Five Steps to Freedom and Exponential Growth | 379

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December 26, 2022

Dan Kuschell is a husband, dad, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor. He runs Breakthrough3X, a company that gives you instant access to a Fractional CMO Team. Breakthrough3X helps founders and CEOs grow their businesses 3 to 10x and generate more clients daily with a simple system that gets them free from the day-to-day. Dan has owned 12 companies since 1992, building multiple businesses with revenues exceeding eight figures before selling. He is also the host of the Growth to Freedom podcast, where he interviews industry leaders and experts in a variety of fields.


Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

  • Dan Kuschell describes his personal and professional journey
  • Dan’s business consulting approach
  • What is the distinction between B2C and B2B marketing?
  • The five pillars of marketing and the importance of analyzing metrics
  • Dan talks about direct response branding as a concept and his book
  • Key takeaways for marketing and business growth

In this episode…

When marketing their business or services, many entrepreneurs employ overused internet marketing strategies or embody a “seller’s culture” that deters customer interest. So, how can you market to your clients effectively to achieve optimal growth?

Business advisor Dan Kuschell insists that B2B and B2C marketing are antiquated strategies. Instead, businesses need to adopt a people-to-people, or P-to-P approach. To apply this, it’s essential to combine the five pillars of marketing with direct response branding. The five pillars entail recognizing a growth plan and vision for your business, creating connection campaigns, building an internal lead machine, coordinating education-based events, and optimizing and implementing your processes. Additionally, direct response branding integrates direct response marketing and branding to maximize leads, relationships, and sales. You can solve your clients’ most pressing issues by creating a custom strategy. 

In this episode of Growth to Freedom, David Newman of Do It! Marketing hosts Dan Kuschell of Breakthrough3X on The Selling Show podcast to discuss optimizing your marketing and selling strategies. Dan explains the five pillars of marketing, the importance of analyzing campaign metrics, and the concept of direct response branding.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor for this episode…

Thanks for listening to this episode of growthtofreedom.com. 

Are you struggling to get a steady flow of new clients every day? Or maybe hit a plateau or hit a wall in growing your business? Well, let’s help you solve this problem today. Let’s review your business and have a conversation. You can do that for free today at breakthroughstrategycall.com. That’s breakthroughstrategycall.com. 

In addition, if you’re looking for a simple way to implement some of what we’ve been talking about in today’s episode, I want to encourage you to get our free small business toolkit. You can get that at activate.breakthrough3x.com. That’s activate.breakthrough3x.com. 

If you’d like access to the special resources and all the show notes for this special episode, make sure to visit growthtofreedom.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:03  

Welcome to growthtofreedom.com, the show that brings you inspiration, transformation, and leadership, we’re helping you connect the dots, see the blind spots, and get unstuck. So you can go out and generate more leads more sales, more profits. More importantly, so you can go out and have a bigger reach a bigger impact and make a bigger contribution.

David Newman  0:25  

He is here. He’s back. That’s right, the amazing Dan Kuschell Welcome back, my friend. Great to have you on.

Dan Kuschell  0:33  

Dave here, David. Thank you.

David Newman  0:36  

So tell us a little bit for the folks that maybe missed our first episode. And you definitely have to go back and re-listen to my earlier Interview with Dan, give us just kind of a quick sketch of your professional journey and what some professional adventures were along the way that brought you to your current work that you’re doing today.

Dan Kuschell  0:56  

Yeah, I think the short version, David, you know, I’ll start with, you know, as a kid, like, why am I actually doing this? What I’m doing and why have I been doing it for over 30 years, is as a kid, I grew up in the inner city of Detroit, Michigan, and we were on welfare a couple of times. And my dad was, you know, he was spirited, right, he had the entrepreneur bug. And so it wasn’t like he didn’t do anything about, you know, our financial situation. But my dad didn’t have the skills. And right one of the first businesses he started was a restaurant bar. And, you know, he, you know, some of the things were out of his control. But what I watched and observed as he, like a child as like eight years old when he had that business, is that he didn’t know how to market it, he didn’t know how to fill the seats of the restaurant. And then fast forward a couple more years, he started another business, which was a printing visit, which was really fascinating. And actually, I was 13 years old, when he had that business, and I would go with him in the summers and work in there. And I started doing typesetting and graphic graphic design, like all this stuff. But what I found from my dad’s similarly is he didn’t have the skills for marketing and selling. And he actually had this sales rep that kind of pulled the wool over his eyes, my dad was just really nice. And he trusted what this gal Genie was saying to him. And so long, and the short, our family ended up because my dad was too nice and didn’t have the skills for marketing and selling. We ended up on welfare. And I’ll never forget walking into a grocery store near our house and being left out having to get give out food stamps. And so for me, that became a real driving force for why I’m doing what I’m doing today. And so I started my very first company when I was 22, in my senior year of college, in lieu of graduating at the time, and you know, I went out and, you know, took the took the opportunity. And you know, we found a niche. And we started building some sales. But then quickly, about a year, a year into it, I realized something, I knew how to market and I knew how to sell but I didn’t know how to run a business. And you know, long in the short is now it’s been a journey over 30 years where we’ve helped over 5000 founders and CEOs from 30 different third 180 Different industries 13 plus different countries. And it’s been quite quite an amazing situation to help companies grow, they’ve sold companies bought companies, and a whole lot more.

