 My good friend Anthony Clark, co-founder of Activation Products and in this video we're going to be talking about what it takes to run a multi-million dollar brand. Anthony, I want to thank you so much for giving me time to talk to you in an interview. I've known you for just a little bit over a year and you've impressed me every single stage that I have had an interaction with you and hopefully you're going to enlighten us today on like the nitty gritty on what it really takes to run a lean mean business. Cool. I'm glad to be here Amir. Hey everyone. So yeah like Amir said we do run a multi-million dollar company here we manufacture on supplements and we sell them online direct to consumer for the most part. And before we continue what company is it? It's Activation Products, ActivationProducts.com. To run a company you gotta know a little bit everything like you got to wear all the hats I've worn all the hats whether I'm good at them or not and you may know this or not but you the idea is to train someone to take over that hat systematize it build an SOP and pass it off to them and that's easier said than done you read about it in all the books but actually do it it's challenging. We've had false starts we've hired the wrong people we've built the wrong processes and it requires the you as the owner to be very present and focused on your business. If you're not there if you think that you can just do a little bit and just let it coast it's not gonna work I've been guilty of that I've had the mentality of just letting someone else do it you know they say they're good at it they ace the job interview and great now I'm paying for it because I have to fire that person have to replace them I have to get back into the trenches and relearn that thing example sales I have to get back on the sales floor and relearn how to sell because I haven't done that for quite a few years. So you brought up something important though is before you expand your team is you actually dive in deep into the subject matter and you internalize and you actually know it. Yes. As opposed to just saying go do this you try to outsource everything. How can I tell someone to do it if I haven't done it and I have done that and I paid the price. So if you're gonna tell somebody to do that you've already done it you know the ins and outs of it you maybe don't go so deep into it like you're hiring graphic designer you don't have to be an amazing graphic designer but I know enough about it I can talk to them I can speak their language I get what's going on with them. So I can call BS on them when they're trying to just be me alive. What would you say were the key the key factors to your success from going from zero to a million dollars. We had to have our products sorted out. You really got to know where if you're doing physical products which we are you have to have a stable product. Some people would say that's not the most important thing. Some of my trainers say get your marketing done first and you can do that you can sell a product before you even have it. But if you do that you got to be able to quickly follow up and provide that product. So it's product price placement. I've heard stuff like that piece. Yeah exactly like those are quite relevant. So when we it's a few years ago and I think we made our first million it was a marketing was a huge part of it learning how to write sales copy or hiring someone to do it finding an audience to sell it to the right price and just doing more of that. So the first thing was finding a great product that yeah yeah was quality grade product and be the people wanted. So what was type of procedures that you did to actually locate the product and be actually find the people that want to buy the product. Well to find the product we went to trade shows we found other people who had already found good products we you know white label them or we found a manufacturer and we brought a custom formulation say hey you know you've got a and this guy's got B. Let's put them together make C. And it's important that you have a high quality product. There's a lot of companies out there that sell junk and they can make millions and even billions and they could make maybe make more money than you and I ever could. Yeah but that's not why we're here exclusively making money is important it drives the company but at the core of it we're actually here to make people's lives better and if we're selling crap and low quality knickknacks we're not actually making people's lives better we're just lining our pockets so I want to line the pockets at the same time that I'm making someone else's life quality of life rise and that's really huge to us. That's really important but here because a lot of times we get sucked up in the honey moons of just like there's a saying in the startup world ship it they say just ship yeah ship ship ship regardless of the quality regardless of money love speed stuff like that exactly so there is there is some positivity to just ship it to kind of test up the MVP back in the day when you're dealing with the food grade type of supplement over here where people are actually eating it swallowing it putting on their skin quality over quantity is going to win long term long term. That's right. So once you figured out the product and you spent your time getting the best product in the world on top a quality you mentioned about sales. Why did you pick for example direct marketing or that type of sales channel over anything else. Direct marketing especially with supplements is the easiest way to go with the lowest cost if you're trying to go offline if you don't have VC money you don't have a lot of money backing you up you have to go and find those big clients you got to give them terms 60 90 days you got to float you're basically financing their company by giving them your product. It's really tough. You can do it and you can be huge but for us with our the resources we had at the time it wasn't a possibility and we've seen other companies that that we're selling is actually a honey company they're selling honey direct to consumer. We did the math like wow there's good margin way way better margins here. Yeah the volume is lower but you can make up for it and we've been working on ramping up the volume and we will do more like that offline. So what got you into direct marketing was it like Dan Kennedy or like I don't remember who would name it was it was really just observing another company that was doing it. Hey like that they're doing that they got sales pages that we met a guy who said have you heard of internet marketing. Here's a sales page. This is how you do it. This is a copywriter and wow. You know Michael Matheson talks about this kind of Gora. Oh yeah. You know Gora early to rise and in his book ready fire aim. He talks about stop reinventing the wheel. Stop thinking about I'm going to reinvent something and everyone's going to love me for it. There's people out there who've done this before you and they've done it very successful. So you know look at models that work out there and ask yourself how can we duplicate this model for a self in our own way in our own language and put our unique spin on it in our own way as opposed to OK let me just start something from scratch. So you saw a model you saw a company like the honey company and I go wow they're doing amazing sales from direct marketing. How can we use direct marketing for our own advantage. That's right. And it worked. How did you get into direct response marketing. We met a gentleman named Larry Ostrovsky and he runs the site called B well buzz dot com and he told us about it and he actually educated us that this thing existed and that you can sell stuff online. He got it hooked up with a shopping cart. He kick started the whole thing and then from there we just kept