Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:01:00: Get social with us
00:02:50: I’m not you
00:05:07: Hating your business
00:07:18: Validation
00:08:48: Seeing the future
00:11:53: Having what it takes
00:13:59: Online courses
00:20:03: Creating an online course advice
00:23:21: What you bring to the table is less than you think
00:25:54: Start to plan an online course
00:28:49: You’re being sold to
00:31:08: Prove you’re serious
00:32:28: Building your business not someone else’s
00:35:40: Software platforms don’t care about you
00:38:23: These are people out there
00:41:54: Tom’s conversation that counted
00:44:06: Be honest with yourself
00:44:45: A simple life
00:47:44: Nest egg and income
00:50:42: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Wendy Harris: Welcome back to Making Conversations Count with me, Wendy Harris.  I’ve been looking into creating an online course and whilst doing an online course standalone seems like a wonderful cash machine in the corner, it’s not for everybody.  As I discovered, as I’ve been creating my own online course, that is not the way that it’s going to work best for me, for now.

But on that journey of discovery I was looking to talk to experts about the best ways of doing things and how to get it to sell and why it may not sell.  If you’ve been thinking about creating an online course, you really do need to listen to what’s coming up next.  We’re going to be making conversations about online courses count.

What’s new Wendy Woo?  We’re getting rather social here at Making Conversations Count.  We’re already encouraging you to connect with us, with me on LinkedIn personally, and we’ve got a Facebook page for the podcast, because Facebook are very kindly helping to push podcasts at the moment.  We’ve got a feed on Twitter and we tweet a little bit, but we’ve also got an Instagram channel, where we’ll be using guest episodes and some of our favourite quotes from those conversations.  Go check us out over on Insta, all the links are on our website www.makingconversationscount.com.

We’re going to be making conversations about online courses count with Tom Libelt.  It’s interesting because you can go through life — and I had a quick peek at some of the things that you’ve done, which is really kind of cool.  I just thought, “Do you know what?  You kind of get to an age where you just know stuff”.  It’s because you’ve been there, you’ve done it, you’ve bought the T-shirt, you’ve changed the design a few times.  If you’re a lady, like me, I go up and down a size, so I have to have more than one T-shirt.  I find it really hard to hold back telling people what they need to hear sometimes, because that’s what I know.  I don’t charge for it, it’s just what I know.  If that one piece of advice can help them to move on and do something with it, it’s not really good business advice is it to not charge for it?  But hey, I like to be a good human being.

Tom Libelt: Yeah, I’ve done my advice-giving for the most part, now I try not to.  Unless like we go over a specific scenario, I might tell them some of the ways I think about it, but not really into advice-giving anymore.  I hate blanket advice; I hate when someone says something like, “This works, and you should just do it”.  No, cold showers and saving $5 on coffee, they will not grow my business, trust me on that.

Wendy Harris: Hang on, you forgot the bit that says, “You’ve got to have the cold shower at 5.00am”.  We’ve all been there, “Really?”

Tom Libelt: It’s like it’s just blanket advice, right, just copy habits of millionaires, it’s like, “No, those habits you start doing when once a millionaire”.

Wendy Harris: I’ve got a good friend and previous guest, Heidi, and she talks about this.  You do need help building a business.

Tom Libelt: Agreed.

Wendy Harris: We can’t do everything ourselves.  We need help building the business we want to have, not what those people, where they do their expertise, want to imprint on us.  We have to manage the right people to get the job done how we want it seen.

Tom Libelt: You need a team, you need consultants, you need people above you, if you don’t, you’re a freelancer.  You got yourself a good job, that’s what a lot of people do.  They just created a really good position for themselves, but they can’t take a vacation, they can’t sell it, they often can’t move up or scale because they’re the bottleneck.  For all those things you need people, you definitely need people.

If you come asking me for advice, “What should I do, this or that?”  I don’t know, I never know, like I’m not you.  I actually don’t like business advice, I barely ever ask for it unless it’s, “Okay, I’m having a problem with Facebook, they messed up the accounts again, this whole new pixel thing and how do I fix this thing?  Can you do it for me?  Here’s some money, go away tell me when it’s done”.  That’s a completely different thing.  Then what most people ask, “What niche should I go into?”  How am I supposed to know?  “What kind of business should I build?”  How do you want to live?

Wendy Harris: What do you want to achieve, yeah.

Tom Libelt: The chief thing usually just comes up, “I just want to make this much”, or, “I want that”, but there’s no actual criteria of what I do and don’t want to do.  Often, if you don’t have that, you grow a business that you start hating after a while.  I’ll give you an example.  We have this agency that is just a cash cow, and I don’t want to grow it because if I grow it, I’m going to have to manage more people, more clients and my margins will die, so no.  Every consultant comes up to me asking me if I want more leads to how to grow my agency.  I’m like, “Stop, I never asked you for that because I don’t want to do it”. 

With my new businesses, we are building stuff that we can sell, and I’ll just give you criteria for that.  No phone calls from me, I’m not fulfilling anything, it needs to be systemised, SOP, I need to be able to bring someone off the street, train them to do it.  We need recurring revenue, and we need multiple, not broke, clients; we don’t want to work with anyone broke, you know how that goes.

Wendy Harris: Yeah.