David Newman  3:38  

Amazing, amazing, amazing. Well, and also, tell us a little bit about about how you work because unlike a lot of quote unquote coaches, or consultants, you have a much deeper, much more integrated relationship with your clients. So some people call it fractional CMO, I would even say it goes beyond that. It’s it’s almost fractional CEO, because it’s both hands and brains and everything. So talk a little bit about how you work with your clients just to set the stage for the rest of our chat.

Dan Kuschell  4:12  

Absolutely. And yeah, I think you hit a couple of really cool distinctions. There, David, which is, that’s what we really do, right? Is we bring this idea of this fractional CMO, right, because a lot of people struggle to get clients every day or have a system more importantly, that brings clients every day. Right and that’s the key right is get his system for marketing, get a system in place to drive business and if you don’t have a system, like What’s it costing you, you know, most of the time, you know, founder CEOs, they’re wearing nine hats or 12 hats and you know, juggling a lot of balls relying on referrals, relying on partnerships and you know, with that well drunk runs dry or you had a little bit of a slow season or a slow year, then it can be impacted. So having a system in place you know, Not only from the strategy, but also the implementation or the operation side. So we have a team of about 30 Different people who do a variety of different things to help our clients beyond the fractional cmo strategy side to actually get the stuff done to actually build the models, build the campaigns, write the copy, build the copy, build, all the integrations handle the tech behind the scenes to free up the founder, in the CEO in the business. So it becomes like we’re a co pilot, as a fractional cmo team, a fractional CEO team mixed with implementation. And that’s kind of the, if you could picture the trifle that’s really three circles kind of inner looping to help you as a founder or CEO, get more clients daily, because of a system in place to drive, drive business, drive growth.

David Newman  5:51  

Now, I want to dig into this because a lot of folks listening are going to be successful business consultants who run a consulting firm, executive coaches, corporate trainers, and they may be listening. And they say, Well, Dan, this all sounds great. But I don’t want to become an internet marketer. He right ideal with you know, corporate CEOs, corporate VPS, corporate executive VPS. These people are not clicking on Facebook ads, necessarily, this is their thinking, you know, I don’t want to build all these complex funnels, I don’t want to do the internet marketing monkey show. So talk about sort of B to C, internet marketing, and the kind of entrepreneur that that might be suited for. And I’m talking about B to B internet marketing, which by the way, totally works. And Dan and Dan’s team are totally killer at it, just want to put that on the record. But people have this image of hey, I’m selling crap for $47 Come on down. And they’re like, Well, no, I don’t want to be that kind of internet marketer. So talk about b2c versus b2b and what strategies work with your clients that are in that corporate sale environment. Yeah, and

