How to Create a Service Business to Create Profits Quickly with Troy Broussard

SEO Expert, Information and Affiliate Marketer, Speaker, Online Entrepreneur, Avid Writer, and Owner of TopMarketingStrategies.com – Troy Broussard

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Troy talks about really finding your strengths, when you start your business or if you are experiencing a slow down. Then Troy gives step by step information on how to create a service business. What to do first, what to charge and how to develop that confidence to charge what you are worth.

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Transcript:

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy, and today we have Troy Broussard on the show. I met Troy at Dot Com Xpo, which is Ryan Lee's event, who I also interviewed. He's a business strategist. He has Top Marketing Strategies dot com, and he knows a ton of information about building huge businesses. I'm really excited to have him on the show today. Thank you so much for coming on, Troy.

Troy: Well, it's a pleasure. I'm glad to be here, Jaime. 

Jaime: So you have an extensive background, and so we cannot get into all of it right now. Tell me sort of a high level overview of sort of the businesses that you've started. In general, from the age of twenty on. 

Troy: Yeah, sure. I do have a big background. I've gone through a lot of stuff. I have lived this life; it kind of all goes back to losing my sister when I was ten years old which was something that really kind of influenced the entire trajectory of my life. When I was ten, my eighteen year old sister was killed in a car accident. It, I think, we're born with a certain part of our DNA, and I was always a focused, kind of intense person, but that really shaped it. I have never been this huge risk taker or somebody out there looking to jump out of planes and crazy stuff. Hike up Mount Everest or any of that goofy stuff. I've also been a firm believer, and I learned it very early on that tomorrow's not guaranteed for any of us. You know whether it's in business or doing something I always wanted to do like become a pilot and fly private airplanes. My grandfather used to fly me around when I was a kid. Whatever, I always just went after it. Maybe it was blind ignorance of just not worrying about it, or maybe it was just not being too afraid of failing, which I have done many times in my career. I started out, went into the military at a young age, enlisted into the military, went into the nuclear engineering program, was on submarines in the Navy, here in Orlando actually. It's kind of funny since I'm back in Orlando now, full cycle and they don't even have the military base here anymore. I kind of started out there. Actually before that, I went down to Brazil as an exchange student in high school. I fell in love with travel and international, fell in love with the country. Came back, went into the Navy for the same kind of reasons, get out of podunk hometown and get around a little bit. Was tremendously challenged by the nuclear propulsion school; it was just incredible. You go from not knowing what electricity is to sub-atomic nuclear physics in six to seven months. 

Jaime: Really? Wow.

Troy: Yeah, oh yeah. No, I mean at that level, I never did stuff in college, even in like senior year high end, five hundred level courses, and stuff that ever came anywhere close to what I had done in the military. Then I went through college at Illinois Institute of Technology; I had a scholarship on ROTC to go there. That kind of fell through. I dropped out actually in my senior year and never did graduate. 

Jaime: In your senior year?

Troy: Yeah, in my senior year. It was, I was on a ROTC scholarship, and Clinton had started downsizing the military. One of the first things he did was start limiting scholarships, and what they did was I had a six year deal. They told me "Now it's going to be an eight year deal." I said "Well, I've got a signed contract for six years." They said "Well, sue us. We're the federal government. It's now eight." I'm like "You know what? I don't need this." I left. It was okay. I had a really good experience with the military. I don't have any grudges against it. I really loved the active duty stuff. I didn't really enjoy ROTC. It was, you know, kind of like the Boy Scouts. It was the kind of guys who had never really served in active duty, trying to pretend they knew what the military was about. If I'd never gone to, enlisted first, I probably would have been okay with it. Then I came out of that, and I found myself just looking for something to do. Here I am; I studied. I had a nuclear engineering background. I was an electrical engineer. There's not a whole lot of nuke jobs out there, you know. I didn't finish my electrical degree, so here I was without that. But the funny thing of it was I didn't really enjoy any of that. I was just stuck in this career, in this choice. You get so many credits and so many units into it, you can't change. When it all kind of fell apart, and I walked away from it, then I was just kind of forced to do something on my own. I started doing software sales for a while. Then I got into programming. I just self-taught myself as a programmer and really loved it. Went through a few different jobs. I worked for a medical practice management firm and really understood and learned consulting and that whole angle of consulting and how to serve your clients and build a business on the success of your clients. That was a really good lesson early on. Then I kind of went the corporate route. Went to Blue Cross Blue Shield for a while, in Chicago, then ended up at Encyclopedia Britannica for a few years. 

Jaime: I remember that name. Wow.

Troy: Yeah, yeah. I was there through the crazy times. I was there when billionaire Swiss banker Jacqui Safra bought the company and tried to take it public, and when Britannica dot com launched and had the huge, had so much traffic we were down for three weeks. Yeah, dropped tens of millions of dollars into the infrastructure in a matter of a short time to get that site back up and going. I kind of went through that whole thing. I went there as a junior developer, and within a few years, I was an executive director of core technologies there at Britannica. Ran five departments and had about a hundred and ten people in our departments working there.

