How to Write a Book to Grow Your Business in 30 Days – ep 124

Mostafa Hosseini  00:02

Hello and welcome. In this episode, you will discover how to launch your book and get clients in 30 days or less how to avoid giving away too much of your secret sauce in your book. Why clients who read your book are more eager, more qualified and ready to buy? And how do we get five to 15 qualified high ticket prospects a week with zero ad spend? That’s a big promise. And with my friend, Steve Gorton, we’re going to talk about that. Welcome, Steve.

Steve Gordon  00:34

Hey Mostafa, great to be here.

Mostafa Hosseini  00:36

Great to see you, my friend. I look forward to this. Today we’re talking about how to go from best kept secret to the one who wrote that book in 30 days. Let me do the proper introduction of my friend Steven, we’re going to dive into a very interesting conversation. Gang. If you are looking for ways to market your business, establish yourself as an expert be to go to be the Gordon go to person in your industry. Stick around, save the link, send the link to a friend. Share this with them.

This is going to be valuable information. And make sure to like and subscribe to the show before you forget. And before you leave, so that you keep getting all of our amazing guests and, you know follow the following episodes now. Steve Gordon is a two time entrepreneur, Best Selling Author, marketing strategist, consultant, and speaker. He has interviewed 183 of the top entrepreneurs in the world as the host of the unstoppable CEO, CEO podcast, and his books have helped 1000s of business owners attract better clients and get paid more.

And as the founder of unstoppable CEO press. He has helped dozens of entrepreneurs write a book that lands clients, premium fees and speaking opportunities. Welcome, Steve.

Steve Gordon  01:59

Really excited to be here.

Mostafa Hosseini  02:00

Great to see you. We’re about are you? I’m

Steve Gordon  02:03

in Florida in a town called Tallahassee state capital.

Mostafa Hosseini  02:06

And then what do you guys experiencing right now? Is it summer, winter? Spring? What’s it? Well, it’s

Steve Gordon  02:13

technically winter, but we don’t have like, real

Mostafa Hosseini  02:17

winter.

Steve Gordon  02:18

Yeah, I think it’s a it’s currently 70 degrees. So I can’t live there.

Mostafa Hosseini  02:24

You got to try up here in Calgary, Alberta. It’s always winter in Canada. Yeah. It’s been pretty nice. This year, though. January, this is probably the nicest January I’ve seen in the past 22 or 23 years. Like temperatures are around zero degrees Celsius. So above freezing, or just around freezing, which is warm for this time of year.

So and we’ve been enjoying it. And gank right away. This is Steve Steve’s mug, I’ve been a guest on his show the unstoppable CEO podcast, it is honestly my favorite coffee mug. I literally drink my coffee in this every single day. So it’s worth it speaking of marketing, to get a mug, slap your name on it and send it to your clients or prospects and have them carry it with you and advertise your name all year round on their podcast. How good is that?

Steve Gordon  03:23

That’s awesome.

Mostafa Hosseini  03:24

Fantastic. So let’s dive into it. Steve, what is your story?

Steve Gordon  03:29

Well, so, you know, I built two businesses. And been at this probably more years than I want to admit that I got really lucky out of school, I graduated from college with a technical degree, went to work for an engineering consulting firm out of school. And, you know, after I’d been there for about four years, the founder asked me to take over CEO and I had kind of risen up and taken some some other roles along the way.

And that was a really big changing, you know, kind of turning point for me running a business for the first time I was 20 years old, had no idea what I was doing. And and got got a really great opportunity to learn. And so we grew that business to about 3.1 million in revenue. And, and then I decided I wanted to go out and help other professionals grow their business, I was really much more interested in the sales and marketing side of that business and, and so in 2010, I launched our current business and it’s taken a number of different iterations.

We started off just consulting with professionals and helping them get clients and in and we’ve used a few different marketing tactics along the way, but the one that we’ve kept coming back to is the idea of writing a book because we haven’t found anything that works better. And, you know, I wrote my first book in 2014 and use that book really to go from one and a half person, local marketing consulting firm, to affirm that was known around the world back when we launched that book I had, I had just 15 partners, I had a podcast way back before podcasting was cool.

And I interviewed for a year I interview people like this. And I went back to the 50 people that I’ve interviewed, and only 15 of them, were willing to help me promote that first book. But those 15 people sent 5268 people, new new leads that purchased the book, in the first week that we’d launched it. And it changed my business overnight. And and so, since then, we’ve been, we’ve been perfecting our process for writing books, and doing that in a really short time. So we help our clients now write a book in about 90 days.

Mostafa Hosseini  05:52

Oh, that is amazing. I have and I love what you’ve done. And I think what you’re doing is really valuable with writing books and helping people stablish it themselves is probably the fastest, one of the fastest way, if not the fastest way to be the experts and the guy. So I know you already touched on it. But what do you do these days? And who do you serve?

Steve Gordon  06:14

So we we help experts write books, we work with? Really anyone that’s selling their expertise. And usually that means they’re in some type of a sort of service business. But probably the three main markets we serve are attorneys, financial advisors, and consultants.

Mostafa Hosseini  06:31

Tell it attorneys, financial advisors and consultants, yes. Fantastic. So why should people are experts, Consultants and attorneys and other people write a book.

Steve Gordon  06:46

So you know, the biggest problem that I think most professionals have, is not that they aren’t good at what they do. Not that they don’t have tremendous expertise. Most of the time, they’re they’re struggling on what we call the revenue rollercoaster, where they’re, you know, they’re up some months and got plenty of work and not doing any marketing, because they’re fulfilling all the work, then they turn right around and realize, Oh, these projects are done, the engagements are over, and nothing’s in the pipeline. And they just kind of ride that all the time.

 And the reason that they do that is they don’t have any consistent way to create the flow of opportunity. And so most of these businesses are just struggling because they don’t have enough deal flow coming at them. And you know, and really, that’s the thing that we’re looking to attack when we help them write a book.

Mostafa Hosseini  07:39

And so how does the book help them get leads and customers?

Steve Gordon  07:44

So what we’ve discovered is that a book is kind of like throwing gasoline on any type of marketing that you’re going to do. It’s, it’s going to help multiply the results that you’re getting. And so we’ve got nine different strategies that we use with clients, and helping them attract leads with a book. And we want to match the right strategy to the client, but probably 80% of our clients use the referral strategy that I wrote back read about back in 2014, in my first book, unstoppable referrals, and we use the book as a kind of a lever to create referrals.

