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Daryl Urbanski, founder, president of Bestbusinesscoach.ca and host of the Best Business podcast. Hey, good morning where I’m at, uh, what time a day is where you’re at Daryl?
Daryl Urbanski: Uh, we are approaching 2am here, so, but …
David Brower: Oh my …
Daryl Urbanski: I’m used to it though.
David Brower: It’s funny when you travel and you have to figure out how to get used to different time zones, huh?
Daryl Urbanski: I make my team work eastern-standard time …
David Brower: Uh-huh.
Daryl Urbanski: And my teams all around the world. And so now that I’m traveling I feel like I should maintain that; that the company just exists in eastern-standard time. But I’ve actually enjoyed it because people complain about the traffic here …
David Brower: Right.
Daryl Urbanski: I’m in Segu right now, but at 2am, there’s no traffic. You can cross town like nothing, so I actually enjoy it. Your sleep schedule’s a little off, just you know, go to bed at 4am …
David Brower: Right.
Daryl Urbanski: But, you know, you sleep until noon and you feel like a teenager again. You’re like, oh it’s noon and I’m getting out of bed.
David Brower: That’s awesome.
Daryl Urbanski: So, you know, you just adjust everything so …
David Brower: That’s a great idea to have your team on the same time no matter where they are.
Daryl Urbanski: Well it’s so important because, especially if you have a virtual team. I’ve been working with online employees for almost 10 years now and it’s just, there are pro’s and con’s. Some of the pro’s are it forces you to build a real business sooner, faster. What I mean by that is you create more documentation on how things are done whereas if people are in the office, it’s just watch me and I’ll answer your questions when you ask them. But online, you actually tend to make videos and checklists and actual assets for a business that become things if you ever want to sell your business … You know what I mean? That gives it bulk.
David Brower: Oh yeah.
Daryl Urbanski: Umm. And an ability to train other people. So that’s a pro. But a con is that it can take a day, two days, a week, two weeks to get feedback, to have a conversation about something. So I’m really adamant that, hey, you don’t have to commute, you don’t have to drive anywhere, you probably aren’t even paying any tax on the money I’m paying you …
David Brower: Right.
Daryl Urbanski: So, let’s … You know, let’s make this a team. We have to work at least 75% of our hours in the same block of time.
David Brower: How big is your team?
Daryl Urbanski: Uh. Right now I’ve got about 12 people.
David Brower: Okay.
Daryl Urbanski: I’ve got … I did have four interns, but now I think I hired two of them. So I think I have two interns and 10 people spread out all around the world. US, Canada, Guatemala, India, Pakistan … Actually no, no one in India anymore. Bangladesh …
David Brower: Wow.
Daryl Urbanski: Pakistan and The Philippines.
David Brower: How do you recruit … Like, how do you recruit people for that kind of online business? That has to be quite a challenge I would think.
Daryl Urbanski: It’s funny because this is what I’m known for. But, I actually feel like I’ve gotten good at hiring online. So there’s a lot of job sites. There’s all sorts of different online worker sites that you can go to and you can find talent. And I usually tend to go to those sites, find the talent, and then depending on the site, I might try and pull them off that site. Because some of them are really greedy. A recent one … A recent couple just got bought out by a big company and from the employee’s sake, they want 20% of everything the employee makes, which is a huge cut of your income.
David Brower: Oh my god.
Daryl Urbanski: It’s a huge bite of your income, right?
David Brower: Yeah.
Daryl Urbanski: They want 20% of the first 100 hours. But then for you, they want to charge a couple extra bucks. So if I want to pay you, you know, 10 bucks an hour or 5 bucks an hour or 15 or whatever, I actually have to pay you a couple of dollars more per hour for the staff member to actually get that.
So I like to pull them off and then we use a tool called Time Doctor. Timedoctor.com. I’m a huge fan of it. It was really funny because after I signed up and became a huge fan, I was telling all my friends about it. I was telling one of my friends about it and he’s like, I know Time Doctor. And I was like, really how do you know it? And he’s like, I had it built.
