A Quick Overview
Last week was ProfitCon 2021 – this is our annual conference, usually held in New Jersey or New York. We were in Weehawken, which is just right across the river, although I was told it’s not a river. I guess it’s some body of water…any who…
We spent a lot of time in New York and New Jersey for this really great conference last week. It was super busy and I am just getting back into the saddle here in the office. Today I was asked to go over what happened at the conference. First of all, as many of you know, we are one of the few Master Certified Profit First firms. I think actually there’s around 100+ in the world. And then there are the regular, core member Profit First Certified firms – approximately 1000 or so, I believe, in the world. Come to find out, we may just be in the top ten of all firms..Shh. Don’t tell anyone. 🙂
Part 1 – Mastery
Michael Broderick
The first part of ProfitCon 2021 was Mastery and we had a guest speaker, Michael Broderick. He doesn’t have a book out yet, but I know he’s working on it. His presentation was called “Giving yourself an F; A Deep Dive into Destroying the Jargon Around What You Do for Your Clients.” He shared a great personal story about networking in a really different way that came down to looking at networking and how you interact with prospects, leads and then your clients. He created a grid and shared with us how you can develop and use this grid to truly understand all the different ways we help our clients – great stuff.
Mike Michalowicz
The rest of the Mastery conference was led by, of course, Mike Micalowicz, the owner of Profit First and author of several great books. His newest book that just came out, which you may see all over our social media because I am in it and LOVE it, is called ‘Get Different.’ There’s a part in chapter four and chapter eight, from my time as a restaurateur about things we did for marketing.
This book is getting huge attention right now. Not only was it almost immediately number one on Amazon’s Best business book list for marketing, but it’s also in the top 10 Wall Street Journal books that are selling right now, which is kind of unheard of for a business book to be honest with you. It’s such a fun read – but all his books are fun to read. In the book, he walks you through a system on how you can kind of develop a marketing plan that will give you immediate results. And it actually works. I know this, cause I’ve done it.
Part 2 – General Conference
But then moving into the bigger arena of ProfitCon, we had a bunch of amazing speakers. We had Cindy Ashton, a Broadway/opera singer with the great story of survival. She was very entertaining. And then we had Jenny Blake, who wrote the book, ‘Pivot.’ She’s such a smart woman and great speaker – and then there was ‘Raymon Ray’ who was hilarious. I don’t remember the name of his book but I am sure it’s outstanding. He was one of the funniest speakers I’ve ever seen and really invigorating so that was fantastic.
Sally Hogshead also spoke – she has written several really well-known books, her most popular likely being ‘Fascinate.’ She’s a dynamic speaker, and that book has gotten tons of acclaim.
We had Precious Williams, who is the ‘Pitch Queen,’ and who was actually on Shark Tank, I think she said in Season Eight. She created a line of lingerie for plus-size divas. She was awesome.
John Jantsch
But the one I wanted to really focus on was my favorite of all, in terms of what I got out of his presentation. That was John Jantsch, and I have talked about him before. He’s actually been at another conference I was at, and wrote the book ‘Duct Tape Marketing’ back in 2011 that a lot of people know about and have read. That was a number one bestseller business book for a long time. He’s written a few books since but Duct Tape Marketing is probably his number one. He took us through an exercise and a thought process around our customer journey that I thought was so valuable and so that’s where I wanted to land this today.
The Client Journey
We have a customer journey here at Spark – I’ve talked about it often before in my social media. At Spark we do a full-year client journey, but it’s particularly packed full during the first 100 days of the client onboarding with us. We then do things sprinkled out throughout the rest of the year, and then annual things beyond that. This additional part is beyond the contracted work that we do – special things that we do to show our clients that we really care.
John’s presentation about the client journey went so much deeper than that. It was eye-opening, and although there are too many habits to really go over, there were two key points that stayed with me about this presentation.
2 major Points on the Client Journey
- One was thinking about your clients more as members of an exclusive club, rather than clients. It’s a mind shift that you make, because a client is a client. They pay you, and you do the service. A member of an exclusive club has a different cache. Usually, they’re going to be showered with more appreciation and it’s just a different way to look at them. He went deeper into that but that whole area was really fascinating to me, and I really loved it.
- He then left us on this one last note, which is going to seem kind of dark and dreary, but it definitely changes things. What if you knew that the person you’re talking to, whether it is a client, a prospect, a lead, an employee, neighbor, or anyone – what if you knew that that person was going to die in six months or a year but they didn’t know that and you couldn’t tell them? How would you interact with that person? It can vary but if you sit back and really think about that being a true scenario in your life, knowing that something terrible was going to happen to them in six months. How would you treat that person?
And maybe that’s how we should be treating people all the time. It’s just a very special kind of take on how you interact with people. John’s presentation was very deep but I thought it was super valuable so I’m going to be doing some more work on that myself.
Summary
In the end, ProfitCon 2021 in Weehawken was really fantastic. Thank you Mike and everyone for putting together such a great, GREAT conference and all the speakers. I can’t wait for next year!