And so the way that you would be okay, if I kind of roleplay with you for a minute, and we walk. Yeah. So the way that we would do that is we would, you know, I might come to you and say, Hey, Mostafa, I just wrote a brand new book. It’s called the million dollar book. And it’s all about, you know, how to how to get new clients in a really unique way and position yourself as an expert. And I’m on a mission to really transform the way that that businesses get clients, by using a book, and I want to get this into the hands of as many people as I can, as fast as I can, I would love to have your help. What do you say?

Mostafa Hosseini  08:58

Yeah, be happy to.

Steve Gordon  08:59

Yeah, and that’s what everybody says, If you mean, you’re gonna give me the opportunity to give away some books to people that I know. And, and most business owners are doing a really terrible job, have, you know, of, of giving value to their network? So they’re looking for ways to be able to give something to their network, and have it be valuable and be seen as somebody who’s kind of in the know. So it’s very easy to get people to say yes to that. And it’s a very low risk way for them to introduce you. Now, the advantage you get is that now you’re getting introduced not as somebody who’s going to sell something you’re not showing up as a salesperson, but you’re being introduced as the one who wrote the book as a preeminent expert, much more powerful way to sell and, and so that’s one of the ways that we would use it and referrals and so what our clients find is that on average, they get about five referrals every time they have that conversation.

Mostafa Hosseini  10:02

And so so then what happens is you would give the books away to someone, you know, let’s say you give your books to me, right? The million dollar book book, right? And then I would give it away to my audience into my people as a way to provide value. And through that process, you get referrals. Did I get that? Right? Yeah,

Steve Gordon  10:24

absolutely. So it might work on a really small scale. So if I’m working one on one with you, and maybe we’re sitting in my office or on Zoom, and I say, hey, Mostafa, you know, if you’d be willing to share it, what do you say we sit down and brainstorm? Who in your network might be a really great fit? Who, who would really benefit from getting a copy of the book? Most people will say yes to that. And now you’re able to kind of guide the conversation about who they’re referring to you, and you’re not leaving it up to them to just kind of go pull people out of the air?

Because I don’t know about you. Have you ever had one of those referrals where, you know, the client really meant, well, they wanted to really help you. And they said somebody who was just a complete wrong fit? Absolutely. Well, this is a way to prevent that, because you’re actually going to brainstorm with them, you’re gonna guide them through as they look through their contact list, and they’re gonna say, oh, you know, Bob Smith would be really great. So tell me about Bob. And you’re able to kind of curate through their context. So that’s how to do it on a small scale. But you’re gonna, I’m sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say get off on a really large scale.

And, you know, we’ve had partners in some of the mastermind groups that you guys that you and I have been in together before, who would share an electronic copy of my book. And you know, and they’d send us 300, or 400, leads in a shot.

Mostafa Hosseini  11:47

Interesting. And so you would ask your partner to come up with a list of people, and then you go through it together?

Steve Gordon  11:55

Yeah, we’ll get well actually, when we when we asked them to do is, hey, if you’re if you’re open to brainstorming, then let’s sit down together where you know, you’re able to look at your contact list. Most people have it on their phone. So if you’re sitting at an in person meeting, say I just pull up your phone, let’s browse through, and let’s find four or five or six people, that would be a great fit.

And they’ll go do that. And what what we find is that, because the book is seen as something that they’re giving as a gift, they’re excited to do it, when they send it out, and people get it, you know, very few people are ever offended by receiving a gift. Very different than go ahead.

Mostafa Hosseini  12:37

No, no, go ahead. I’m sorry.

Steve Gordon  12:40

Yeah, it’s fine. It’s very different than if you’re trying to introduce someone, you know, to, you know, to a business contact. And they sense that there’s going to be some selling involved. There’s all of a sudden, there’s tension, and there’s resistance to it, you’re given a gift of a book, there’s none of that.

Mostafa Hosseini  12:59

Fair enough. Do you ever get resistance to or that are going through someone’s contacts and saying, oh, no, no, I don’t want to do that.

Steve Gordon  13:06

Very rarely, because they’re doing it, you know, I never I never sit and take over their phone, they’ll see if they’re willing to do it. If they say yes to the idea, then you just simply tell them, you know, the best way I found to do this is pull up, pull up your contact list. That way, you’re not trying to wrack your brain. And and, you know, and struggle to do this, just see who’s in your network. You’ve already got them right there on your phone.

Mostafa Hosseini  13:31

Love it. Love it. So Steve, what should go in a book that is designed to attract clients?

Steve Gordon  13:37

So great question. Really, the, the key thing that you want to put into a book that’s going to attract great clients to you is to first focus on the problem that your clients face. And this is I’ll be honest, when we work with an expert, the very first thing that they want to do most of the time is prove that they’re an expert by listing all of the qualifications that they have, and nobody cares.

Exactly. You know, if you’ve written a book, they assume that you’re a smart person and that you’re qualified. And so you need to start with the prospect is start with the problem that they have the thing that’s keeping them up at two o’clock in the morning. And, and focus there and you’ll hook them right at the beginning of the book. So that’s really the first thing that you want to that you want to share. Okay,

Mostafa Hosseini  14:31

what else?

Steve Gordon  14:32

So the next really important piece is to walk them through your unique process. And I like to think of this as I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie, The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy lands in Oz and she wants to get home and she has to get to the city of us to do that. And she’s told to follow the yellow brick road. And the idea of your unique mechanism. This is sort of the yellow brick road that connects the problem that your ideal client is facing. And that that kind of ideal outcome that that City of Oz experience at that’s at the end of the road, that bigger, better future that you’re going to create for them. So you want to lay out for them? Well, this is, you know how people in your situation can find a solution and you lay out step one, step two, step three, step four, and walk them through your solution.

Mostafa Hosseini  15:29

Love it. So we first talked about the problem talking about, it’s about connecting with them where they’re at, and what they’re experiencing, then sharing your, your unique process, or some people call it your framework, here’s what we do to fix this. What’s next.