Dan Kuschell  7:11  

there’s a lot of layers. The short, the short version is David is, first of all, I cut my teeth, unlike most people in this visit, is that you and I, we you and I’ve talked about this a little bit, is I got started, you know, in the late 80s, and direct response marketing and I worked for a direct mail company in the health club industry. And you know, that’s where I really cut my teeth and got inspired and that Tony Robbins, my dad had also gotten me books and stuff that were a significant impact. So I got started, like, in the old ways in the old school way. So like, I had to learn how to make a business grow using direct mail, using TV using radio. And that was the first you know, handful of years or decade of my business career. And then flip to today, you know, the internet side of things like I’m agnostic, right, so I still love you. I know some people go direct mail doesn’t work. Oh, yes, it does. And the beauty is it’s not as cluttered as email, so to speak, not that you don’t want to use email. It’s not an either or it’s an ad. But when you use all of these things, you mix the online stuff with the offline, right, I don’t look at business today, as David is a b2b. And I don’t look at business as a B to C, it’s a little bit of a counterintuitive, what I look at is P to P, person to person business. Right. And we found there’s five real quick pillars. And I’ve actually reviewed over 4000 companies over the last few years. And what drives them what makes them work. Also, what also sends people down the wrong path? I mean, we’ve also reviewed as part of that process, companies like Apple and Nike and Disney, big giant companies that are primarily have segments of their business that are B to B. Right, using that, that terminology and a lot of mom and pops and everything in between, right? And we found there’s really five core pillars that most people you know, need to lean into, but it starts with, I think the mind shift, right or having mine growth around? Well, maybe I am a little bit resistance to internet marketing. But like what if I can incorporate some of the tools, some of the, you know, automation, some of the pieces to enhance the experience, and speed things up and speed the sales cycle up because it’s like a tide, like when you mix, you know, call it offline, you know, type business to business, traditional stuff with online stuff. It’s like a tide that lifts the boats is what happens. I love that.

David Newman  9:48  

Might you take a sneak peek behind the curtain and walk us through just the essentials of what those five pillars are?

Dan Kuschell  9:57  

Absolutely. I think a good example of that is So, you know, one of the clients that, you know we’re working with right now, you know, he’s someone in the space of, you know, he helps with the health industry is transforming mankind one one person at a time. And it’s, you know, with some of the new evolutions, some of the revolutionary technology that’s available in medicine. And so he’s an expert to, you know, a lot of different communities there. And so, we’ve helped get a system in place where him and his wife found themselves, you know, they run a very successful business. They had really great clients, great relationships, but they found themselves wearing a lot of hats, they had, you know, they were wearing the, you know, the marketing hat, and they were wearing the sales hat. And it was good business and very profitable, and they, you know, a lot of things they love, but what they didn’t love is like not having a way to get themselves removed from the day-to-day of the business, David. And so they wanted a way where they could escape the traps, right of having to do the things and that’s where we came in to go, let’s put this system in place. Right. And so the five key pillars, you know, whether it’s that business, or you know, another client we’re working with in the tiny home business, we got to another fascinating business we’ve worked with, which is in like forensic animation stuff, for accidents that happen out on the road with trucks, like, it’s so fascinating. The five key pillars hold true. So number one, the first pillar is Get clear on a vision and growth plan of your business. Right? Clarity brings confidence, bring certainty, brings drive bring me it gets people on the same page gets people aligned instead of misaligned, right? So vision and growth plan is the first step. Like what do you want? Where do you want to go? And don’t get hung up on the what to do yet or where to go. We’ll talk about those here in a second. So the vision and growth plan is like, what do you want? What do you not want? Right? Because if you want, you know, if you don’t mind handling every single call that comes into your business well, great, that’s different than someone who says, you know, I really don’t want to handle that. All of that business anymore. Myself, I’d rather have. Well, that’s where a system comes in. Right? So vision and growth plan. Step number two, David, is really we call these connection campaigns. And this is where some of the online stuff can really why I get fascinated by this, in a lot of ways. And a lot of clients, once they understand the framing, it’s like a lot of companies go whoa, I would run advertisement on TV, I would run ads on radio, but I found a I tried it, it didn’t work or it’s very expensive. And it is, you know, bad marketing is very expensive.

David Newman  12:49  

Nice. Totally true. Totally true.