Jaime: How old were you? At the end of that.

Troy:  Yeah, I was in my twenties, mid-twenties. It was, I get kind of goofed up with the years. I am so focused on what I'm doing today. I look back and it's like long term memory starts to fade, but I was in my mid-twenties. I helped them expand and grow, took them off the mainframe, led a lot of the software developments in getting there. I really got into the systems side of it. That was another real stepping stone in my career was having that systems integration, but I think what really started to kind of launch me there was I was really the one person in technology there that kind of got the bridge between technology and the business. I think that's something that so many people really kind of miss. They're, you know I'm a former geek, still I'm a geek, it's like being a recovering alcoholic. You'll always be a geek.

Jaime: You'll never be a former. Yes. No. Proud, proud.

Troy: But at the same token, I understood the needs of the business. I worked very closely with our CTO and our CEO and even Jacqui directly, Mr. Safra would call me from Switzerland, wake me up at three in the morning to do something crazy. It was because I had a way to bridge that, between the business and the technology. Not just technology for technology's sake. I took a leave from there. They kind of downsized the whole company, when the whole public thing kind of. It was right in that dot com explosion, right at the collapse of it. They were kind of late on the scene, and the timing wasn't good. When the company kind of really stepped back and pruned, I walked away. Literally didn't, you know, I took a couple years off. I had a nice severance package, and I had been saving money for quite some time and had a comfortable savings put away. It just was a good time to take a break, so in my twenties, I kind of took off for a couple years, went down to Brazil and just kind of got away from it all. Reconnected with my quote, end quote, family. I call them that because I lived with them when I was a teenager, and they to this day are closer to me than some of my real family. Anyway, I went down and stayed down there. After a couple of years, I started up doing stuff with my brothers. I had moved away at a young age and never really connected with my older brother or my younger brother that much because I just hadn't been around, moved away so early. I went off to private boarding schools of my choice, and on scholarship even in college, and then down to Brazil et cetera. Had kind of lost that, and got back into my brothers, and we started doing a bunch of land development. They had been doing construction for a while and built a lot of houses, but just kind of general, one-off kind of stuff. They were getting together; they had secured a big deal on a subdivision. They needed someone to come in and manage the business side of it.  I joined up and got into construction. We did, over the next, I don't know, seven, eight years, we did a bunch of commercial and mostly residential subdivisions. Pretty hard core stuff. I mean, dealing with the Army Corps of Engineers and wetland mitigations and annexing properties into the city and getting them approved, you know, all that stuff. It wasn't, it wasn't trivial. We were always living on the edge, but did real well with it for several years. Then I, in the process of that, ran a couple of different cabinet shops and became a pilot during that time. We bought a little plane, and I was flying us around back and forth between California and Oregon. We lived in California, but we commuted to Oregon every day. It was like a six hour drive, and I said "Nah. Let's fly."

Jaime: See. I want to fly too. That seems so much easier. Just fly, no big deal. That's awesome. Okay.

Troy: Yeah, and from that, we kind of went through the same thing where the bubble burst in 2008, and worst possible time for us, we had some big deals in escrow at the time, several million dollars in escrow. We're literally about forty-five days away from retirement because had those deals closed, then we would have paid off all of our hard money stuff and been able to hold a whole bunch of inventory back and just sit on it. You know? For twenty, thirty years, trickle a lot out here and there and do well. But didn't happen, you know. That was kind of starting over from ground zero again.

Jaime: How does that work? Because you went through both bubbles. The first one at least wasn't your own company. Which was great, but then you went through one that really must have hurt you. You started from scratch both ways. The first one you had a severance package; it wasn't that bad, but this one probably was.