Steve Gordon  15:44

So the last piece of the book really should be focused on the client’s future. So if you think about this as a transformation story, we start with what they’re struggling with, we take them through a transformation in the middle.

And at the end, we want to really paint a very clear picture about what life will be like for them, once they’ve solved that problem. You know, what are all the new opportunities that open up? How much more peace and peace of mind will they have? And really paint that picture and make it really clear and compelling? And exciting for them?

Mostafa Hosseini  16:23

Fantastic. Love it. Love it. Is there anything else that goes into book? Or is that it? Well,

Steve Gordon  16:28

that’s the kind of the high level structure. There’s a lot kind of, you know, of nuance in there. But but that’s the key structure that you want to put in your book.

Mostafa Hosseini  16:37

Fantastic. So the problem, the framework and the future? Yes, those are the three main things that you got to cover. So I know they’re like, there are two things that I’ve heard about, get your expertise and given it away. One is, I’ve heard people say, just give away everything and people will still come some people say, Don’t give away your secret sauce. What’s your take on it? How do you deal with that?

Steve Gordon  17:07

So I get asked that question all the time. And, you know, for the clients that we work with, we’re generally writing a shorter book that’s designed to be consumed. And that’s important in thinking through, how much should we give away. So if you’re writing a book, that’s 100 250 pages, and you’re a true expert at what you do, I guarantee you, we can’t capture all of your secret sauce, all of your expertise in 100 250 pages.

You can’t, you can’t you’re more of an expert than that. We could never tell them how to do everything that you do all of the things that you’re unconsciously competent at. We could never teach someone that in 150 pages, we probably couldn’t teach it to them in 1000 pages. If you’ve been, you know, working at your chosen profession for, you know, for decades, and so, I don’t see that as a big concern. But what you do want to reveal is enough about your process so that a sophisticated buyer can look at it and go, Okay, this is somebody I can trust, because I see that they’ve thought through solving my problem well enough that they’ve got a system for

Mostafa Hosseini  18:24

it, have a system, love it. And I think by going through your three, three step framework there, once you knew that it does show that you do know what you’re talking about, you do have a framework, you could talk from here, where he’s where you are, here’s what we could do free doing. Here’s what the future looks like. That’s like establishing your expertise there. Which is simple.

And it’s the name of our show the simple Marketing Show. Interesting, interesting. What are some mistakes that people make with writing books.

Steve Gordon  19:04

The biggest mistake is writing the wrong kind of book. So we’ve talked a little bit about the ideal structure. We call that kind of a transformational story by but we had a client come to us about five years ago, and he had written a book already, but he had been trying to market it for a couple of years. And he was just incredibly frustrated because it wasn’t producing any results for him. And, you know, I took that book and I started looking at it and reading it and studying it.

And the interesting thing about this book is it had won two literary awards in his industry. So it was a legitimately good book, it was well written. I mean thought leadership all the way. And his target audience were you know, trying to he was trying to sell consulting into corporate executives, very, very high level corporate executives, busy executives, and his book laid out his whole system. I mean, every last detail was Totally thorough, totally well written.

And it was, I think it’s probably one of the book was in the area of sales, probably one of the best sales books I’ve ever written or ever read. And yet, it still wasn’t working. And the reason it wasn’t working is that he had written a textbook. He laid out every single step, everything that needed to be done in the process. And really what his ideal client was looking for was, what’s the transformation? How am I going to get from here to there, they weren’t going to implement it, they weren’t going to do it themselves. And they didn’t certainly have time, because of their role to read a 360 Plus page book.

So it’s very long book very detailed, very dense. That’s probably the biggest mistake that people make, and particularly experts, if you’ve got all this expertise, the kind of the thing you think you need to do is put everything out there, have it all perfectly researched, have it all referenced, you know, and leave no stone unturned. And that usually is just going to put a prospect to sleep.

Mostafa Hosseini  21:07

Interesting. So you don’t want to write a textbook, you just want to show do you do was is it recommended? To use stories? To, to? To demonstrate the possibilities? Is there a limit? Can we do too much? Or too many stories? Or what? What’s your take on that?

Steve Gordon  21:30

So I think you probably can’t have too many stories, but I haven’t found yet a business that has collected more stories than then, you know, we kind of be across that line. Yeah, I mean, most businesses do a really terrible job of collecting stories and case studies and testimonials. You know, one of the things we really look to do is with each chapter, try and pair a client story with that chapter to illustrate the point.

Because if we can put kind of overwhelming proof inside the book, where we’re showing the reader who has a future ideal client for you, that here’s, you know, a series of other people who had the same problem that they’ve got, they went through your unique process, and out the other side, they’re now living that bigger, better future, they’re an example of that transformation, it’s going to really get the the energy created in the mind of that of that reader to want to move forward and reach out and contact you.

Mostafa Hosseini  22:34

Fantastic, fantastic. So you talked about writing a book, yeah. 100 150 pages, what’s the and then you said, we want to design it to be consumed? What’s the right size of a book that people would consume and data? Because I know the average book that is read, what is it 10% 1% Most people don’t read a book.

Steve Gordon  22:54

It’s about 10%. And Amazon can measure all these statistics, because they know how much of Kindle each Kindle book that you read. And so they say it’s about 10%. And, and so if all that were gonna get conveyed is 10% of a longer book, well, let’s just shorten the book. And there’s a balance there. Right? So if a typical, you know, kind of business book is 250 to 350 words, probably writing a 25 to 35 page book is not the right answer, because you’re gonna look like you’re not very credible.

Right? We found that that 100 250 pages is a really good sweet spot. Okay, that that length of book can be read in a couple of hours and in one sitting. And, and that’s really what we’re going for is something that can be read in one sitting, that, you know, if somebody takes it with them on their next, you know, plane flight, they can read it on the plane and be done at the end and make a decision. And that that’s what we’re going for. Love it. So yeah.

Mostafa Hosseini  24:01

So you just shared a really, really valuable piece here. Maybe some of your secret sauce. So about 100 150 pages that they must be able to read it in a couple hours in one sitting. What do you say to people who think the thicker the book, the more credible and the more of an expert there are in someone’s eye?

