How to Turn Your Invention Idea Into a Real Profitable Business with the Inventor The Neck Hammock (Dr. Steve Sudell)

Audio Transcription

How do you take your product or invention to market? How do you effectively market a new business idea? Do Split testing, trademarking your idea? How do you determine the cost per acquisition of a new customer? How do you copyright your idea? How do you launch a successful product while still working a day job? On today’s show, Dr Steve Sudan, the inventor of the famous neck hammock joins us to teach you all of this and more.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. What is it? On today’s show, we have the trinity to interview the founder of the revolutionary product that has many members of my office excited. His product is called the neck hammock. It is simple. It’s a portable, is a simple portable solution for neck pain, neck pain relief, relaxation, and the world loves it. In fact, he was able to raise over a million dollars of product on kickstarter and Indiegogo as result of selling over 30,000 units in just six weeks. In fact, Dr Steve [inaudible], the founder of the neck Hammock, is now ranked in the top one percent of all crowdfunding campaigns worldwide. Dr Steve Sudan. Welcome onto the show.

It’s really great to be here. I’m excited.

Okay. I gotta ask you this here. Now. The product, it’s doing well. It’s easy to say. Well, it’s probably because he’s well connected or he’s good at marketing or I would want to start at the beginning though. I want to start at the beginning, sort of celebrated the finish line. I want to get into how you got here. So did you, what was your educational background? Tell us about your, your, your formal education.

Yeah. So for the last 10 years I’ve been a physical therapist. I got my doctor of physical therapy, uh, back in 2009, so just, just under 10 years. And then before that I did uh, athletic training at University of Central Florida. Go Knights and, uh, you know, aside from the formal education, I’ve just been very involved in athletics, uh, my entire life in working with athletes, so have a lot of experience in that background as well.

Okay. So, so you, I went to your website trying to learn as much as I could about you and it appears to be you appear to be a family man. Uh, did you and your wife come up with this product together or when did the, when did you have the epiphany? When did you have the idea to create this product?

So, my Aha moment came when after years of suffering from neck pain myself, you know, I grew up playing football and uh, as you can imagine, you know, it took its toll on my neck and then fast forward a few years it became a physical therapist and I learned about this wonderful thing called cervical traction. But problem was that the only way to really take advantage of that was a physical therapy clinic, chiropractic office using their $2,000 machine to kind of replicate the cervical traction. There wasn’t anything that you can use at home and uh, so one day I was working out and I tweaked my neck again, so like I grew frustrated and I decided to, you know, recreate sort of attraction, something that’s given me relief in the past by grabbing a long resistance fan, wrapping around a pole rafting on the back of my head. And then I laid down it for 10 minutes and 10 minutes later my neck pain was gone. So I knew that I was onto something that was kind of like my Aha moment. It was just a matter about the next two plus years developing it, testing prototypes and actual real patients in my physical therapy clinics that are run over here in Venice, California.

Assume that for a second that you’re talking to a third grade boy because in many ways I am kind of an adult. Third grade boy. Can you educate me, enlightened me in any other third grade boys out there maybe about what cervical traction is all about.

Exactly. Just the simplest way to think about it. It’s just decompression, it. All we’re doing is we’re just gradually and gently decompressing the spine, stretching out the tight muscles that become very tight, you know, when you have a, you’re on your cell phone all day or when you’re looking at the computer, I’m all traction stealing. It’s just kind of opening up those spaces and allowing increased blood flow to get to the nerves, the joints and uh, you know, alleviate pain and improve healing.

I don’t know if it, if this is part of the, the, the byproduct of, of using this product, the neck, neck, hammock. But it appears as though you’re a beautiful man. You are, you are a beautiful man to. Do we all look better and feel better as a result of this product.

No, I can’t officially make any of those claims, but there is plenty of studies out there that say when you’re less stressed that you look better and so happy people looked at her and uh, so if you’re happy because of it, you know, the results Kinda speak for themselves.

Now I read on your website and again if I’m getting, if I’m misunderstanding something, I think you somehow had a how cancer somehow led to the creation of the neck hammock. Can you talk to me about cancer and how that helped you to create this product?

Yeah, so my younger sister was diagnosed with leukemia about four years ago and right around the time that she was diagnosed is when I actually came up with the idea, but you know, it’s one thing to have an idea. It’s another thing to pursue that idea. And I remember sitting in the hospital room with her and she was just so much pain and was. It was a pain that there was nothing that I really could do to help. But I remember sitting there and thinking two things. Number One, a 26 year old female who is battling for her life with cancer, you know, so life is really short, too short to sit on ideas. And then the second thing is, you know, here I have this opportunity, this idea where I can provide pain relief to a large number of people out there who, who can’t really get it without drugs or surgery or you know, all the other harmful stuff that we’re trying to avoid. So she was really kind of my motivation too, you know, just get moving on this thing and take a risk and, you know, make a lot of investments in myself and the product, uh, to make this thing happen.