Tom Libelt: We want to sell it.  That’s it, like we have our criteria and if it doesn’t fit those, that’s not a good plan, that’s not a good idea, we can’t be doing that.  Most people don’t have that, they’re like, “How do I land more clients?”  “You can land more clients but I’m not sure if you’re going to be happy with your life.  What kind of clients do you want to work with?”  My first piece of advice, and this is the only blanket statement I’ll ever give, don’t work with broke people.

Wendy Harris: It’s a good piece of advice.

Tom Libelt: That’s the only one I’ll ever give on the client thing, because you know what; a broke person, you will invoice them for $400 to $500 and they’ll send you a big email back saying, “This is going to change both our lives and I can’t wait for this stuff”, and I’m like, “Now, we’re going to talk every week”, and you’re just like, “What?”  Then you send a $5,000 invoice and someone’s going to say, “Thanks, paid”.  That’s what I mean by building a business, you really need to think about what you want to do, how you want to live your life, what your day should look like.

Asking yourself just how do I get clients is a very basic question and I get that initially, I completely understand, but you need to have more than that.

Wendy Harris: It’s a simple question with a complicated answer, isn’t it, because there are lots of different channels and ways to attract customers these days?  You’ve got to figure out exactly where those people are that have got the money to pay you, where they hang out and be starting the engagement there.  It’s interesting, because the show is all about how conversation helps and sometimes it is about getting back to the nitty-gritty of the right questions to ask. 

If you want to be an entrepreneur there’s a certain amount of risk taking that you’ve got to do in order to get there, that only you will know whether it’s the right thing to do.  It doesn’t matter how many polls you do on LinkedIn, it doesn’t matter how many people on Twitter you ask, “What would you do A, B or C?”, you know the answer already.  Why ask for validation?

Tom Libelt: That’s what most people want.

Wendy Harris: Yeah.

Tom Libelt: Most people want leaders, and most people want someone that’s going to give them permission.  I often do have these emails where people reach out to me and ask me some big question around a niche business and all I respond is like, “Whatever you want, you’ve got my permission”, often they’re just happy with that.  Like I don’t even answer those questions because like I said I can’t, I really can’t.  I just give them permission, I’m like, “You’ve got this.  You’ve got my permission.  Whatever choice you make you’ll be fine and if you’re not, you’ll figure it out”.

Wendy Harris: I love the concept that at the age of 7 we knew what we were going to be as an adult.  We could project and see into the future at our clearest when we’re 7 years of age, and yet we still, no matter what age in adult life, still try to predict the future.  We can’t do it; we haven’t got that.

Tom Libelt: It’s funny but it’s true, it’s completely true.  I knew exactly what I wanted to be, I had three goals and I completed two and one was just not realistic, so I dropped it.

Wendy Harris: Does it mean to say that it will stay dropped, or is it something that still might happen?

Tom Libelt: It’s going to happen if I’m rich enough.

Wendy Harris: So, it’s still a goal.

Tom Libelt: Yeah, but I dropped it as a career.  It was just three things, I want to go into space, I want to start a business and do music.  The space thing just wasn’t realistic for the whole schooling and educational thing.  I came from Poland to the US, in music I figured I’d got to do it early, because I was doing hip-hop which is a young man’s game.  You’ve got to be angry and damaged to be successful, so I did in my 20s.

Then the business took over and now, with all these space trips happening, Bezos and Elon and all this stuff, the tourist industry, I looked at it, I was like, “I can actually afford a ticket now, but I just wouldn’t pay yet”.  If I’m a bit richer, yeah, I might just take him up on that offer and go into space as well.  You’re right, it was exactly when I was around 7 years old that those were the three things I just wrote on my bedroom wall actually, yeah, just things I wanted to do.

Wendy Harris: There you go, so we will challenge the listeners then to send us what they wanted to be at 7 years old, I’d love to hear what they think.

Tom Libelt: Yeah, that would be super interesting, that’s actually a question I’m going to start asking people now.

Wendy Harris: It sort of links into where I was taking it was that in lots of instances as an entrepreneur and wanting to scale a business or start a business, start-up, scale-up, shake-up, whatever you want to call it, there’s an emotional intelligence that’s needed behind what you do which is, even if you have to rational it out with logic, your gut will still be what you return to.  That’s just proven the case for it, so if you think it’s a good idea and you feel it’s a good idea, if you’ve got that kind of anchor in your stomach, do it.  What harm will it do?

Tom Libelt: It depends again, it particularly depends.  I’ve seen people do things which I always ask myself, “How did they think this was a good idea?”  There’s a lot of neat things that I see, especially in business.  The most attractive things are usually short-term hustles, because we see other people doing it, making a lot of money quickly and the media starts pumping it up.  A lot of people don’t actually belong in business, but they’ve watched enough business porn on TV that they just think they want to be a boss lady or a boss guy or whatever it is that they have chosen.

Wendy Harris: Influencer.

Tom Libelt: Yeah, just nonsense.  But a lot of it is actually not a good idea based on their personalities, someone that’s undecided, anxious and unorganised, starting a business, really?  You think this will be something you can pull off?  You can’t even wash your socks and put them in the same place.  I’m not one of these people that say everyone can pull it off, it’s not easy.

Wendy Harris: That’s true.  It’s certainly never what you expect.

Tom Libelt: It’s just not easy.  The thing you’ve got to realise is there are going to be moments in your business that break the average person.  When I was first starting out, the best piece of advice I got and I think the plan works for everyone, it’s not really blanket advice but it’s just the reality, if you keep doing what you’re doing, you just get a little bit better.  The stuff that’s stopping you right now and that’s breaking you will be just business as usual in a month to two years.

