 I heard about a seven figure solopreneur who has a team, so not really a solopreneur, but seven figure business who went bankrupt recently because they were basically getting new clients and students through ads, like Facebook ads, Instagram ads, that kind of thing, which as you might know, I use a lot as well and I recommend it, it's helped my business a lot, but why did they go bankrupt even though they seem to be doing a good marketing strategy of I'm sure they had good copywriting and they were using ads a lot? Well, it's because according to them, their advertising costs went up and even their ad agency couldn't figure it out and so they went bankrupt. Now I know most of you watching this are not seven figure businesses, so you're like, George, what are you talking about? Why is this important to me? Well, it's because the story teaches us an underlying assumption about marketing and how we grow our business that I think is applicable to businesses of all sizes. So my diagnosis for why that seven figure business failed was the following and I took a few notes so I'm going to go ahead and read it. Number one, she didn't have a true fan base, why? Because she was relying on ads just like, oh, we'll just spend more money on ads, we'll get more people visiting our website and get more leads for our business. It's so interesting, I keep getting people messaging me about, oh, would you like lower cost leads? And I'm like, dude, if you start talking about potential customers and clients as leads, you've already lost me. Yes, leads, leads, L-E-A-D-S, is the technical term for a potential customer or client, but if you're looking at people as leads, you've already lost the heart connection with them. You're now in this hyper sort of scientific and left brain way of dealing with your business and with your audience, which is not an authentic business because without that heart connection, you can't really build trust. You can manipulate people super well, can't build trust. So again, back to my diagnosis of why this business failed, didn't have a true fan base, was relying too much on ads to get leads rather than having resonant content that comes from a heart of service that creates real trust and real loyalty, and therefore a true fan base. That's where marketing gets easier rather than for many people, it just keeps staying hard over the years. Marketing is supposed to get easier over the years, not harder, right? And your marketing is not getting easier over the years, then it's probably a relationship between alignment and trust. It's not about the reach, it's like you throw more money at running ads, you can reach a billion people, that's gonna cost you a lot of money. But if you don't have trust with the people, like they trust your expertise and they trust your values, and if you don't have alignment between what you're selling and what they actually want, then reach is pretty much useless. So I've talked about this framework before, the art framework, ART, alignment, reach and trust. You kind of need to build up all three to have a really authentic and sustainable business but with just using reach without really having a heart to build trust and without having a heart to talk to enough of them to find alignment between what you wanna offer and what they want. You can't just be like, oh, I'm real so passionate about this modality, I'm so passionate about my peak experience, I'm so passionate about what I've studied, I'm gonna push it on you. George just teach me how to run ads and when pushing on people, no one's gonna care. If you don't shape your modality and reframe your skills into what they actually want, that they wanna pay money for, you can sell to them all day long and no matter how clever your copywriting and design is, you're not gonna sell anything or gonna sell very little. So back to my diagnosis of this person, so didn't have a true fan base, was relying too much on reach and ads and also her marketing was so aggressive, which is how most marketing is. If you learn marketing elsewhere besides me and maybe a few others, like you're gonna learn the aggressive marketing that's pushy, that's trying to like get, okay, if I have something to launch, I'm gonna talk about it 85 times and then I'll wear them down. It's like, sure, that works sometimes and it works for some people, but it's gonna wear you down too. But not only that, it's going to erode trust with most of the people in your audience and your marketing's not going to get easier over the years. It's just gonna stay hard. So as a result of all this energy that she put towards her marketing, aggressive selling and using ads and all this energy money towards her marketing, guess what? She didn't have much energy left in time and money left to improve her product. And ultimately that is what makes marketing easier and easier over the years is that your product is so damn good. Your service is so damn effective and it's framed in a way that people want. You can have a really effective service but you deliver it in a way that people don't want, then you're still not gonna get enough clients. So that's why market research is super important and also the effort to keep improving your product service to be so effective that people cannot ignore you. It's just so good. So it's like she didn't spend enough time making her product so good that it created a sort of like an ongoing loyal word of mouth marketing engine. And so due to lack of repeat clients and customers because the product is not that good and lack of word of mouth and spending so much time and energy and money on just the reach aspect of it trying to get more people to look at her website that was unsustainable, ultimately a fail. And so then you might say, well, George, I thought you always told us about ads and how important it is and you run ads yourself, you spend lots of money on ads. Yes, I do. And let me tell you what ads are for. Ads are not to convince people. This is how I differ from most people who teach ads. Most people will say, well, ads, okay. It's to