Steve Gordon  24:27

When you go to buy a book, do you care how many pages it

Mostafa Hosseini  24:31

is? No,

Steve Gordon  24:34

1. You care about the promise that’s made in the title of the book? No. I mean, you’re you’re you’re buying the book because of what the title promises you who’s gonna that’s the only thing the only thing that matters. And so you can get away with a very short book. I do think there is a link between credibility but there are some great books that are a really short length. And so there’s a great book called u squared that I think is 28 pages.

And it’s sold millions of copies. A really good book by Richard Kosh, who wrote all the 8020 books, he’s got one called the breakthrough power of 16x. And it’s basically the 8020 of the 8020 of all of his other books. And it’s about 30 pages, I think. And it’s fantastic, you know, but those, you have to work really hard to create a great book, that’s that length. For most people hitting that sweet spot of 100 250 pages, gives you the opportunity to include stories, because they’re shorter books, you probably won’t have stories in them.

And it gives you an opportunity to get enough detail that you really convey your expertise.

Mostafa Hosseini  25:53

Love it. Love it. So we talked about doing a book in 30 days. And so what’s that? What, what is that process like?

Steve Gordon  26:02

So, you know, one of the things I discovered when I wrote my first book was, so my first book actually wasn’t my first book. I wrote two books before that, except they never got finished. And they didn’t get they didn’t get finished, because like most first time authors, I didn’t have a system to follow. And I would get really excited about an idea, I would do kind of a rough outline. And then I would just start writing. And I get a couple of chapters in and think, Oh, this is pretty good. And I come back the next day, and I’d be lost.

You know, and I never made it very far. And what I discovered, when I wrote, The first book that got published unstoppable referrals was that I needed a really detailed structure to the book. And I needed a process for writing. And so I created this very detailed outline and structure for the book. And we have a process that we take our clients through now to, to create that and, and get it to the point where when you’re writing, all you have to do is kind of open up the book framework and answer the next question. And that’s kind of in line.

And there’s some magic about just being able to show up and answer a question. The brain can’t stand an answered question. And so if all you’re doing as you’re trying to write the book is, look at the next question and answer it. And each answer is maybe just a few paragraphs, it now becomes very quick to write the book. So what I would find when I was writing that first book is, I would get up at like five o’clock in the morning before the kids were up, because our kids were much younger, and they were all still at home. And I needed to I needed like an hour a day before they they would you know, be up in the day would start.

And I would I would knock out a bunch of these questions that I had written in my outline. And in 30 days, an hour a day, I had that book written. That was number one. Uh huh. So book number two took eight hours, start to finish, start to finish. Now, granted, I had become a much better writer and a much faster writer, not everybody is going to do that. But following this process, even people who have who look at themselves, and they say, I’m not a very good writer, when they follow the process, and we create the structure, they can create their book in about 30 minutes a day, over 30 days or so.

Mostafa Hosseini  28:34

Wow. So you could actually, you know, I could see that. Like, if I if I have a bunch of questions that I have to answer. If I grab, like, I know, I use this quite a bit like the text voice to text kind of thing on my phone. If you put in a question for me, I’ll talk it out. And then I could get into an editor to fix it up. I’ll be done in no time. And that makes it very simple. That makes it very simple. But then there’s a I bet there’s this other pieces that they need to have in the book that would make it the you guys do. So it’s not just like, answer five questions, and you’re done.

Steve Gordon  29:08

No, I mean, we ended up with, you know, with dozens and dozens of questions, actually, you know, for every little, you know, every few paragraphs of the book, there’s another question that’s prompting them for what they should put in. Because what we found is that if you go too far between one of those questions, we kind of use them as like mileposts along the way. If you go too far, they the brain starts to get lost, and you start going down these rabbit holes, and then you end up with a book that’s disorganized, and and hard to follow.

And so by really being strategic about how we create those questions up front, that’s what speeds it up. And we want to do that, again. Tying it all back to that original framework, you know, and so it’s not, it’s not that we just want any question in there. We want to make sure that it ties back to that original framework. So the beginning of the book, the first few chapters were dealing with the big problem and But consequences of that problem, and then we’re taking them through, you know, five to seven chapters that describe the unique mechanism for that business.

And then at the end, what does the future look like? So it’s all got to be tied to that framework.

Mostafa Hosseini  30:15

For sure. Love it, love it. And so let’s say that we write the book, we edited the cover, and everything is designed, what do we go? How do we go about launching it? What are some best ways and best practices there? Sure.

Steve Gordon  30:29

So there’s two approaches to launching it. And the first is the Go big or go home approach. And this is what most people think that they need to do. And the truth of the matter is very few books are going to actually make a bestseller list. Virtually any book can be an Amazon Best Seller. In fact, we’ve got a really easy strategy for that. But to get to the New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, and USA Today lists, very few books are actually going to make it their most don’t have the market for that. And most business owners who write a book don’t need that.

They just need to be famous in their community, famous in their little part of the market. So the Go big or go home strategy, what that ends up doing is it ends up costing you a lot of money, and getting you to do a lot of things that don’t produce a lot of value. So we we’ve developed something a little bit of a different approach. We call it the inverted Viral Launch. And inverted, the inverted Viral Launch Viral Launch. Okay, what we want is we want the book to go viral really quickly, with in the the community that is closest to you.

And that’s with people who’ve already expressed an interest in working with you in the last two years. That’s the people who are in your network, who are your biggest fans, that’s with your your existing customer base, because they’re going to look at the fact that you read a book, and it’s going to validate for them why they’re working with you. Yeah, I really haven’t. You know, I’m working with Mostafa, and he just wrote a book, he really is the number one expert on fixing your follow up, you know that it’s gonna, it’s gonna instill that feeling in them, like they’ve already made a good decision, and they’re going to want to share it.

And by doing that, what we see is that we get almost instant ROI with our clients. Sometimes before we’re even finished working with them, they’ve been paid for what it costs to produce the book. Because we’re not trying to go get it to a million strangers, we’re trying to go get it to the 100 or 200 or 500 people that are closest to buy 100%

Mostafa Hosseini  32:37

I think there was that book, the famous article about 1000 true fans, saying you don’t need a ton of people to make a big impact, like couple of 100 people, if they share it with their network. Now you have all sudden 1000 people and boom, like within just a few days or a few weeks, you would make a big impact out there and get all sorts of titles like best seller, this and that in Amazon and and, Steve, do people care if it’s a best seller and attracting clients, the

Steve Gordon  33:09

readers don’t care your future clients don’t care. We work with a lot of authors who think that that’s really important. And it’s it’s largely an ego play, you know, for the author, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The good news is it’s very easy to become an Amazon bestseller.

