Episode 27:The Pepsi Gravitational Field: Make Money Offline
In this special episode of Make Money Online, we talk about automating systems for client intake and email management with our friend Kurt Elster. This was recorded in front of a live audience at Double Your Freelancing Conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
Summary
Recorded live at Brennan Dunn’s conference in Sweden, Nick and Kai bring Shopify expert Kurt Elster on stage to walk through marketing automation for independent consultants. The conversation moves from basic drip campaigns to full intake systems that qualify leads before they ever reach the phone, with practical tool stacks and real conversion numbers throughout.
Highlights
- Kurt solved his feast-or-famine cycle by aggregating every guest post, podcast appearance, and article he’d ever published into a year-long drip campaign. One email per week, every week, regardless of what he was working on at the time.
- Kai tracked 35 discovery calls in two months that produced two paying projects. He traced the problem to low-quality leads slipping through a loose pre-call questionnaire. Moving to a formal application form cut that waste by raising the barrier to entry and reframing the relationship: the prospect is applying to work with you, not shopping for a contractor.
- Nick’s application form uses branching logic to auto-disqualify leads who don’t hit budget or traffic thresholds. When someone fails, the form sends them a polite automated message that references his book Cadence and Slang and his newsletter, then closes the conversation. His assistant only sees leads who pass.
- Nick routes successful applications through Zapier into Twilio, which texts his personal phone. That number is his only VIP contact on his iPhone, overrides Do Not Disturb, and he replies within minutes with a short, typo-friendly human-looking message. He says clients are consistently surprised anyone replied at all.
- Kai cites Ramit Sethi’s ‘Craigslist Penis Effect’ to make the bar concrete: the average consultant either ignores bad-fit inquiries or goes silent. A polite two-sentence decline with a referral is enough to stand out. Nick gave a garage door company three names of recent college grads from his Chicago meetup; one of those grads sent him a gift basket two weeks later after landing their first client.
- For testimonials, Nick drafts one himself using the client’s Google Analytics data, sends it over, and asks for a thumbs-up. Kai uses six questions from Sean D’Souza’s The Brain Audit ($9 on Kindle), then falls back to Nick’s pre-written draft approach after a follow-up or two if the client hasn’t responded.
- Kurt built a press kit at kurtelster.com/press with a bio, headshot, topic list, and a booking form. His contact page explicitly solicits podcast interview requests. He says once he made it easy for podcasters to say yes, inbound requests started arriving without any pitching.
Read the transcript
So, this is an unusual episode for us because not only we’ve done a few episodes where we’ve actually looked at each other’s faces in person. And that’s been really wonderful. Not only were we looking at each other’s faces, but two things. We were also looking at a third person’s face. His name was Kurt Elster. And he was our first ever guest, which is amazing. But second off, we were looking at the faces of a live audience. Like we did this in front of some 60 odd people at a conference. Actually, there’s a third thing. We were in Sweden.
What normally in Sweden? This is slightly atypical for most Make Money Online episodes. They’re either recorded at the. Palatial estate I’m at in Eugene, Oregon, or Nick’s very beautiful house in Chicago. For this one, we decided to switch it up and fly to Sweden to record a podcast episode. We convinced Brennan Dunn to host a conference in Sweden concurrent with the podcast. Episode recording, and it was very generous of him to schedule it around our podcast.
Kai, are you Swedish?
Well, I mean, I have a little Swedish in me. Do you really? No.
Okay, so you’re not Swedish?
I’m in no way Swedish.
I’m not Swedish either.
This was weird.
The sun never set. Oh, God. Everybody had blonde hair, and neither of us.
No. So the thing you have to realize about Sweden is they have a midsummer holiday, and the midsummer holiday is celebrated by getting continually drunk for approximately a week. And a Maypole dance. And a Maypole dance. And you basically talk to people in Sweden. They’re like, what are you doing this weekend? And they’re like, it’s midsummer holiday. I’m going to be blackout drunk. Thank you for asking. And I didn’t realize how much of a thing this was until we were at a bar and it was 7 p. m. and I looked outside and I’m like, ah, it’s about 7 p. m. And then I look at my watch and it’s 11:30 p. m. because the sun does not set. And then I woke up the next day at 8:30 a. m. , looked at my watch, and it was 2:30 a. m. because the sun comes up incredibly early, hence the insanity.
So, yeah, we were sleep deprived. I had been pouring malort basically all day. And then we had a lot of variables, right? So there was Kurt, there was the audience. there were technical flubs. There were a lot of things. So what I would recommend going into this episode is my favorite two words in the English language, which are diminished expectations. Just, it’s an hour long. We’re going to get through it together. This is also the longest by almost double Make Money Online episode. You’re going to make so much money by the end of this. You’re actually not going to be able to listen to us anymore because the playback device, whatever it is, will be. Fully covered in money.
If you have not doubled your money by the end of this episode, you obviously listened to it incorrectly. You maybe were listening to it at half speed or double speed. Go back, listen to it again, a third time, and uh You’ll be a successful internet entrepreneur.
I think that’s all we need to do to introduce this. This is Sweden, man. Crazy. Sweden. Crazy. And then we went to Copenhagen together. It was a bromance. It was wonderful. I can’t begin to tell you.
We’ll be diving deeper into it in the forthcoming travel episode, but For now, I’d like to introduce you to the Pepsi gravitational field.
So, first, thank you to Brennan for having both of us on stage again today. I know that you probably are sick of both of us, but we’ll. We’ll try and make this relatively quick and painless. It’s going to be really protracted and painful, just like this bottle of Malort that I have here.
The malort is required for all attendees. You are not allowed to leave the conference venue until you finish the malort. I know that sounds interesting since spa. but you aren’t allowed to use the spa either until you finish the malort.
Yes, so you can’t we you know two malort bottles enter zero leave. So we run a podcast called Make Money Online, and this is our first time actually doing it offline. Who here actually listened, has listened to or knows about? or is horrified by the home page for our hot podcast? Okay, great, wonderful. So we talk a lot about running an independent consulting business and a lot of the things that are very similar topics to what happens here. It starts like that. Every episode. Every single episode. And yeah, we’ve been doing it for both. We’re on episode 30 now, and we’re probably over six months in, which is shocking and horrifying. One of the longest relationships I’ve had in my life. That’s also shocking and horrifying. Yes. Okay, good. And this is, again, pretty unique because.
