How to Build a $400k Marketing Business (Without Hiring a Team)

Most of us think that if you deliver results, everything else will take care of itself. It's not true. If you have a really great product and you do a good job telling people about it, then your business will grow. There's really three pieces to it, getting new leads, converting those leads into clients, and delivering results. This is just how to scale, period. If you have ever struggled to explain what your business does, or you felt like your marketing should be converting better than it is, this might be the most valuable two days you spend this year. Story brand your business live. It's a two-day in-person workshop happening May 7th and 8th in Nashville. That's not a conference. It's a working session where you will build clear messaging for your business, create five survival soundbites that you can use immediately and get direct feedback from Story Brand certified guides who are in the room with you until your message actually makes sense to customers. So far, all of this year's workshops have sold out, so don't miss your chance to attend this May. If you want marketing and messaging that is simpler, clearer, and more effective, just go to storybrand.com/live and join us in Nashville this May. You're listening to the Story Brand podcast based on Donald Miller's best-selling book, Building a Story Brand. The Story Brand framework is made up of seven key elements, all of them anchored in one powerful idea. Your customer is the hero and you are their guide. Each week on the podcast, you'll get exactly what you need to craft clear messaging that connects with more customers and grows your business. Now, let's dive in with your host, Donald Miller. Today's episode of Story Brand podcast is all about growing a $400,000 independent marketing business. Normally, we speak to business owners, business founders everywhere. Today, I want to talk to freelance marketers, independent marketers. However, if you just own a regular business, you're actually going to learn a lot about just growing a business period, but today I do want to focus on independent marketers. The reason is we actually have a certification at Story Brand. The Story Brand Guide Certification, Story Brand Certified Guides. These are freelance marketers that we have certified in our products, Story Brand products, to go out and help people understand the framework and execute a marketing plan that works. The Small Business Owners, after I wrote Building a Story Brand that books sold 1.4 million copies, I got flooded with Small Business Owners saying, "Will you make my website? "Will you?" That's not really what I do. I'm much more wired as a professor. I write books. I teach this framework. Don't actually do the execution part. So I began to certify Story Brand Certified Guides to do that for us. They're all at a directory called MarketingMadeSimple.com. There are hundreds of them. They do great business. We tend to vet them, and so they're the best of the best. Really great community. Since then, though, that was about nine years ago. We have learned what it takes to actually grow an independent marketing business. And today I want to share with you best practices. If you own an independent marketing business, a freelance marketing business, you are going to learn a lot because we have figured out a lot based on best practices. And I'll do this walking you through the three-phase, 15-step journey. We take every independent marketing business to get to that $400,000 mark. Now why $400,000? The main reason is I've met multiple guides in our program. One Chris Jones was just talking to her the other day. She went from $100,000 in annual revenue to $400,000 in annual revenue. She's able to deliver a fantastic value for her clients. She's just done a fantastic job. She doesn't even have a virtual assistant. She does this without an assistant. So I picked the number $400,000 because it seems like we had so many guides who were able to get there without starting an agency, without hiring a team, continuing to have good work life balance, offering fantastic value for their clients. Really great return on investment. It's just the sweet spot. Many of our guides have multi-million dollar agencies. Many of them go well over $400,000, but to me it's that $400,000 mark. It's kind of where you're asking yourself, "Do I actually need more money than this?" I like my client load. I'm not having to deal with a ton of clients. I'm not spending a bunch of plates. I'm able to sleep at night. I don't have a staff to deal with. It's a nice place to be. If you're wired like me, you've got to go way past 400 grand because you just, you full throttle, you love building things. But most guides are part-time artists in some ways and they want work life balance. In today's episode, I'm going to walk you through the three phases and 15 steps that we guide our guides through inside of the Story Brand Certified program. If you're not in our program, it's still going to help you understand what steps you need to take. If you don't have a freelance marketing business, this is just a small business guide. Some of it is specific to freelance marketers, but it's also how to get your business from kind of a side hustle into that $400,000 mark. If you have a business that's already at half a million or a million or five million, the exact same steps will get you to 10 million, 20 million. This is just how to scale your business, period. All right, let's get into it. The Certified Guide program starts with three phases. Those phases are attract leads in phase one, close leads in phase two, and deliver results in phase three. Those are the three foundational pillars of growing a business. You've got to have leads coming in. You have to be able to close those leads efficiently and effectively. The whole thing falls apart if you don't deliver incredible results to your