Wendy Harris: Yeah.

Tom Libelt: Your skin will get thicker; you’ll have more experience.  It’s like with sales.  When I started my sales career, the first couple of noes, had me confused.  Then the next maybe 50 had me a little discouraged, the next 1,000 and I didn’t care anymore.

Wendy Harris: There’s a resilience that you build up, isn’t there, naturally when you’re in a sales environment?

Tom Libelt: To me, it’s partly resilience and partly just being jaded after a while.

Wendy Harris: If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, I would agree, yeah.

Tom Libelt: Yeah, but the sales careers that I’ve had, and I’ve done this on purpose was, I tried to learn how to sell things I did not want to sell, because I figured if I can sell stuff that I completely don’t care about, then when I’m selling something of my own that I do care about, it’s going to be extremely, extremely easy and it is.

Wendy Harris: I would agree that passion for what you do, that belief that you have for what you do means that you’re not selling anymore.  You’re helping people

Tom Libelt: No, we know what we’re doing, and I can’t even sell.  I choose who I want to work with.

Wendy Harris: What do those conversations look like, Tom?

Tom Libelt: Someone’s going to come to me with a problem, always some kind of a problem and I ask them what they think their problem is, because I know it’s usually false, but I still like to know where we’re starting off.  That is because we are doing cross-marketing, in the agency, that’s our number one.  There’ll be like, “Well our course is not selling”.  “Yeah, of course, we know that that’s why you’re calling.  Why did you create this?  Are you even someone that should be teaching?  Who are your students?  What are you going to get them after they achieve this course?  What are your goals for this?  Is this a business for you or is it a hobby?”

I’m trying to figure out is this person actually an expert, first of all.  If they are, do they have any experience teaching?  Because, anyone ever went through this, have they gone through this method, their system, and actually accomplished what they promised?  Is this going to be a business for them, because if it’s not, you’re going to have a problem growing this hobby because it’s not simple?  It’s a great income stream when it works but it is not easy to set up.  All I’m trying to figure out is, once again, is what they think they want actually what they want?  Then can they deliver it, because if the fulfilment is going to be garbage, then they’re going to have a problem with retention and refund and stuff like that and I’ve seen this.

A lot of the people again watch too much of this business porn and they just think courses are the best thing ever and it’s the next thing I want to make one.  “Do you really want to make one or do you like the idea of having one?”

Wendy Harris: It’s an interesting question.  Certainly, I’ve had an online course on my to-do list for the best part of three years, along with a book and a podcast.  Of course the book and the podcast have won, and the online course is still sitting on the to-do list.

Tom Libelt: That’s what to-do lists are for.

Wendy Harris: I would like to have an online course, but I don’t want to have an online course that is without me, if that makes sense.

Tom Libelt: Yeah, and again this is when we start going over what it is that you want in your life.  A lot of people think they want an online course, but they actually want a bootcamp that happens twice a year.  Then we think about the time, and they don’t actually want a bootcamp, they want some kind of a class, group coaching class, where they just hold one hour every week or two and control their time.  There’s a lot of variables and I try to quickly get this out because I’m like, “Look if you don’t even want this business, really why are we even talking about marketing?”, because I can sell it for you.

I had this one guy, he’s like, “I want to make this course and I know it’s going to sell because it’s a hot topic, I’ve had people asking me for it and I wanted to do some in-person stuff with each one of these buyer students, so I’m going to offer one hour of live coaching along with the course”.  I’m like, “That sounds like a horrible idea”, but I said, “Yeah, okay let’s do it”.  So, I was able to get him to sell 45 in the first week.  After doing all the fulfilment, customer service and 45 hours of coaching, he came back to me saying, “How do I stop?”  I was like, “I needed you to learn and now we can figure it out”.

I was like fine, “If you think it’s a good idea, let’s go”.  So, once again you really need to think this through, and that’s what I help people do; and then if I like the idea myself, if I have that clarity on how we can sell this, if I even want to work with someone, because after speaking with someone for about 15 minutes, you know whether you’re going to enjoy the next month with them.

Wendy Harris: Yeah, we’ve had this conversation on the podcast before and we’ve come to the conclusion that actually you’ve made your mind up in the first five minutes.

Tom Libelt: I make my mind up on the person in the first five minutes, and then I need to think about the niche and if I can get clarity.  I always tell them, “If I don’t have clarity, you do not want me to say yes, because it’s going to be a really weird road to market this thing”.

Wendy Harris: There’s better things you can do with your time, isn’t there, right, Tom?

Tom Libelt: We have around eight people coming in for every spot that we can give.  Being in a position where we actually don’t — and we have built enough of a nest egg over the last year, because that was my goal in that last year in business, where we don’t actually have to work for two years as a business at all.  Coming from that position, we have more leads than we can take on and we actually don’t need to do the work, we can really only pick the best clients.  If we like you and we liked your idea, we like everything, yes; if not then we just say, “Sorry”.  We come clean and have zero feelings about it.

Wendy Harris: It’s certainly a space that is filling up and I get frustrated when I see somebody that’s ‑- it’d be like me saying, “Oh I’ve done a year’s worth of podcasting and I’ve been podcasting for a year, I’m going to create a course to help you launch a podcast”.  I know my producer, Neal, will just be going like that, “Oh no, man, not another one”, because I’m still learning.  I don’t think I’ve got the authority to be able to do that and I’m not just picking on podcasting, it’s because I see that on a daily basis, “Come and do my course, I’ll show you how to get your podcast up and running in 14 hours”.  Really?