get your funnel opt-in in front of lots of people and you gotta make your funnel opt-in the beginning of your funnel. Already saying the word funnel is already messed up. It's like, is that how you treat people? Is that how you treat your audience? Looking at them as widgets to push through a funnel so they eventually they start out as a stranger, you push them through a funnel and they become a buyer. It's so damn cynical people. I just, please, somebody who was a marketer watching this go, do you understand how cynical you are and how jaded and like not connected from the heart you are, dear marketer. It's like that's not how you treat your friends, right? Then why the heck are you treating your audience that way? Because as I always say, authentic marketing is essentially making friends at scale, making friends at scale. Yes, keeping good boundaries but making friend or having friendliness happen at scale between you and your audience. I try to create a friendly audience by well, showing my heart and really serving from the heart. I think you can hopefully tell. And anyway, so it's like, so ads are not to, in my view, they're not for getting people into a funnel. It's a cynical, jaded, manipulative view. No, this is how I see ads. Ads are to amplify the value and service you are already providing and proving that you are providing to your audience and to your clients. Now, what do I mean by that is not, oh, ads are to expand the reach of your testimonials and your sales copy? No, no, it's not that well, yes, but that's not the main purpose of ads. The main purpose of ads, you spend money on Facebook and Instagram ads and by the way, you don't need to spend much. Start with $30 a month, three, zero. Most of you can do that. If you have a small business and you're not spending any money on advertising, you got to question whether you have a small business or whether you're serious about your small business. Really, like, have you heard of any business that doesn't spend money on advertising? Well, they're probably not, they're either very lucky to have just enough word of mouth to get them into clients, which is extremely rare. Or most of us need to spend some money on advertising to stay on top of mind and get enough business and get more than plenty of business. So, no, it's frankly ridiculous that a business doesn't spend money on ads, honestly. I don't know where that idea is coming from. If you're a business, you spend money on ads, period. I mean, really, if you're not doing that, you're not taking your business seriously, you're not. So like I said, a few exceptions where they get all their clients, but you probably don't have clients. You don't have enough clients just from word of mouth. Do you? Not yet, until you use ads the right way. And then like at this point, at this point in my business, I could stop running ads and I would still be quite successful for indefinite future. Cause I have enough audience now that it would just sustain itself a very successful business just from word of mouth. It could happen. I still run ads because, let me tell you, ads is an amplifier of the value I provide to my audience and explain. When I have a piece of content that my audience tells me is helpful, I make a post, people say, wow, that's helpful or that's inspiring, okay? And typically that post does not sell anything. Look at most of my posts. Most of my posts don't sell a single thing. Occasionally they'll mention one of my courses or whatever, but most of my posts go and look at my videos, go and look at my text-only posts. Most of them don't sell anything. When my audience says it's good, oh, it's really helpful, it's inspiring, I spend money to get that piece of content out to more people, to help more people, regardless of whether they ever buy from me. It's not a funnel. They don't, they're not, you know, I'm not asking for their email address. That's to be very clear. My ads do not ask for your email address. No, they don't. They get the content out there. I think of it as marketing as ministry. Marketing as ministry. I'm spending money on ministry money. I know it sounds ridiculous. George Mark Zuckerberg doesn't need any more money. This is ridiculous. I don't understand. But as a small fry, as, you know, as somebody who spends a pittance compared to the corporations on ads, the money that there's little money I spend compared to big companies allows me to reach thousands of people per month to serve them with good content, even if the content doesn't sell anything. So I think of myself as making a difference by paying money to get my best content out there. It shifts a little bit of people's minds. It shifts their heart towards a more helpful, productive, joyful way of thinking about business. Wonderful. And inevitably, obviously some of those people decide to follow me or to look at more of my content. And eventually at some point, when the timing is right for them, they will also see my posts about my offers and then they will take me up on it. But so that's the point. Ads is ministry money. That's most of my money I spent on ads. It's just getting content out to people who might really benefit from it. I remember one. And number two, I also use ads to occasionally make sure my warm audience sees my offers and that's what I recommend that you do as well. Your ads, part of your money should go towards ministry money, meaning just cause. Your content is a cause. Your content could save someone's life. It could change someone's life. I don't know what kind of content you produce. Some of you are healers. Some of you say something that shifts their life in a way that it really makes a positive ripple effect that you can't even imagine. So most of our money or at least half of it anyway goes towards ministry money, just getting our message out and helping the world. Number one. And number two is occasionally we also make sure that whatever we're promoting that month or that quarter your service, your course, your program or event that your warm audience make sure they see it at least