And you know, there’s companies out there that want to charge lots and lots of money to get you there. We teach our clients how to do it in about 30 minutes. I mean, it’s just an easy thing to do on Amazon. Yeah, on Amazon.

Mostafa Hosseini  33:42

Okay, fantastic. So we talked about how people read your book are more eager and qualify and are ready to buy? What would be the same mechanism to, to? So let’s say that I’ve given the book to you. And you’ve given it to a few friends? How do those people come back to me and become customers? What does that process look like? So

Steve Gordon  34:10

a couple of ways that can happen. One way is for me to do all the work of getting the book to those people, right? So if you’re going to share the book with people that, you know, I say, hey, let’s stop and let me make this really easy for you. I’ve got a whole team here who will send the books out just if you’ll give me the addresses, we’ll stick them in the mail for you. And now I know who that’s going to. And I’ve also taken all the work off of you and most clients will be like, Oh, this is great.

I get all the credit and none of the work. And, and so then you know, and then you’re able to follow up and you want to do that respectfully and you know, not, you know, not hound people, but you know, there’s an easy way to do that. The other way to guarantee that you’re going to get response is to put things in the book lead them back to you If, and, and so, you know, oftentimes when you’re writing a book, there are other resources that would be really valuable for the reader. But they just don’t fit in the book very well.

So, you know, one example that we did for one of our clients was a, this spreadsheet, that was like a calculator that helped them figure out, there was a book on finances, and it helped them figure out and calculate, you know, some of their finances. And obviously, we couldn’t put that into the book very easily, but really, really valuable for the reader to go through that exercise. And so we made that available on a website, they go to the website, they opt in to get it, and now you know, who’s reading your book.

And so there are usually opportunities to put one or more of those sorts of really great resources into the book to generate leads. And then we also put throughout the book, and for sure, at the end of the book, a listing of the other ways that you can help, you know, and a listing of the ways that you work with people, if you’ve got different programs, what are the different programs? And how can people find out about them? And you’ve got the chance then to really describe those in a lot of detail.

Mostafa Hosseini  36:16

Love it. Steve, is it better to print a book? Or does Amazon Kindle work? I guess you get the question asked all the time, I

Steve Gordon  36:24

get that question a lot. I’m a big believer in physical books. I’ll be the bookshelf behind me. Some of those are books that I’ve written. And then on this side are books we’ve done for clients and, and so imagine that, you know, you’ve been able to send a physical book to someone, and now they’re going to put it on a bookshelf, or they put it on the corner of their desk, and you’ve just purchased some real estate, or maybe they’ve purchased if they purchased your book. they’ve purchased it for you, they purchase some physical real estate in their world. And that’s got tremendous value. So about two years after my first book was released,

I got a sales call booked from a guy in the UK. And he gets on on the call on Zoom. And he said, I have your book, I’ve never read it, I’m not going to read it. And online, this is the strangest call ever starts a call like that with somebody who’s written a book, right? And he said, A buddy of mine gave me your book, you know, like a couple of years ago. And which is that’s a whole advantage to having a book in and of itself is that here’s someone that I don’t know who got a copy of my book, like the ideas and it, shared them with someone else. And now I’m on a sales call with him. But setting that aside for a second, he had a copy of this book, he put it on his nightstand when he got it.

He’s telling me all of this. He said I’d have it on my nightstand for two years. I look at it every night. And I look at it every morning when I get up. And I haven’t read it yet. But I keep reading the cover and I need what it says on the cover. And it has your name on it had your website your my guy. Email sales call ever.

Mostafa Hosseini  38:13

So I’m guessing the cover is important what it says on it. And they have to title.

Steve Gordon  38:17

Yeah, it’s important.

Mostafa Hosseini  38:22

I don’t think gang if you’re watching or listening title is hugely important. Hugely. Yeah. I mean, that’s. Well, we also don’t don’t judge a book by its cover. But I guess it’s the cover we do.

Steve Gordon  38:35

We just buy the cover and the title all day long, all day long.

Mostafa Hosseini  38:39

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, what I like about a physical book is that you haven’t physical presence in their on their desk. I probably have. I have a bunch of books around. But then they seem to come across the book. And if it’s nice, like you said they could read it maybe two years later, and one day, they’d be like, maybe I should read this book, or maybe, Steve, I’ve bought blocks, or I’ve had books that I haven’t read it. But later on I realized that I have a problem.

And then I realized that I have a book on that problem. And they went open the book and I read it. So maybe they’re not going to read it now. But later they’re going to come to it. But like your perfect story here, they just read the book. They’re like, I need to talk to Steve, this guy is going to fix my problem. And

Steve Gordon  39:25

exactly, and that’s, to me, that’s the magic of this as a tool. And that’s one of the things that we’ve just discovered over the last eight years since I published my first book and we see with our clients as well. Books are like planting seeds. And you know, for for most business owners, they’re probably doing a lot of the selling themselves. And that takes a lot of time I used to do a ton of networking. And I don’t do any anymore, but I used to do a ton of networking.

And I’d spent eight hours 10 hours a week away from my family away from my business just trying to meet people. And that’s hard manual labor. I was, I was taking all of my great ideas and my best thinking, and I was putting it in the most expensive packaging that we could ever come up with. And that was me. Right? And instead of me going out and trying to sell the ideas, you package the ideas like this, and you send these out. And these now are little seeds of ideas that that you plant. And you do it very inexpensively. So a book like this to print it, to $3 a copy. Pretty cheap.

Mostafa Hosseini  40:39

Do you have a minimum quantity for that? One? To three bucks for one? Yeah. Holy moly. That is the nicest business card you can get for two or three bucks.

Steve Gordon  40:55

Yeah. And so you know, one of the things we really challenge our clients to do is, how many of these things can you get out in the world, and how quickly because as you get them out there and you plant all these seeds, some of them are going to come back to you right away. And kinda like that story I shared about the guy on the nightstand. That guy came back two years later. And I had no idea that he had even gotten the book.