Tom Libelt: This is a rule of thumb, every failed podcaster wants to do a course, every failed yoga instructor wants to do a course.  Every failed — whatever you pick wants to do a course.  You can pretty quickly single them out, you see it.  You see it as soon as they come through, you see it in their sales copy and their video and you’re just like, “Yeah it’s another one”.  Those guys never pass my test for the marketing.  Within a few minutes I’m just, “It’s not going to happen”.

Wendy Harris: What’s your advice then for anybody listening that’s thinking about creating an online course, in terms of the numbers?  And this is another reason why I’ve stalled a little bit around just having a course sat on the shelf for people to just do whatever they want with it.  I’ve put my name to it, it is my responsibility to deliver something of value enough for them to want to get to the end of that course.  So, what would your advice be to people who are thinking about doing a course?

Tom Libelt: With people completing stuff, it depends.  If your outcome is good enough, they’re going to go through the course to figure it out.  Often what people don’t realise is you create a course, but someone just needs one component or two or they actually get to a piece, they figure it out themselves after that.  I’ve taken courses like that.  Someone tried to take me a whole path on how to scale an agency and all I’ve seen was the way they think about speaking with the prospects on the phone and I was like, “Wow, that changed a lot for me”, and they didn’t need anything else.  It’s not that they did a bad job.  I’m like, “I’m good”.

Wendy Harris: They give one piece of the puzzle.

Tom Libelt: Yeah, so it really depends on that, but with creating a course there’s only one path that guarantees success.  Everything else is more, “I’m a celebrity, lucky influencer”, but there is only path that you are guaranteed a success with a course.  You start with a do-it-for-you service, whatever that is.  If you want to teach podcasting, start setting up podcasts for people.  Start with a do-it-with-you service, so now you’re teaching people a little bit but you’re also finishing a lot of the work, so it’s do it for you, do it with you.

Then you charge a little more and do one-on-one consultations, where you don’t actually do any more of the work, you’re only telling them what to do and then you’re just giving feedback.  And you do that long enough until you produce a method that works for every single consultation that you do.  From then, you’re going to have too many people wanting consultations, so you try to do a group coaching method, using what you’ve learned so you’ve got this thing that works every single time, but now you’re just using more and more people.

The next step from that is for a lower price, then your group coaching is your online programme, for all the people who want to get in but can’t afford it.  If you use this path every single time, you’re going to have a success.  Most people skip it, most people are basically public speakers or someone that’s got a lot of theory and they skip this, do it for you, do it with you, one-on-one coaching, they go straight from, I know this to let’s go and do group coaching and online courses and most of them fail miserably. 

It happens the most with public speakers and coaches and educators, because what they don’t realise and this is mostly for the public speakers and educators, that any time they spoke, someone else got asses in those seats.  If they were teaching at Harvard, Harvard was the one who put asses in those seats and made sure they listened to you so they can complete the certificate or credits to get a degree.  If you’re a public speaker, the organiser, that’s a traffic and conversion summit, they made sure those people got in those seats and then they had nothing to listen to, so they came to your thing or they just like you, but you didn’t do it yourself.

What happened to these theories that they speak at those conferences, at the schools?  They try to sell those, they’re not proven.  Theories are what they are; theories, for the most part.  Now, you’ve got to put people in the seats and there’s a huge disconnect because there’s no system, there’s no real proven outcome and you have no clue how to get people to listen to you, because all you’ve ever done is got put on a stage or in front of a crowd. 

These are the people that got hit the most during COVID, especially public speakers, you can imagine.  They all wanted to create courses and a lot of them struggled, extremely.  A lot of these conversations just came down to me explaining to them, “Look, you think of yourself much higher than what you really bring to the table.  You’re like a guy that loves Gucci but has an H&M budget”.

Wendy Harris: It’s the impulsive purchase when you see somebody speak, isn’t it?

Tom Libelt: There’s the excitement of a crowd.  A lot of them actually use that and they’ll have people running, like Dan Kennedy was amazing at this.  A lot of the MLMs are great at this, they have people running to the back of the room signing up, and some of them will just run because they’re like, “I don’t want to miss out on this”.  The speaker’s up there, there’s lights, music, a lot of excitement, and you’ve got to remember somebody already put those asses in seats.

Wendy Harris: Yes, there’s money to be made isn’t there?

Tom Libelt: I’m just saying, so for those people it’s just more difficult.  Even though they think they’re bringing much more to the table.  In actuality, it’s those people who are performing the service, like your producer/editor for example.  He’s running your podcast, he’s already started on the path of eventually being able to have an online course and it would make sense for it, but there’s quite a few more steps that he needs to take to really make sure it’s like a no-brainer.

Wendy Harris: I’ll get him to talk to you, Tom, because I know it’s on his 90-day plan.

Tom Libelt: It might take a little more than 90 days, unless it’s only doing group coaching.

Wendy Harris: That’s another point really, we should make that a 90-day plan is not something that I stick to; my creative brain doesn’t allow me to stick to something, but the point is that you can have a 90-day plan and want to create an online course.  But when you start to break that down you could do one small thing towards that online course, it doesn’t mean to say that you’ve got to create the whole thing, you could break it down and it could take three years of thinking about how I want that to be for me.