David Brower: *laughter*
Daryl Urbanski: And so a buddy of mine actually owns it. He was the fourth person I was referring to the software. Like, this tool is amazing, you’ve gotta try it. He’s like, really, you really like? I’m like, yeah I’ve been telling everybody. He’s like, good I’m glad you like it. I’m like yeah, you should use it. He’s like I do use it. I’m like, oh how do you know about it? He’s like oh well, I had it made, it’s my software. I was like oh!
David Brower: What a small world, man. I’m gonna check that out when we get done, that’s cool. But your best known for your ability to create seven figure income … automated income streams from scratch. How do you do that?
Daryl Urbanski: Well it’s a lot more than we can cover in this short call.
David Brower: No, you’re absolutely right. Absolutely right.
Daryl Urbanski: People are welcome to check out my website, bestbusinesscoach.ca or check out the podcast. But in a nutshell what I can tell you, what I can share with you is that, uh, first of all, it’s … Like I did martial arts. And there’s lots of fancy techniques that people come up with. There’s all sorts of … Like I’m a jujitsu guy. All sorts of fancy stuff you can, weird chokes and stuff. But, you only see … The fundamentals are fundamental for a reason because they work at the beginner level, the intermediate level and the advanced level.
David Brower: Sure.
Daryl Urbanski: They work across the board. So, when we say, how do you do that? I focus on the fundamentals of business that work at every stage of business, whether it’s a young business, a medium business or a large mature business. So, umm, in a nutshell, you know, a lot of businesses … There’s a few things you need in place. So, I’m going to give people here … I just kind of add hawk, so if I don’t have exactly five points, but I’m going to try and give you five points for how you do that.
So first of all is, umm, you have to have more than just one thing for sale. You either want to sell something that’s a subscription or you already want to know what your second, third, fourth, fifth offer are going to be for people. So, if you solve one problem for them, what’s the next problem they’re going to have. It’s really hard to build a big business off a one time sale business. Most people know that a business needs repeat customers for stability and to survive, but nobody has a system or process or a method of doing that. Subscription kind of has that built in, but even then they could still do that; Oh you have the subscription, maybe you want this or this? You want to upgrade to the VIP subscription.
There’s a lot of ways to do that. We call that lifetime customer value. Which basically means, how much is a customer worth to you while they do business with you, before that relationship kind of just takes it’s natural course. So lifetime customer value is an extremely important number and you have to always be focused on growing that. So that’s one, that’s for sure. Subscriptions really help. But you don’t have to have a subscription, but you do need to think about what’s the lifetime of this customer relationship. So that’s one.
Two is, you need to be able to get your message in front of people on demand. I’m a big fan … I have my own podcast so I’m a big fan of content marketing. But you can’t with content marking go hey, I would like an extra 300 leads today and just go get them. You can’t say, hey, we would like … Hey, people are loving this program, let’s put another 1,000 people in here. You can’t do that on demand with content marketing. You can do that with paid advertising. The number one difference between a small business and nationwide, or an international business, is the ability to pay to advertise your business, which is not easy. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. But it is simple.
By saying it’s simple means it doesn’t take a lot to wrap your mind around all the facets that are involved in paid advertising, but it does take time, energy, money and experience to be able to get something to work. And even the best professionals, you know. They start off with a guess, their best guess and they go from there. It’s almost like if you were to hire a sales rep, you would kind of have to invest in them for awhile before they actually started, you know, performing, because they’ve got to learn your product, they’ve got to learn how to … You know what I mean?
David Brower: Yep.
Daryl Urbanski: They’ve got to learn how to sell it. Same thing. So, paid advertising is huge, huge, huge thing for a lot of companies. I’m … It really is. I don’t know how to emphasize that enough because it’s really tough through any other means to scale your business on demand. The economy is up, down. If you can know, you can afford … We go back to that lifetime customer value.
David Brower: Right.
Daryl Urbanski: If I know a customer is worth 800 dollars to me, net after my expenses. Then I know I can spend up 799 dollars in marketing to get them before I lose any money. So if I want to make 100 thousand dollars, then … You know, and I’m spending 799 dollars to get them, then I just 100 thousand sales. As long as my numbers work, the arithmetic works, it’s just arithmetic. I don’t need algebra, I don’t need calculus, I don’t even necessarily need a calculator. I’m doing addition, subtraction and multiplication. It’s just really basis.