Mostafa Hosseini  41:22

Interesting. Um, so speaking of how many can you get out, we talked about getting five to 15 qualified high ticket prospects with zero ad spend. I mean, he shared a little bit about saying sending out with your friend and going through the contacts. What is the strategy there to get five to 15 prospects a week zero ad spend, for

Steve Gordon  41:47

for most of our clients, if they have that kind of referral conversation that we went through with their clients and with the people in their network, do a couple of those conversations a week, they’re gonna get to that level of, of lead flow pretty quickly, usually within about 60 days.

And then if you want to make sure that that happens, the thing that we would encourage you to do on top of that is build a list of the 100 prospects that you would love to do business with. And sometimes this is a challenge for people.

Mostafa Hosseini  42:22

But I think Russell Brunson calls that dream 100 List

Steve Gordon  42:25

dream 100 Yeah, Chet Holmes has written about it, a lot of people have, you know, they talked about this, but then send out a book a day. If you send one book a day, over the course of a year, you just every working day, that’s 210 books that are out. Most businesses don’t need that

Mostafa Hosseini  42:44

any leads. They can’t even handle that many leads.

Steve Gordon  42:48

No, as you know, because they can’t follow up with them. But when you turn it into a habit like that, and you’ve got a few easy ways, you’ve got a great easy referral conversation that you’re gonna have a couple times a week. And now you’ve got, you know, five or if you really want to get crazy, send two books out a day, and you’ve got 10 new prospects that you’re reaching out to pretty soon, all of that starts to come back usually within you know, 3060 90 days, you begin to see that lead flow coming back in and if you keep up with that, it’s just unstoppable.

Mostafa Hosseini  43:21

Love it. Let’s talk about your gift and then we’re gonna do Mustapha exposed and coached session here. Please tell us about your your gift here. And what people are gonna get?

Steve Gordon  43:36

Yeah, so we’re giving everybody a copy of my new book, The million dollar book, which talks about, you know, a lot of the stuff we’ve gone through here, but in a lot more detail. So it’s going to take you through what to put in your book. It’s going to take you through how to market your book and kind of the three most important funnels that you want to think about as you as you put your book out there.

And really kind of give you the blueprint for everything that we’ve talked about today. So folks can go and grab that at the link that’s on the screen there and in the chat, and they can download it right away.

Mostafa Hosseini  44:12

Love it. So the book is called The million dollar book by my friend, Steve Gorton. The link is in the show descriptions of this show the link of the show on social media and any platform would have the link download the book today get how many pages do you have in their book?

Steve Gordon  44:33

That’s a great question. I should know off the top my head.

Mostafa Hosseini  44:34

But is that like a one sitting like a couple hours? Yeah, 125 pages. All right, perfect. And get all the secret sauce and everything that he has got going because obviously he knows what he’s doing. How many guys how many. How many books have you guys published so far?

Steve Gordon  44:52

We are just over 100 In the last year.

Mostafa Hosseini  44:56

Oh nice. So you obviously know what you’re talking about. We’ve done a couple of books at this point. So let’s do a Mustapha exposed and coached. Are you open to that?

Steve Gordon  45:06

Yeah, let’s do it.

Mostafa Hosseini  45:07

Here’s something that’s running in the back of my head. And that is, I don’t know how often you hear this. Sometimes I say to myself, if I write a book, nobody’s gonna read it. Because there’s all those big ass, you know, best sellers and names out there. And who cares about my book?

Steve Gordon  45:24

So there are four levels of engagement with a book. All of them are good. We’ve talked about some of them. So the first and most basic level is somebody doesn’t even get a copy of your book, but they just see that you’ve written a book and that you’re an author. And you’ve now elevated in their status there. Yeah, yeah.

And that might be all that a prospect needs to go. Yeah, that’s my god. The second level is they see that you have a book, and they get a copy of it. And kind of like the guy who had it on the nightstand. Never read it. Okay, great. We’ve already shown that that turns into $2 in your bank account, okay. So they don’t have to read the book. The third level is that they get your book, and they read it. And that’s really good. Right?

The fourth level is they get your book, they read it, they book a conversation with you. And on that conversation, they spend the whole time selling you on which parts of your system are perfect for them. And I have that happened several times a week. All four of those levels are good, I’ll take all four of them. You don’t have to have them read the book.

Mostafa Hosseini  46:37

Love it. You told me. As soon as you started talking with the first level, I started coming up with my own solutions. That people, okay, good, the fact that you have a book, but most most of my competition, though, probably don’t even have a book. And if there are two guys, where everything is equal, one has written a book the other person hasn’t haven’t doesn’t have a book. Which one are you more likely to lean towards and have a conversation with your,

Steve Gordon  47:04

you’re gonna go with the guy who wrote the book, or the book. So and I’ll tell you, I talk with 10 to 15 business owners a week who want to write a book. Here’s the thing that I hear from them. Most all of them have had it on their bucket list. And they’ll use that term, they’ll say, it’s been on my bucket list for two years, or five years or 10 years, the record so far is 27 years. guy told me I’ve been thinking about doing this for 27 years.

And I’m like, Okay, wow, let’s get it done. But there are an awful lot of business owners out there who aspire to write a book, and never will, even with all the millions of books that are being published now. Right, more books being published now than at any point in history.

And even with all of those, there are going to be far more people who never write a book than people who write a book. Okay, but those business owners that you’re selling to that, you know, that we’re you go and write a book now, because they in the back of their mind, they’ve kind of thought about it, they aspire to it. Now they’re looking up to you, you’re the leader.

Mostafa Hosseini  48:13

Interesting. Very interesting. Let’s talk about some some some examples of people that you have worked with and some of the success stories on what they experienced as a result of working with you have churned over over 100 people. What, what is the transformation? What are the stories that you see every day?

Steve Gordon  48:39

Sure. So one of our clients is named John, and he’s in financial services. And we’ve actually written three books with him now. And I mean, he’s got so many success stories, because he uses our referral process and send some books out, you know, does a lot of the things that we’ve talked about here, and he’ll have people come in, who got the book, and we helped him write his first book, nine years ago, 10 years ago now.