Dan Kuschell  12:53  

terribly expensive. But if it’s done right, it actually is free. And then some it’s a huge multiplier. So can we call the second step connection campaigns? What are these simple way to look at connection campaigns? is building a romance and your client journey, right? And where do you do this? Well, you do it everywhere. In your business, strategically, there are three key buckets to kind of think of it’s before you have a client. It’s as you’re developing a client. And while you’re doing business, and after, right, so those three buckets. So how can you do this one. And there’s dozens of ways that we help our clients get a system David in place for this. But one of the ways that you can do this using some of the online technology that’s available through all kinds of different platforms, some of the common ones that most people know like Facebook and Google and YouTube and a bunch that most people may not know yet. And that’s okay, too. But connection campaigns are romance. So for example, someone might become a lead and well, you could send them an email, you could send them a follow up. And on top of that is their most people are searching online at different points in their, their day, these days. It’s almost become a replacement to television, in many ways. So now, if people are just searching anywhere online, they might see your video, you might have experiences as you’re watching right now or listening right now. Imagine, like you’re online, and then suddenly, you had researched or looked at a company recently. And then suddenly, it feels like they’re kind of following you around to a degree well, even better, as how great would it be if it was just like a little snippet, like a 32nd, or a one minute or two minute video clip. And it helped build trust, which is what connection campaigns are designed to do. It’s geared to build respect, credibility authority, in some really cool simple ways. And here’s David why it’s so powerful is because it’s pennies to get to your perfect clients. Most people don’t notice, especially if they’ve done it wrong, but literally you can get in front of your perfect clients. For as little was like two to five cents per client with these connection campaigns, and most people have never done it before. So you usually start with the first bucket before you do business, because let’s face it, the hardest and most expensive glide to get is what is a new one. So you got to build more trust and respect. Well, you can do it literally pennies per client, right, that you’re focused on. So connection campaigns, building, roaming, and then ultimately evolve as the business you know, as you evolve into these things as you go from the before, as you’re doing and, you know, working with them and or after, in those phases. So that’s the second pillar. The third pillar is building your own internal lead machine. Right? There’s so much ways like, for example, we were working with a client in the real estate business, and they had people coming in and wanting to talk to the realtors and all these different things. And we said, hey, like, do you track? Do you like, keep the names of the people who are actually looking? And they did it? Right. And I’ve seen this in, you know, in businesses we work with over the years like salons, we’ve seen this and in, you know, hair cutting places. You know, manicure pedicure places where something as simple as gathering the first name, a phone number and an email or some version of that to then why do you do this? Why do you build a lead machine, it’s not what most people think most people have been taught by these traditional online marketers who’ve actually never really built that many great businesses is you know, I build the lead machine to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, that’s also been one of the biggest lies. The reason to build this stuff is to build a buyer’s culture, the companies that are going to have the most success over the next decade or two or three or longer, if that’s something that interests you are those that are not a selling culture anymore, it’s more of a buyers culture. And the way you build buyers cultures is by building relationships, again, comes back to p to p, right, p to p. So a lead machine is geared to do one main thing, David, and that’s to one, develop, and move people from all these places out here to your company. In other words, they’re in your database, they’re in your list, they’re an asset now, but it’s not to then sell, sell, sell, it’s actually to develop the relationship for your buyers model. And that’s such a big distinction, that when people really get it, and they start to understand this, because, you know, most business I go, how many people have you had come through your doors, you know, either physically or online, and you’re not really following up with them. Over the last three months, I’ve got some that have said 1000s of people have had some that said any year, hundreds and hundreds of 1000s. I said well just imagine being able to then communicate with them, either by a text in a cool way not salesy, but in a cool way to build and move the relationship just like, you know, dating, like if we’re dating somebody, David, we meet someone and we strike up some chemistry first. First thing is this. Let’s say we meet somebody and we strike up chemistry and we happen to get a phone number. Now is a guy pursuing someone as a female? I probably after she gave me the number, right and go, Hey, can I get your physical address? No, she considered me a stalker. But guess what, there’s a lot of this outdated stuff on the online marketing where people are doing just that, that they’re becoming a stalker, instead of the nurturer instead of being the trusted resource, right? So it’s a process. So how do you have a project like dating? Well, you might get the phone number. And then a couple days later, you might have a call, or you might send a nice text, you build the relationship, but this is the same stuff. And you can do this, the beauty of using online marketing is, again, is not to sell, sell, sell, and hype and all this sort of stuff that a lot of the marketing community has, unfortunately, read into business-to-business types. What it really is geared to do is is developing culture, those relationships a lead machine, your lead machine, your customer lead me, and then ultimately you might have multiple lead machines, right? Like, for example, we’re working with, with a client in the tiny home business, and you know, we use direct response branding, which is really, you know, using organic plus paid media stuff while we’re focused on SEO, organic stuff with them and some other things. But she had mentioned here in the last 30 days, hey, can you just kind of throttle things down? Because you’re driving us too many leads? Because we’re her manufacturing company. Right? You know, she got an order for 17 new tiny homes in less than 30 days. Right? And we were averaging about four to five and like she had the spikes. So she’s like, Hey, just hold and now our new vision and growth plan is there. it by the first quarter of the year that we will be between 30 and 40 homes a month. Right, which I’m pretty excited about, because of the way our performance-based model works. But those leads, she’s able to follow up with them because of her custom lead machine. Right. And then that leads to the fourth pillar, David, which is education-based events. Right. And a lot of people, again, online marketing, to some degree, may may kind of create a bad taste, and a lot of people, and for good reason. There’s a lot of bad things out there. We’re agnostic to the type of education-based event. I mean, if you really take the online marketing world away, like who has become some of the best in the world and education-based events, Disney, Nike, Apple, you know, Apple does a launch every year, that’s an education-based events, and it create buzz and momentum. And it’s almost like a, an amazing, it’s almost like an amazing launch, that someone would do, right? And lots of great companies use it, well, why not? A small business, why not a consultant, right? And then the other great part is some of these can live on, it’s one too many, and it can live on for a long, long time and bring you new leads, bringing new business and so on. But what does an education-based event really do, and it doesn’t matter whether you call it a training, or a launch or a party, or you know, there’s all kinds of names, you can use challengers that, you know, all kinds of things that people use. An education-based event allows us to collapse, trust and respect in most cases, because of the nature of time, let’s face it, what’s the most precious thing that we all have today? It’s time, right? And minimizing distractions. So when you can bring people into your buyers culture, and you help eliminate the distractions, and you help focus the experience, you know, you can take an education-based event like right now we’re working with a client, and he’s in the financial industry. And so he worked with, you know, different types of financial experts advisor, as an advisor, he is looking for a fluent type client. So we set up an education-based event, but it’s not we use the event as one tool. Almost like the NFL uses Sunday games to ultimately week by week promote through the year and season two, the Super Bowl, which is their call it grand finale. Well, what if you don’t your model that had summer, in his case, it wasn’t like for, you know, seven months or eight months per se, it was about 20 days. So we hosted an event and started promoting it ahead of time. So like promotion going on. And then we had a sequence of many events on the back of that event. And this client generated over 109 new clients in less than 25 days because of this experience. And it’s a buyers culture instead of a selling culture. So education-based events are great at collapsing timeframes creating a world-class experience done right. And it can lead to a lot of momentum. And people enjoy them. You know, the tiny home manufacturer working with she hosted her version of education-based event last minute, she really just had some time available. She was going to take a trip, but you know, the trip got canceled is like Well, I’m gonna have some time. Why don’t I do an education-based event? Her event was essentially an open house. So she put up some balloons, right, she put up some balloons, she put up some nice stuff in her thing, she served some food and drinks. And she had her date or her lead machine that had produced leads in that particular market that she was going to be in. She sent out the email she had, like I could be off just a little bit on the numbers. But she had like 70 people show up at her version of an education bait which is an open house where she was able to just build report and so on and she got three I believe it was three new sales and the average sale for homes are like 202 $100,000 each.