Who’s on the show today? One of our show sponsors, Paul, there’s a lot of cpas out there, but you are a CPA with thousands of customers. So when you have multiple locations, did you have an Aha moment where you did what Dr Steve did? And you thought to yourself, you know what, screw this thing of just being an average. I’m going to go for it. I’m going to buy a practice, I’m going to start a practice. Did you have one of those Aha moments as well? Well, yeah, I did

clay because I, you know, the CPA industry is kind of unique in that, um, there’s really not that many people going into because Cpas, most cpas just work themselves to death and they don’t make that much money in the overall scheme of things. So I, I saw this and said, hey, you know what, I want to scale. I want to figure this thing out. I want to be, you know, not necessarily Henry Block H and r block, but I want to create wealth and, and all of that. And, and uh, by the way, Dr Steve, I’m on my phone right now and I’m ordering two of your, your neck headaches. I’m excited.

Well, I’m excited to get you the relief you deserve.

Bam. So, Paul, you’ve already, you’ve already purchased two. I think Andrew is going to buy one here before we wrap up the show. Heck yeah. I can just feel that the thrive nation, we have so many workers out there, so many employees, so many entrepreneurs that are listening to this show, and you’re spinning your entire day at a desk. What happens to the neck? Dr Steve, what happens to the body overtime when you’re sitting there hunched over a computer, a keyboard, typing, clicking what happens over time,

it doubles the amount of strain on the neck musculature on the spine and you know, that’s okay for a few minutes. But when you think about doing that day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, which is really the reality for a lot of people out there, it just leads to some really terrible things. You know, arthritis, you know, whenever you’re talking about increased blood flow and circulation, you know, you’re also, you have a lot of neurovascular structures back there that can actually affect your breathing. And you know, whenever you’re in a state of, of pain, uh, there’s plenty of studies out there that show that people with chronic pain or like five times more likely to develop things like cancer. And um, you know, when you’re in pain, it just makes you less willing to go exercise. And we all know that the negative effects of that. So, you know, everything really starts at the neck, you know, when, when the neck is dysfunctional. It just works its way down the body to affect the shoulders, the low back, and it just leads to a whole slew of problems that we can go on for hours about. But you know, when you get that thing in proper alignment, a lot, a lot of special things can happen.

My friends that a guy had the opportunity to serve for four years, his name was Maurice Kanbar. I guess I would have called marise and acquaintance. He was a guy that I worked with. He started a skyy vodka was his invention and a skyy vodka is a product obviously. It did very, very well, but he also invented the modern needle protector. You know, he also invented the modern stoplight that strobes the guy. I mean his, he has over 70 patents. He’s brought in over a billion dollars in royalties and license fees throughout his career. I mean, just prolific. Maurice Kanbar is his name. K A N v a r n e talks about these five steps for inventing something in his book, the inventors handbook. And I kind of want to go through these steps here with you to, to see, um, you know, I’d like to get your take on this step one he says is you have to solve a problem that people are willing to pay you to solve. Do you agree with step one or what’s your take on that? Solve a problem that people are willing to pay you to solve.

You know, if you want to have a, an invention that has any sort of longevity to it, then I agree with that 100 percent. You know, there’s a lot of good products that people invent that really don’t do anything. And you know, they kind of go away after six months to a year. But, but a truly good invention, I’m 100 percent fits that. That’s step one.

Now, step two, he says, you’ve got to prove your invention. Actually build a prototype. You know, you can’t just run around with this idea. Can you talk to me about the, uh, the struggles? What were the trials involved in making you prototypes of your product?

I don’t think we have enough time for your,

you know, the, the thing about struggles in, in one of my friends, Terry Marshall actually kind of explains this really well, is that, you know, whenever you face a very large obstacle that should motivate you because that’s where a lot of people stopped and the struggle with even knowing where to begin, you know, is like the hardest thing, but it’s like every step for that you take towards that idea towards building that prototype just gets you one step closer to that goal. So whether the struggles financial, whether it’s, you know, not understanding how to even assemble a prototype, not even understanding who to even go to, to assemble a prototype, you know, there’s, there’s so many challenges along the way that depending on your background, your skill set, uh, everyone’s challenges going to be a little bit different. But for me, those were some of the, some of the big ones.

Getting your prototype made. For anybody out there who’s struggling to get a prototype made, what advice would you have for somebody that we have many, many listeners. Paul, you and I meet these people once a month, every couple of months we’ll have somebody come into our offices who’s an inventor with an engineering background. I mean they, these people are professionally trained, but they don’t even know where to go to get a prototype. What, what advice would you have for somebody out there who’s trying to figure out where should I go to find a prototype?

So the biggest type of person that you’re looking for is in an industrial designer. Uh, those guys are really good at developing prototypes, but in order to find the right one, I would even use this little thing called facebook where you just put it out into the universe asking if anyone knows of, you know, good recommendations and you’d be very, very surprised of who knows who or who knows someone who knows someone. So that, that’s a great start for most people.

The next step is protect your idea. Step three, how did you, you obviously did some crowd funding there. So how did you protect your idea while also doing crowd funding?

Uh, I didn’t project it very well. I’ll tell you that this, we live in a day and age of a cloners and counterfeiters in China just waiting to knock off the next big idea. Yep. And so for me, figuring out one of the smartest idea that I did was to register my copyrighted images and to create a trademark. Those two things, right? There are probably some of the strongest Ip defenses that you have against someone knocking off your product because the thing about people always go to the patent right there, but there’s essentially two types of patents and they take anywhere between three to four years before they’re even issues, you know, or, or sometimes even looked at and um, and they can cost you a lot of money. So the best way to start would be the copyright your images and trademark, your names, your logos, things like that.