Make money offline. Hell yeah. After dark, right there. This is the first time we’ve ever done it live in front of a crowd. It’s uh Well, I think for our listeners, the people who are listening to this after the fact, we should describe the stadium auditorium we’re speaking to right now. Now I’m not sure on the exact attendance count, but I think we broke 15,000 attendees for this.
Yes, so we really thank you, Eurovision, so much for having us today. We’re really grateful to be able to perform for you. It’s going really, really well. And we’ll talk a little bit about the kind of topic that we’re going to go into today. But first, I wanted to kind of set a little bit of expectation around Overall agencies, because we’re all kind of running agencies. We’re probably one person agencies, maybe under 10, something like that. And I wanted to bring up a certain topic just to You know, warm up the room and everything. Who here knows about the presentation that leaked after Pepsi’s rebranding launch? Because I’m going to teach you all about this. So, Pepsi changed their logo about eight or nine years ago, something like that. And they changed it from the original like swirl. Do you guys have Pepsi in Europe? Am I just totally talking? Okay, great. I don’t even know.
This would have been important to ask before we invested 15 hours into the slide deck.
We didn’t do any research on this, and it’s kind of grim. They made this presentation to Ad Agency. They got paid millions and millions of dollars to do this presentation, and then the pitch deck leaked. Leaked. And it got posted to a bunch of different design blogs, and they held it up as an example of the absolute worst thing that you can possibly do with design. And they came up with this concept called the Pepsi gravitational field. And well, the theory, yeah, right, real solid. The theory behind this, it was so amazing. They thought that by creating a theoretical gravitational field around the new Pepsi logo. It would pull you in in the grocery store aisle and you would be somehow attached to the bottle of Pepsi and would irresistibly buy it.
I read the entire presentation deck last night. We are not exaggerating. We’re doing a lot of bits. This is not a bit. This is a real thing. This is a real thing. I’m going to post the whole PDF to the Slack channel for this reading.
Absolutely. I’ve read. LSD trip reports that were more sensible than the Pepsi Gravitational Field Pitch Deck. Here is one slide from the Pepsi Gravitational Field Pitch Deck. As you can see, it’s going through some history. It goes from the Vastu Sastra to the golden ratio to Feng Shui to the art of building to L’Agiometry to the Mobius Strip to Corbusier’s The Modular. to, of course, the apotheosis of all of science and proportion and flawless form, the Pepsi gravitational field. This is I did not make this up.
This is a real thing that somebody was paid millions of dollars to make.
So, you know, if somebody can be paid like. Seven or eight figures for that presentation, you, all of you, can be paid, what, $50,000 for your design work or your development work. You can have real palpable success in your consultancies. And we’re really sorry we had to subject you to that and charge more. We have a third person on stage here. Hi. This is a rare occurrence. This is very rare. In fact, this is the first time this has ever happened. So we’re going to talk today about how to create automation strategies in your business. And I actually brought this up to Kai like one or two days ago. One thing that I do really, really poorly in my business is have like an automated system for client intake, follow up. A lot of the things that we’ve been talking about today, I whiff horribly. And I do like the very, very basic things like have a freebie offering, have a five-part drip campaign, these very like initial steps that you need to be doing. But then there’s a vast gulf between that and I’ll just say Brennan Dunn, for example, who is basically whenever I look at his marketing automation strategies, it’s like looking into the matrix. I have no idea where to even begin putting this sort of stuff together. I don’t really know what the path is.
You know that scene at the end of The Matrix where Neo suddenly sees the code and dives into Agent Smith and comes out flexing, and the world changes. Yeah, it’s that guy.
He’s given me demos of his drip like automation strategy, and I’m just like I can’t even begin to figure out how to go about doing that. So, there’s a big difference between those things. And, like, what’s the middle thing? Like, what’s the next thing that I should be doing? And what’s the next, like, what’s the actual progression that makes sense for my business? So, that’s why you’re on stage. We have Kurt Elster, MBA. on stage. And this is a picture of Kurt. We actually found it from the Google image search for Kurt. So we So yeah, it’s actually like right there. We just picked out. It says Kurt Elster MBA, so it looks pretty convincing to us. And Elster is Swedish for marketing automation strategies, which I didn’t realize. So there’s nobody better suited for this. So we’re going to We’re going to ask you a bunch of questions, kind of riff on the topic, try and figure out if some of you have put together like a freebie offering and it’s gotten some amount of success, what on earth do you do next? I am hoping to God that we figure out the answer to this question by the end of this podcast.
Otherwise The podcast will never end. The doors should be locked in about 30 seconds. Please stop bolting. We might cause a riot, but we are not allowed to leave. You are not allowed to leave until we solve this. It’s a conundrum. All right.
It’s really a pickle. Tell me a little bit about how you have automated your marketing in the past and like where your system is now. I know Julie’s talked about it a little bit. I know that we’ve gotten a couple of people actually shouting out how you get people in. Like you’re one or two steps beyond the basic thing, and you’re at the like 201 level. I don’t think you’re Brendan Dunn level, which is not Brendan. My eyes cross when I see the Plinko board looking flowchart that Brennan has going for his automation. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so, like, what tell us a little bit about what yours looks like.
So it started with the realization that was I wanted to solve the feast or famine cycle. So when I had no clients, I’d panic and then I’d have to I’d start following up with people and sending out emails and writing blog posts and marketing and doing all this stuff to try and draw draw clients into my my gravitational pole, much like the Pepsi logo. Then when I had I filled the pipeline, I had enough work, I stopped doing all of that. And then suddenly I’d be right back where I was, where the project you know, all my projects had shipped and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any clients. So I said, you know what? I bet marketing automation, you know, the dream of marketing automation where it making money online. It makes money online for you, you know, while you sleep, while you’re on vacation, all that, that maybe that wasn’t some info marketer’s fever dream that I could actually do that. So I started with just the five-part drip campaign, and sure enough, it started easing some of that pain, where I didn’t have to do as much scrambling at the end of projects. So I just started building on that. And I think literally step two, after you have that freebie offering, is build a content library. So I went and I did a Google search for my own stuff. So I wanted to find like every guest blog post, every blog post that mentioned me or quoted me, every podcast, find all of those things, take all my own stuff and put it into a library. And I ended up building doing that a year long drip campaign so that no matter what I was doing, there was at least one general campaign where someone would be hearing from me once a week. Have you ever had a client come to you and be like, I got this last March, you know, like a year and a half ago? So, you know, when we’re looking at, you know, when you’re creating a drip campaign and sending marketing stuff out. And when I was doing it too, my fear was people might see something more than once and comment on it. So I’ve got this system running for like three years now. Literally, no one has ever made that comment. And even if you have stuff like in multiple places, it’s egotistical to think that someone is going to keep a running catalog in their head of where all your content lives.