David Newman  24:05  

Yeah, right. Wow, really incredible. Each of

Dan Kuschell  24:09  

these steps, and then the last one is optimize and implement. So what does that mean? You cut out the fat cut out the things that are not working, and then focus on implement go deep. Go deep so many of us I’ll speak about myself versus anybody else for the first decade of my business career day, but I found myself so often chasing shiny objects and then new strategy and the new idea the new

David Newman  24:33  

thing no not possible. Come on. How can that be? No one listening has ever had that problem.

Dan Kuschell  24:41  

Yeah, the truth is I built this five step pillars originally for me because me I’m very easily distracted. I can go off and run in about 100 different tangents, and this five pillars is just a great set point to go okay, like where are we at here and now optimize is you cut the losses Do you drive the winners go deep, go deep, go deep because everything has a shelf life. So go deep as far and as long as you can. And then rinse and repeat, and focus on implementing, right? The things that matter and the multipliers in the Maximizer. So, so those are the five key pillars, I was probably a little bit longer explanation than you want to, but hopefully, that serves you. And as you know, that was doing right now,

David Newman  25:24  

that was brilliant. So build the machine, run the machine, build the machine, run the machine, build the machine, run the machine. And then obviously another thing which we don’t have to dig into, necessarily, I know that you and your team are also data freaks. So when you say when you say cut the fat, stop doing what’s not working, optimized, and ramp up what is working, these are not guesses. These are not approximations. I mean, you are metrics, maniacs, you know exactly what’s working. And you know how to tune it and tweak it. So it works even better.