Okay. This is a big, this is a big teaching moment. This right here might have been worth thousands of dollars for the listeners out there, which is why everybody should at least 17 of the neck hammocks. So copyright your images. I agree with that. Trademark your idea. I agree with that and I wanted to give you just a little bit of unsolicited a therapy that might help you. I’ve helped many inventors sell many products and every single time, no matter how well they’ve protected it, uh, it’s almost immediately you can find the product made, as you mentioned from a knockoff company in China. And it’s amazing how you can’t really win the litigation. You know, when you’re running a company that’s based in China, you can’t really stop them. And so what would you, what advice would you have for somebody out there who needs a little therapy from your Dr Steve? They said, I have my idea, I have my copy written images. I’ve trademarked my idea, but the Chinese are copying my intention. What would you say? Do you just have to let it go? You let it flow. What advice would you have for somebody out there who’s currently having their product idea stolen by the Chinese?

So you just have to understand that the overall market is very massive and part of that market is going to go to the knockoffs and cloners you just have to live with that, that fact. But the second thing is it’s like you can fight them, um, but it’s like a really messed up game of whack a mole, you know, because what you can do is you can get the listing taken down on Amazon or anything to get it their website taken down via a dmc a takedown on shopify. And there’s companies out there now that facilitate that process for you. If you can afford it, they’re strongly worth it because they have algorithms in place that can handle that. Um, so it’s just one of the things that you just got to kind of understand that, like it’s gonna happen, but you know, the market’s so big, he still can make a lot of money selling where he wants to sell.

Maurice Kanbar instructs people to take it. They’re trying to invent a product and take it to market. He says you have to begin manufacturing it or decide whether to license it or not. How did you fund the manufacturing of your, of your product, the neck hammock?

Well, I got lucky with a kickstarter campaign. Definitely gave me a big kitten kickstart, so to speak, of uh, being able to raise enough money to then um, you know, go into manufacturing and to be able to afford these very large purchase orders that, you know, if you want to get the cost of goods down, you have to place very large minimum orders and uh, so kickstarter really helped me to do that. Um, you know, I will say I believe there’s a statistic out there that says over 90 percent of kickstarter campaigns that raised more than six figures go bankrupt within one year. And I think a big reason why they do is because they don’t have the manufacturing and fulfillment in place. So I was lucky to have done enough research before that to say I already have a good head start.

So what has been so far as you look at me, you, you’re selling thousands of these. What, what, what has been the most effective way for you to market the product? When did you start to get some early traction?

No, just figuring out why people really liked the product but what they really resonate to and I think that one of the things that we really focused on is showing people a really good here images where they immediately kind of see it and get it and they don’t know why it’s going to help their neck, but they just look at it and they just know that it probably will and you know, for us, like on a digital marketing side, we’ve done a lot of split testing on what people are really resonated to, whether it’s static images, videos, you know, things like that. But, but ultimately, um, I’ve spent a lot of time before I launched it, making sure that the quality was good. It actually worked. You know, I, I, it does exactly what it says I want it to do, you know, it’s not perfect and it’s not for 100 percent of people out there. But I think genuinely a good well made product certainly gives us a good reputation so that we can continue to sell and you know, then other people who buy it, they recommend it to their friends and their family and hopefully it snowballs from there

to, to drive traffic to the website initially. Did you do a lot of youtube ads or did you do a lot of ad words or do you do a lot a megaphone marketing at church or boy, what was your, what was your method to get people to initially to the website or even hear about the product for the first time.

So, you know, we spent a lot of money on facebook ads. That was for us a great tool for us, number one, to learn who our demographics, even his youtube wasn’t, wasn’t too successful. So we stopped doing that. A Google adwords and retargeting it has been very effective for us. Um, you know, I would say those are kind of some of the main drivers, but, you know, reaching out to friends and family and in local influencers that I know and, you know, trying to get on as many podcasts as possible and just trying to educate the world on this thing, you know, so that they understand that this weird little device that claims to have neck pain, um, you know, actually does, you know, there’s, there’s a real story and there’s real meaning behind it.

So if I’m out there right now, I’m thinking about pardon, with some serious cash for the holidays. Let’s do it. I want to get, maybe get one for my friend, but I wanna get one for myself to, uh, I want, I want to ask you this question here. Uh, Dr Steve, how much money are we talking about? How much does the, does the neck Hamot cost?

So right now retail, we’re selling an academic for $49 on our website, but we currently have a $5 coupon right now and Amazon to where it’s a 44, $99 with free shipping.

So you’re, you’re uh, right now there are 44, $99 plus shipping.

The shipping is free.

Oh, shipping’s. Very. Okay. So Paul, I want to ask you this and then Paul, you can ask Dr Steve, any question you want here, but this is one question I have for you. Paul, would you pay $44 to not have neck pain? Is it worth it to? Absolutely. Dude, I just bought he, they have a special that has oil and different things. I went all in clay. I went all in. I didn’t just get the hammock. I wanted the full treatment. So yeah, I paid a little bit more than that because I wanted the oil and the other things that are on there. But here’s the deal. I think Paul might be throwing your money away because I spent a little over $45 on this cow bell here. Dr Steve, listen to this and you’re not going to have the money needed to buy this kind of cal bell if you’re out there taking care of your neck and spine health. I mean think about that. You’re just throwing your what, what do you think about all the stuff, Steve? Think of all the uses of the cowbell. I can do this with it.