David Brower: Right.
Daryl Urbanski: So that’s two tips. The third tip is, there is a ton of automated tools you can use online nowadays. In fact, one of them revolutionized the business world and for a lot of people, went unnoticed. And that’s called an auto responder. These things are phenomenal. I don’t mean like, David, when you’re on vacation and I email you and I get an email back saying, Hey I’m on vacation in the Philippines, I’ll be back on this date. That’s like an auto reply, that’s not really an auto responder.
Email marketing automation, auto responders. It’s a way to actually schedule emails. So, I mentioned I’m into martial arts. I used to have martial arts school and we used to have six month and 12 month contracts. So if you joined and signed up, I had an email auto responded where I had already planned all the emails out. So you would just be added and it would merge your info in, be like, “Hey David, Welcome to the club. Hope you’re having a great time. Here’s what you need to know for your first few classes.”
“Hey David, you know, it’s been a week since you joined, just wanted to send you and email to see how are you doing? Do you have any questions?”
“Hey David, it’s the end of your first month, really appreciate if you could fill out this customer survey and let us know how we’re doing, how can we improve, how can we make it better for you?” You know? So I didn’t have to have a staff member monitoring all these people, right?
David Brower: Right.
Daryl Urbanski: I didn’t have to have a staff member remembering to do that sort of stuff. You can do some very sophisticated and advanced things with that. But again, start with the fundamentals. So, that’s just one way that you can create automated income streams because now I have an automated system that if I get a lead, “Hey, thank you for signing up for a quote on our website. Just wanted to know if you had any questions. Please click reply, let us know what your questions are.”
“Hey, haven’t heard from you yet. Just wanted to reach out.” Like, it’s an automated way to follow up the leads. An automated way to deliver products that have been bought, depending what your product is. If it’s a digital download, right. I’ve even done things where the email will automatically email a fulfillment house with a letter with the box of goods to the person, so no one’s touching anything. They buy, automated email goes the company, they print the manuals and the books, they put in a box, they send it to the person, boom, done. Right? As far as I’m concerned, that’s automated.
David Brower: Oh yeah.
Daryl Urbanski: Sure there’s some manual labor, but that’s an easy way to do it.
David Brower: That’s brilliant.
Daryl Urbanski: So that’s three. Uh, I got to come up with a couple more.
David Brower: *laughter*
Daryl Urbanski: Those are really the top three keys, I mean honestly.
David Brower: Yeah, yeah.
Daryl Urbanski: But there’s still like … There’s obviously a lot more that goes into it. There’s other things. There’s things like, I recommend anyone that gets into this to understand database marketing. Uh, like what would you do if you were unable to ever get a new lead or a new customer? How would you design your business to support you? You have to think about that.
Oh, actually that’s a great one. And the fifth one would be, umm, planning for scale at the beginning. So begin with the end in mind. And what I mean by that, is there’s something called the rule of ten thousand. I got this from Michael Gerber. The rule of ten thousand is, you have to think about, how would I manage ten thousand leads? How would I manage ten thousand orders? How would I manage ten thousand complaints? How would I manage? Because you have to think about that. A lot of people think that they’ll start small and build into it, but the reality is if I want to do catering for massive scale events, right?
David Brower: Right.
Daryl Urbanski: Hundreds of people. My vision is to have this big business. I can’t … Like, I have to think of that in advance because I need different equipment if I’m baking pies and dinner for five to 10 people versus 40 versus 100. The kitchen structure, layout is totally different. So you need to kind of keep that in mind. And so, it’s a simplistic list, it’s kind of an on the fly list, I didn’t have it prepared in advance. But, those are really some key points that I definitely think would point people in the right direction.