Troy: Yeah, it was. You know, I think that it really puts everything in question for you. Your back is against the wall. I think that, and it was more than that. It was more than just financial issues. At the same time, the marriage collapsed, and I was subsequently divorced not too long after. Then I sold off everything for pennies on the dollar, what I could get, and moved down to Brazil to be close to my children. I, yeah, I was dead broke at that point. I mean, I had, I couldn't afford a car. So I rented a little condo close to my family, so that I could see the kids and be around them. You know it's something that I've just always had this kind of tenacity. I think that it, again, it really goes back to my sister. It goes back to that influence from a really young age. When my sister passed away, I was ten. My, I think it was, we, I don't recall the exact circumstances, but we went to see a concert. I played piano. I started at five, and I was at that stage where I'd been playing for five years. I was kind of getting burnt out on it, and I kind of wanted to quit. My parents were incentivizing me, paying me. My allowance was paid per hour on how much I practiced. We had this concert that they had bought me tickets to. They were trying to inspire me to stick with it, you know. I think that they got them before my sister passed away, and then after that happened, they just still wanted to go just because they didn't want to let me down. With all the things going on, it was kind of tough everywhere. Anyway we went to this event, and it was Dino Kartsonakis, I still remember the name. He was kind of like the Liberace of Christian music and just really flashy. You know, he cracked me up. We went to this event, and I listened to him play the song called My Tribute. I'm really not a huge religious person anymore. I'm a person of faith, but I don't really define it in terms of religion. It's more higher level for me. This song had just this real connection, and my parents were just in tears the entire time. It had this huge impression on me, at a young age that this was something that I could do to have an impact on my parents. You know, it's a like a burden I kind of took on. I was determined to play this song. Now I had no right to be able to try to play this song. It was something that was five years more advanced than I had the capacity to play. It was well, well beyond me. I went up to Dino, and I got his autograph. I still have that to this day. The book is falling apart. The cover is ripped off, and half the pages are torn, falling out, but I still have the book that he autographed for me. The sheet music, I bought the sheet music, and I started playing. It took me, I think, two years to learn that one song. It was something I used to, you know, my parents used to encourage me at first, and then I think they thought I was insane at some point because instead of practicing after I got home from school for three or four hours, after basketball practice, or whatever, I would practice every day. Then it became I couldn't get enough practice time in on the piano, so I would get up before school. I would start getting up at six AM and practice an hour before class. You know, before I'd go to school. I'd catch the bus at seven-thirty, so I'd get up at six. Six became five, and five became four-thirty. I would wake my parents up every morning, in there pounding away at this song. It really was just pounding away. I literally kind of learned it measure by measure. Until I could get that one measure down, I would just stay on it and stay on it and stay on it. I would just gradually build it up. 

Jaime: Well, let me just say, that's not normal, right? I mean that's.

Troy: It's not. It's not. That's why I say I don't know that there's something that. A lot of people ask "Well, how do you counsel somebody to be that way?" I don't know. I don't know if that was inherently in my nature or if that was something because of the situation I went through with my sister. I know that that one song, which I have recorded and I can nowhere come close to playing today, right. I played at twelve years old something that I could never repeat, and I shouldn't have ever been able to do. Once I got it memorized and down, it was just, it became something that shaped my whole outlook on life. It led to a lot of different things. It led to me buying a plane before I knew how to fly. We purchased our airplane before I even had a license. It led to me doing my instrument rating in ten days, something that most people will do a year or longer to study on. It just shaped my whole outlook on life, and that, I know it's a long answer to a short question, but sometimes the simple questions are the most difficult to answer.

Jaime: Ah. So tell me, because this is changing what we were just about to talk about, because I really want to get into this a little bit more. You actually help people transform their business. That's one of the things that you do. Is it hard for you as somebody who is that way innately to help somebody else that is not like that transform their business?

Troy: Terribly. Terribly. It's painfully difficult. It's like pulling teeth without any, you know, Novocain.

Jaime: So, yeah. What advice do you have? Especially as people are listening to this interview, they're probably like "I'm not like him. He's a little bit, he's a little bit different." That what I want to bring it back to, is something really actionable, something that they can really relate to. 

Troy: Sure, sure, yeah. What I learned to do, and I learned this the hard way. I think we come at this when we're trying to make a difference in our own lives, for our income or our career, we always think in terms of numbers, and we always tend to translate that into an audience. In other words, I have to have this huge impact on all of these big numbers and this huge audience. Our business that Mike and I built up was on a tiny, tiny little audience. Most people don't know us today. We've never really focused that. When I created our podcast recently in December and launched, it was like the first real thing where we really did trying to do any type of branding or audience. We never really focused on it. What I started out was that same mistake. Trying to go big; trying to go wide, trying to get this huge influence. Doing coaching at a group level and really low-end kind of stuff, and while there's a place for that, and I still have low-end programs, where I became inspired by what I was doing was when I really ratcheted up my pricing and started working with people that were coming in with a degree of commitment. Somebody that comes in with several thousand dollars to work with you at the beginning, there's a degree of commitment. I know you participate in various masterminds. You know when you put that skin in the game, then all of those things start to melt away. You start to surround yourself with the people that have that level of commitment, and that's much more enjoyable for me. Top Marketing Strategies business, I mean it's fun; it's cool; but what I really get the most involvement out of or the most personal satisfaction is working one on one. You know, that's what I'm really choosing to focus on right now. I'm really lucky in a sense, and I don't really believe in that word tremendously. I have a great partner in business with Mike. The two of us, we did our first million online, we'd never ever met personally. We had a corporation together, legal building, and had never, ever sat across and met each other. We had formed a relationship working together and developed trust working together online, but he was up in Pennsylvania, and I was down in Brazil. It was really kind of an interesting situation. We have a kinship, a respect, closer than brothers. We have a great business partnership, and we're completely, completely opposite end of the spectrum. The stuff that I really enjoy, he can't stand. The stuff that he's really good at, I do not want to touch. We complement each other really well. He focuses on one aspect, and I focus on the other. What I'm really doing now is just focusing on those highland successes with people. I guess my point of advice, my point of actionable advice is really understand yourself. Look at the person in the mirror. You can get advice from all kinds of mentors and all kinds of coaches. I do that. I've paid in the past year, close to a hundred thousand dollars in mentoring that I do for me personally as well. I continue to invest in that as well. At some level, you have to look at that person in the mirror. You are the only one that truly knows you. Should somebody try to emulate my degree of focus? No. They should understand what their assets are, and leverage them to the best ability possible. I really believe that we're all given different gifts, different things that we're blessed with in our lives. Now how we choose to us them or not use them is what we're ultimately accountable to, and we're really accountable to the person in the mirror, the man or woman in the mirror that you're looking at. To me that is the best piece of advice that I can give people. It's get guidance and seek guidance from coaches and mentors. That's an incredible level of support for your business. It will help you your game tremendously. It will challenge you. Ultimately you have to trust in your own approach. I've done things that people say "No, I'd never do it that way. Don't ever do it that way. Go this way." I've done completely the opposite, but it's because I knew who I was. That I think is the biggest piece of advice. That, and don't let fear run your life. Don't let fear run your life.