Dan Kuschell  25:58  

Yes. And, you know, that’s one of the things that I found in the last decade, David doing this. And, you know, serving our clients, the way we do in this role is most people are blind, or in the dark, or in limbo, unlike the benchmarks, and the expectation, we were kind of, you know, there’s another version of this, we were talking about book a book, right? And, you know, like, thankfully, I’ve been through the book process more than like, a handful of times, like five or six books. So I know how the process can get elongated. But for someone who’s new, who’s never been through the book process, like, if they’re thinking a number one, it’s going to take, like just a couple of weeks to get it done. And be that it’s like the biggest moneymaker in their entire business structure. They’re going to be sadly mistaken. Yeah, because neither are really true. Right? And, you know, they’re, they’re the best one of the best business tools in the world done right. Yet. They’re just really what they are they I would put that a book under like the lead machine category, not like the conversion, enhancement, optimizer, any of that sort of stuff. But it’s a great tool, right? A lot of people just don’t have those benchmarks like what is the range that I should be paying for a lead? What is a range? You know, if I’m hosting an educate what is the range of experts based on data, because we’ve got all kinds of data sets from 1000s of clients we’ve worked with to know, okay, this is the range. We met with a client, for example, Friday for one of our kickoff sessions that we do with our private clients. And we were sitting through and we had worked with this client before and help them build an exit and sell his business. And so he’s got this new business, and we sat down and went through the benchmarks. And for the next quarter, we charted out based on the benchmarks, and he understood them because of our work in the past together, but we laid it out and said, We need to get this in front of 2000 to 4000 eyeballs. Right. And that is going to net in his particular business model based on the client journey, about $3.5 million in the next quarter. Right. But we know that only because of being able to reverse engineer based on real data, real benchmarks, and for a lot of people, they’ll work with a marketing agency that number one, they don’t have a vision and growth plan. You know, we call it a marketing growth or marketing plan blueprint. And I would suggest to somebody, if they’re not working with someone that doesn’t give them their vision version of a vision and growth plan or marketing blueprint, or whatever you want to call it that’s around, like, who is your client? Where are your clients, you know, and the benchmarks firing, because they’re an amateur, right? They’re an amateur, if you haven’t taken that, for an eye, we find so many times that that’s the case that people again, they’re, they’re in limbo, they’re just throwing stuff on a wall to see what sticks, they don’t really have real clarity to be able to make good decisions. And or understand the process because it is a process, right? It is a process to be able to build up, you know, some we were working with a client recently where, you know, we reviewed their business, the tools, they have the tools, they don’t, you know, it’s kind of getting under the hood of a car and look in and out. We got a little bit of cleanup to do here to get the data even right and it was gonna, you know, we help our clients typically within 30 to 90 days, start seeing revenue, growth, some profitability. This particular client, though, based on the assessment was going to be about six months for the specific things not to mean the rest of their business that’s already there already operating is not going to continue to grow and or be enhanced slightly but that particular piece because we have to lay that lay the tracks laid, but you know, a lot of people as you know, David don’t want to hear the truth. You know, harsh, harsh, brutal truths are comforting lies, which I think is a friend of mine. In a past client of ours. Michael angularity, who says that you know, hard truths are comforting lies. I want to work with clients who risk expect value, sometimes the harsh truth so that expectations can actually be met. Because I know this David, like you do doing the great work that you do, like, I’d rather tell the client looks like it’s gonna probably be about six, seven months to get to this place line this new new track because of where you’re at, like, we can’t control that. This is just where you’re at? Or would you rather me lie to you? And basically, oh, yeah, in 40 days, we’re going to be, you know, you know, hitting pavement. Right. And at the same time, what I what I do know is reputation is, you know, one thing we can control. And it takes years and years decades to build a great reputation in about five minutes to lose it.

David Newman  30:41  

Absolutely. Absolutely. And just going back to the truth, right, the truth will set you free. The truth about your marketing, about your sales about your numbers. Now, let’s talk about your book. Let’s talk about direct response branding. Before we turn on the microphones, you said, You know what? branding for the sake of branding, that’s kaput, that’s over. That’s just silly. And direct response marketing, at least the old definition of direct response marketing, that’s kind of kaput, too. So when we combine them into this new concept that you’ve written an entire book about direct response branding, tell us about what’s broken with those two old models. And then tell us about this new hybrid version.

Dan Kuschell  31:27  

Yeah, so the short version, David, and oh, by the way, so like, I think I promised to you so that I hand wrote the book, I wrote this in about 60 days, I guess, taken an hour a day to write it? Oh, my

David Newman  31:39  

gosh, look at that. That’s like, what six legal pads altogether?

