At the end of the day, businesses come down to the revenue they generate. After all, it is the very thing that keeps the business going and pays people’s bills. What better way to ensure money is coming in than through marketing? Gem Rinehart and Melanie Davidson welcome a very interesting guest for today’s episode! Josh Rosenberg from Very Good Marketing Consultants shares some advice to help increase your revenue with strategic marketing efforts. Josh says businesses should pay attention to how everything operates around them and leverage that to add more value. He dives deep into identifying profit centers, what’s not working, and the value of taking the initiative. Don’t miss out on this opportunity; help yourself with key takeaways from this conversation as you move forward!
We have a very special guest, Josh Rosenberg. Josh, can you introduce yourself to our audience, who you are, what you’ve been up to, what’s made you successful and what you’re truly focusing on now?
I run a right now called Very Good Marketing Consultants, where we provide fractional chief marketing officer services for a lot of online businesses. I got started in this space back in 2007 when I built up my first information product. I’m focused primarily on studying everything I needed to know about copywriting and marketing and went down that rabbit hole, ignoring literally everything else.
In turn, my offers were at the very top of the ClickBank marketplace for a very long time. At this point, people were contacting me about running their marketing and copywriting for them. For the last couple of years or so, that’s where I’ve been focusing and growing. These days, primarily, we are working with companies that are looking to raise their valuation because they have an exit plan in mind and want to be able to exit at a higher multiple. We’re helping businesses get as close to a 10X multiple as possible before they get acquired.
How are you teaching them to do that? If that’s something that we can touch on a little bit.
A lot of it comes down to how much revenue the business is able to generate automatically without needing to hire a team. It could be something as simple as helping them to set up a 90 or 120-day autoresponder email sequence. It could be finding very high-ticket backend offers to attach to their sales funnel. It might be if you’re selling some kind of coaching or training system, maybe now you attach a $ 50,000-a-year mastermind service to the back of it.
It could be about simply raising prices and affiliate commissions so that more money is generated per customer, presenting more offers, and repositioning offers for a wider audience so that they convert at a higher percentage. There are a million different ways we can do that, and it’s something that a lot of businesses think that they have dialed in until we look at the numbers and realize that they’re not as dialed in as they suspected.
That’s a nice thing. What are some of the signs that they haven’t? Is there any, if I can ask, anything that you look for that are big triggers to show that they’re not as dialed in as they think they are?
Right away, after I got a good idea of what their business looks like and how it operates, I found what I like to refer to as trashcan assets, which are either unused or underutilized assets that they don’t realize are staring them in the face. After I’ve compiled a list of all these things, before I start creating anything or building any systems, I’m going to look at their marketing team, whether they be full-time, in-house employees or vendors that they work with, ad vendors, email vendors or whoever.
I’m going to look at what training was provided, or, “Did you hire somebody expecting them to know what to do and tell them to just have at it? What SOPs do you have in place to make sure everybody is operating correctly and identically so that if somebody gets struck by lightning one day, they can be replaced, and you know that the work will be done the same way? What KPIs do we have?”
These key performance indicators are a great motivator because if an employee realizes these are the numbers that they have to hit as a minimum just because that’s a requirement of the job, but anything above a certain amount, now they get a year-end bonus attached to it, that’s a huge motivator. A couple of years ago, a client brought in an affiliate manager to start and run an entire affiliate program. They didn’t give them any training.
Strategic Marketing: The key performance indicators are a great motivator.
This was the affiliate manager’s first time doing this. They had worked a little at another company, but they had never run anything. As a result, they weren’t generating a lot of money because they didn’t have any direction or knowledge of what they were doing. I hooked them up with somebody I believe to be one of the best affiliate marketing trainers on the planet. We got them fully trained up.
Previously, in this company, I was doing around $3 million annually in revenue. Now this new affiliate manager who finally had direction and had somebody keeping her accountable did about $1.5 million that first year by herself, so a 50% increase in less than a year of that first year. Her end-of-the-year bonus was somewhere around the $70,000 to $75,000 mark, which for her was life-changing. She paid off her student debts, became the most loyal employee you could ever ask for and has zero plans to ever leave.
Now in 2022, she has trained her team to work with her and under her, and they’re doing around $7 million. In a couple of years, they have almost tripled the amount of revenue this business brought in, and I consulted with them for a few weeks. A lot of times, we can find big ways to improve things in a very short amount of time.
I would like to bring it back a little bit. What did you do before you got into marketing? What about marketing that caught your attention? Why did you want to get into marketing at all?