Yes, as consultants and content creators, I think we often fall into the trap of assuming prospects or clients see the world or see our material the same way we do. We see it top down. We’re like, I have a blog, I have these articles, I have these podcasts. Obviously, I know them very well. Everybody I work with must know them as well. But really, somebody enters our funnel. Somebody starts working with us, and they’re like, oh, I read two articles on your site. And then I stopped. And then I contacted you to work together. And that’s where it ends. It’s not that. the prospect has seen everything or will see everything. Good luck to them if they do. But we have a biased view of how people engage with our content.
I don’t want to say that nobody cares about you because that seems very uncharitable, but it’s like one and a half steps up from that. It’s that they care about themselves. They care about what they’re doing. They have a top-down view of their business. And they’re not thinking, I wonder if Nick D has sent me any repeat content this week. Like that’s a sentence that never comes out of anybody’s mouths in the history of mankind. And so you end up having this situation where You are worried about recycling your content effectively. You’re worried about dripping out something that does in a way that doesn’t work. Another question for Kurt. How do you, you know, we’ve talked a lot about your application. How did you go about building that? Like, how did you realize at some point, oh, I need an application and I need it to look like a bunch of crazy branching logic?
So initially, once I had that drip campaign going and then I had started segmenting it into different campaigns that were segmented to be as applicable as possible to each person depending on their life cycle and their business, I suddenly had an abundance of leads. And if I was in that, you know, I would be in that feast cycle where I had a full pipeline and I had all these leads. So now I had room to play, and I needed a way to better qualify. people without just me blowing them all off because I was too I was feeling too busy. So that’s what I built the application form. And first it was just, okay, let’s get the basic questions out of the way. And then I’d get people on the phone to do really just a gut check of how do we feel talking to each other, working with each other. And I started asking myself, all right, what’s the questions I keep asking over and over? And these like very revealing, qualifying questions that I’d ask either in email every time And those are what started going into the application. And then as I built more products in a product ladder based on and each one is built around solving a pain I would have that branching logic based on what they had picked. So if someone said, well, I need conversion rate optimization. Okay, well then the next logical question is, well, what’s your conversion rate and how much traffic do you have? But if you’re not interested in conversion rate optimization, I shouldn’t bother to ask you that.
Yeah, if I’m showing up and saying, I need your help setting up a store, you’re right, you want to tailor the questions you’re asking. to the pain you’re solving, not wholesale ask the same questions.
One thing that we’ve talked about a lot today is reselling to existing clients So maybe they haven’t done conversion rate optimization, but they’re getting enough traffic to get statistical significance on A-B testing. You already redesigned their website. Then’s the opportunity to say How about conversion rate optimization? But before they even come in the door, it’s on them to drive and say this is what we need. Now as a consultant, you can kind of tease out with some Socratic questioning whether or not that is actually true and they might need something else. But until you have where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right? Like you have to tease out where the smoke is.
Here’s a question I have for you: As the amount of leads you started getting coming in, the leads increased. Did you notice that there was also an increase in low quality leads, tire kickers, people you wouldn’t want to work with?
I think so, but I don’t know if it’s confirmation bias on my part. That because I have this abundance of leads, my standard for quality goes up. So I don’t know if that’s the case, but either way, yeah, you do get more tire kickers, and that was the pain for me. was, all right, how do I not waste time on the phone? How do I spend more time with good existing clients that make me excited to go to work versus people who are like, oh, I want to spend $300 on a custom theme? You know, I don’t want those people, and having, you know, wasting time on them hurts my current client base. So it was solving that pain for myself, really, that drove me.
I’ve gone through something very similar recently, and I’ve migrated to a system like yours recently, but we flash back to January and February of this year. I between those two months, I was on a collective thirty-five phone calls with prospects that turned into two. Two. paying projects. And it’s not because my proposal sucked. It was all productized consulting, fixed price, click the button, pay me money, great, we’re done. It was the quality of people coming in. We’re like, I’d love to get on a call. And I was like, great, I’ll ask you some questions. They’re like, I don’t technically have a business right now. I have an idea, but I’d really like your marketing. And I’m like, I charge you money. And they’re like, I don’t have that either. And what I found is I migrated from like, okay, you contact me, we got on a call to you contact me, I send you a list of questions. Okay, if your questions are, your responses are good enough. Then we get on a call, and it helped weed out some people. But it was still easy for people to slip through the cracks or maybe be a little too generous and be like, they just responded with two sentences to each question. I’ll still get on the phone call with them. And by moving to a system like Kurtz, where I’m now mandating that anybody who contacts me goes through this application process. It forces them to start the it forces A. Me into more of a position of power relative to them, where the frame is now, you are applying to work with me. It’s not, you are hiring a consultant or a freelancer. You are applying for the chance to talk with me, for me to interview you, to then accept you as a client, which is a huge mind shift and a huge reframe of the traditional relationship.
To build on that, I could not agree more on all of Kai’s points. I will say I have an application form The application form has a bunch of branching logic on it to basically disqualify you as a client. So if you don’t have enough of a budget or you don’t have enough traffic or whatever have you, it actually gives you an automated message that says Thank you so much for your application. Unfortunately, I don’t think it would be a fit at this time. Please take a look at my book, Cadence and Slang. Please subscribe to my weekly newsletter, Revise Weekly, etc. , etc. then it gives them an alternative when it very politely nopes them out, tells them why, then gives an alternative. And that works out really, really well. The next thing that happens, all three of us are lucky enough to have assistants. And so the application does not go to me, it goes to my assistant. And then she goes and vets it and says, okay, this guy’s a good lead. This person, should I even bother, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, when I get an application in. And then her when she forwards me an email, it shows up from a VIP account. So I end up getting to see it on my phone right away, and I know an application has come in. and it’s a hot lead, and I should reply immediately as a real human. So maximizing my discretionary time is the biggest goal out of all this. We talk about this in a lot of episodes of the podcast where it’s just I’m not lazy. I’m just trying to be more efficient. And having a bad lead come in front of my face is an enormous distraction in my day because I’m like, a lead. Oh my God, a lead. What happened? Oh, uh-oh. It’s roulette. It’s a slot machine. Every time you check that inbox and you see the new lead application, you get very excited. Oh, a new lead. And then it’s very deflating when it’s something terrible. Someone likes me. Yeah. And quickly, one of the interesting side effects to doing it this way is you are radically increasing the number of touch points the client has to have with you before you ever ask for money from them. So, by the time I get on the phone with someone, they’ve gotten several automated emails from me. They’ve gone through this application. They’ve probably listened to my podcast. They’ve had all kinds of interactions with me. I’ve had one or two with them. But when we get on the phone, then it’s a very easy conversation because they’re already quite familiar with me.