clients. I'm wondering, do you understand your business that way? There's really three pieces to it. Getting new clients, getting new leads, converting those leads into clients and delivering results. Most of us think and it's a lie that if you deliver results, everything else will take care of itself. It's not true. I call this the field of dreams fantasy. If you build it, they will come. If you create really great products, people will line up out the door. Absolutely 100% false. If you have a really great product that delivers results and you do a good job telling people about it, then your business will grow. Most people, they skip that second part. They don't tell people about it. Let's do a little deep dive into this. First of all, you've got to attract leads. You've got to build a lead engine that supports that $400,000 business. The way I do this is I say, okay, if I'm going to do $400,000 in business, I need three retainers at X. I need four full sales funnel creation packages at X. I need to deliver one workshop in which this number of people come and pay this much money. In other words, I'm taking the actual products that I sell and I'm reverse engineering $400,000 in revenue and then I actually know what I need to sell. The reason I do that is because each of those products probably needs its own lead generator. Now if 100 people download my lead generator and I know that I'm going to close 10% of those, then I know how many leads I need to get, how many leads I need to close and then how many products I need to sell in order to hit $400,000. It all starts with those leads. You need these leads. The very first thing we need is leads. What we do to help you get leads is first, we help you come up with your foundational sound bites. In order to grow a business, the foundation of a story brand philosophy is this. You need to disseminate a message that is zero cognitive load. You need to disseminate sound bites about the problems that you solve that mean people don't have to think in order to understand what you can do for them. The only way to do that is short repeatable sound bites. There are actually five sound bites that we help our story brand certified guides create. Every guide is custom. They all deal with different problems and so they have a custom set of sound bites. Then they actually, that's step one. We help you come up with those sound bites. These are repeatable things that you say at a cocktail party. They're on your website. They're in your lead generator. You open and close your YouTube videos with them. They're in the bio of your social media. You disseminate these sound bites almost like a campaign trying to get people to memorize them. This is the by far. The most effective way to grow a business by far is disseminate that confusing, complex message that you are putting out in the world that everybody is ignoring. You actually distill those into repeatable sound bites. That's step one. Step two is we give you a conversion website kit. We help you take those sound bites and we explain to you exactly what to do with them on a website. Your website needs to be a sales team. It's not a clearing house for your portfolio. People mess this up all the time, especially creatives. They just put all their work on there and hope that that's going to do it. Your website needs to sell for you. It needs to explain the value that you bring to the client. It needs to hit those curiosity touch points where they say, "I wonder if this person can help me survive. One of this person can help me make money. One of this person can help me reach into a certain demographic. It looks like they're good at that. Maybe I'll give them a call." And then once you have those things, once you have your sound bites and your website, you can actually start pointing attention toward your sound bite and your website. You do that with what we call the authority content system. This is a system that we give our story brand certified guides. That helps them make YouTube videos, social media posts. You can create LinkedIn articles on and on. Ways of making yourself what a friend of mine calls five mile famous. And five mile famous just means you're the authority in your area or the authority in your demographic that you're serving. Whatever that is, you need a system of content delivery that brings attention to your sales funnel. Your landing page, your lead generator, your emails, those are sales funnels, right? But nothing's going to happen until you bring attention to those. Yes, you can use paid ads. But we do very little paid ads at story brand and have a very successful company. Why? Because we use an authority content system to create YouTube videos, podcasts, social media posts, LinkedIn articles that drive our sales funnel. So that's step three. Step four is the smart nurture engine. A lot of people don't know that up to 85% of your customers will not do business with you until they've heard from you consistently for a year. That is one to two times a week for a year, 12 months up to 85%. Why is that? Well, think about the brands that you've bought from. Maybe you saw something on Instagram. Maybe it was a pair of shoes that you liked or, you know, who knows what it was. You clicked on it. You actually gave them your email address and exchanged for 10% off on their first order on your first order, but you didn't place that order. Then they started emailing you text messaging you posting ads on Instagram that you saw. How many, honestly, how many weeks was it? How many months was it before you finally placed an order? What they did was they warmed you up. They gave you value over time. They reminded that you ex that you that they exist and they created trust. It's only when you trust a brand that you buy from them. But how does trust happen? It was a formula for trust. Trust equals value over time. So you have to stay in touch with that customer. The best