In my previous life, I had a corporate job. I was working commercial real estate, which I disliked, seven days a week, sixteen-hour days. I was working with one client right around a year or so just to move them into an office space. I finally closed the deal. The commission was going to be a life-changing amount of money because, at this point, I was working on a $ 40,000-a-year draw against my commission.
I’m basically surviving on ramen noodles every night. When I finally closed that deal, the owner of the company said, “Sorry but that broker down the hall, we paid them a few million dollars to come over here a couple of years prior, and he hasn’t produced any new business. To not look like we made a mistake to corporate, we’re going to take your commission and give it all to him.” There was nothing that I could do.
What a big slap in the face.
They let me know they were stealing my money and had more powerful lawyers. They knew I couldn’t afford any, so there was nothing I could do about it. I left and said, “I’m never returning to that corporate life again. I’m done.” Thankfully, I convinced him to fire me so I could collect unemployment. That’s what I survived on for the next year and a half until I had figured out what I was doing and built my first info product business. I was starting to get my first couple of sales here and there.
I realized with any business that there are many things to focus on and do. There are sales and marketing. There’s building the deliverables. There’s having the right mechanics. There are so many things that go into it that it’s impossible to be good at everything. I am terrible at numbers. I should not be the person handling the finances. I’m sitting there with my calculator out, doing basic addition and subtraction. There’s no way I should be handling the finances. I said, “Rather than try to be a jack of all trades like a lot of brand new entrepreneurs and startup founders have to be, I’m just going to find the thing that I can do the best that I enjoy the best.”
There was something about marketing that spoke to me, and I liked it. I took to it naturally. I was reading every book ever written, going through every course imaginable, and studying all the legends. I’m still doing that even to this day. That was the area that I found that I was the best at and that I enjoyed the most. Honestly, it’s the lifeblood of any business because if you don’t have your marketing dialed in, you don’t have customers or clients. You don’t have revenue. How are you paying the bills if you have no money coming in?
About Josh Rosenberg
Josh Rosenberg, 10-time ClickBank platinum award winning marketer, known as one of the top copywriters in the world, and serial entrepreneur. The music education business he co-founded was recognized by The Manhattan Music Awards as ‘The Best Music Education Business of the Year’ for 2018 and again in 2020. From making his first dollar online back in 2007; Josh Rosenberg is now on a life legacy Mission: To Help 10,000 people to Start, Launch and Grow a Business That Allows Them To Live The Life of Their Dreams. He whole heartily believes that everybody would be better off if they worked to better the lives of the people around them.
And being able to create jobs while also offering the world a fantastic product or service is one way that we can all give back. He is the visionary and founder of Very Good Marketing Consultants along with the ‘Copywriters Clubhouse’ A Global Entrepreneurial Community Specifically for Marketers. Josh is also a managing partner of the New York City based animal rescue and adoption charity, Sasha’s Mission. He helps online businesses on best strategies dominate their industry through strategic marketing and High-Ticket Sales strategies to close the right clients, anytime they want.
He is regarded as a top authority on direct-response marketing, copywriting, and developing complete sales-funnels and High-Ticket programs that practically sell themselves. In 2007 he started, developed and grew an online adult education company from ground zero to over $2 million in sales in less than 15 months, before selling it to an investor. In 2016, he started and grew an online music education business, which is continuing to grow larger every day. Also in 2016, Josh begun working as a freelance marketing consultant for numerous online businesses. In all, his work has generated over $100,000,000 in revenue for online businesses in more than two-dozen verticals.
Starting without a list, a product, a name or an offer, Josh Rosenberg, has the ability to create business packages, marketing lists and sales from ground zero. He has instructed and coached hundreds of entrepreneurs leading them down the path to success in building a lucrative business from their knowledge and leveraging it online. Josh Rosenberg is the Author of highly-acclaimed book Profit Cheat Code™ ‘Multi-Billion Dollar Video Game Industry Tactics for Internet Marketers’. You can find his book here.
Josh has been a guest speaker at numerous industry conferences and guest contributor and coach for many programs to help teach people the skills needed to become successful entrepreneurs. He is very open to share his incredible story of success and loss on the entrepreneur journey, and his true happiness in a completely compelling and vulnerable way that audiences relate to and always learn from. He talks about growing up in poverty and not knowing if he would eat that day, to achieving great success by discovering his true passion in owning his own businesses and serving her clients by helping them achieve their goals. Josh Rosenberg is a smart marketer and businessman who is now stepping out from behind the curtain to educate, enlighten and empower ALL online entrepreneurs to grow their businesses and live a fearless and fulfilled life.