Tom Libelt: Let me help you with this, because this is again one of these blanket things that the industry keeps saying, “Build a course”.  You don’t need to build a course, you don’t.  Here’s what we usually do with people who come to me and say, “Tom, I’m thinking about building a course, I need your help marketing”.  I was like, “Thank God you haven’t built it, because we don’t know that it’s what people will actually want”.

Wendy Harris: Okay.

Tom Libelt: Instead we have a much different path.  We say, “Why don’t you try selling a four-week or six-week live bootcamp”, again think about yourself, so you’re getting to set one hour live of your time, let’s say on a Friday or Saturday, and you’re going to sell an agenda, an outcome.

You’re not selling modules, you’re not selling anything like that, yet.  As you get into your first module, you’re going to have 100 people or so, and you’re going to go through the initial part of the lesson and at the end you say, “Look, I’m thinking of teaching these following things next week, is this what you all want to learn to get to that outcome?”

It might take you three or four iterations of this, but the people will actually build this course with you.

Wendy Harris: Okay, yeah, I get you, yeah.

Tom Libelt: You now have a really well tweaked course because you’ve done a couple of iterations.  You’ve got testimonials and feedback and look, if you cannot sell your live time to a group of 20 people, nobody is going to buy your course.  But you haven’t put any work in it upfront, all you’ve done is give an agenda.  For example, “I will help you create a podcast and get your first 100 listeners”.

I’m just giving you an agenda and if people who want that, just join me live and I’ll teach you how to do it over the next six weeks.  You’re not giving them, “And in the first week…”, don’t worry about that yet, because it might all change.  It might actually change in a way where the outcome will change a little bit too.  You’ll start realising people on the sites start asking you, “How do I get this podcast to have a sponsor?”  “How can I have someone pay me to talk?”  If you can deliver, that’s going to bring you outcome, because that’s what people want and you just change it towards like, “How do people land a sponsor?”, and then you just create a message audience fit. 

I’ll probably have to teach you how to be more entertaining, because that’s going to be a big piece of this.  You need to educate and entertain to get people to listen, but if you have to be in the right niche to get a sponsor.  So, you can tweak this as you go, and I’ve done this with quite a few people, and they’ve all had successes.  I have had much bigger problems with people who came to me saying, “I have this big course I worked on for the last year and I haven’t sold any yet and I want you to market it”.

Wendy Harris: You’ve got to unpick it.

Tom Libelt: No, what happens often is I’m starting to market and I’m going to test a lot of different things, and I realise that the audience doesn’t actually want what you’re selling, they want a variation of that, so you have to rebuild your course.

Wendy Harris: It’s interesting because I don’t do any online as we’ve been talking about, but the in-person thing generally what they come to me thinking they’ve got a problem with is not what they leave solved.  Yes, I can help them with what they came to me in the first place, but I’m always astonished at the by-products that come from working with somebody, because you don’t know to ask for something if you don’t know it exists and you don’t know that it’s missing.  This is a perfect way of being able to uncover those little secret gems, I suppose.

Tom Libelt: If you have a method that you’re able to get to uncover these, because you’re going to start asking similar questions, you’re going to go through a certain path.  I don’t do a sales call per se, you still travel through a same path.  I’m still going to ask you similar things because I want to figure stuff out and that’s a method.  That’s your method for a group coaching and then an online course, but you just need to make sure you can develop a one-on-one method to help each person somehow in a way uncover what they need.

Wendy Harris: Gosh, Tom, I didn’t realise this is like a little personal coaching session, but I think it’s really valuable because if I’m stuck with this, how many other people that listen are going to be stuck?

Tom Libelt: Everyone who wants a course, they don’t understand that there’s a much easier and more foolproof way to build this than what everyone’s telling them.

Wendy Harris: I’m all for foolproof.

Tom Libelt: What they also don’t realise is most of the messaging that hits them about how to build a course, it comes from software companies.

Wendy Harris: It’s all marketing, isn’t it?

Tom Libelt: Yeah, it’s a switch-and-bait thing.  For example, blog posts and webinars about how to market your course from people who never marketed a course and are trying to sell you that their software’s the best thing ever, and at the end you’re just like, “That’s not really what people came here for”, but that’s what I’ve noticed.  All the blog posts, the advice, the tips, they’re all getting it from software companies who are actually just trying to sell you their software.  One of the number one questions I find, “Which software should I get to build my course on?”  It doesn’t matter.  In 99% of the time it doesn’t matter, they’re hosting companies, none of them are going to help you with any type of sale marketing situation.

Now, if you have fancy stuff and you have cohorts and quizzes and stuff like that, yeah, maybe you’ll need to just make sure that one of them delivers it in their hosting package.  They don’t matter, but that’s who is giving everyone advice.  I usually always look.  If you’re hearing something like, “I’m going to help you be more successful with courses”, who is telling you this?  Is it ConvertKit because he wants you on their email responder platform?  Is it a webinar jam blog post which is, “You’ve got to do it to webinars, because we sell webinar software”?  You’ve always got to think who’s giving this advice, because most of it is completely unnecessary.

You can run a bootcamp with Zoom, simple emails and just like Facebook.  Later on, obviously you want to get onto a fancier piece of software that makes things easier and more automated and stuff, but that is not the important part of what’s going to make the course successful.  And I often have to switch this with beginners too, I’m like, “You’re all completely missing the boat here.  Forget the platforms”.