Connecting to the idea of touch points, I do a lot of work for people, placing them on podcasts, and I go on a lot of podcasts myself. And I’ve been amazed the number of prospects that Go through the funnel, get on a call with me. I have a standard set of seven questions. I’ll send them out to people after the conference that are my qualifying questions. And if I don’t, please harass me on the Twitters. But one of them is always, How did you hear about me? And time and time again, I’ve gotten responses, and you’ve gotten a similar response. Oh, I listened to you on a podcast. And then I went out and found more podcasts you were on, and I listened to like eight of them. And I just have to say, it feels like I know you now. And I’m like, who is this person? How did they get in my house?
I hear that like halfway through a phone call. It feels like I know you, and it’s because podcasts are such a personal medium. Somebody, I shook somebody’s hands. I don’t mean to call this person out, but just as an example, I’ve gotten this before. I’m like, hi there, I’m Nick D. And they go, I know. And I’m like, it’s always unsettling. I’m like, okay, great. Who are you, random stranger who is bent? Like, you immediately flag as like an internet stalker, but somebody They come in through. I get why they say I know because you’ve been reading my email list. You know about my podcast. You know what I look like off the computers, you know? Like I’ve spent. years building my authority around my field and speaking at stuff like this and being a social butterfly. So yeah, I know is actually a totally rational response, right?
That speaks to one of the objections people have about marketing automation. and this like mass one-to-many communication is, oh, it’s not personal, it’s you know, it’s robotic. Well, no, it’s still your words. You still wrote those emails. You still spoke on that podcast. So people do, you know, having consumed all of that, they do know you, even if it’s one-sided.
Jumping back a thread, I wanted to talk about a little more about a when those leads come in in our qualification system. Like Nick, he has his assistant screen them. I just transitioned over to having my she was CC’d on all applications that came in so she could see what it looked like and like Started feeling out, we have a weekly meeting and feel like, like, oh, this is a good one, this is a bad one. Now I’ve started CCing her on all of my responses, and I only sell product eye services. flat rate fixed scope services where there’s no proposal, here’s a sales page, this is the price, we can work together. And she’s starting to see like, oh, when somebody comes in and they say like, this is the expensive problem This is what we’re selling. And we’re probably a month to two months away from her not being in a sales position, but being in this communication position where she’s able to say Oh, hey, Josh, thanks so much for writing in. I noticed that I work with Kai and help him coordinate his new relationships with clients. I noticed you mentioned Badonkadonk. Great. I love the word. You know, typically we see the best results with clients who start with a marketing growth workshop. And here’s like two paragraphs that we co-wrote about it. And if this sounds like a good fit for you, hit reply. I’ve CC’d Kai on this email, so he’ll get your reply as well. So I’m able to divorce myself one step further from, okay, now I have to talk to the client. Not because I don’t want to talk with the clients, but like Nick pointed out, I want to be Let’s call it assertively lazy or assertively efficient or la or whatever we want to call it. I’d say I’m lazy. Yeah, I’m I’m lazy too, I guess.
Either way, it’s a power move.
Yeah, it’s a it’s a power move. A lazy power Anti-profit.
In the absence of having an assistant, how many of us have an assistant here? Okay, so it’s maybe about a third of the audience, which is great. A lot of us don’t have the luxury of an assistant. We may just be starting out and everybody is just like, come on, this doesn’t apply to me at all. So in the absence of an assistant, offer more stringent qualifying criteria and a ton of text expander snippets around those criteria that say, I’m terribly sorry you don’t fit this criteria, do this instead. And at the end of the day, You review all your applications. Nope, nope, nope, maybe, nope, nope, nope, nope. Ask a couple questions. It will be more time. But it’s a way to. Say, it’s a way to get yourself out of the mindset of saying, Oh, this is a lead. I could get money right now. And then you’re negotiating from like anything but a position of abundance in that scenario. You need to just be like, No. Here’s the flowchart. This is the thing I wrote when I was more sober and not blinkered by this. You know, by sober, I mean not having drank the scotch that’s in front of me right now. I mean more like this person hasn’t put their lead in front of me. During a time when there was no lead in front of me, I thought this. Nick D from a week ago would be furious at me if I actually accepted this lead, so I need to go and do this. It’s very hard to remember that when you actually have the lead that’s right in front of you.
No, I completely agree. There’s a sort of blindness that happens when somebody shows up and best intentions go out the window, where it’s not a project you tip I mean, I’ve gone down this road so many, so many times. It’s not a project you typically take, but there’s money and money is kind of nice. It lets you buy things like trips to Sweden or podcasting equipment or nice scotch. But it’s better, I think, if in like your off time you’re like, what what defines a good client for me? And you make that list, you make those criteria, and you j even if it’s just three points, they must like have this much traffic or this conversion rate or Be in this industry. And then, when somebody comes in, you’re able to say, like, okay, I allow them one fail and they have to pass on everything else. They failed too much. Okay, I have to pass on this person because they are not a good fit for my business. If you, as a business owner, accept all comers, it’s going to dilute the efficiency of your work. It’s going to dilute your positioning. And I think having a marketing automation system set up is sort of the next level of that handy-dandy checklist.
So more stuff for Kurt. Before that, but I’m going to pull the audience, who here uses Zapier in some capacity to manage their inbound leads? Okay, great. So that’s about half of you. That’s wonderful. Zapier, for the rest of the audience, if you go to Z-A-P-I-E-R. com. Z AP. It’s basically a bunch of like bolts that glue on various APIs of various services. So for example, Somebody buys a copy of Canada Slang through Stripe, and then Stripe pings Slack that says Curred at ethercycle. com, bought cadence and slang, here’s his address, ship it out. My assistant sees that, sends out a book. So Zapier manages to connect all these things. So the reason marketing automation matters for all of this, you have somebody apply through Google Form, Woofoo, Pipe Drive, whatever not Pipe Drive. Gravity forms, type form. Typeform’s the one. Scan’s the same. Poetry. And then a bunch of things happen. What are those things for you?