David Brower: No, those are great great answers. Great thoughts, great processes and I appreciate you just flipping that off the cuff very much. I’m sure people will appreciate that a lot and obviously we’ll check out your website to learn more. I guess at the … part of it, and I really like that you talk about basics. I mean, no matter what you do. If it’s sports, if it’s marketing, if it’s mowing your yard, you’ve got to start with the basics, but you’ve also got to look ahead to the big picture and keep that in mind as you … Otherwise you’re just going to grow a small business instead of the business that you want.
Daryl Urbanski: Right, yeah. A lot of people … That’s the other part is. You know, I mentioned the rule of ten thousand.
David Brower: Right.
Daryl Urbanski: But you have to design your business for scale to begin with. Because if you don’t, you might have all the success in the world but you might hit a ceiling. You know?
David Brower: Yeah.
Daryl Urbanski: If you’re selling hours, or if you’re trading your own time for dollars, there’s only so many hours in a day that you can sell. So at some point, you’re going to have a ceiling on that. So …
David Brower: So when you started … How long ago, what age were you when you really started having these epiphanies to grow all these businesses and have all this success? What was, what tripped your trigger at the time do you think?
Daryl Urbanski: Umm. Well, I mean I’ve been as a kid, I think, like a lot of entrepreneurs, I had issues with authority. I had a hard time just staying in my own swim lane, so I would get a job somewhere and I would see ways the whole business could improve or ways and things people weren’t doing things right. And so, you know, I would get frustrated and I would move. I never got fired, but I would leave jobs and move on. I would want to change to something new. But, I think the real changes actually was right before I launched that martial arts school. I had left a six year relationship and uh, it was almost like, you burned your bridge, like there’s no going back type thing.
David Brower: Right.
Daryl Urbanski: She was very against the entrepreneurial lifestyle, I was very for it and that was a point of contention in the relationship.
David Brower: For sure, yeah.
Daryl Urbanski: And so it was almost like I had to make it work. You know? I can’t fail now. You know? Umm. So that was definitely part of it. But another part of it comes from just wanting to have an impact, an influence, a control in my life. And understanding that the world … Steve Jobs does a great interview on YouTube where he talks about how, when you realize that the world is not like … When you grow up you’re told the world is like, this is the world as it is and you know, you’re supposed to just exist and not bounce, bump into things too much. But when you realize that the world is something you can interact with, you can push and pull on things, and it’ll almost dance with you.
You know, you can really design your life and design your lifestyle and you know, I’ve just always wanted to help other people and it’s just constantly been a leveling up. Like I grew my martial arts school and it was very successful. Like it was a young business, but it was very successful for a young business and I had other instructors and sales reps and I was able to do what I wanted. So I just kind of started playing with other projects and I ended up helping other entrepreneurs, my friends and they were having success and I realized that one, obviously the price point was higher so that’s an incentive.
David Brower: Sure.
Daryl Urbanski: But even beyond that, I knew that in my business, I loved … I really loved the testimonials. Like, people would come and tell me how the martial art and training and discipline and just the physical activity, how it’s affected their lives, the exercise, right? I mean if exercise, if exercise would be a drug … If we could make exercise a drug, like in a pill, it would be the best pill that we have.
David Brower: True story.
Daryl Urbanski: The most effective medicine that we have. So, I’d love those testimonials, and when my friends were becoming entrepreneurs and I was talking with, and sharing openly like I am now, I loved that and I realized that every business needs a few hundred to a few thousand customers to stay afloat. And through my business, I’m affecting a few hundred people’s lives. If I had a few hundred entrepreneurs that were following me and I was helping them, effectively it was an exponential, it was a multiplier for me.
David Brower: Yeah.
Daryl Urbanski: I could be impacting tens of thousands of people’s lives. So I actually set a goal to help create 200 multimillionaire business owners. How? You’ll do better when you know better. And it’s for the impact and that influence. Because the reality is if you have skills, knowledge and expertise, you know, you usually don’t have to worry about putting food on the table. And so I’m in a good position that way. I’m smart in the sense that I try to never spend more than 50 or 60 cents of every dollar that I make. So I’m very smart that way that I’m not really, I don’t have a lot of pressure in any sense that way. So it really has turned into something just wanting to have impact and influence on the world. And a legacy, you know?