Wendy Harris: Don’t get hung up on the detail, get hung up on the outcome.

Tom Libelt: Make sure you can serve your clients and you can get clients.  After that, these platforms will just be like, “I switched from this one to that one because something sucked, or they changed something”.

Wendy Harris: You see that a lot in podcasting as well, “What platform do you have?  Who hosts it?”

Tom Libelt: It doesn’t matter.

Wendy Harris: It doesn’t matter really.

Tom Libelt: It doesn’t matter.  In podcasting as in these platforms, I’m like, “You should definitely control your sales page”.

Wendy Harris: Yeah.

Tom Libelt: And your opt-in page and if you’re able to, the checkout process.  The last thing you want is a hosting company controlling your entire sales process and where your money comes in and out.  I usually tell them.  With podcasting, any time I see a podcast and the person doesn’t have their own website and it’s just like on Anchor and stuff, I’m like, “They’re not serious”.

Wendy Harris: Neal would agree with you.

Tom Libelt: You can use it, but you really need to control your business.  Why in the world would you build your business on someone else’s sand and someone else’s lease.  It’s online, why would you?  You don’t have to pay much for it.

Wendy Harris: It’s drawing back the curtains on, I suppose this is a marketplace that’s fairly new, certainly newer in the UK than it is in America, so there’s a lot of people not understanding necessarily.  They’ll follow the leader won’t they, who they think is the leader.

Tom Libelt: Which is fun.  People can do what they want, but I find taking the simple and easy way out is always the wrong choice.

Wendy Harris: I prefer the path that’s a little overgrown myself.

Tom Libelt: It’s the path that you can control.  Always the easy stuff is like, “Come in here and just put in your name and write some stuff out and we’ll put this out for you”.  Yeah, but you have no control over it whatsoever.  ClickFunnels for example, it’s a great company, horrible software.  It’s easy to set up but it’s very easy to get into paying them and have zero control and then when anything happens, and things happen, you can’t track it properly.  If it goes down, it goes down.  Again, you don’t control anything.  So, it’s very easy to get into it, and there’s a lot of hype.  If you go to other events, you see why people sign up and it’s great, but you’re building someone else’s business not yours.

Wendy Harris: I’m just thinking back to a time when I was last carried away like that, yes, and I can safely say it’s worth doing your homework, isn’t it, Tom?

Tom Libelt: Yeah, definitely yes.  We all learn this the hard way.  I’ve set up my previous businesses when I was first starting out without thinking about the control, so we would sell Facebook advertising or use the Kindle marketplace or just something else.

Wendy Harris: There’s the learning curve.

Tom Libelt: It’s always seeing the edge of the mountain that you’re eventually going to hit, but you just hope that it’s not going to happen tomorrow.

Wendy Harris: It’s an analogy I use a lot actually, Tom, is that you see that summit and you climb, you get to the top and you go, “Yay”, and then you see another mountain, bigger in the distance and go, “I’ll just take this one for now”.

Tom Libelt: Yeah, but the thing is that’s not that bad.  The problem with taking these zero control things is that businesses just simply fail, and you have to start over again.  It’s not even just you being on the mountain and seeing a bigger one.  Your mountain disappears.  It happens to a lot of people, ClickFunnels, something happens.  I’ve seen these platforms go down for days, I’ve seen the checkouts break, I’ve seen so many things, like someone’s in the middle of a $10,000 campaign and the checkout’s not working.  There’s nothing they can do because they are saying they haven’t seen anything yet, and a day later, “We have software people are working on it”.  You have zero control, zero control whatsoever.

Now, Facebook actually wants you to own the properties that you can track, so all these ClickFunnels, all these platforms that you actually don’t own, and you can’t put your own pixel on because you don’t own it as a domain, you can’t verify the domain in their system, they’re all playing with workarounds and stuff, but the tracking sucks and it’s like the basic thing.  How can you sell things well if you can’t track it properly?

Every single client that I’ve seen, even though these platforms say, “Everything sort of fits”, we use our own tracking on the side, and we see that it’s off by like 30% to 40% every single time.  It’s just a basic part of what we do, because we focus on it.

Wendy Harris: Begs the question why they don’t want you to have the full analytics.  That’s possibly another podcast.

Tom Libelt: Possibly, but the main thing, these platforms they want their recurring income, and they want to get their investors and they want to go public.  Coursera just went public, Thinkific I think just went public in Canada, Teachable just made an exit maybe a year ago to a Mexican company, a bigger course company, Fiverr public and created the learning marketplace.  There’s money now, so most of these companies, it’s all about how many subscribers do you have, what’s your monthly ARR and what multiple of that can we get.  They’re software companies.

In the beginning it was more about just we want to help course creators.  Now, we have shareholders, we have VCs, it’s a much different game.  You’ve just got to understand that it’s just a part of the game, we can’t hate it.

Wendy Harris: Play if you want to.

Tom Libelt: We don’t really have a choice, that’s just the field.  If you’re in business and you’re getting into these spaces, you’ve got to navigate these waters.  You’re not going to build your own course platform when you’re starting out, that would be the dumbest thing ever.  I’ve seen people with those ideas, I think that’s definitely not the route you want to take.

Wendy Harris: There should be a course on how to apply common sense.