way to do this traditionally and still today is one to two emails a week for a year. 52 to 104 emails. When I create a robust nurture campaign, that's how many emails I am writing. You need this as a freelance marketer. You need to be in touch. You're either sitting out a newsletter or you're sitting out emails, whatever it is, you need to be in consistent touch with that customer for at least one year. What we do with our storyboard and certified guys is we give them those emails. They can drop them into AI, customize them, rewrite them themselves, plug them into their CRM and go. But these are proven emails that close business as a freelance marketer. Next is the evergreen authority webinar. This is the fifth thing that we do to help you get leads. We give you a keynote deck that you can click through in the form of a webinar to close or to actually attract a lot of leads all in one place. Plus, when you're on camera delivering a webinar, you are the authority. So we're positioning you as the authority. You don't have to think about what to say. We actually give you a deck and you click through it. Let me go back through the five things that we help you do. First, those foundational sound bites. Second, you put those sound bites into a website that works, landing pages that works. Then you bring attention to that sales funnel through an authority content system linked in YouTube, social media. Then if they don't buy, you nurture them for a year so that they stay warm and familiar. Then you actually occasionally present a webinar which you can close sales right there on the webinar or even attract more leads. Five things that you need to do that every small business needs to do, but especially freelance marketers in this case, in order to grow a $400,000 business. All right, let's actually talk about closing those leads. Now you've got a pipeline of leads flowing in. What can you do to close those leads? All right, the very first thing and arguably the most important thing is the pitch deck. This is a keynote presentation that you click through that has a specific formula that invites the customer into a story in which they realize they need a sales funnel and they're going to buy one from you. This is very formulaic. It's strategically created. They actually give our guides a pitch deck that they can customize for their specific business. But this is the number one thing. Why? One is answer so many questions and makes things so clear for a potential client that they have zero cognitive dissonance. They feel extremely clear about what you can do for them and they are much more likely to say yes right there on the call or it shortens the sales cycle dramatically. That's the first reason a pitch deck is important. The second reason a pitch deck is important is it helps you understand your offer. Just by creating the pitch deck and clicking through it, you better understand the value and can communicate that succinctly to any potential client. Next, you got to offer them something. We have an offer architecture framework. Step seven in phase two is the offer architecture framework. There is a way to structure an offer so that it is perceived as very high value to the client and actually helps them understand the value that they are going to get. I'll give you a little clue. It is products delivered inside a fixed timeline. Products delivered inside a fixed timeline. If they're going to experience a six week small business marketing overhaul, they are much more likely to buy that than a website. Why? Because it's a marketing overhaul and each week we have deliverables and we're going to hit those deliverables and this allows you to charge a premium because you're doing something much bigger than just delivering a website but there is a way to architect that offer and we give that to you in the story ran certified guide program. Next is the deal closing proposal system. You actually send out a proposal but that proposal needs to be designed beautifully like a PDF and needs to include very specific information in a specific order. You are basically repeating the deal points you put in the pitch deck inside of a custom proposal and inviting the customer into a story. This is by the way the third way that we're helping you close that deal. Now step nine is the retention and growth playbook after you close the deal. What you actually want to do is you want to turn these into retainers and you actually want to offer a ladder of services that end up with you as their fractional marketing director or fractional CMO. This is where pretty much all if not the overwhelming majority like upwards of 90% of our story ran certified guides who are doing that $400,000 number they're working in short term retainers as well as one off projects. We teach you to do that how to sell yourself as a fractional. The client testimony testimonial referral system is step 10. If you do not have case studies, if you're not regularly collecting testimonials, if you're not putting your testimonies into testimonials into Instagram, if you're not emailing testimonies to your clients in that 52 to 104 email nurture engine, then you're not making use of one of your most powerful assets to close deals. People believe you 25% when you say you can change their lives and deliver value, they believe a client 75%. Some of your best sales will happen in testimonials and also you want to incentivize referrals. When you join the StoryBurn Certified Guide program, we give you a system in which you can do that. Let's talk about phase three and it's by far the most important. That is deliver actual results. I mean make small businesses a ton of money if they hire you as a marketer. This is the giant difference between a StoryBurn certified guide and everybody else. We harp this in our certification so hard and it's this. Nobody's paying you to be an artist. They're paying you to grow their business. Nobody's