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FLETCHER: And so here is a fascinating case study. And one of the things that they always talk about is it negative reputation industry. So you have politics, negative reputation; nobody trusts one, nobody likes them. Real estate agents, negative reputation. Car salesman, negative Contractors…

So you’ve got Adam Crawler her right now on TV doing, “To catch a contractor.” Because there is a negative reputation about contractors. Plastic surgeons, on again cable, you have a show called “Botched” a lot of plastic surgeons promising transformation, botching the surgeries, leaving people in dire straits.

And so one of the things that you really want to do is study those professions outside of real estate that are also negative reputation industries where the people in those industries are doing something phenomenally well. Financial, advisors is another negative reputation industry because of course they are tied to Wall Street. And so if you see a financial advisor doing something really smart, differentiating themselves from all their competitors, the smart question to ask is, “What are they doing?” How can I bring that back to real estate?

And so I got an article here “Media magic: How the Money Guys struck gold on air.” This goes back to what we talked about on the last episode. Gary Vaynerchuk becoming a media company, putting out content, crafting a message, feeding an audience with constant content. Okay media is the key word here, become a media company. Don’t be in the sales culture. Be media focused. And so these are couple of financial planners, The Money Guys struck gold on air.

And so in the financial planning industry if you are not familiar with it, everybody does preview seminars. – Come, have a free dinner, listen to the sales pitch by the guy on stage who is a financial advisor. He talks about 401(k)s or IRAs or [39:24 Ralfs] or retirement or different levels of annuities. They give out a free dinner and then of course hopefully they convert a certain percentage of those people into appointments and then they become clients.

Here is the problem, the event itself has a negative reputation. It’s kind of like our industry, the guru party, they use webinars. Webinars have a negative reputation. Nobody has to tell you what it is, it’s a sales pitch. It’s not a training event, they are not there to help you, they are there to sell you. And so you have, in the financial industry, organizations like AARP and financial industry regulator authority, they are warning the public, consumers about financial advisors putting on these kinds of seminars. And they are seeing all of the advertising rates, response rates, their ROI, they are plummeting because of course nobody wants to come to the seminars anymore.

You are seeing the same thing with the guru party and the real estate industry; the attendance level for these seminars, these pitch fests, it’s plummeting. Why would you ever get on one? There’s nothing valuable, you’re going to be sold. And so the media guys or the money guys here, the financial advisors in this case, based out of Baltimore, they said, “We’ve got to come up with something else.” They decided that they were going to get on radio.

Now here’s how you know when you can become the authority, is when you have an idea, when you can talk. When you believe in something and you can communicate that to an audience. I am not talking about a flipchart, I’m not talking about representation, am talking about believing something, actually having knowledge, expertise because you’ve researched, because you formulated a viewpoint, a worldview. So they knew that they had to change and so now prospects, I’m going to read this, “Prospects now come to us whereas previously we had to go to their homes or restaurants or meet them in public places like Starbucks.

They’ve also changed their business model anybody who has a pulse, i.e. real estate, only accepting 100 new clients a year.” Okay they named their show “The money guys.” But here is the thing, here is what really made their show take off, they fine-tuned their content, they figured out what the message was. Kind of like Sloper, when they first got on the radio, it talks about him, here it summarizes, “They failed they work on getting the lead they wanted, they weren’t getting the quality of leads that they wanted.” And so the media alone isn’t the answer. Just getting on the radio will make a difference. It’s kind of like going to a fake gala or having some sort of alphabet soup behind your name, having another designation. You can’t buy authority because it’s something others perceive about you.

And so just because you say you are an authority, you don’t get to determine that. But if you have a message, if you have a believe, if you have a conviction and you fine-tune that content and now you put that out into the world using radio or another medium, people get attracted back to you. And so one year after starting the show they were able to retire their seminar marketing. So one year after they started doing radio and now remember the firsts 6 months they weren’t getting the results. One year after that they stopped doing all that ridiculous stuff that are taught by the guru party in their industry.

And I’m just going to fast forward. All the details aren’t really that important so dramatically changed their business, how they are perceived now by those they come in contact with, how there is never any negotiations on what plan is going to be, how they, control, how they force obedience. “We no longer go out to dinner without someone recognizing us as The Money Guys.” They’ve become legitimate celebrities in their marketplace; not manufactured, not fake, legitimate. And so they go on to say, “If you are not using radio or TV to promote your practice perhaps it’s time that you give the media a second look.”

Sloper you’ve been in radio. How did it change your business?

SLOPER: Dramatically. I mean it made me reinvent myself altogether because I actually realized that I had to put in about 10 times the work of what I was doing just in my regular business because I actually had to prepare a show. I had to create new content and topics and the guests and everything down the line. And so from that perspective it made me on top of my game every single day. Which I think is important. I mean I feel like if you are not everyday working on researching, gathering more knowledge and Intel and from other businesses, not just from your own industry, then you are probably failing.

And then from the consumer perspective I just gained immediate credibility right. But I mean because it’s easy to go on to our radio show where somebody interviews you and you talk for 5 minutes. Like anybody can do that. They can give you a list of questions, you can prepare for that. But then to be on the other side of that where you actually have to be in control of the show for an entire hour, it takes a big leap of faith to do something like that.

FLETCHER: And I want to make a point, when you talk about creating content, a lot of real estate agents, the low information agent, he’s going to hear this and he’s, “Oh, that’s what I do I research the market all the time. I look at the MLS, I pull the Comps, I go preview homes.” That’s not what we’re talking about.

When we say content creation, we are talking about putting ideas on paper, recording your ideas on video, recording your ideas to audio, burning CDs, writing articles, writing books because you have that level of research of a different approach or innovative concept. We’re not talking about researching the market because all of that just positions you as another real estate agent. We are talking having a different set of beliefs about how you operate your business and then of course communicating that in a message.

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