 And he’ll have people come in with that first book, who maybe got it five or six or seven years ago, and they weren’t ready yet. But they come in and they’ve got a dog eared copy that’s old. It’s got coffee stains on it. They’ve highlighted stuff, they’ve got sticky notes, and they come in and they know exactly what they want to buy. Okay, and for somebody who’s selling his case, life insurance and investments and annuities and things like that. He doesn’t have to prove to them that he knows what he’s talking about or an expert.

They’re coming in and saying, I really hope that you can help me. That’s a totally that’s a game changing conversation if you’re in his business as a financial adviser. He uses the books as kind of an initial way to get people’s interest, and then invites people who get his book too. Come to in person seminars that they put on. And they’ll put over 100 people in a seminar. And this is not the kind of seminar that most financial advisors do, where they spend a lot of money, buying a big steak dinner and all this other stuff. People are coming because they want to hear from the author of the book. So that’s one success story.

On one end, on the other end of things, we worked with a lady named Mary, and she was just starting a consulting business. She’s an educational consultant, and works with parents who homeschool their kids, helps them design custom programs. And she didn’t even really have a business at this stage didn’t have clients and she was trying to launch this new business. But she was really great at what she did.

And so we took all of her philosophies and helped her craft those and kind of organize them into the structure that we talked about. And she started sharing that book, and she got major media coverage within two months. And that just really fueled the growth of her business. And so she’s gone from no business to having a thriving consulting business in just about six months. I

Mostafa Hosseini  51:11

love it. And once you have a book, Getting on podcasts and getting some media exposure and whatnot becomes a lot easier. Oh, absolutely. The author of blah, blah, book, you know, experts in this field, would you like to have me as a guest? It’s a lot. I think the yeses on that question will increase significantly once once you have a book?

Steve Gordon  51:32

Absolutely, they do. Yeah, I mean, on this show, you

Mostafa Hosseini  51:35

could probably give away a bunch of books. Yeah, you

Steve Gordon  51:38

give away a bunch of books, you get a lot of leads. And so it’s great, you know, and on our podcast, we only have people on who are authors or who are referred in. And so if you’re not an author, unless you’re referred, you’re not getting on the show, because we get so many inbound requests inquiries, I, we have to have a filter. And so those are the two filters. Fantastic.

Mostafa Hosseini  52:02

You have dropped a lot of value and a lot of amazing nuggets that people could could use right away. Here’s a question with a simple Marketing Show, give us a simple marketing strategy, that people could do something that we could do in 1015 minutes, and potentially see some results.

Steve Gordon  52:23

So I’ll tell you that probably the simplest thing that you could do is look at who has been in your, in your pipeline over the last 90 days, or 180 days, and send them an email. And this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the book, but you can do it in the next 10 to 15 minutes. I’m stealing a little bit out of your book and then follow up. But there’s probably probably some money hiding in that list of people and most people will ignore him.

So that’s the easiest thing to do in 10 or 15 minutes. If you want to spend a little bit more time than that, then I would get together your best ideas and put them in into a book or if you can’t get a book done, put them into, you know, some kind of a form that you can easily share. Let your ideas go do the selling for you.

Mostafa Hosseini  53:16

Love it. Sure. Third idea back in on what you just said.

Steve Gordon  53:22

Yeah, so you know, I’d actually combine the two. Yes, you’ve, if you’ve put your best ideas together into something. I mean, I did this when I first started this business 13 years ago. And nobody knew me, I was going into a new industry. And I wrote down the things that I had done in my first business that had made us successful in marketing, because I was gonna go try and sell those ideas to people. And I started sending them out to people in my network.

And you know that that got us enough clients to get started, then so taking those great ideas and emailing to the people that have been in your pipeline, it will almost always shake something loose.

Mostafa Hosseini  54:04

Absolutely. And if you got a book, you could just email a PDF copy and say, Hey, I just wrote this look, hey, here’s you download it. Let me know what you think. Right? And then you have another reason to follow up and say, Hey, did you like it? What do you think, you know, well,

Steve Gordon  54:18

and if you’ve got a physical book and this is a secret, like we’ll FedEx these are send them priority mail. And then getting someone on a phone call after you sent them a priority package when you get them on the phone is just a piece of cake.

Mostafa Hosseini  54:37

After you do a follow up call, like what will you do? Say hey, would you like to have a chat about that? How much time would you give them? Well as if given it’s a two hour thing? Would you follow up? Like how many days would you give it before your follow up?

Steve Gordon  54:49

So if we’re mailing it will, the way we time all these follow ups out is seven days. And the reason they’re seven days yeah. reason is we don’t have to worry about it as a follow on a weekend. So if we mail it on a Monday, we, the follow up calls happen on a Monday. Okay? And that’s enough time for it to be delivered. And I don’t care if they read it or not. Because when we have that conversation, usually it’s just hey, did you I sent you a copy of the book?

Yes. And your package together? And most time, they’ll say, yes. Great to have you just read the book. Most time, they’re gonna say, No, that’s okay. Hey, would you like me to give you a 15 minute executive overview from the author? Or if I’m having somebody on my team do that, hey, would you like me to schedule your 15 minutes with the author, he’ll do a great little executive overview and save you the time of reading the book.

Mostafa Hosseini  55:41

Amazing, like you have another great reason to follow up, say, hey, what do you think? Can you have a chat? You know, yadda yadda? Yadda? Love it. Can I ask you a few personal questions before we wrap up?

Steve Gordon  55:52

Do it? Yeah, that’s all right.

Mostafa Hosseini  55:54

What say no new thing you have tried recently.

Steve Gordon  55:57

Bigger, it’s a new thing. I have tried resize

Mostafa Hosseini  56:02

as small as a cup of coffee as big as going to the moon.

Steve Gordon  56:05

Well, as small as a cup of coffee. A good friend of mine turned me on to a great new Ethiopian single source coffee at my favorite coffee shop. But that’s pretty small. In terms of a big new thing. That that I’ve tried here, lately? And that’s a great question. I’m trying to think what about what have I been doing?

Mostafa Hosseini  56:32

Look at technology as software? Yeah,

Steve Gordon  56:36

I’ll tell you what we’ve been experimenting a lot with is, is chat GPT.

Mostafa Hosseini  56:42

I was coming up next. Yeah.