learning and investing like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year into coaches and training courses and going and meeting people to get better. We'll talk about this. You know we'll pull up on your products. We'll pretend it's a new product. It's kind of see oh by the way if you're looking at if you want like the best quality supplements go check out activation products dot com. I'm going to fill you with them. I make no money from them. I use them every single day and trust them. They're one of the best in the world. Let's just say this is a brand new product. You and I spend our time. We spent the year. We've got the best product in the world. We just call this the black label. What are some simple steps for anybody out there to start in the direct marketing space? You have to know your product. So if you're going to write the copy yourself you obviously have to know the product very well. Studying Dan Kennedy and other copyright training. You can write your own sales copy or if you don't if you want to get up and running fast you can hire a copywriter to write your copy. He's going to interview you. He's going to look he's going to research your product. He's going to learn everything he can about it and he will have the experience to write a letter with the psychology to walk someone through the story of the product and eventually lead them to a call to action a buying decision and that would be the fastest way to do it because learning copy takes time. I spent time doing it and a few months of it like okay well this is really intense stuff. I learned a lot from it but I'm not going to be the guy writing copy in the company because I need to run the entire company and I know other business owners who they don't hire a lot of copywriters they do actually write their own stuff and teach their own if you're able to do it but that is what you doesn't matter who writes it you absolutely have to have copy written you have to have the emails written you have to have a sales page written and what's most important is not the upfront sale it's the backend sale so you make this the sale up front and you have to follow up with those people you have to nurture that client because you paid money to acquire that customer you pay your copywriter your developers your designers paying for traffic your Facebook ads whatever you had to pay to get them there and you spent all those thousands of dollars to finally get your customer and you sold them a twenty dollar digit or a forty dollar supplement whatever it is and now you've got to recoup that money you have to keep selling them more stuff. Jay Abraham talks about a loss leader for examples and I'm all making money in the front end it's about making money in the back end and usually on average if a customer spends fifty dollars with your product or in your business the likelihood they will spend another fifty dollars always times two whatever they spent yeah so fifty dollars equal that customer to use worth a hundred so you know for a fact that if you can if you're willing to spend eighty dollars to acquire a customer you're still making twenty dollar profit off that customer so let's say we got the sales page we hire a copywriter we spent ten thousand dollars on a beautiful copy writer and sales funnel how did you get the traffic to a website we've used affiliates for four or five years and we should have paid attention to other types of traffic a lot sooner but the affiliates are actually quite nice because they have a warm relationship with their audience you're going to get a much better response than with cold traffic and it actually work beautifully like we've driven millions of dollars of sales to the affiliates but what you need is you got to have someone to manage those relationships again it's another task you're going to have to hire someone someone who is a very good people person but they're also a good sales person they push hard so how do you get initially the first let's say five how do you get the first five affiliates on your team they said yes I'm gonna sell your product for us because my dad and I co-founded the company he travels a lot while I stayed at home and operated the company he would meet people at trade shows he would meet them at conventions that's one way okay you can just do flat out blogger outreach you can make a list of all the blogs that you can find in your niche and start out reaching to them and you know you really know how to do that more of a story though building your affiliate network I call the relationship network is focusing on relationships yes right you're not just saying here's my product it's the long play yeah because if you just hit them up with your product there you're not going to get anybody yeah I have to give before you get you have to make it to pause it before you make that's right withdraw even take as Adam Graham Adam Grant talks about so once you have these affiliates you mentioned something over here that's really important is having a manager for them yes so how key was a manager for your success when it came to running your business oh like when I was managing the affiliates you know things are like pittering along as soon as we got affiliate managers like three times sales the first month and just go up up up eventually she plateaued for you know other reasons but it was money well spent she made money for us immediately so you would say that your company's growth up to a million dollars would be direct response marketing plus affiliate marketing yes absolutely made a huge difference that was I mean I could go and pull the actual reports but I know roughly in my mind that was when it made a huge difference let me ask you this though if you had to rewind since you've been through it you've learned everything what do you have done anything differently from the get-go when it comes to direct response and affiliates direct response affiliates do more of it I think we get into other types of traffic we learn how to build funnels for cold traffic meaning scrap the affiliates Facebook Google paid media drops meaning somebody's going to email their list in for a cost per thousand so they have six thousand people and they charge $10 per thousand it's going to be $60 to drop mm-hmm you know and just do the math and anything else that's all cold traffic you and other ad networks display networks we would have gone into that it's harder to do that because you have to be much more tight with your sales copy and your psychology and you have to be willing to stomach the lower results up front and have your back-end return path yeah really strong so you know it's easy to just go the affiliate route and say I will get to that cold traffic stuff but we would have if we would have got to it faster with a scale faster we've seen other companies do that be really successful because they took the time to do the hard work to make a cold traffic funnel mm-hmm and paid off of them so let's summarize everything so for somebody starting off from the get-go invest your time in getting the best quality product possible don't skim on that become the best in the world number two understand copy writing understand the rep response marketing number three build relationships with key industry players yes and number four right away hire somebody to nurture the relationships so the system flows right that's what you need yeah awesome I love it you have any final words to say make it happen go make it happen guys all right if people want to find out more what you do where they can reach you they can reach us on activation products dot com they can check our product so they can reach out to us my name is Anthony Clark yeah that's it awesome guys go check out activation products calm Anthony's been a pleasure brother yeah alright man guys take care peace