I could do this

and I can talk about Calvin. I can demand more cowbell. I said, Andrew, I need more cowbell on the track. And you say, okay, and then I.

Okay.

This is all the things. I mean, it’s amazing. It’s amazing. I mean really do you care about your spine out there? Now Dr Steve or somebody out there who’s saying, I don’t know if this is a good investment, how does it work? How do you use it? And then Paul has some tough questions for you.

So basically all

you do is you just take it right out of the bag. It’s already fully assembled and you can attach you to any door knobs, door jam or railing if a, that’s a better fit for you. And then all you have to do is lie down, wrapped in that candidate, ground your head. And then, uh, just, you know, move away from the door to a tension that feels a good tension for you. Have a nice, comfortable stretch, close your eyes for 10 minutes and just relax. It’s really as simple as that.

That is hot clay. Hey. The reason I bought it is I stay in shape. I actually just did a physique bodybuilding show a few months ago and I left and I ran a marathon, but the one part of my body that hurts his, my neck and I think it’s just because, you know, you lift heavy weights so you do different things and you, you tend to tense up and I fill all that plus compounding with the amount of work I do. So I’m excited because I’ve gone and had massages before. And my favorite partner thing I, I liked the best was with this one lady. Um, she takes a towel and puts it on my, underneath my neck and then lifts and poles and it’s. So it’s the same concept. So I’m excited about the clay out, you know, when I go get a massage at costs 80 bucks for an hour. I just took care of my massages for, for one price. So I’m good

now. Okay. How did you, how did, how’d you do, how did you go about determining the price? I mean, why not $4? Why not $400? Why not? How did you determine the price?

No, I spent a lot of time before even launching kickstarter, looking at similar products to mine and for me to make it a price to where, um, it wasn’t too expensive to where you were willing to suffer with the pain. I wanted to make it at a price to where it was just under $50 mark to where, you know, it can be like a good impulse purchase. You try it. If you don’t like it for 60 days, you can send it back. We have money back guarantee, but it was at a price that’s affordable enough to where again, you can, you can be the master of your fate as far as controlling neck pain. You don’t have to wait hours to see a massage therapist or weeks to see your doctor and just get prescribed drugs. Um, I wanted to give people the power and the ability to use it in their home at a very affordable price.

You are having all sorts of of success with this product now and I think it’s very exciting. I want to get into the, the deep dark details, the part where, you know, a lot of people aren’t even up yet, Paul, you know, cause it’s dark outside and I’m sure a lot of the work that you did here, Dr Steve was done in the early morning hours, maybe late at night. Can you walk us through how do you spend the first four hours of your day? What’s your habit? What, what’s your daily routine for those first four hours of your day?

So everything is kind of a little bit different because that one thing that I didn’t say is I still manage and run my own physical therapy clinic two hours a week. So my day is very busy and I need to be very efficient with my time. Uh, but for example though this morning, wake up at 7:00 AM, so I get to sleep in a little bit on Mondays and get right to the computer staying out, you know, probably I usually have about 50 to 70 emails waiting for me in the morning trying to get through those as quickly as possible. And then I go to some of the higher level tasks and the things that need to be addressed as far as, you know, one of those components. Today’s things on how to make an economic better, you know, what are some, some changes, modifications that we can make to constantly evolve and improve and to get ready for Q, for paying attention to. Is fulfillment and manufacturing. Are they still on schedule for q four? Because we have a lot coming up. Um, I reviewed some news articles that we’re going to be in here soon. We’re gonna be featured here in women’s health and Gq for q four, which is pretty awesome.

And so managing those types of relationships. And then, you know, after I get in about usually about three hours of work right to the gym, to the gym to go ahead, get it in about an hour, clear my head, and then that gives me the energy to kind of get back to work, have a little bit of lunch, and then I usually see clients in the evening. So pretty, pretty busy day.

So you, you have a definite plan, you have a plan for your life. You’re not just waking up and saying, I wonder what’s going to happen. I mean you have a plan, right?

You on my bathroom mirror before I go to bed. I write down all the things that I have to do the next day so that the second I wake up, first thing I see as I’m brushing my teeth in the morning is just the list of to do items and I just go through and I just try to bang those out as quickly as possible because I found that the ladder is very inefficient and you waste a lot of time working twice as hard when you don’t have a plan.

Now you are a guy that we talked about on the show at the time, but according to Nielsen, the average American watches five point two hours of TV per day. The average American is now spending two point three hours per day on social media. I could be wrong, but it appears as though you probably don’t spend five point two hours per day watching TV. You probably don’t spend two point three hours per day on social media. Are there things that you don’t. What? What are the things that you don’t do that a lot of people do that has given you the time to work on this, on this company? Is there somebody out there who’s doing things that you are not doing and that’s how you have so much time? What are you saying no to?

I spend about a 24 minutes on my phone per day and I only know that they’ve got one of those tracks will tools to minimize my time spent my phone. Um, I spend probably on the TV I spend probably about 30 minutes a day, but half of that is watching. I don’t want to say inspirational base, but like business space, youtube videos from like anywhere from, you know, uh, Jordan Peterson to Pedro’s, to Tony Robbins, whoever, whoever the case may be. Like I’m constantly trying to watch those, like during lunch to keep me in.