Steve Gordon  56:45

And here’s what I’ll tell you about that. It’s not going to replace humans writing books? Because that’s the question I get all the time. Yeah. It will easily get 10x or 100x. Better. But here’s the thing that makes your book, whoever’s listening to this your book really great. You have unique insights that a computer can never replicate, based on your experience, and the meaning that you bring to those experiences, professional and personal.

And that will never be replaced by a computer. Yeah. Chat. GPT is super cool. I was playing with it on a zoom call with a colleague about two hours ago. And we asked him a question. I was amazed it had an answer for us. So

Mostafa Hosseini  57:44

fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah, I played around with Chad GPT as well. Got it. I actually did get it to write a chapter for me. What it wasn’t me. Yeah. You know, I want some, this is what I learned from navall Raava Khan, you know, and of all, yeah, yeah. So he said, you want something that is human. So and you touched on it as well.

You want something that is so uniquely you that nobody can replicate. Right? Right. And, and then there’s already code and software out there that picks on whether this content is AI or not. And I don’t want people to pick up a book and say, Oh, this is so boring, like, this is obvious. Is this stuff? Is this chuck GPT? I don’t want that question. I don’t I want it to be so uniquely me, that people will just, you know, relate to and get it get a feel for who I am. And what I do, basically, right.

Steve Gordon  58:38

And you know, the way that the systems are working, and they’re just predicting, you give it three words or 300 words, and it’s just predicting what words should come next. And it’s sometimes it’s right, and sometimes it’s not. But again, it’s just putting words down, it doesn’t understand the meaning. Yeah, and, and it can’t make meaning out of it.

And part of what makes a really great business book that’s going to help someone and it’s going to bring leads to your business is when you can translate something and put meaning to some ideas for a particular type of potential client. Absolutely.

Mostafa Hosseini  59:16

Steve, give me two of your favorite books, please.

Steve Gordon  59:21

My two favorite, the Bible I read every day, and the other is thinking Grow Rich and I read that probably twice a year.

Mostafa Hosseini  59:29

Grow Rich, love it. What’s one advice that made a big, big impact on business or life for you?

Steve Gordon  59:38

Man, there’s a lot. But probably the biggest biggest. Yeah, biggest impact is actually a quote from President Calvin Coolidge. And it’s around the idea of persistence. And he says that persistence is kind of the only the idea of the quote is persistent. is really the only thing that you can rely on that that talent won’t get you there that, you know, skill, knowledge, education qualifications, none of that will really get you there.

Because you can look at examples of really smart people who never made it or really talented people that never made it. And the people that make it are the ones that persist. And so that’s not the exact quote. But that’s the idea. And I think that’s the that’s the that’s the only thing that guarantees that you win 100% 100%.

Mostafa Hosseini  1:00:32

Somebody recently, we were talking to discuss him, I think you were in the discussion, curious, passing the the persistent test with this show that we’ve done about 120 Some episodes over two or three years. And so something I’m happy about? Yeah, I enjoy this.

Steve Gordon  1:00:54

That’s a huge milestone. I mean, I think most podcasts

Mostafa Hosseini  1:00:59

die out around six episodes. That’s what I hear. Yeah, you know, it’s a lot of work to do this. And you’ve got 180, or 90 of them or so. So

Steve Gordon  1:01:08

we have done at this stage, actually, that numbers a little bit old. We’ve done over 200 interviews, and over 300 episodes altogether. Some of those episodes are just me by myself, but yeah, solo episodes. And so we’ve been at it for five years now every week. And and I committed when I started the podcast, I committed to doing it for at least a decade just to see what would happen.

Mostafa Hosseini  1:01:36

Yeah, it’s funny, I was looking, I was looking into Joe Rogan’s podcast, he started back in 2009. And it was around 2015. So seven, eight years later that he actually made it big. And I think a lot of us want to like, become Joe Rogan within 90 days.

Steve Gordon  1:01:55

Right? Yeah, good luck.

Mostafa Hosseini  1:01:57

We forget it or don’t think about that. persistency or the consistency type of test that is there and the time that it takes

Steve Gordon  1:02:07

the key? Absolutely,

Mostafa Hosseini  1:02:09

Steve, if you had a Facebook or a Google ad, where everyone around the globe with access to internet could see your ad. What would your message be? For people of Earth?

Steve Gordon  1:02:21

We do have a bunch of those actually. You do so Oh, yeah, we’ve got we got Facebook ads running all the time. This was

Mostafa Hosseini  1:02:29

a personal message. Oh, a personal message. Yeah, you have a message for people? What would it be?

Steve Gordon  1:02:37

I’m in a stage of life right now where I’m putting a lot of focus on gratitude and practicing gratitude. I think that is that’s a tremendous antidote to fear. You can’t be grateful and in fear at the same time. And so my message would be to practice gratitude daily. Love

Mostafa Hosseini  1:02:54

1. Love it. Steve, this has been absolutely amazing. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom and some of your secret sauce, even though I didn’t get permission to ask for it. But I tried to dig as much as possible. Is there anything that you’d like to share that you wanted to talk about, but we didn’t get a chance? Hey, we

Steve Gordon  1:03:13

covered it all. I just love for as many people as possible to get it again, get a copy of the book, go put it to good use. You know, get get your book out there in the world. If we can help you do that great, but it’ll be a game changer for your business.

It was a game changer. For ours. It’s a game changer for every one of our clients. And so that’s why I put off our secret sauce into the book. I want to get it out to as many people as I can

Mostafa Hosseini  1:03:36

love it. Love it get gang It is a game changer do reach out to Steven his his team, download his book, The million dollar book and go through his his strategy to get the book. I mean, it’s a no no no brainer to have a book. And yeah, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Steve. Again, if you have any questions for me, or Steve, put it in a comment below or do reach out to Steve on LinkedIn or Facebook or other places. He is most likely tagged on most social channels that were going live on and get some help a two or $3 business card is very effective.

Like think about it. And this is probably the most useful business card that you would ever print. Because most business cards do nothing for you. But this one is most likely to get something. And yeah. Again, if you have questions, put them in the comment. Please don’t forget to like and subscribe to the show or share this episode.

Grab the link, send it send it someone that could benefit from writing a book most likely an expert, a consultant, a business owner that is looking to grow leads and get more people in their funnel, send it to them. And we look forward to seeing you on our next episode. Thank you for joining us and we’ll see you next week. Bye now.