Jaime: That's actually one of the things that I want to say. I did that at the very beginning, thinking that the mentors knew so much more than me, but they don't know you. A lot of the pieces of that is because of the fear. Right? They're like "Well, they might know better than me because who am I to know?" And all that stuff plays around. That's a huge, huge key that I want to highlight. I'm glad you actually brought that up. And what's funny, you actually go through, and you, you've built seven and eight figure businesses, which is amazing. Now you go in and you help transform things. I would love to know what's the typical, well, maybe not, maybe none of them are typical, but what's sort of the typical client that you go? I'd love to sort of hear what you're capable of, and what people are capable of in their business, especially in transformation. 

Troy: Yeah, you know I don't really define who I work with in terms of money. I define it in terms of character. It's the same way I hired people at Britannica. When I hired them, I didn't hire them on their resume. In fact, they would come in all full of themselves because they had a perfect resume, and if I sensed that, I would tear up the resume in front of them, to set them off guard. What I really was interviewing was the character. I wanted to know, and so I would push them to a point of they were uncomfortable, where I knew that in this one little particular area I knew more than they did, and I wanted to see how they would handle it, how they would respond. Would they say "I don't know, I would go get help," or would they try to BS me? Character is the huge aspect for me. When I'm working with somebody, it's by application; I don't work with everybody that wants to. I have the luxury of working with the people that I want to work with. I've helped one, and it's funny that this would come to mind. One of the ladies that comes to mind is a gal that is in Spain. She's divorced, went through a divorce and has custody of her kids. She's actually French and living in Spain, and had gone through a lot in her life, and was just trying to start something up. She didn't have a lot of funds, and she went through just some really basic stuff with us. She was devoted and put stuff in, and in the course of a year, built up a nice little business for herself. It wasn't a six figure business, but it was something for her that was a huge transformation. Now that is just as satisfying as one of our clients that I ran into the other day that patted me on the back and said "Hey, I just want to thank you. We had our best sales day ever. We did sixty-seven thousand in sales yesterday, and I'm just totally psyched." You know to me they're equal, in the sense that the transformation was about what happened for that person, what they were able to achieve. It's really not about the net value. It's about the difference in the life, and I think that today as a society we're kind of cultured against entrepreneurialism. We're taught from a young, early age to college, to high school, go to college. We're chasing this dream that hasn't been around since the fifties, you know, of work for IBM, go get your pension, and retire after thirty. The average person changes jobs so many times it's insane, but yet we're still being sold this other dream. To me it's actually about transforming somebody's own limitations, and the limitations are usually self-imposed. That's the hardest part. As we go through this in our own, and I say we meaning me as well, go through these different levels of growth, you realize that the only thing in the way was you all along. The only difference in selling a twenty-seven dollar e-book or a twenty-five thousand dollar coaching program is your ability to create value and your ability to look in the mirror and be confident in what you're doing and create those results for your clients. Many times you can create much more results with somebody at a much higher level because their commitment is there. So I guess that's kind of it in a nutshell.

Jaime: Yeah. That's really interesting. There's a lot of people that are listening. There's exactly those two types of people that are listening. There's the people that might be down on their luck or have a day job that really want to get out. They're just looking to start something. They of course want it to be a six figure business, but it doesn't have to be at first because they're looking for that freedom. So there's that, and there's also people that would like to have businesses to have a sixty-seven thousand dollar day. What I would love to know, let's start out with somebody that might be just starting out. You have you're an internet marketer; you know tons of information online. Walk me through what you would have done with the woman from Spain, of how she could actually start something up within a year to be able to change her life. 