Dan Kuschell  31:43  

Probably actually seven or eight. Nice. And then you know, of course, they send it to my team. And so they put it in this form. And now we’ve got this with the publisher that we built, but literally, it’s 30 years of experience doing this. So coming to your direct question. So direct response, marketing, why? Why is it outdated to some degree, so traditional direct response marketing has, you know, been built on this idea of a selling culture, right? And every, you know, the one good thing about it is it’s measurable, right? Which branding doesn’t do. So the one thing you want to have in any marketing, you do branding, or direct response marketing, you want to measure it so that you can then maximize it when you find a winner. But you know, so many times we find that that isn’t the case. The biggest reason direct response marketing is outdated, is because it’s a seller’s model, a seller’s culture instead of a buyers culture, right, people today are more savvy than they’ve ever been, they don’t want to be oversold, they don’t want to be, you know, in a hype machine, which a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of direct response marketing has kind of led to it. Right. So branding, on the other hand, you know, if you’re a billion dollar business, branding can be a great thing, right? But branding is kind of building the image in advance. The problem with traditional image branding is that you’re not able to track it, you know, it might look good, it might win awards at some, you know, some point depending on the size, or whatever, but it doesn’t move the dial, it’s not a needle mover. What we found when you bring the many times you can almost look at these today, like, you know, there’s experts out there teaching, go post 60 times a day on social media. And if you’ve ever heard that before, and maybe you’ve tried it, how’s that working for you? Or maybe you’ve heard someone say, go posting groups, and be incredibly active in groups or even start a group. I’m not opposed to those. But how’s that working for you? Those are to a degree organic strategy. Now there’s ways to leverage them. And part of the way to leverage it is to bring it and marry it to a direct response, marketing strategy. And when you do that, you know, the subtitle of the book, and this will kind of sum it up, which is, you know, we’re bringing organic and direct response, organic, and he’d models together to create a new model for exponential business growth and escaping the day to day traps so that you can have a more predictable flow of leads have a more predictable flow of relationships have a more predictable flow of sales every day. And along with that, profitably, do it profitably and have a system. So it’s a system that runs without you. Right, you can manage it or get someone to manage it, or get someone to maintain it, manage it, while you get to reap the fruits of your labor.

David Newman  34:51  

Amazing. And when’s this coming out? When can we get our little paws on Direct Response Branding

Dan Kuschell  34:59  

at the end of the first quarter is when we expect to be able to roll that out in a big way. Yeah.

David Newman  35:05  

Excellent. All right. So we’ll have we’ll have a q1 book party, I’ll promote the heck out of yours, you promote the heck out of mine. And we’ll hope that the paper shortage and the print delays and the supply chain Gods will be smiling on both of us. I agree. Totally agree. All right. Well, Dan, as we’re rounding the homestretch here, I’ve got two final questions for you. The final final question is Where can people get connected and stay connected to more Dan Kuschell brilliance even before the book comes out? I know you have all kinds of amazing tools and goodies and downloads. We’ll talk about that in a second. If people were to take one idea from real from this entire conversation we’ve had around real deal business growth, not myth, not internet marketing hype, not sellers culture, as you talked about, but direct response branding, the five pillars, developing a buyers culture, adding romance points to your buyers journey, all of that wonderfulness. Won’t that one core takeaway idea be?

