years, which has been an incredible story in itself. But anyway, I was thinking about, um, what’s great about freelancing is it’s a way to become a business owner with all the without all the pressure of going all in on a business, you get to, sort of like, step into this idea of, what are your strengths as a business owner, as a service provider, what you know and what parts of it drive you crazy, and do you put off because there’s, there’s five or six jobs.
The thing about becoming a freelancer, you got into it because you would love doing one thing that you were really good at, that it seemed like people needed you found out they did need that. And then you look up and you’re like, shit. There’s like five other jobs that need to be done to make this thing work. And I wouldn’t hire me to do any of those. That’s that’s that you gotta, you gotta understand your unique ability. You have to, you know, that’s that. That’s the big part of the journey of, yeah, you know, what do you do? Well, and stay in that lane and buy every and couldn’t, some people don’t have the cash, but you got to buy everything else around the corner. I mean, you know, I had the, I had the the advantage of going freelance after I had 34 years, so I had some cash built up. I could hire Carla, I could hire Chris. I could hire Chris’s guy and Chris’s person in the Philippines, or the guy who does the hooks up the plumbing on our on our sales stuff. But if I had, if I had to do any of that, I’d be out of business. I’d be out of business, yeah, and can you imagine, right? And so and you, plus you also knew that those departments needed to exist, you know? Yeah, that was the advantage. I knew what I had to do. I wasn’t going to do it. If I had to do it, I wouldn’t have this business. I wouldn’t.
I wouldn’t do that business if I had to do it, wouldn’t it ugly, yeah. And so that’s what freelancers face. They it’s all, it’s all love and glory. In the beginning, you’re like, oh my god, another person just hired me, and I just got more. You get that alert on your phone. You’ve got cash. Oh my god, I’m winning, man, yeah. And then you start to realize, if I’m going to scale this thing, I need some new skills, or I need some new and you can’t afford to hire, delegate those things out. There’s no, you know, in four hour work week when you’re on, when you’re skimming by. So, um, that’s what. So let me, I’ll just quickly show you. Brian, yeah, share that. That sounds really know my history. It’s pretty exciting just to have this. So if you can see this, oh, yeah, I think I’ve seen this. This is great, yeah. So these are the phases, and I was only able to actually create this once we had escape velocity, because that covered I was actually, look, I couldn’t. I wasn’t going to create this until I really successfully taught at all, right. I had phase three, four through rfl.
Phase Five is where people join, like my mastermind, and now I think I call the incubator Brian is where my mastermind has become more, more of a partnership, almost right, where I’m helping them build their own business, rather than just putting them on. Am I raising them on my own platform? I want them to go beyond me and copy the chief. That’s what excites me now, right? So now, and this is phase seven, is where I am in my business. It’s crazy to think, but actually pondering, what is the legacy? You know, I turned 50. Was it last year? This year? Who can remember 50? You’re, you’re, you’re, you’re a baby, you’re a steer, a spring trainer. I said I still do jump squats, but I’m, you know, but still, like you do, start thinking about what Kevin, 60. It’s going to be very different from 50, certainly very different from 40. You know, I don’t want to be starting anything over again if I don’t have to. Right? So how can I take what I’ve got now, what I know now, and turn that into something I can, you know, transition out of and maybe leave to my kids, and how long can it live even beyond me? It’d be fantastic. So, but that’s seven, obviously. That’s another level of teaching altogether. But to have this, these phases, and I forget the original impetus that made me think of this, what we were talking about, though, but what you need at given times to be successful. And I would imagine most people on this call and in this group are here in phase 345, where we don’t do important things like setting a standard.
Sometimes it’s like, as a freelancer, you’ve got to make sure now at phase three, that the only clients that qualify to work with you are meeting your standard for how a project goes right. You’re excited about what they do, you, you believe in their integrity. You identify with their voice. You’re excited to learn more about their audience. And then once you stabilize, you start gathering momentum. Now it’s like you’ve done the work. You’ve been in the trenches. Now it’s time to step out as a leader, sticking your face in every camera that’ll have you, being on every podcast that’ll have you because you have something to say, you have something to share. And then Phase Five is fine tuning and starting to actually systematically scale beyond client work, which, again, is like where most people want this is where it’s like, okay, am I ready to be a business owner? Can I learn? It’s kind of in a sense, where you were, Brian. It’s like you’d learned everything through all that great experience at the boardroom, and now it was just like deciding phase six. Really, how do you want to scale and leverage your existing knowledge without having to start over or let it be overwhelming and instantly become a nightmare?
Brian Kurtz 27:40
Yeah, you know, the only thing I would, I would, I’d love you to comment on this. I, I, you know, you said the last step is, is the legacy piece. And to me, you know, I’m, I’m definitely closer to death than everybody on this call, just about so well, you visited, so I almost died a year ago. You see it inside the store? Yeah, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen what death looks like. Not interested, not interested. I was a little too busy death. Death had to go past me. Yeah, so. But the thing is that even before and after, I never, and I have this in the Xcelerator launch that I’m doing, that I never think about the legacy, because legacy kind of it, kind of it kind of talks about your death. I’m always into the living legacy, like, what you know, what am I going to do while I’m still here so you’re not and again, I think that it’s a difficult thing to do, but I’m always thinking, What can I still do? What can I still do while I’m still here, while I can still enjoy it, while I can still see the fruits of my labor? I mean, while I can still see, for example, right here.