Troy: Yeah, well, it all starts with constraints. That's where I start everything from. If you're constrained by the time, if you're constrained by your family. When I started in Brazil, I was constrained by the fact that I couldn't work locally. I had to do something online. There was no way I was going to create the income I needed in a foreign country. Even though I speak fluent Portuguese, I was. First of all, I couldn't make enough money, and no one was going to hire an American because they initially think you're going to want way too much money, and we're not going. It just would have never worked. You have constraints. The first thing is identifying your constraints and knowing how you can build a business that works within those constraints. If you are constrained by English as a second language perhaps, well then maybe, audio or podcasting is not the right medium for you. There's whole different ways that you can work around. The first thing that I do when I'm working with somebody is a constraint assessment. Then we start looking at their passion and their skills, and try to intersect all three of those, of what your constraints are, what your passions are, what your skill sets are. And how can we bring that all together to create a real income? Now what are those goals? Whether it's five hundred dollars and pay the car every month, or if it's the two thousand dollar pay the mortgage each month. Whatever those goals are, we start, and I focus on teaching somebody to get comfortable with themselves and how to intersect those and be productive and be consistent. A lot of it is the consistency. I think that most people that haven't built income for themselves, that have always worked for somebody else, have this false belief about how income is generated or how a business grows. They all, in their minds, have this linear growth pattern that they believe in. They believe when you put x amount of hours that you get y result, and that's what they are trained as, as an employee. Right? Or working as a consultant, or anything else. You're paid on this hourly rate, so you have this belief that that's how it works. When you're building a business, it's not that way at all. It is exponential. Exponential everybody thinks is the positives of exponential. They always think of that rapid growth at the end.

Jaime: Yeah, they don't see that, the beginning. 

Troy: Yeah, you don't see that first eighty percent of the exponential which is zero, until it starts to move. I think that understanding that a lot of it is working with the people with the mindset, to get their expectations proper. You know I would never advise somebody to leave their job and start something for example. That, to me, is just ridiculous. I've had to do that because I was forced into it when I lost everything and moved down, went down to Brazil, and had to start from zero. I mean, I've gone through that, but I certainly would not advise anybody to do that. Right? That was a perfect example for me for constraints because I was constrained locally. I was also constrained by the income model I had to pursue. I needed to get into something that would generate revenue quickly. I couldn't do something that I could do this long, passive growth model. I couldn't go after a Pat Flynn type model of building a blog, building an audience, and this long term passive thing. I didn't have the option. I was, I didn't have a car. I needed the income, right. That was another constraint. That constrained me to go after services. Go after high end services and recurring high end services. I think that it all starts there. It all starts with the constraints. For somebody just getting started, and again it comes back to knowing yourself. Know what your own constraints are; know what your own limitations are. Design a business that's something you're passionate about, that's something you can become an expert in over time. You don't have to become an immediate expert to be able to help people. If you're passionate about it, that will drive your expertise. That will drive your own personal authority in that niche. It's that intersection really. 

Jaime: How do you find that? Because I hear, I hear from a lot of people, right. And so they're like "I know I want to do something, but I don't know what I'm good at. How do I find out what I'm good at? How do I find out those things that are sort of innate?" A lot of the times, we're so good at what we do, it's so innate, we don't even realize that we're doing it. So how do we pull those out and know what we're good at? 

Troy: Yeah, that question is interesting in the sense that it is applicable not only when you're just getting started, but it's also applicable when you're far along in the process and maybe having a down period in your business. It all comes back to your confidence and your self-assessments. What I really do is try to get somebody to assess themselves, to create not like a resume that you're trying to get a job but a skills assessment, a what have you done in, and I'm not talking about the things that people typically put on a resume. I'm talking about your skills as a person, your abilities, what you're good at. Really list those assets. You know, what normally happens is somebody will come back, and they'll have this little, pardon my French, but they'll have this little half-assed list that just isn't well. I'll say "Okay, now go back and do it again." Sometimes it takes three levels before people really start to ask the right questions to understand. That awareness is what really fuels it in my opinion. You have to have that awareness. A lot of times we go through the motions, and we don't really even know what it is that we're doing or why we're doing it. I think that's really important. My dad was a jack-of-all-trades. He was never great at anything; he was just, he did everything. He never finished anything. You know, it had a huge influence on me, and I became kind of a virtual jack-of-all-trades. If you look at most people in the guru space and the coaching and the mentoring, they'll tell you just pick one single thing and focus like hell on that. That's all good advice, and I agree with that. Many times that's the best way. For me, I'm a jack-of-all-trades; that doesn't work for me. That's where you have to have that understanding of yourself. What I used to look at as a limitation, in what I do is really an advantage because I can look at a business from all different perspectives. Whereas a lot of people will come in and say, they'll hire an AdWords consultant, and they'll just optimize this one thing. I look at the entire business from A to Z. While they may have an immediate need there, it's more of a long term picture that we need to put in place. I think that it really comes back to that knowing yourself and those constraints.