All right, so you could use Zapier. Zapier is very good. It’s paid. It has. You know, much more business-related things. There’s also If This Than That, which is totally free. God knows how they make money. It works well. I think it’s a little friendlier. So try one of the two, see what works for you. The simplest marketing automation, and I think probably what started me on it, was playing with if this, then that and just having it cross-post social media images. And that was totally a rabbit hole. I didn’t answer your question. No, what Zapier and if this then that is wonderful for, and you touched on a little bit, is connecting all these disparate services. So, you know, to work with me, I di my phone number is not published, my email is not published. You have to give me your name and email address in a woofoo form, and that’s it. That’s the only thing that’s in there. And what I’m using if this, then that for, or Zapier, it doesn’t matter, is just to cro like, have woofoo post to uh my CRM post to you know, if they pay for something through my payment form and stripe, I’ll have them dump it into hivage. It’s just a I only I don’t do anything fancy with it beyond just connecting all these um disparate services?
I I use it a bit aggressively. So I have things happen like when somebody fills out an application form on my site. add them to my CRM, add them to my email campaign in Drip, post a message to Slack, and a couple other things just so it’s notifying the different services. But Zapier in specific. Basically, it lets you say, like, hey, if there’s an action somebody could take in an application, like Stripe, a new customer created, new charge happens, or Drip or MailChimp, new subscriber happens, or started this campaign, trigger something else happening. So, you’re able to connect these different things. It basically is the tubes behind the internet.
My system is so funny. So, if you pass all of the qualifying questions. and it is sort of clear that you would be a really good client for DraftRevise. I have Zapier set to connect to Twilio, and then Twilio has an instance that texts my phone that a successful application has passed. That is listed as the only VIP on my iPhone and it has a special ringtone. So if I get that vibrate It is the only time it overrides do not disturb, and I can, when I’m at dinner with somebody, excuse myself really briefly to be like, Thank you so much for this application. It’s off business hours right now, but I’ll get back to you tomorrow morning. Clients are shocked, shocked when you get immediate responses. from places that you’ve applied to, and it looks like it comes from a real human. So one of the things that was mentioned earlier today was make your replies look like they come from a real human, even when they may be automated. This is me excusing myself to the bathroom and typing out a two-sentence text message that’s full of typos and grammatical errors. And they notice that a real human being has done this after drinking two cocktails, and they actually really appreciate it. It works out really, really well. What’s both good and bad in that anecdote is how low the bar is for impressing people. Like you just have to be the most basic level of professional to impress clients.
Anybody here read Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich? I see a couple hands. He has an article, financial blogger diversified into a range of different things. He had an article he published about eight years ago, some people might have heard of. He might not have. It’s called the Craigslist Penis Effect. Anybody read this article? I’m seeing no hands. Excellent. Great. I love this story. It basically goes like this. Let’s say you’re dating or want to date, and you post an ad on Craigslist. The typical response is, suddenly you have an inbox full of dick pics. And you think about that and you realize, well, to be better than the average, you just have to not be terrible. And so. You write a response that’s like, Hi, I read your ad. You seem interesting. I like hiking. Do you want to go on a hike? Not like a very compelling call to action for a date, but when you compare it to what the average is out there, suddenly you’re heads and tails above it. And it’s the same thing when dealing with clients. What is the average experience for a client that comes in the door and applies for a service? Well, it might be four days later they get a response or they get a form response, which is like Thank you so much for replying. We will be in contact shortly. And if you do take the effort to just be like, oh, I got your application. I’m very excited. It’s Saturday, but I will be emailing you on Tuesday. It stands out.
One of the most common complaints. So I’m a Shopify expert. That’s why I exclusively do work with Shopify. One of the most common complaints that Shopify store owners have with the experts program or with other Shopify professionals Is that they literally never get a reply from them to their initial email. Like there are just plenty of freelancers who they’re not interested in a lead. Rather than be confrontational and immediately say, No, this is not a good fit, here’s a referral, they just delete it. Or if they’re busy, they just ignore it. So I mean literally just like replying and saying, hey, this isn’t a great fit for me, but here’s something, here’s someone else, they will remember that. I’ve gotten referrals and thank yous consistently. Just for politely declining people promptly. Don’t send a dick pic to your clients. Send two polite sentences that say, Thank you so much. I don’t think this is a good fit. Here’s insert name of other client. I loved the there was a Laura had the talk today about offering up like the names of two or three other freelancers that might be a really good fit. That was fantastic. I do that all the time. I keep actually a roster of other freelancers in topics that might be sort of related to mine, and people thought that I could do them, but I actually do this other thing that’s weird. And so you can actually recommend that really well for people that don’t quite fit your positioning effectively.
Yeah, absolutely the same for me. Even just responding back. I mean Sometimes I respond back and say, Hey, thanks so much for reaching out. I deeply appreciate you want to bring my brain into the mix. Unfortunately, this doesn’t align with my current positioning. It’s not the work I’m accepting right now. Take care. And I’m not even offering them a referral somewhere else. I’m just doing the polite thing. Like, if somebody walks up to you and is like, Do you want a burrito? You might say, I’m not hungry for a burrito. Client walks up and is like, I want to hire you for a thing. And you’re like, I don’t do that thing, but I really appreciate it. They’re going to be thankful that you said no. And maybe you could go above and beyond and say, like, here’s an article I wrote about finding somebody, or here’s somebody out there. I don’t know them personally, but I know they do this type of work. There’s a range of options you could give to close down a client interaction with somebody who is not a good fit for you as a prospect without going completely silent or going completely cold.