I mean that the Xcelerators will do amazing things while I’m still alive. I mean, I want to see them, you know, succeed at a high level, and I know you do too, so you know your group. So I’m just wondering how you, how you, if you separate it or because I think that when I, when I woke up from my stroke and I was alive, I mean, I could have been dead, and that would have been it. And I said, Okay, if I had died, what would have happened, I had a book, but that, you know, what’s a book? I mean, that’s, is that a legacy? I don’t know. But what I had, actually, the thing that was more of a legacy for me was the was the over deliver book.com page, which kind of, like, honored all my mentors who had also, a lot of them had died and they had been forgotten. So now I’m saying, Okay, I’m alive.
Half of the mentors on that page were alive. Half of them are dead. So now what do I do? What do I need to do to buck up and keep being alive, doing that living legacy thing while I still honor the ones who are dead because they’re going to be forgotten faster. And the ones who are still alive, how do I boost them up? You know, I did this with Kennedy. You know, Kennedy, you know he, he had the fortunate. He was fortunate. He got to read all his obituaries in advance, and then all of a sudden, he wasn’t dead. So now what is he going to do? Right? So, yeah, so what talk about that? Because I noticed you had legacy in that last step. So, I just want to know how you feel about it.
Kevin Rogers 30:25
Yeah. And to be fair, I haven’t thought of, maybe there’s a better phrasing for that, you know, but to me, here’s what it means when I look at copy chief, you know. Again, we talked about this kind of a theme for the call today, is that we just move, and we have momentum, and we try to be as smart as we can in directing the momentum we’re creating, and that means a lot of little choices along the way. But if we can measure that we’re moving forward, and we have an idea of our goal, then that’s what what we’re doing here, right for me, what copy chief became that I didn’t expect was a platform for really bright people who had more talent than experience, more knowledge than experience, to rise up and find their voice and discover an ability to do certain parts of direct response Marketing of all kinds of different things to specialize in a way that sort of catapulted them, allowed them I mean, I’m really proud of some of the people that I feel like I’ve had a direct hand in changing Abby woodcock, Russell Laughlin, Mike Renard, Chris Zakowski, like these current superstars, people who inspire me. I’ve worked with, and they all will say, you know, copy chief and rfl were the other reason.
And so when I think about legacy, I think, can I turn copy chief into this sort of simple idea of what is now? Is like the simple concept was, Let’s just all get together. It’s so great when we can get together in person. We have these great conversations, and we have these brainstorms, these spontaneous brainstorms, and then we all go our separate ways. And none of that transpires in anything, unless in the rare since a couple people connect and actually do something very rare, I said, what if we could keep that party going, 24/7 on the digital platform, and foster these ideas and turn them into trainings, and that’s what copy chief is in. But now what I when I think about the legacy is like, what if it was, it evolved into, like the Udemy of anything in marketing, right? Like where I could help nurture somebody into the seed of their idea, take the process they’ve created for getting amazing results for their clients. Because as freelancers, man, we learn from our clients. Dime, we just do it with integrity. But that’s the deal, right? And so the people who get damn good at it, this is what we’ve been doing in copy chief, is like, let’s turn that into a training, and let’s help you grow a business around that. Or how? So what I want the copy chief to be is less of a Wow. That was cool, and that happened that month, and let’s have that person go off and see if they want to do something different with it, and in a sense, Brian becomes a competitor, in a way I don’t.
I try not to think of it that way, but logistically, I’ve created a lot of my own competition, if we’re talking dollar to dollar, right? So what I would love, my new vision, my passion is, like, I want copy chief to be the hallmark of excellence for copywriting training. Sure you can get specialty training from people like Dan Ferrari and Justin Goff and David Deutsch. Like, that’s always going to be there, and I think that’s awesome, but they’re really specific kinds of direct response when it when it comes to learning direct response, copywriting and marketing on a deeper level, and even more than that, discovering which part of it speaks to you in a unique way. And you can combine your life’s experience. Look at Nicole Piper with branding. 29 years as a global branding executive retires from that comes into copywriting, and in her mind, she’s got to get at the back of the line because she’s a new copywriter. And I go, No, you’re a top level branding expert who’s now adding an emerging skill of copy into your ability.
So let’s make that the thing, and now you’re at the front of the line. You see that’s the kind he had already there. It was already there. It was already there. I just had to show her. It was the same with Carlton. Told me he’s like, How come you never talk about being a stand up comic? Like, that’s fascinating. I like, because nobody ever hires stand up comics to be reliable. They’re worried you’re going to run off to the next club. You know? And he’s like, No, it’s, you can let that go. And while I was, you know, so we, if I can, the thing that excites me more than anything is getting to know somebody and helping them discover their unique abilities and realizing that done correctly, you really can turn your passion into your business.
And man, if Copy Chief was a store, a housing place for those kinds of training that could help you discover, oh, I just thought I liked copywriting and wanted to learn that. But wow, this like list building thing is, like, super cool, like this lead magnet. Thing is, like, Man, I’m really passionate about that. I want to make that my thing for now, right? So helping people specialize through other people, we’ve proven the model that you can specialize in different things. And so, you know, provide them the inspiration, provide them the blueprint, whether you want to do it for your own business or make that another part of your career. To me, when I think of a legacy, it’s like, how can I create that and give it to other people and make it super easy for them to do that and not have to fumble around and do all the hard parts of starting your own business?
Outro 36:22
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.