Jaime: It's so funny how we don't see that. One of the funniest, I think, things for me is that I didn't realize a lot of my strengths and people started telling them to me. They were like "You're a connector," and I'm like "Really? Hmm, I didn't even notice that." So until many people started actually telling me, I think asking people too. I can tell what a lot of your strengths are even before. I mean we only met a couple times, but it's really interesting that the other person can see that. Because I don't have the same exact strengths as you, I can see them a lot better which is kind of funny the way things work. If you were to start online, I loved how you were talking about services because I think this gets overlooked. 

Troy: It's not very sexy. It's not sexy at all. 

Jaime: Everybody wants to start that passive. Make money while I sleep, that's what I want. But the services is really the fastest way for anybody to get online, or to make actual income, money online. What do you, what did you suggest for the person in Spain? What are some of the, not trends, trends or hot markets or something like that where people can do some services? Give us some ideas. 

Troy: Anything that you can help. I tend to focus on business. Most people come into this and focus on internet marketing. Right? And it's such a small fraction of what's out there, it's not the right space to start out in; it's not the right space to focus on. It's so much harder to make a sale in the IM space than it is in the business world. My advice is to find a service that you can provide for a business that is recurring in nature, that is not results driven, it's service driven. You did A, and they paid for A, and they're happy. We'll teach you how to, they pay for A, and you give them A and B. They're happy because you delivered on the service. Don't try to do the hard stuff that is results oriented. That is really difficult in the beginning, like doing an SEO service for example where people are just going to be, they're going to hounding you on the results side of it. Many times it's something that you don't have control over. So services, pick something that has a business value. I like starting out at something in the two hundred fifty or five hundred dollar recurring service level because it allows you to build up an income very quickly. Always look to double your money. If you're doing it yourself, and it's costing you a hundred dollars to provide this one particular service, then bill it out at two-fifty, so that you have some cushion in there. You have to be willing to make profit. I know that sounds crazy because everyone says "Well, I'm in here to make money," but one of the biggest things I look at is people don't charge enough for their services. That, your pricing really comes back to your own personal confidence. You're starting in the business; you don't feel confident that you're providing enough value so you undercharge. You're insuring your own failure because you're not putting enough profit into the business to actually be successful in it. That's something that I encourage. I like the services. You can pick any type of business related service that helps and produces value for somebody. It's really about the value proposition. You can look to IM maybe for guidance but then market it outside. For example, if you're good at creating videos, and you have this knack for making fun and engaging videos, then that's something that if you're in the IM space only is worth about a hundred bucks for a video, right? But if you're in the business space, I have a friend that is, runs an agency, a creative agency, and he charges sixty-five hundred dollars for his videos. Clearly they're a different level than somebody just getting started. Let's be obvious here. What I'm trying to illustrate is the range of what people will pay for the same exact thing. Take something that maybe you learned in trying to make things work, if it's in the IM space, but now apply that outside of IM. Focus yourself. Again this is my advice, even though I don't practice this because it's the best advice for most people, is to focus in one particular sub-niche. Don't try to offer your services to everybody. If it's something you have a background, for example, let's just say that you have a neck condition and you're going to the chiropractor all the time. Well, you kind of have an intimate knowledge of the chiropractic area, and then maybe kind of focus on that first because your confidence will be higher. It really comes back to the confidence because that is going to catapult your sales. I know that, I'm sure he didn't invent this, because I really kind of believe there's no, we don't have unique thoughts. I think that everybody is kind of repurposing information, not by trying to rip somebody off, it's just you're influenced by people and so you take that, and you embrace it, and you kind of repurpose it. I know that Tony Robbins talks about going after your fear, and if you make your list in the morning of what you've got to get done for the day, if you look at the thing that scares you the most on that list, that's probably the single, if you ignored everything else on the list, that's probably the one thing you should do. If that's going to a chamber event, if that's going to create a video that you have to put yourself out there on, and you've never done it, and you're a little self-conscious. Whatever that is, going after that. He also says something that I've really embraced and I embrace in my coaching and working with people, and it all comes back to that confidence, but your business growth will follow your personal development. That's something again; I didn't create that; that's Tony Robbins that preaches that. I truly believe that in my life because every time that you personally take that next step up and conquer the next little fear, then your skills as a person grow and your business then inherits that. It perpetrates through, it proliferates through your business, and all of the sudden, you start to have breakthroughs that you had been plateauing at for a while. I think that it's not all this mind game, but a lot of it is in your head. You've got to get out of your own way. Getting started is tough, and the bottom line is not everybody's meant to be an entrepreneur. They're really not. You know you have to acknowledge that as well. Perhaps it's not. I really believe that we do all have a gift, and if we learn how to express that and how to shape and impact others. If we can make an impact in somebody else's life or their business, then that's going to come back to us, regardless of what the monetary exchange on that is. 

Jaime: And I, okay, so this is good. I think a lot of people don't realize that it's the mindset. We're always looking for strategies and tactics. What's the new hottest, newest thing? Oh podcasting. I want to do the coolest tactics, but it really is us going through and doing the tactics and putting ourselves out there to the best of our ability. Getting really uncomfortable with ourselves that really makes all the difference in the world for your business which is an amazing thing. Which is why probably working with you with someone who's probably just starting out is very different from working with someone who's going to be making sixty, seventy grand in a day. Tell me about some of the stuff that you do for somebody that already has a business that is looking to grow but already has some of that self confidence, at least some, with their business. What sort of things do they need to implement? I know it's on a case by case basis.