How long have you do this?

Um, anywhere between 30 to 45 minutes. I do get myself on the weekend one day to kind of binge watch tv if I want to and just be, be mindless and brainless activity. But, but for the most part during the week, it’s mostly business and I try to avoid the other distractions as much as possible because I find that those distractions really inhibit your creativity and a little bit of boredom is a good thing because that’s what gets you thinking. Um, it’s when we’re always constantly stimulated is when creativity goes down and action goes down as well too. Um, so those are some things that are, that are really important for me to minimize as much as possible.

Do you spend a lot of time arguing with people about political or racial tensions on social media?

I used to about two years ago and then I realized what a colossal waste of time that is, and so I actually, I don’t watch the news unless it’s bleeding in unless we have like a massive category five hurricane coming towards us, but we were in California so we’re good there. Um, you know, so I don’t really watch the news. I don’t get involved in political debates or anything like that anymore because it really just doesn’t do anything. Um, I would say that there’s a lot of people that I’ve seen who get involved in those things that has really been very destructive to their personal and professional goals. So I really try to stay away as much as possible.

Do you smoke heavily?

I do not smoke at all. Do you gamble? I never have.

Is there anything else that yours because you’re telling me that I, I want to help the listeners out there become successful like you are. Is there anything else where you could look back where it’s far enough in the past where it’s not too soon, but you go, gosh, I used to do the social media thing all the time. Wastes a lot of times. Anything else that you used to do that now you don’t do?

I’m used to. I used to do competitive crossfit, so I actually would exercise a little bit too much and it’s just been, you know, close to three hours a day in the gym that I’ve had to cut back to just 60 minutes for four to five times a week if I’m lucky. I’m so actually like exercising a little bit too much was actually reducing my other business time, but not really. I’m, I’m usually pretty disciplined about the things I do and don’t do. Especially during the week.

Do you have, do you have any kids?

We, I do not have any kids yet.

Okay. Okay. How old are you looking at John Line here? How old are you at last count? Thirty four. Okay. Thirty four and thrive nation, if you’re there and you’re procrastinating, you have an idea. You have an invention, you have a product, you have a company, you have some vision in your head, you have a book, you want to write a song, you want to sing a rap lyric to write down a poem to create, and for some reason you’re going, I don’t know, I don’t know the time. I’ll probably do it next week. A Napoleon Hill, the best selling author once wrote, the time will never be just right. You must act now. Napoleon hill goes on to write. Most real failures are due to limitations which men set up in their own minds. A George Washington carver wanted to pile on by writing. Ninety nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses. Could you encourage somebody out there Dr Steve, who has got an idea in their mind and have a vision in their heart, a somebody who’s just was stuck and they just haven’t taken action and there they’re overwhelmed by that feeling of procrastination. Give some of the listeners some encouragement.

I’m definitely not the smartest guy like know. This is actually my third invention. My first to you. Some would consider failures. I consider expensive learning opportunities.

There we go.

But those two ventures that I pursued laid the foundation and laid the groundwork for the neck chemic to be such a massive success because that was already extremely prepared. So you can’t be overwhelmed by all the things you have to do. You just have to get started and take action and you know, what your first idea may not be the big idea. In fact, I won the biggest blessings is that my first idea was not my biggest idea because I wouldn’t have any idea of where to even really go from there, you know? So like having some of those, uh, that foundational groundwork kind of laid from mistakes that I made in the past is such a blessing that I’m so thankful for. So the biggest thing is just get started on something. Even if it’s, like I said, just put out a message on facebook like, hey, does anyone know someone? And then calling that person, just continuing to follow up. You can’t underestimate the power of momentum when you’re feeling inspired and you feel that momentum, just go with it. You know, and don’t stop until you eventually get to a point where you need to eat. Um, so, so that’s really what I was strongly encouraged to just keep plugging away just day after day and eventually, you know, a few months down the road are going to have something really special.

No, Dr Steve Likes to ask to ask our guests tough questions. So Paul, you work with a lot of entrepreneurs, man. You work with thousands of business owners and entrepreneurs who don’t begin to have the kind of success that Dr Steve is having here. Uh, I know you’ve got a hard hitting question perhaps on, on behalf of yourself or one of the clients you’ve worked with over the years as, as a CPA helping coach people through the financial ruin of a failing business. What tough question do you for Dr.

Steve? Hey, Dr Dave. Yeah, couple of questions. One, what we find is, is there’s a lot of people that have great ideas. There’s a lot of people that work really hard, but what they don’t do is they don’t measure the results and then and then modify their plans. So we taught, clay, asked you earlier about how you arrived at your price on that product, have you done studies, have you, have you actually figured out what we try to teach our clients, start with a goal in mind, how much money do you want to make, and then back into that price to see if it’s even a profitable venture because we’ve had clients that that actually think they’re selling their product at a loss and their big plan is just to sell more weight loss. Yeah. So have you done. Did you do on the early stages, did you start with a goal in mind or you just get lucky and this is a great price that you came up with?