Dan Kuschell  36:13  

Well, I would say it’s to kind of layer in if I were to take one single strategy, if I could possibly do it that brings all of those five things together once and it is repeatable. First of all, remember, what are we? We’re human beings? Right? Again, it’s not b2b, it’s not b2c, it’s p2p. We’re human beings, HB to HV human being the human being. And so how can you take all this stuff and simplified? So the simple version would be this, if you find yourself looking for a simple strategy to get in place, it would be going out daily, and asking just five people a day. And or train your team to ask this question five times a day each? And that one question would be what’s the number one thing you need the most help with right now. And if you become that catalyst to be a human being and show up for them, and ask a question that no one else is likely in their life going to ask not their spouses, sometimes not their kids, not their co workers, not their staff, you show up and ask what’s the number one thing you need the most help with right now. It’s building that buyers culture. Now, here’s the truth, when you do that five times a day, or X number of times a day or you get really aggressive, you’re the overachiever type, and you go for 10 or 12 or 15 a day, you’ll find that today in this given moment, you will likely find that 70% of people don’t have a need for you, or your product or your service right this moment. And here’s where the key comes in, is focus on being invaluable to them to connect them to a solution of some kind. And meet them where they’re at. So if someone says, you know, let’s say, I don’t know what business you might be in, but like, let’s say you’re in the, you know, you’re in the coaching business or consulting business to help companies grow. And someone says, you know, I’m having a health issue instead of trying to twist them into, you know, take some of that and flip it into a business conversation. What What if you just went out and became a catalyst to connect them to a solution to solve some of their health issues? Tell me more about that, like what’s going on. And then you you either get them connected to a who a person that you might have a relationship with, or you find a resource online, even if it’s an Amazon book, which it’s hard pressed that any topic, you can literally just go do 30 seconds of research and be valuable to somebody, Hey, I, this book seemed like it might be a fit for you, from what you’re describing, are both a resource and a connection to a live human being? What will that do? It’s going to build trust, it’s going to build respect, it’s going to show empathy, it’s going to show just you being more than business. And that’s what people are starving for today. They’re starving for connection. They’re starving for collaboration, they’re starving for things. They don’t even know what that is, until you show up this way. And so that would be the strategy train your team to do it, become vigilant at it. And you could do it one simple step right now. Take take your phone and find the audio version. Find one of your connections or potential clients or even clients and reach out and hit the record button on your phone. It doesn’t have to be a video maybe if you’re conscious of a video but just do the audio or video whichever you prefer. And go Hey, David, hey, so and so. I was thinking about you today and give them us very sincere reason why I was thinking about you today. I wanted to chat I came with you want to make sure you’re okay, I would love to find out what you’re excited about as we’re heading into the new year. Right? Now, if you’re hearing this in the middle of the year, love to find out what you’re excited about in the next quarter. And if you did that one time, two times three times, again, got pretty aggressive and got into those conversation asked that one single question, what’s the number one thing you need the most help with right now, you’d be amazed because there’s about 20 to 30%, likely, you just might find have a need for your service to In either case, you’re showing up in service as a servant leader, you’re showing up as a human being, you’re showing up up in a way where you’re taking the direct response branding combination, and these five pillars and putting it in place with one simple single strategy.

David Newman  40:52  

They’re really really powerful. Wow, it’s like be a better person. That’s the message I’m picking up from you Dan is be a better person and more sales will happen. And you can systematize that, believe it or not, and you can systematize that totally love it. Well, at this point, people are drooling. My friend, people are drooling. Like how do I get connected and stay connected? To more Dan, more Dan? Resources, downloads links, what can we put in the show notes? Where can we steer people?

Dan Kuschell  41:22  

Yeah, this is a simple version, we built a small business toolkit to help you with your business. So if you’re wanting to have a marketing plan, blueprint, or your marketing growth blueprint that you know you, your team get on the same page, we are going to give that tool to you. We’ve got something called the CEOs checklist. I have these tools, by the way right up here on my whiteboard, as well taped up there because I use them as a reference point to be able to run my business to run my companies. So you’ve got the marketing growth blueprint, you’ve got the CEO blueprint, we find that a lot of people David are struggling with, you know, hiring part time, full time, fragmented people, fractional people, and more. So we’ve also put together an eight step process to hire more effectively, in our entire process that’s led us I’ve had over 2000 employees work for us, I’ve interviewed well over 1000 people through our companies, over 100,000 people at our companies over the years. So we found a handful of things where you can create a marketing system for actually hiring, we’re gonna give you that checklist and a whole lot more so you can go get that that small business toolkit at activate.breakthrough3x.com That’s activate.breakthrough three x.com and get your free Small Business toolkit.

David Newman  42:41  

Excellent. Well, Dan Kuschell Thank you so much. By the way, those links and a few more goodies. Dan’s got a few more surprises. We’ll put all of Dan’s links into the show notes directly below this episode at thesellingshow.com Dan Kuschell You are such a rockstar. I appreciate you, my friend. Thank you for dropping all that wisdom on us.

Dan Kuschell  43:03  

Absolutely. David, appreciate you high five. Thanks, brother. 

Outro  43:04  

Thanks for listening to this episode of growthtofreedom.com. Are you struggling to get a steady flow of new clients every day? Or maybe hit a plateau or hit a wall and growing your business? Let’s help you solve this problem today. Let’s review your business and have a conversation. Do that for free today at breakthroughstrategycall.com That’s breakthroughstrategycall.com. In addition, if you’re looking for a simple way to implement some of what we’ve been talking about in today’s episode, I want to encourage you to get our free Small Business toolkit. You get that at activate.breakthrough3x.com that activate.breakthrough3x.com. If you’d like access to the special resources and all the show notes for this special episode, make sure to visit growthtofreedom.com

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