paying you for creativity. They're paying you for results. Now you can be creative and you can be an artist, but if you aren't delivering results for that client, you should not be called a StoryBurn Certified Guide. If somebody spends $100,000 on marketing, they should make a million dollars off of you. They should make a million dollars that they wouldn't have made if you wouldn't have created that sales funnel. That's where StoryBurn is different. That's where our marketers are known as really strong business people and really strong business partners. How do we help our StoryBurn Certified Guides deliver great results? The first is the SoundBite Strategy Delivery System. What this is, it's a StoryBurn Sales funnel license. If you go to StoryBurnSalesFunnel.com right now, it explains all of what a StoryBurn Sales funnel is and all of the products you can buy to create a StoryBurn Sales funnel. Step 11 is we license you to deliver specific StoryBurn products that work. Next is the Fractional Leadership Positioning System. This is how you position yourself as a fractional CMO or a fractional marketing director at that retainer level. What to deliver on behalf of your clients, that is extreme value to them and gets them the best possible return. Then there's the StoryBurn Messaging Keynote and Workshop. We actually give you a robust keynote that you can click through in the form of a paid workshop. People can literally pay you to come in and deliver this workshop. It's also great for breakout sessions and existing conferences and webinars. You can use this as a secondary webinar, but people get paid $5,000. Our guides get paid all the time. Five and $10,000 to deliver the same keynote that I deliver. Why? StoryBrand is the rock star, not you, not me. It's the actual framework and people will pay to hear it at their conference. Then there's the own and niche playbook, not all, not even most, but many of our guides have gone from, well, Joshua Taylor went from 1 million to 10 million when he niched down on just carwash owners. Can you imagine you're doing marketing for small businesses in the end when you say, "I'm not going to work with anybody that I own a carwash." You actually 10x from 1 million to 10 million in revenue. It's a powerful play to niche down. Not everybody wants to do it. Not everybody has to do it, but if you want to do it, step 14 in the StoryBrand Certified Guide program teaches you how to do it, gives you the marketing collateral and the decision-making collateral to choose a niche and market yourself as an expert in that space. Then finally, step 15, if you want to scale up past $400,000 into the millions, we have an agency growth plan. You actually grow your independent, solo independent marketing business into a full, bledged agency. This takes you into the millions of dollars a year. Not for everybody. If you want to run a team, it's a whole different skill set from creating sales funnels to running a team as a completely different skill set. It's one that I've enjoyed learning how to do, managing a team. It's expanded my skill set that I can lead a team now, took forever. I didn't know how to do it at first, but if you want to do that, you can and we give you a playbook. That's it. If you take these 15 steps in these three phases, it is nearly impossible for you not to have at least a $400,000 business and honestly, probably a lot bigger than that. One final thing that I want to say to all independent marketers, freelance marketers and also just business owners who are still listening to me. It is easier to run a $400,000 business than $100,000 business. I know that because it's easier for me to run a $10,000,000 business than a $1,000,000 business. I remember when my business was a $1,000,000 business. I had no time. I was always on airplanes. Thankfully I wasn't a dad, but my wife wish she could see more of me. Why? The systems were not in place. The processes were not in place. The pitch deck wasn't there that closes sales easier. The lead generators weren't there that bring in a pipeline of leads while I sleep. The sales and nurture emails weren't closing clients and warming up clients. None of that was in place. Because of it, I was doing it all myself. The systems and processes that you need to install in order to get to $400,000 give you work life balance. It's just an added benefit of having the systems and processes in place. All right. You're probably saying done. You've done an effective job. I wouldn't mind being a story brand certified guide. What do I need to do? Go to storybrand marketing business.com. Story brand marketing business.com. I've got a checklist there that will help you check off the things that you need to do to get to a $400,000 independent marketing business. Story brand marketing business.com download the checklist and we will go from there. If you say done, I just want to be a story brand certified guide. Where do I go? Story brand.com/guide. We will take you through the three phases and the 15 steps and you'll join a community of hundreds of the most successful independent marketers in the world. I hope this has been helpful for you, especially if you own an independent marketing business. I hope that this episode has helped you understand how to grow your independent marketing business. And again, we'd always love to have you as a guide. Thanks for listening to the Story brand podcast. No matter where you are in your marketing and messaging journey, get the tools, the training, and the support you need to start clarifying that message at storybrand.com. Don't forget to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. And if you're watching on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and then leave a comment letting us know what resonated with you and what we can impact to help your business grow in a future episode. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next week.