once, just once or twice is enough. And this is where I wanna say like, okay, some of you are running ads and on a particular offer. You're like, oh, I've heard George that someone has to see an offer like 13 times before they decide or no, they don't. They see it once or twice and that's enough for my experience. I've been doing ads now for just about 10 years actively and for my experience, it's not 13 times. It's once or twice. Oh, but George, I always hear from people who tell me, oh, I wish I saw your offer. I didn't see your thing. That's why I didn't sign up. And then you're like, you get scared from that. Go, I better send more emails. I better run more ads. That is terrible. Never ever let someone who tell you that make you market more aggressively. Let me explain why. Well, George, don't we want, make sure everybody sees our thing once or twice? No, no. Let me explain. When I say I let my warm audience see it once or twice, my warm audience, first of all, if you don't know my lingo, is are the people who have engaged with my content recently, they've liked, commented, shared my posts, running ads make this all easy because Facebook, Instagram tracks all this stuff. Just say, oh, we know who to engaged and we know who visited your website. We know who's on your email and all that stuff, right? So it's like, I make sure that my warm audience sees it once or twice on average, but not more than that. And yes, I'm sure there are always some people, some of you watching this, don't realize I'm launching this or that right now, that's okay, guess what? If you miss, so this is the key point. If you miss something that I launch and you regret that you missed it, guess what's gonna happen next time I launch something? You're going to lean in more. You're going to make sure you don't miss it. I'm not trying to make you feel FOMO. I'm just launching my regular stuff and I'm just gently getting the word out about it, using some ads to make sure my warm audience on average sees it once or twice. Some people see it zero times, some people maybe see it three times, but on average once or twice, okay? And like I said, you might sometimes miss that I launched something, guess what? You're more likely to lean in for my future launches and that's what I want. I don't want you to go, oh my God, yet another email from George about selling me this, selling me that, which is how I feel about most marketers. They're just like, they have to make sure I see their launch like three, four, five or more times. And that's like, that is not helpful, helpful for audience trust. That is not helpful for the audience to lean in of their own free will. So this has always been my perspective about marketing. Be, or once I got into authentic marketing rather, be sought after rather than be someone that people have to kind of push away because you're marketing so aggressively. Be sought after, which means the trade-off is yes, some people will always tell you, I didn't see your thing. That's okay, sometimes they're just making an excuse, honestly, right? Have you ever told a friend, oh, I didn't see your thing, but you didn't really want to sign up? Of course you have one, I don't know about you, but many people have. So a lot of times that's just an excuse. And sometimes it's true, they didn't see it, they go, oh, you know what, that's okay, here's my email list, if you wanna join, then you're more likely gonna see it next time. Be sought after, you're going to just assume there's a bunch of people who won't have seen it, but that's a good thing because that means you're marketing gently enough so that you build trust with the whole audience and you allow their free will to lean in. Again, I'm not being passive here, as you know, I'm not being passive to go, well, I just put something on my website and hopefully people see it, no, no, no. You know, I send, get this, whenever I launch something, I send only two emails. This is unheard of, not unheard of, but compared to my peers who send you three, five, 10 emails per launch, I send you two, sometimes I only send one. The one I'm launching right now, I only send one email. Dedicated, one dedicated email about it. I also sent a weekly email that had a mention at the bottom of it after my content at the bottom, a brief mention, but that's it. You see how gently I launch things. And so I send one email, dedicated email, maybe two, sometimes for a bigger thing. And then I also run ads to make sure most of my warm audience, several thousand people, see it on average about once, one and a half times actually. And then I turn it off and some people won't have seen it and some people will have seen it like twice. That's fine. And so basically, by treating my audience with respect and by continuing to enter my heart, to express my heart in my content and to be gentle with my launch is gentle yet active, yet making sure I'm doing my part to gently announce it. It's a gentle announcement. Then my business has been really good better and better over the years. Unlike this seven-figure marketer that I said who had to go bankrupt because it was just lack of trust, huge amount of advertising costs that was very aggressive and pushy and cynical because it was all funnel driven and I don't have a funnel. I don't. I let people choose. It's more like a menu of options. You get to choose. Some people they find out about me and the next week they say, I want your highest level program. And some people they find out about me and five years later they buy my book. I spend $5, five years later. That's fine. I let people go with their own organic timeline and that kind of trust in them and trust in you builds your trust in me. And this is why my marketing has gotten easier over the years rather than stay hard or be harder as some people have discovered. So I hope this is helpful as a way to understand sort of like the difference between my overall strategy and values for marketing and how most people seem to do it which is a hard life to my opinion. So I hope this is helpful and thank you for watching.