Tom Libelt: I just had a client, and we have an email that we like to put at the end of an email sequence, and it works for every single niche, and it does well.  Basically three days after they get the last email upselling them, “Hey, Jim, what did I do wrong?”  Let them give feedback.  This guy was so shocked, he receives feedback saying, “I don’t know how to enrol”. 

So, I look back through this guy’s path because I can see it, we’re tracking it.  I’m like, “Okay, this guy has read every single one of your emails, went over to the sales page, which has enrol buttons like every three paragraphs, and he doesn’t know how to enrol.  That’s up to you whether you want to answer this and go along with this, but I will drop it, block, report, whatever you can.  These are people out there.

Wendy Harris: I remember a piece of advice that I was given too, and it was basically that you have to treat every single person like a complete and utter idiot.  They could be an alien from outer space that don’t speak your language, but they can learn fast and will take time to understand it.  You have to spell everything out as plain and simply as you possibly can, and it’s so true.

Tom Libelt: Yeah, I actually use that in my copy a lot and people are like, “Are these people really that?”  Trust me, they are.  They are, you need to tell them where to click, how to click, if it’s below your video, point your finger down, click right there, it’s this red thing and it’s, “Buy now, underneath.  You see it?  Use your mouse, right cursor, yeah, double click.  Okay, good”.

Seriously, this is really what sells a lot of the time.  It depends which age group you’re selling to as well.  I’ve had a lady like that, she looks just like your friendly neighbour next door that could bake you a pie, but she’s sold the dream to older people.  She does stocks and then sells, “I’m travelling the world, I don’t even know how this computer works”, and she really doesn’t, but the videos are great, and she’ll do that, “Okay, honey, just press down on the” — she’s at $10 million a year right now because she got her audience, she’s got the message.

She does have a decent concept of how these stocks work, very simple advice, but she can explain it in a simple way.  Basically, take very small losses, take bigger profits.  It’s very simple but she knows how to speak to her audience.

Wendy Harris: She’s not promising them instance millionairedom.

Tom Libelt: No, she’s actually not promising anything, she just keeps saying, “This is what I did, this is what I’ve done.  I’ve been doing it for over 15 years, I’m horrible at tech, I don’t know much”.  She says, “If I can do it, you really can do it, because I don’t know”, but it’s working.  All her videos are very similar to that, just very simple like, “I show what this means, what that is and click here.  Have you clicked yet?”  She’ll actually say that like for 20 seconds of the video, “Why are you still here, go click the red”, simple stuff like that and it works on her audience.  There’s a lot of truth to that, people don’t know what to do half the time if you don’t tell them.

Wendy Harris: I think it’s time, Tom, for us to do the part of the show that I really love.

Tom Libelt: Tell me.

Wendy Harris: Where I ask every guest to come with a conversation that counted and created a turning point in their life.

Tom Libelt: Conversations that count.  You know what, the one that counted was the one I had with myself.

Wendy Harris: I had a feeling you would say that.

Tom Libelt: Just start being extremely honest with yourself and with everyone you’re around.  If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it.  Even if someone thinks it’s a good idea, like all these things, I’m very honest with my clients.  My testimonial is a guy just saying, “If you’re going to work with Tom, you need to understand he’s not going to tell you what you want to hear, but he’s going to tell you the stuff you need to hear”.  I do the same with myself. 

There’s a lot of stuff I don’t want to do when it comes to work and personal and family, but I’m just like, “This is what you’ve got to do”.  Honesty is the best thing for everybody, you just got to go through with it.  None of this trying to play games with my own head, mislead myself, do this first and then that later, procrastination.  Just being honest with myself, and it took a while.

I was always raised around people that hustled.  Whether it’s in life, in business, and everyone tried to do all these playing games and mind games and short cuts and everything was a little weird.  No one was really honest with each other.  It was one of the toughest conversations.  After I’ve had that, everything took off for me.  I was just like, “Stop playing around, you’ve got to get serious.  Don’t be one of these business dudes or ladies that say they’re serial entrepreneurs but all they’ve done is the same business 20 times and just have three years of experience.  Figure out what you want to do, be honest, and stick with it and do what’s right”.

If you’ve got to fire a client because it’s the best for all of you, fire them, don’t worry about the money.  Just refund and go your own way.  Stuff like that, it made a lot of difference.  Don’t tell people it’s going to be okay when it’s not.  That’s another thing.  Don’t give unnecessary hope.  Some things, I’m like, “Look, you’ve just got to take this behind the barn, shoot it and you’ll be much happier, trust me”.  That’s what happened, and that’s when I looked at the name of your podcast, I actually thought about that.  It was the first thing I thought about.

Most people are not honest with themselves, and then they can’t be really honest or successful with anyone else.

Wendy Harris: It’s so true that conversations that I have with a lot of people is, if you can’t do it for yourself, how on earth can you really be invested in anybody else?

Tom Libelt: Yeah, it’s like the thing on the airplane.  Everyone hears it, but you’ve got to put your oxygen mask on first.  It’s with my family too.  Ever since I became, I don’t want to say successful, but I’m more at peace.  I call it more at peace, because the only thing that success does for you is you just don’t worry about a lot of stuff.

Wendy Harris: Success is measured in different ways, isn’t it, and I don’t think it’s about a bank account?