Yeah, we actually started with a slightly higher price point. We actually started at $59. Price point is I wanted to have at least a five in front of that, but not anymore. And that was very successful. But the problem was is that two weeks into our kickstarter we had all these counterfeiters and cloners pop up that we’re selling it for 20 bucks. Naturally. We didn’t want to have a race to the bottom, but we did have to get a little bit more competitive with our pricing to show consumers that, hey, you’re still buying them a higher quality price. Um, but yeah, to your point though, we’ve done a lot of split testing on, you know, all the way down to the $39 mark, a 45, 49 and we didn’t see any statistical difference between 39 and 49. The only time that we actually saw a statistical difference in sales was when we sold it at the $49 price point, but then offered like a $5 coupon or a $10 to fund.

And for us the $5 coupon and it seems to be the sweet spot that really kind of gives us the highest conversion rate is still allows us to feel like, for example, with facebook ads, we want to stay at a CPA under $30. Which for a lot of people listening that might seem high because you know, you’re, you know, and for most people I don’t know, a CPA cost per acquisition. So that’s greater than 50 percent of our overall average order value, but it also bleeds into, you know, other outlets like Amazon, you know, that we necessarily, we can’t necessarily track, um, so just a lot of like testing and, and just kind of figuring out as we went. But luckily we were pretty close based on the successes that other similar products have had in the past and me kind of piggybacking off of, you know, what they’ve done so to speak.

Okay. So what you’re saying is you didn’t just flip a coin and say, Hey, let’s just pick this price. This looks good. It looks good. You know, I like the number four. I liked the number five. You actually did some, some actually intentional study from a market standpoint and a profitability standpoint to get to those numbers. Correct?

Correct. Yep.

I have a rough question. This is my final question I have for you. This is a rough question. This is, this is the one that I just, if you hang up, no, you didn’t like it. I see a lot of people that come in, they say, Clay Clark, I love this workshop, and I said, thank you. It would be nice. Wouldn’t it be nice if, and I said, well, what would it mean? What do we. What do you mean? Wouldn’t it be nice? They said, well dude, you got five kids, you’ve got the house with the land. You’ve got the 13 multimillion dollar companies you and your partner have built and it’d be nice and then I go show him my target shirt in my applebee’s shirt and my directv shirt because I had three jobs at the same time and I was able to fund my first company Dj Connection Dot Com as a result of delaying gratification and working three jobs simultaneously.

Now when I see a lot of times Paul at none of the people who attend our workshop, but it’s more of their friends, they’ll say, hey, I’ve got a friend of mine who his idea is so good it could sell itself, so he’s going to be quitting his job and going all in full time, baby. The product is so good. It could sell itself, so he’s going to go all in. What would you say to my friend and then I say, is that friend to you? And they go, no, no, no, this is just a friend of mine, so I’m just. I’m asking you this question here. For somebody who says the product is so good, quote unquote, that it’s going to sell itself. Thus they should quit their day job immediately and begin going full time as a first time inventor. What advice would you have for them?

I’d say start looking for another job in case that one doesn’t go through. You know, we live in a day and age now where you can have a side hustle that makes a lot of money based on the fact that, you know, I only have one employee and it’s a virtual assistant who I’ve never actually met in person who lives in Michigan, you know, and but she is like the backbone of my business. You obviously run everything that allows me, my, my physical therapy business is the driver is the thing that helped fund all of the other projects. Had I given that up, I wouldn’t have had the money to pursue this idea. I would eventually run out and you know, most businesses when they first start, what they take two to three years to become profitable, right? So can see how many people have the money in their bank account to sustain those types of loss

over that period of time. So,

you know, I, I get it like I love the enthusiasm of you’re going all in, you know, you’re going fall into bankruptcy court.

We’ll get to do that. People will get elephant in the room, our men’s grooming chain, and they go, dude, how’d you build that thing? And like, well, you know, I wrote a check every week. I committed I’m going to lose five grand a week maximum for a maximum of five years and then I’ll reevaluate, but I’m not even to think about the pain. And I was luckily to place in my life where I could do that. But most people say you lost five grand a week every week for years ago. Yeah. It’s specific over three. Like what, you know, what were you spending it on? I’m like, I dunno, paying people to cut hair, charging the wrong

price, having a logo that didn’t make any sense. Having a website that didn’t make any sense, just everything didn’t work, and now we’ve nailed it, but I just, I, I admire your tenacity and staying diligent to the cause and for anybody out there, if your neck hurts at all, if you are sitting right now at a computer, if you’d type for a living, you work on adobe, some kind of photoshop. You’re a graphic designer, you’re a photographer, you do something that requires you to sit. You’re a thought leader, you’re a writer, you’re a pastor, you’re a really, really lazy member of a fast food chain. He decided to sit down and instead of standing up while working while you’re cooking those fries, Dr Steve, why should everybody buy a, at least one neck hammock?

Because it’s gonna make you feel better. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?

I, I have a commercial I’ve been working on for you here and see if you like it here. Okay. Here. This is my new commercial. Dr Stevens totally unauthorized. You didn’t ask for it, but I give it to you now. What better way to say I love you this holiday season with a gift of a nic hammock. What do think about that? We like to end every show with a boom, and then, uh, so are, are you emotionally ready there, Paul, to give the boom the boom stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum, which is what we believe you need to bring to every day to be successful. So we’ll do a little countdown here. Steven, are you ready to bring a boom as well?

Oh yes, I am.

Okay, well, can do the three, two, one of the boom. Here we go. But wait, there’s still more.

Keep it as simple as that.