Troy: Sure.

Jaime: But let's talk about that made sixty, seventy thousand. What are the things that you changed in that business that really made a difference? 

Troy: Sure. So if you're at a high level of success already, you already have a six figure, seven figure business. Typically the people that I will end up working with come to me because they're at a plateau. They have built this business up, and then they've hit this point, and now it's just here, maybe even dipped. They're trying to get beyond this level, and they don't realize what that block is. What I start out with is the same type of thing. It's the same process that I go with. It's understanding them, understanding where they're at, and going back to the fears and concerns that they have in their business, and also looking at. It's different now because instead of building from zero, they've already got a system. They've already got a mechanism in place. It's actually a lot easier to influence them. They've already had a degree of success, so they're starting by nature a strong, confident person, even if they don't know it. They have self-esteem issues. They are a strong, confident person, or they wouldn't have achieved that six or seven figure level already. Now it's about visualizing their business, breaking it up. The way I like to think of it as a chain. It's going to have different links. Every business has those links. Not any, none of us can be specialists at all those areas. There are going to be areas that they excel at in their business, and there's going to be areas that are really, really weak. What happens, is when I was out at Traffic and Continuity Summit with Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher and talking about this, it really, you know, made a lot of sense and something that I see in working with businesses at this level. I generally focus at businesses in this half million to two million dollar revenue per year type of level. Some businesses are higher, some in the ten and fifteen million a year, but most of them are in this five hundred thousand to two million dollar level. There's some real plateaus that occur there. What it takes to get a business up to seven figures of revenue is one set of skills, but what it takes to get from seven figures, a million to ten million dollars in revenue is a different set of skills altogether. A lot of it is getting out of your own way, and putting the right people in place and learning to delegate, oversee at a whole different level. You have to introduce entirely different structure and management into your business. The fears though are the same thing. You're working with the person now; they've built this business, and it's come up to this plateau point. Now their fear is in letting go of some of that to take it to the next. I say this with all sincerity, but the same thing is limiting their business as is limiting a person that hasn't started a business. It's that fear, and it's just at a different level. We look at that; we look at, examine the links in the chain, and examine their assets. I don't mean the assets of their business or income assets, but their personal skills and leadership assets. Find the areas that are the weak links that we can have the biggest gain in. For some people that might be exposure and traffic. For others it may be that they don't have a good back end system. They really like their front end, and they like the product, but they don't do anything to really monetize it more on the back end. I just look at those different aspects, and bring what I have in experience of working from a systems and a programming background, from clear back in the days at Encyclopedia Britannica to just use those experiences at whatever level I can to mend the fence and to strengthen those links in the chain. It's a lot easier to take a business that's in place and has all the systems out there, and double their profits than it is to get somebody over that first hump, and that's honestly the truth. That's why I enjoy working at that level more. Today, I still work with start-ups and people who are just getting started, but it's a harder approval process for somebody at that level to work with me because I really want to know that I'm not wasting my time. I really want to know that somebody has that. You know, everybody talks about "I gave a hundred and ten percent." I think that is such BS. I think that it's just such complete and utter BS. I think most people coast their way through life, on about a level five, and they have probably never put level ten effort into anything in their life. Even when they thought they put level ten, it was probably about an eight. I think that if you accept that without being insulted, and I don't mean it as insulting, but I mean it to open people's eyes. If you really stop and analyze something in your life that you thought you gave it your all, and now stop and think back. If my child's life depended on it, could I have done more? 

Jaime: It's that same thing.

Troy: I say this to a mother of two on the other side of me. 

Jaime: Yeah, I know, right.

Troy: But.

Jaime: Was it at Ryan Lee's event? No, it was somewhere that they said "Raise your hand as high as you can." Then they go, "Raise your hand a little higher," and you go "Oh shoot, I totally can do that." You don't realize. You're like that's as high as, oh. No, and we don't realize it.

Troy: When you're on your tippy-toes, and they say raise it even higher, and you're like "There's no possible way I can go higher," then you see one person in the room that jumps up on a chair. Because there's that plateau, there's the plateau; there's the acceptance of this is my limitation, and there's the I don't accept this limitation. And somebody jumps up on the chair or the table. Yeah, it's that kind of breakthrough. That to me is a transformation. As a programmer, and so I've got to go back to geek speak now, so I've got a fellow geek here, and all that, so that's okay. But as a programmer, that's what I loved about it. The best programmers are lazy programmers because...

Jaime: Fastest, easiest way, yeah!