I’ll share an anecdote. And this probably resonates with a lot of you, but I used to work in a shared office space, and I had an office right next door to a garage door fabrication company. And it was so fascinating. And like, you know, it’s a shared office, so you’re not really talking to each other very much. And like, after five or six months of being there, the head guy Who fabricates the garage doors comes up to me? He’s like, What do you do for a living anyway? What are you doing there? I’m like, Well, I’m a web designer. He’s like, You’re a web designer. We have a terrible website and we need a better website. And I’m thinking, like, Okay, well, I just got myself into this mess because I actually generate revenue for e-commerce companies and SaaS companies using A-B testing. If you charged me, you know, if you hired me, I don’t think you would be able to afford a $30,000 week as a consultant for this. So I was like. Thank you so much. I am so grateful for the opportunity. I actually am booked up right now. So what you can do I’m going to give you my card, and I’m going to write on the back the names and email addresses of three people who might actually be able to help you. And I like wrote down a bunch of people who are fresh out of college that I’ve met at the meetup I run every month in Chicago. And they might be able to help you. And one person sent me a gift basket two weeks later, thanking me profusely for referring them their first client out of college because I gave them the garage door fabricator. I ain’t never touching the garage store fabricator. Thank you. This was not even, this was like a butterfly flapping in like, and I was just a facilitator. Like, I will be very, very humble about this. But, like, just to say. I ain’t doing this. We are not a good fit. I called myself a web designer because that’s so much better than say I generate revenue for her Whatever. One click. Nobody cares. You hit him with the, it’s not you, it’s me. You didn’t tell him that you didn’t think it’s a good fit. You said, I’m booked up. Whether or not it was true. I do the same thing.
It’s not you, it’s me. It’s a perfect way to defer a client engagement that’s not a good fit just by saying, like, oh, I’m booked solid right now. Thank you. And what are they going to do? Make more time in your day, work more hours, invent another hour in the day to do my project.
And if they did ask for that, then you’d know fundamentally that that was like the biggest, boldest, reddest of flags. Or they’re a wizard. Or they’re a wizard. Good. So the whole like building an automated system for doing this, we talked a little bit more about having the like application process that feels like the 200 level. For you is missing in your process right now that you want to be doing in the next like four to six months? Like, what are you kicking yourself about because you’re booked solid and you aren’t doing yet?
I should be automating. I have almost automated requesting testimonials and referrals. I still do it manually. Using uh text expander to make my email templates very easy, um and also uh boomerang to remind me to do it, to like to bring uh emails back in my inbox if I haven’t heard from a client in a while. and the for testimonials I use a a survey form. But all of that still requires me to have the presence of mind to do it.
I think there’s a lot of value if you use an email service provider, Drip, ConvertKit, MailChimp, InfusionSoft, whatever, badonka donk. Setting up a campaign that you subscribe past clients to And it could be like every two weeks it sends them an article you’ve written or a previous case study you’ve written. And at predefined times, maybe like A month after the project, it’s like, hey, insert name here. It was great to work with you on the project. I’m really excited and I really enjoyed working with you. As you know, testimonials are great for my business and a wonderful way for me to attract other people like it help. I would have deeply appreciated a testimonial from you. Here’s some questions. You could just hit reply or you could click here and fill out a little form that’ll automatically mail it to me. And you’ve deferred the need to do it manually to a robot that’s running in the background somewhere.
Yeah, when someone pays via Stripe, they automatically get added to the list tagged as client. So then all you well, I still got to double check it. But yeah, it could ma add them to a a drip campaign, just a follow-up drip campaign.
How do you audit whether the system you’re putting together is working effectively? Like you put together these event-driven emails and these drib campaigns, but like Is it not? What constitutes a lack of success as well as success? How can you optimize it? I know it’s a very broad high level question, but I think it’s important.
If you get people saying, thanks for the automated email, like occasionally you’ll get people acknowledging the fact that they believe it’s automated. If that’s happening, you did it wrong. Because if it’s done well, it should be totally transparent. No one should notice. Yeah. That’s one. And the other way to do it is making sure your conditional logic is good. So test it several times yourself. And depending on like what this specific process is, before it sends if it’s sending stuff toward you, who cares? You could deal with it. If it’s sending stuff toward clients That’s where you might want to have it, you know, like put an email in draft and then you tre check them once a day. Yeah.
So for an example, when you buy revised weekly for me, not Express, that one. The one off teardown. You get a receipt, but on the receipt, giant text. Now you need to fill out this questionnaire so I can actually do your teardown. You absolutely have to do this, or we are holding up the project and you will not actually get the quoted deadline. Please do it right now. It will take you five minutes. I love you. 100% conversion rate within an hour. And that’s over three and a half years with probably around 60 people, something. Yeah, like I’m looking at you like you would know. But but yes, so you know, that that’s the kind of thing. If that weren’t converting, if it were taking too long, I would try and retool the language around it. I would try and maybe send a separate email. I would try and personally follow up after two days or something like that. try and figure out what strategies could potentially work using all of the techniques that we’ve been talking about today about making proper follow-ups about emails, being really persistent about that, and making sure you’re really continuing to get their attention effectively.
It’s slightly ancillary, but I wanted to bring this up. When I have somebody opt into my email list through any channel, I set up a custom thank you page. And like we’ve all seen a lot of thank you pages for newsletters, which are like, thank you so much, drag me from the promotions tab to the inbox, my content is very I set up a GravityForm survey, and the survey is basically three questions long, and it says, like, hey, what’s the number one thing you’re struggling with in your business? What’s your name? And where can I find you online? And as soon as I get like a 33% conversion rate on that, and as soon as somebody fills that out, it shoots it into my inbox. And we have a conversation starter right there. If they’re like, you know, my number one challenge is getting on podcasts, I’m able to instantly reply and be like, well, hey, here’s a couple articles I wrote. I’ve had people respond to those emails, these handcrafted emails, and they’re like, This is an automated email, isn’t it? And I’m like, No, I’m a dude in Eugene. I just responded to you. This is real. But the point I want to make is setting up these tiny little tr sort of like tripwires to learn more about the people who are coming into your ecosystem is a perfect way to build that relationship. And while it’s less on the automated side, the process for collecting disinformation is on the automated side.