That is a big poster that I have on my wall over my desk and I look at every single day and you know, when, when things are good or when things are bad, I just always know just to keep plugging away. And uh, good things, you know, luck favors those who work hard, you know, and uh, and that’s something that I truly, truly believe in.

That’s no good. I’m going to marinate on that for about an hour and a half. I’m just gonna marinate slow Rotisserie Style and Dr Steve. Thank you for being on the show.

My absolute pleasure.

Take care of thrive nation. If you are out there today and you feel, if you feel stuck, you feel as though you don’t feel stuck. You are stuck. Your business isn’t growing. It’s not growing year after year and you’re exchanging all of your time on this planet for a the little money you’re receiving. I think it’s time for you to make a change and so let me be the first to personally invite you to our next in person. Thrive time show workshop. It is absolutely a game changing event. You will love it. I promise you’re going to love it. We have over 800 video reviews from real people out there just like you who have attended the workshop and who were kind enough to hop on camera and share with what the conference was about and how it impacted them. You can find out more about it by going to thrive time show.com today, and when you click on the conferences button, you can find the dates of the upcoming events, upcoming events.

Our next big conference, our next workshop is going to be held at our River Walk Twenty Thousand Square foot facility and it will be attended by. I’ll be teaching most of the workshops, but I do have kind of Clay Clark and friends. So I bring up a former clients, current clients so they can share how they’ve been able to have success on the past. I brought an Aaron antice who heads up Oklahoma’s largest home building company. I’ve had wes Carter, the attorney of choice for td jakes and Joyce Meyers. Um, I’ve had a lot of big names, but it does next conference we’re bringing in. We’re bringing a guy by the name of Michael Levine and Michael Levine as the former pr consultant of choice for Nike, for Pizza Hut, for Nancy Kerrigan for prince, for Michael Jackson. And if you want to attend that workshop, just go to thrive time show.com today. Click on the conferences button and you can purchase your tickets there for December seventh and eighth for $250, but let me go ahead and share with you some audio testimonials from real people out there just like you who were probably once skeptical, but decided to invest the time and the money to book their tickets and our first.

Our testimonial comes in from an attorney by the name of Lauren based in the Texas area I believe.

Hi, I’m Lauren. Look from Dallas, Texas. I learned about the conference for my son hardly who worked for Redmond Grove. He told me it’d be great. It would be a great experience and it has been. I’m an attorney. I have a practice in Dallas that we started 29 years ago and I was looking for ideas and ways that we could improve our marketing and client generation. This conference has been so high energy, so helpful. It’s like drinking ideas from a fire hose. It’s been fabulous. I energy great people, smart people, intelligent people, people who understand their business, understand how to take their ideas and translate them into your business. You know, clay is a fabulous guy. He’s got novel ideas. His presentation style is high energy, gets your attention and never lets go. I’ve learned the importance of getting our website to be mobile friendly and how to bring people to get ideas from our website quickly. My favorite aspect of this conference has been the multitude of ideas, the plethora of ideas, the constant stream of ideas that are being presented. If you’re thinking about this conference, I’d encourage you to come to it. If you don’t come, you’re going to miss out on 100 great ideas and

I’m not the kind of person that would argue with somebody who just gave me a testimonial, especially in esteemed attorney, but I can say what fires me up about our workshops is helping you to implement what you’re learning. Now, Thomas Edison, one throat, he said, vision without execution is hallucination. Vision without execution is hallucination. Lee Cockerell, the former executive vice president of Walt Disney world resorts, who wants to manage 40,000 people. He says, one of the main reasons people don’t improve is that they are not honest with themselves, so I can tell you this. Mr Thriver, Mrs thriver having personally grown multiple multimillion dollar companies and having personally spoken to maytag adversity, o’reilly auto parts, Valspar, Chevron, ups, Hewlett Packard, you today I’ve witnessed firsthand how thirsty people are for actionable knowledge. I think a lot of people don’t want to come to a conference and just learn a bunch of theories.

I think a lot of people, most people are excited about implementation and so what I’m going to play for you now as a testimonial from somebody who actually came to the workshop and then was able to diligently implement the systems he learned and was able to double his business in the process. His name is Kevin Lewis and his game, his roofing [email protected] by the way. That’s the website, Lewis roofing.com, and he came to us as a guy who was already. He already had a, a multimillion dollar company, a, but he was stuck. He didn’t. He didn’t have the time freedom and financial freedom, and so without any further ado, back to our interview with Mr Kevin Lewis, so if you were out there giving advice to a business owner, let’s say you’re talking to a guy and there’s somebody who’s been a friend of yours and he’s thinking about working with the business coaching program or with with Eric and he’s go, Nah, I don’t want to get into one of those marketing upsells driven companies. I don’t want to. I’ve. I’ve already hired a consultant before that spent two months talking to me about logos and click funnels. What advice would you have for anybody out there who’s kind of dipping their toe into the water and thinking about hiring a business coach?

Smartest thing you could ever do, you know, but I always warn people before I’ve actually sent people over, but you have to sell out. You have to believe in and when you do, you will see amazing things. It, it, it’s, it’s, it’s been a game changer really has, and I recommend it to everybody. I mean, everybody needs it. I don’t care. I mean, there needs to be, uh, an employee coach to be honest with you. Um, so it’s, it’s an amazing journey.