David Brower: Absolutely. And you really nailed one point that I’ve believed in in a long long time. If you are in an employee mindset and you’re happy with that, you know, go for it. But many of us …
Daryl Urbanski: Right.
David Brower: Get in that employee mindset and you go, what are they doing? Why don’t they do that? I mean, I used to change jobs every two years just for the same reason. I’m going, okay I’m out of here, I’m bored, I’m moving on to the next deal, you know?
Daryl Urbanski: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Brower: And now I run my own business and I’m very happy. And I can play with my wife, kids and dogs and whatever.
Daryl Urbanski: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Brower: And feel like you’re really paying it forward in helping other people along the way. And I think that’s a big piece of what you’re doing too, right?
Daryl Urbanski: Right. Well, there’s two types of income. I actually learned this from a client and a previous mentor and friend, John Assarath. He would always tell me there’s two types of income, there’s physical income and there’s psychic income. And what I found, psychic income, recognition and that psychic reward is way more powerful than the physical income.
David Brower: Yep.
Daryl Urbanski: Wikipedia is maintained by people that work a full time job, come home and then volunteer on there. Why would they do that? Why would you work a nine to five, work eight, 10, 12 hours a day, come home and then start moderating Wikipedia pages? Because you feel like you’re contributing in some way, the psychic income is so valuable. So I think that, not only is in important that people do find a job … Like, I think it’s important people do what they’re passionate about because they’ll do it better.
David Brower: Yeah.
Daryl Urbanski: You know what I mean? And they’ll do it a high caliber. And if you do something well, you’ll get well compensated for it. But how do you figure that out? And how do you know what people are willing to pay for it? That’s a really messy, kind of scary world. And so that’s where, you know, the podcasts and all the other things that I do are there to try and help people. And interviews like this. I just want to help.
Like, anyone listening, feeling like that. That itch that you have in your heart, that’s proof to you that it’s yours, you just have to claim it. You just have to figure out how to make it work. Interviews like this, people like David, we’re all here to help show you the way. You know, be careful where you spend your money, but don’t be afraid to spend your money, because, unless someone’s selling snake oil; everyone that’s got a product for sale, its’ to help you, it’s to provide a result. Just make sure you know what you’re buying or the result that you’re really looking for. You know? And then, don’t be afraid to spend your money because I mean, if your hair’s a mess or if you’ve got a bleeding neck, don’t feel bad about paying the doctor for fixing your neck. Or don’t … You know what I mean?
David Brower: Right, right.
Daryl Urbanski: If you can’t … I’m training for the crossfit open and I just bought a bunch of equipment because I want to be able to train harder and supplements. I don’t begrudge that. I had to spend the money to get where I want. And so it’s that whole … You have to change your relationship with money, you definitely need a coach if you’ve never done this before. It doesn’t have to be … It doesn’t have to be me or David. But, you definitely need guidance, you know? You need guidance, you need to surround yourself with like minded individuals. And you need to commit, you really need to commit. And …
David Brower: Absolutely.
Daryl Urbanski: You can achieve anything as long as you’re willing to sacrifice everything else for it.
David Brower: Absolutely right.
Daryl Urbanski: And that’s something … Some people, they don’t really want it, they just say that they want it. They don’t want it as bad as they want to watch their TV shows at night or to be able to sleep in. And that’s where it comes back to that psychic income; when you connect with something. Bill Gates, one of the richest people in the world, he’s up and working full 10 hour days because he’s passionate about the foundation him and his wife have founded. You know, when you find that … When you find that passion, it’s not work anymore. Something’s you do, yeah sure it’s work, but it energizes you versus drains you.
David Brower: No question.
Daryl Urbanski: And you have to figure out what that is, so.
David Brower: Absolutely right, couldn’t agree more. And folks, if you want to learn more, and I believe you do after this wonderful conversation with Daryl Urbanski, please go to his website: bestbusinesscoach.ca.
Daryl, a real pleasure to talk to you. I wish you continued success and thanks for sharing your wisdom with us today.
Daryl Urbanski: Thank you David. It’s been an honor and a pleasure.