Yeah, I often use I frequently use surveys. In many of my emails, the closer call to action is just a question, just one single concise question. And if someone takes the time to write me a thoughtful response, I will always reply to it with a thoughtful answer. I have an autoresponder that happens the instant you subscribe to my mailing list. So if you go to draft. nu/slash letters, you can subscribe, and then maybe immediately. Unsubscribe running screaming in the opposite direction just to see this. But it welcomes you to my mailing list, says, you know, here are the few things that I’m interested in. I wouldn’t mind. I’m sorry if I’m giving you homework right now. I know we just met, but could you reply and tell me something about yourself? That converts two-thirds. Still to this day. It has gotten so bad that my assistant now has to field all of the replies and send me like the top 5% of them. Kai stole it. For his own mailing list at one point, and then I got the amazing feeling of subscribing to someone else’s mailing list and getting back my own autoresponder, which was. Is this my house? What’s going on? Imitation, flattery, et cetera, et cetera. I love you dearly. I’m the knockoff version of Nick Disalvado. I’ve got a knockoff version of Kai Davis. When’s the wedding? That’s why we’re here. We eloped. No. Oh my God. So that, I ran through all of my questions. I wanted to turn it around to the audience and actually Do a QA. So now is when you pester us. Will you ask us a question? We’re going to repeat back the question. We have a list of things you should not be asking questions about. We’ll do a quick little read of the bad. So Kai’s hair. Kurt Elster Klute’s gigantic truck. My house. I bought a house like six weeks ago, but you can’t ask me about it.
The merits of Hario vs. Chemex versus Clever.
Those are poor overbrewing methods. I don’t know what that means. Pens, even though we wrote an entire podcast episode about this at one point.
Juice cleanses.
Hell no. The whiskey we’re drinking right now, ask us later. We’ll have the rest of it. I mean, Lutfisch. I don’t know. Okay, that’s it. I don’t know, Lutafisk? Lutafisk? Okay. We obviously do not know anything about it. Malord. Do not ask. Or this list. So, anybody, hand questions about automation, marketing? You could literally ask us anything right now. You have three extremely knowledgeable experts on. stage right now. Two and Kai.
We will sit here for the next yes, thank God.
I’ll talk about what I do. Basically, I look up some key metrics that the engagement involves. So revenue went up, engagement went up, whatever have you. Usually, they have not revoked access to Google Analytics for me because it’s really, really hard to do that. And so that can actually be used to my advantage, and I just kind of quietly go into Google Analytics and look at the step function that was my redesign. I say, okay, great. I write a really great testimonial for myself. And then I send it along to them. Like, thank you so much for working with me on this project. Here’s a sample testimonial that I wrote. These are the coin of my realm, and they help me build out a really good effective marketing page. This is based on some stuff that I saw on your Google Analytics sample link. If you like this, rewrite it. Or just send me a thumbs up and I’ll post it to my site. I’ve never had anybody rewrite the thing. They usually are just like you make it as brainlessly easy for them. Hey, this thing, if I send a thumbs up, Nick D is happy. You already made Nick D happy for the past six weeks. Continue making Nick D happy.
I take a slightly different track with it. There’s a wonderful, wonderful book I recommend to everyone in the audience, The Brain Audit, by Sean DeSouza. It’s $9 Kindle, again, maybe tens of thousands of dollars. In it, he shares six questions he asks to generate great testimonials. I snag them wholesale, and his framework is: in a testimonial, you want to communicate to a prospective buyer, or a testimonial exists to communicate to a prospective buyer. why they should work with you and address their objections. So his questions are like, what was your hesitation before working with me? When you did work with me, what did you find out? What was the major benefit of working together? What were three additional benefits? Would you recommend my services to someone else? And I send that across as an email. I’m like, hey, thank you so much. I’d love testimonial from you. It would be wonderful. Here’s the questions. Just hit reply and answer them. The more text you give, the better. Or click here, and there’s a form you could fill out. And When I send that across to somebody, I don’t get 100% conversion rate, but I get a decent conversion rate. And if I don’t hear back from them, it echoes back to my talk. Persistently politely follow up with them and say, Well, hey, wonder just checking in, it’s been a couple weeks. I noticed you hadn’t sent back a testimonial yet. any questions I answer or anything I could do to help with that. If I still don’t hear back, then I go to Nick Strategy. I pre write a testimonial for them, send it across and say, hey, I just wanted to like this is a testimonial, like the general feel, feel free to edit it however you’d like. But if it sounds good to you already, just shoot back a yes or a thumbs up and we’ll be good to go. And if they haven’t converted by that point, then they usually convert at the yeah, the follow-up place.
The follow-up place two months later. I see a hand, maybe. I see Moitza stretching. I see a hand right next to Moitza stretching. So Austin just asked whether there was a line about where you would feel uncomfortable sending an automated email.
Well, that’s actually to an earlier point, that’s why I haven’t automated the client follow-ups is because really If someone is just on my newsletter, they haven’t I’m trying to provide value to them, they haven’t yet provided value to me. So I’m sort of in this buy or get off my list mode. So those people I’m fine with sending automated stuff to. Once they have given me a dollar and become a client, then that’s where I’m really kind of careful about what I automate. I view it as a customer service issue. If you feel squicked out about it, probably don’t do it. If it involves core things about the sales process like contractual negotiation or or that sort of stuff, that could be potentially a problem. If I would send an automated email and it would make somebody automatically assume that it was a robot I manually send all of my follow-ups, but I have stock phrases and then I like use text expander snippets to paste the thing modify the thing if need be. I look for five seconds at the email, take a deep breath and send it. I have never regretted pausing before sending what amounts to an automated email that was generated from Text Expander or some sort of similar.
You know what might be clever is if the the automation sequence follow-up sent it to me, the consultant, to remind me to send a personal email. You could even have it like with email template, you copy, paste, modify, send. I’m thinking out loud. I think this is I like this. I use a tool called Sanebox a lot. S-A-N-E-B-O-X. com. I can’t imagine life without Sanebox. Sanebox is. An amazing, amazing tool that manages your email inbox really, really effectively. And one thing I do, if I BCC either a date at sanebox. com, like jun17 at sanebox. com. or number two days at Sainbox. com, or five days at sanebox. com, or two hours at sanebox. com. It sends me back an email reminder. Just with the email. And I usually know what to do next. I look at that, or I look at the previous email thread, and I’m like, oh, this was this guy, then I can do this. And I follow up with him that way. That’s how I’ve used systems to follow up with all of my clients? Because usually I just get like three or four Sandbox emails at the beginning of the day. I’m like, follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up. We’re done. Great.
I think the larger lesson there is marketing automation in no way has to be hard. It was like three, four, five years ago, it was this very enterprise-y, awful, complex thing. And here, tools like Saintbox, Boomerang, Drip, all make it abundantly easy and accessible.