Tom Libelt: No, but a lot of it is transferred into peace of mind.  I don’t worry about a lot of stuff.  If I’m sick, I go pay for the best doctor; if I need this done, I have enough of a network to help me with it; if my parents need something, I can give it to them.  But I can be much more objective and empathetic since I don’t really need anything per se.  If I meet with someone, I never need anything.  Like I never pitch stuff on podcasts, I don’t need anything from anyone really.  If I do, I hire them to do it and it makes everything so much easier long term. 

Just when I deal with people, like when I go visit old friends from school even, there’s no agenda ever on my side.  I’m just thinking, “I’m just happy everyone’s here, I don’t need anything from anybody”.

Wendy Harris: It’s a sort of monastic life really when you take it back to being so simple.

Tom Libelt: This is why you see a lot of the government policies are so weird in a lot of countries.  It’s because we have 60- and 70-year-old people in charge who all want to take it back to the simple life that they had when they started.  A lot of the laws when they don’t make sense, you look at them and it’s like, “Yeah, this is just an old person that really wants to have a simple life again”.  You kind of can’t on the broad scale like that.  When you even use the phrase “artificial intelligence”, you can’t put that into a simple life, it doesn’t work but I understand it, I get it.  I find a lot of celebrities that I work with, because I worked in the music industry for a while, the more successful they were, the more simplistic everything became.

The ones coming up, always like super ambitious and wanting more and unhappy with stuff, but the ones that made it, you could see it, there was a lot of peace, a lot of peace behind there.  But I think that’s what success does, because you’re not needy anymore.

Wendy Harris: Yeah, goals and aspirations.

Tom Libelt: Even if you don’t need them, when you already have enough, it’s not like living cheque-to-cheque.  It’s not like when you think, “If this doesn’t come through, my business is going to fail”.  I’m just like, “Yeah, I’ve got goals, but either way I’ll be fine”.

Wendy Harris: I think that does affect mindset a lot, doesn’t it, when you’re living cheque-to-cheque, because it kind of paralyses your creativity to get on and be doing what you’re good at doing.  We’re not all money managers, are we?  It’s not a natural thing.

Tom Libelt: Yeah, that’s a big piece that comes later.  I had a lot of friends recently who sold their businesses; life changing money and now some of them are working full-time trying to figure out how not to lose it, because it’s very different.  People think, “I make $1 million or $2 million or $5 million in my bank account, I’ll be happy”, then you quickly realise how little that actually is if you really have big goals.

Wendy Harris: It does become relative, doesn’t it?  It becomes relative.

Tom Libelt: Yeah, but the big part of that is you also realise just how much more stressful it is not having that monthly income.  If you have the money in the bank and a monthly income, a very different story, but when they start losing that one piece and it’s only the money in the bank now, it’s like with investing.  I like to play with stocks, but the money that I play with, I can lose, I would not even care at all.  Now, if I was doing it full-time, and that was only my way of making an income, I don’t think I would like it much anymore.

Wendy Harris: No, because you’re seeing that piece of pie shrink, aren’t you?

Tom Libelt: Whether it’s making or shrinking, “This is my only thing, I’m putting all my eggs in that basket now”.  That’s a big thing too, that’s success path of exits, I’m seeing a lot of people trying to fill that void now.  Some are just bored out of their mind too.

Wendy Harris: I don’t think I ever want to retire, Tom.  The thought of it just fills me with, “What do I want to do enjoy myself?”  Do you know when you get so much fulfilment and satisfaction from what you do regardless of getting paid for it, if what you’re doing is fulfilling you, why would you want to stop?  I just don’t understand.  Maybe it’s because I’m still a young spring chicken.

Tom Libelt: You see the people that I see, they’re around like 50, 55, 60, that’s the ones doing the exits.  A lot of them around me and yeah a few of them just go crazy into golf or something, yeah.  They just pick a hobby and go just as hard as they did in their business, but I do find that it does impact quite a few of them by just losing that monthly cheque.  They see, “I’ve got a couple of million, but it’s not what I thought”.  They don’t have that feeling, “I thought this was going to be a little more fulfilling than it really is”.

Wendy Harris: Maybe their exit strategy needs to change, and they need to have monthly cheques still.

Tom Libelt: Yes, that’s not really how exits work.

Wendy Harris: Not the point of an exit is it, no.

Tom Libelt: It’s not really how they work.

Wendy Harris: No, Tom, I think you’re absolutely right, I mean honesty has got to be the best policy to yourself and to everybody else in what it is that you’re doing.  I think that’s a really valid point, I really appreciate you bringing that to me today.  It’s a good reminder for everybody.

We always encourage people to carry on the conversation afterwards, I know that I’ve invited you to do the letter to listeners.  We’ll put all your socials up on the show notes and I think you’ve got some links to share as well, that are free resources for people to come and find out and check out what it is that you do and how you can help them.

Tom Libelt: Yeah, I’ve only sent them because you asked.  Normally, I never give anything away.

Wendy Harris: I asked very nicely, but the whole point is to carry on that conversation and I’m pretty sure that you’ve imparted such a lot of valuable advice today that I do hope that people do reach out to you, Tom.  Thank you so much for your time.

Tom Libelt: Thanks for having me, Wendy.

Wendy Harris: Now you’ve listened to Tom’s story, I’m pretty sure that you’ll be thinking about your own aspirations as a 7-year-old child.  For me, I wanted to be a teacher or a policewoman and as my youngest daughter reminds me, I managed to do the teaching bit through my telemarking training.  So, that 7-year-old inner self really does connect with you as a grown up.  Of course, Tom wants to go to space and who knows he may well still do that.