Troy: Hear me out. It's true. Because the efficient programmer, that efficiency mindset of just make little fine, incremental refinements, will take performance up three, four, five, maybe ten percent improvements in performance at a time. The truly gifted programmer and the one that's kind of lazy, and he comes at it from a lazy, he or she comes at it from a lazy perspective of "I don't want to go through and analyze thirty thousand lines of code and make all these little tweaks and changes." They will throw it out; scrap it all together, and come up with a completely fresh perspective. They'll make a hundred percent or two hundred percent or a thousand percent improvement in the performance because they're not trying to be, they're not trying to constrain the way they think. They're stepping away. That's the efficiency versus stepping out of the box model. That's what I love about programming. It encourages that type of creativity. It's funny because most people don't think of programming as being creative. They think of it as extremely technical, but to me, it's really creative to sit down when I was working at Britannica and working with people that hold multiple PhD's, and it's really quite intimidating. They're very, very intellectual. To work with those editors and copywriters and all of the stuff, and say "Okay, how can I improve this system? How can I create something that works within their world?" Right? That to me is very creative. Even though it's technical, it's very creative. 

Jaime: Well, it's just like you were saying. It's what an entrepreneur does too. It's problem solving. Like let me look at this; let me be creative in my problem solving, and that's sort of what it all comes down to. So whether it be programming, which lends, apparently lends itself to entrepreneurship a little bit more because it's all about that problem solving. That makes all the difference in the world. I know we need to wrap up unfortunately. I'm sure we could talk for a very long time. I'm sure I'll have you back on the show again because I have notes like crazy.

Troy: I've been accused of rambling on, yes. 

Jaime: Me too, so good thing I have a little clock up here. I always ask the last question, and I gave you a heads up, right? I think I remember I gave you a heads up before. Sometimes I forget. What's one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million? 

Troy: Sure. Whether you haven't started or whether you've got a business making a few hundred dollars, a few thousand, or hundreds of thousands, it doesn't really matter. My thing is going back to what we've talked about today. Find on your list, and I know you've got them because we all are great about writing these lists and rewriting them fourteen times. Look at what is the single thing that you fear the most on that list, and prioritize based on that because it's probably the single thing that's holding you at the plateau you're at. Whether that plateau is not getting started, or whether that plateau is taking your income from three or four hundred to three or four thousand. Whatever that plateau is you're at, find the thing that scares you the most, and go after it. Because I truly believe that is, in the success of my life has been that I have failed, I have had those things, but it's having the self-confidence. It doesn't mean you're always confident; I'm still scared by things. I still have fears, but having worked through it, and saying "If you drop me off in China tomorrow, and I don't speak Chinese, and I got to figure it out, I can make it happen." Conquering fear, it's just like any other exercise. It's just like working out with the dumbbells. You start small, and it builds up over time. As you train yourself to conquer your own fears in your business, your growth is just going to rapidly grow from there. 

Jaime: I love that. It's so funny because I just related it to what you said before about programming. There's the one thing where you can get the three or four percent tweaks, and that's sort of all the things on your to-do list that don't scare you. You're like "Oh, I should do this. Oh, I should do this."

Troy: Right.

Jaime: Then that huge thing that can make all the difference. Deleting all that code, which is scary, and starting into something new.

Troy: Well, it comes out to, and I'm sorry I have to just tell you just one more story. It goes back to something I used to watch as a kid. My dad, he would go out and rake leaves. We owned this five acres of property. I looked at this as the most incredible waste of time, you know, because it wasn't about just getting them, about the eighty-twenty rule, of just getting the majority and getting them away. I know you got to keep it from killing the grass, but no, he would meticulously be there for hours, like he was trying to get every last leaf off the ground. Today, the second point, one is the fear, but the second point is what are you raking? Is it your email? Is it? That's the biggest one, right, the biggest one on the list. It's something that we go through on a daily basis that makes us feel good. I only began to understand as an adult what my dad was doing and what he was getting out of it. What he was getting out of it was, even at some small level, a sense of accomplishment because he was just really frustrated in his life at that particular time. You go after something that's comfortable. You go after something that's easy. I'm going to get through my emails today, and I'm going to clear out my inbox. What value did that add to your life? What did that do to put your child through college? Nothing, right. So it's just a raking leaves exercise. I would encourage people to really get real about those two things: the fear that's holding them back and what they're doing to metaphorically rake leaves in their business. 

Jaime: Thank you. Thank you very much. It totally gives a very good visual too because creative people, a lot of them are visual. They might need that too. 

Troy: That's right.

Jaime: I'm going to go through and figure out what leaves I'm raking. I'm talking to my VA about email next, so yes. Thank you very much. That is definitely something that I need to work on. 

Troy: It's been a pleasure. You know I'm glad to be hooked up here and did the show. It's been fun.

Jaime: Thank you so much for coming on. Like I said, I'll have you on again, and I'm sure I'll see you again at some sort of conference, for sure. Thank you so much for coming on, Troy. 

Troy: You bet. Take care.

Tags: business startup, millionaire interview, Service Business, Service Industry, Startup, Troy Broussard

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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