You have the final word on this, but I will just say we have a coaches meeting single day with all the business coaches and that coaches meeting starts. Typically. I’m at 6:00 AM on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursdays. Every, every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It’s at 6:00 AM. And on Mondays it’s at 7:00 AM. And the purpose of that, Kevin, is to have wins of the week two. We start off the meeting by sharing wins. Anybody, any client that had a big win, we want to share in their success. The second is if a client is stuck or they’re unable to execute or get something done, we want to, as a team, as a, as a family, as a coaching program to uh, discuss where the client stuck and figure out the best plan to help them get unstuck. And that’s why I’m in each one each of those meetings. And I also helped make all the paths for all the clients. And Eric has had nothing but great things to say about you. And I hope I just want to ask this before I give eric the final word. Is your wife a fan of Eric? I mean, or is your wife happier now? I mean, is he really making your wife crazy now? How are things? How are things going now? Is, is your wife a fan of the coaching program?

One Hundred Percent Phantom coaching program.

Yay.

And the coaching program for uh, about a week until I fired her, I learned real quick that we’re going to keep a journal.

So you were keeping the church and the family separated and so with that, uh, but is she happier overall? Like maybe one percent or.

Oh, no, I’d say um, I’d say at least 50 percent.

Yes. Yes. Ms Dot Lewis

gets me.

Oh, of course. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Long Story. It’s just simple things, you know, I’m able to, uh, as she puts it, communicate better now because I’m not thinking of all this other stuff. And you know, it’s, it’s, it’s good stuff.

You have the final word, my friend. Give us a capstone thought about coaching Kevin Lewis and what that experience has been like for you and what makes Kevin so awesome.

Well, Kevin is a prototype prototype wherever your poster child for Stoicism, so he’s a guy who will come in and say, give me a big wind man, what’s going on this week, this last week for, and he’ll say, landed a two point $2,000,000 job. And I’m like, yeah. And he’s like it just another day. And then he’ll come in and say, I’ve got a competitor out of state trying to come in and steal my people or whatever and just another day so I don’t have to worry about, hey, we get lost in the weeds in the coaches meetings. It’s all action on, Hey, what do we need to do here? Some meetings we call up and he’s like, hey man, I’m rocking. Rolling. You good? You need anything from me? No, you good? Yeah, we’re good to go. Some meetings we get into some weeds about it.

The meetings were. Kevin has had an employee. Yeah. You had a competitor tried to steal your employees, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, and I do too every week, right? Kevin is there not a burning fire every week.

Oh, every week.

Well, Kevin is stoic, so he’s able to push through that.

Right. The lows are not low. The highs are not too high. He’s just even keel and so it’s very easy to focus on those key performance indicators and actually just like he said earlier, make sure the business is going in the right direction and when the business is going in the right direction and you’re accomplishing your own goals with your family, it’s a fun time so we have a good time when we meet and we just make sure that things are happening the way they need to happen.

Kevin, everybody out there who’s listening in green country that wants to have a roof put on their commercial building or their residential property, how can they get ahold of you? What’s your. What’s your website and really why should people call you

lowest roofing.com and if they want a company that’s going to be honest and do a good job and more of the company to call, uh, we put her, I put my family name on the business. I hide behind some fake name. We are 100 percent the real deal, not a bunch of sales guys trying to sell a bunch of stuff. We’re a roofing company that dues, that’s all we do is roofing

and dry basin. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve worked with a lot of roofing companies where we’ve done a 13 point assessment with them and it is rare to find a roofing company that we would even approve to coach. I want you to do this. We go through the assessment and probably 80 percent of the time we say, well, it’s not a good fit. Kevin’s a great guy grinder. He stands behind his program. He puts his name on the website, on the business, on the marketing trucks, on everything. Check them out today. That’s Louis roofing. That’s Louis roofing.com. And Kevin, I appreciate you taking time out of your day, away from your family and your business to share your story here on the podcast and radio show. Hope you have an awesome day, my friend.

Alright, thank you. You too. Take care. Alright,

thrive nation. This is your year to thrive, but you have to take that action. You’ve got to take the first step and if you’re saying right now, you know what? I want to attend the workshop, but the cost of flying, there’s going to be a lot of money and I don’t even know if you’re real. The cost to fly. There’s a lot of money and I don’t even know if you’re real. If you’re asking that tough question, are you even real? That’s a great question to ask and that’s why I would encourage you to just subscribe to the thrive time show podcast on itunes. Just find the thrive time. Show on Itunes, hit the subscribe button and leave us an objective review and we will give you two free tickets to our next in person. Thrive time show workshop, but you got to book fast because right now I’m the next conference that we have is going to be here in December and we are selling out here.

This one is the one that’s gonna be attended by Michael Levine, the PR consultant for Nike, for Michael Jackson for prints. It’s going to be huge. December seventh and eighth. Just subscribe to the thrive time show on itunes. Leave us an objective review. An email is proof you did it to info at thrive time. Show.com, and if you learn something today, if you’ve got one nugget of knowledge today, please share this with a friend of yours. You’d share the podcast share link to it on spotify. I think of somebody in your life that needs some help with their company, shirt with them on itunes, share it with them via email from our website. I’ll just share it with them because we want to help as many people as possible. Our our mission at the thrive time show is to mentor millions and that includes you and your friends. And so now that any further ado, let’s end this show with another boom here. Three, two, one, boom.