We’ve got time for one more question. Good question. So the question is, how do we as consultants increase sort of our visibility and the number of leads or prospects who are showing up at our website and then taking some action to convert? In my case, I found I think it’s a tactical decision depending on what you do really well. So in my case, I’m really good at showing up on podcasts and talking. And I did not expect that to be a significant revenue channel for me, but I’ve discovered there is a very strong correlation between Kai shows up on a podcast and talks about something and ends with a call to action, and then money happens a couple of weeks later. For some people, it’s writing guest articles. For some people, it’s doing cold email outreach to prospect lists. But it’s identifying what’s easiest for you. Pay-per-click advertising, Facebook advertising, social media engagement. There’s dozens and dozens and dozens of systems and strategies out there. Some are really easy for some people because their brains just work that way. Some are really hard. I have a colleague who Is a wonderful, wonderful writer. He could write 2,000 words that don’t need editing in 30 minutes. He freezes up in a panic attack if he goes on a podcast. And He decided to not do podcasts and instead write guest articles. And it results in people showing up and saying, Hey, I’d love to work with you. And so I think it comes down to And I know this is like a squishy dodgy answer, but it comes down to figuring out what you’re good at that gets you in front of your target audience, connecting with positioning, and then doing that thing. So I’ll pass them. Microphone today?
So, if you’re starting to feel annoyed by repeated tasks that you’re doing, figure out ways to automate them. If you can find a way to automate it that’s easy, do it. That is my general. And I spend like basically an hour or two every month thinking, what am I doing right now? Do I like it? Is it annoying? If it’s annoying, can I have my assistant do it? Can I have a robot do it? Can I replace myself with a small shell script? And the answer is usually. Yes, to that question, no matter how sophisticated it happens to be. A lot of it is like, oh, I can just use the API to post my mailing list. That’s much easier than like going through click, paste, style, click. Your audience had few more needs. Kai asked, how am I working to grow my audience and gain more leads? Speaking at conferences helps a lot. Writing a lot helps. So I just write a letter to like anybody who’s on my mailing list every week. I reach out to people a lot. Guest on other people’s podcasts a lot. I’ve gotten known as somebody who’s good on other people’s podcasts and gained a reputation for that. If you don’t like podcasting or you hate the sound of your own voice, go and Guest blog post for other people and offer pitches that are effective. The technique for writing a pitch is the subject of a whole other 15-minute talk. Um, but ping either of us afterward. He has like he is the grand vizier of writing a dope podcast pitch.
I wrote a book on this called Podcast Outreach, podcastoutreach. com. It teaches you how to get on podcasts as a guest. And the truth is, it’s the same pitch process if you’re looking to like get a guest article placed or do a joint venture webinar or joint venture relationship. It’s the same pitch process. It’s just pulling out podcasts and putting in guest articles. So if you’re looking for opportunities to get in front of more prospects and leads through what I broadly call off-site content creation, which is the most enterprisy thing I’ve ever said in my life. it works really, really well. It’s a repeatable system. So I recommend the book and I’ve written a couple of articles about it. But Kurt, how about you? How do you grow the number of leads or get more people on the site in front of you?
I predominantly use podcasts and after I was on half a dozen, several people said, Oh, you’re good at this, you should host your own. So I did, and that has worked phenomenally well. But to Kai’s point, you hit a tipping point at some eventually where I no longer I don’t pitch blogs, I don’t pitch podcasts, they just show up. And I don’t know how many guest appearances I had to make for that to happen, but that it’s phenomenally satisfying to see that. You could also set up a self-fulfilling prophecy. So on my personal page, KurtElster. com, on my contact page, I literally have here’s five ways to contact me. Two of them are, you can request quotes from me as an expert. You can request to interview me on your podcast. So I’m soliciting people on my contact page, and by virtue of doing it, It just happens. And then I went a step further. I created a, you go kurtelster. com/slash press. And, you know, fundamentally, bloggers, podcasters are lazy. They want to make their lives easier, just like I do. So I said, here’s a bio, here’s my headshot, here’s topics I could talk on, and here’s a form to request me.
To build off of that, building a press kit is tremendously valuable because you make it easy for the press to quote you, to find you. saying, if you would like me to speak on your podcast, click here, which implies that you speak on a lot of podcasts and that you’re good at it and a safe bet about it. One of the things that I found extremely helpful in building automation effectively is just saying I need to be on more podcasts. Does anybody want me on their podcasts? PS text on my next mailing list. I’d like to be on more podcasts because it’s drying up. Here’s a form. Get on a podcast. I’m really easy at being on a podcast. I record my own audio, et cetera. Alan Weiss says this thing: if you don’t beat your drum, there is no music. So you need to be good at recognizing what you’re good at and what you want to be good at as far as your skills in promoting yourself, and then promote yourself.
Yeah, I completely agreed. And I just want to bring it around again to there’s no single strategy that works in terms of getting people to the site to then opt in and become part of your funnel. It’s testing a broad range of tactics. And seeing which ones you’re good at, which ones you want to get better at, and which ones you absolutely despise and don’t want to do at all. And focus on the things you’re good at. Double down on those. There’s, I wish I could remember this quote better, but. There’s I mean you look at like copywriting ads or and you see ads that ran for twenty, thirty, forty years without being changed. Well, it’s because they worked really well. And we unfortunately, from the top down view, say like, oh, we’ve been running the same thing or doing the same thing for three years. people must be getting tired of it. We should change. Well, if it’s still bringing people to your site or generating leads or generating revenue, why would you change it? Test it against something else, but don’t shoot the horse that’s winning the race in the leg because it keeps winning races.
I think we should probably wrap up and offer some closing thoughts. This started out with automation. have a podcast. This is another episode of it. It’s probably going to come out in a few weeks. We are so grateful to Brennan and to all of you for being such good question askers and good listeners. laughing at the correct times, we were a little worried about that. Yeah, it has, it has. And the like, you know, laugh track and everything. So if you want more episodes out of our podcast, you can go to our website at makemoneyonline. exposed. You can sign up to read more about us there and do everything you can to promote this to other people if this was really valuable for you. It’s relatively new.
We do appreciate referrals for other listeners.
Yeah, refer other listeners, three or four. And then here’s our final slide call to action. If you want to learn anything more about our podcast, we sell our About page for $5, and that’s how we make money online. So you can go there. You can click that button. And you have to click.
There’s no alternative. We have sold 22 about pages so far. I think that’s actually inflated. Really?
Yeah. Oh. No. Yes. Oh. Upper teens. Upper teens. Thank you all so much for all of your time today. We’re so grateful. This was wonderful. Thank you, Kurt. Thank you, everybody. We really appreciate it.