TCC Podcast #89: Building Frameworks with Mel Abraham

Frameworks specialist, Mel Abraham is our guest for the 89th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Mel’s got an interesting background that launched him as an expert is building expertise (kind of meta, right?), which means he is the perfect person to talk about client relationships and how to establish your expertise before you work with a client. We talked about: •  how he learned to leverage his experience to build a real business •  how to stop exchanging hours for dollars and sell your true value •  the risks and rewards of project pricing •  what you have to do to get clients past the “yellow light” •  how you can help clients see the value of what you do before they hire you •  what to cover in your first call with a potential client •  how to know if you’re an expert or a thought leader •  the “prolific power of positioning” and how to use it for your business •  all about frameworks and why you need one •  the steps to follow for creating a framework for your business •  how copywriters can build their own credibility As usual, there’s a lot of good stuff in this episode. To hear it, visit iTunes, Stitcher or open up your favorite podcast app and search for The Copywriter Club. Or just scroll down and click the play button below. Keep scrolling for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Thoughtpreneur Academy The Entrepreneur’s Solution by Mel Abraham Stephen Covey James Wedmore Mel’s website Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity   Full Transcript: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club. Rob: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira: You’re invited to join the club for episode 89, as we talk with entrepreneur and business advisor Mel Abraham about building a successful business from nothing, what you need to do to become an influencer and make a real impact, the importance of frameworks, and how to write a national bestseller. Kira: Welcome, Mel. Mel: How are you doing? Rob: Mel, it’s great to have you here. We’re thrilled to be talking to you. Mel: Yeah, it’s fun. Kira: All right Mel, so let’s just start with your story; how did you end up building your online building empire? Mel: Wow. I guess, you know, it’s a non-traditional thing. It wasn’t like I grew up with the internet; I grew up well before the internet, and I was the traditional CPA. I’m a  CPA by education, but I was building an expert business before I knew what an expert business was. And it was pre-internet; I needed to build a practice. I needed to get clients; I needed to get known; I needed to get myself out there, and the only way to do it back then was direct mail, you know; networking; speaking; and writing articles. And that’s what I did to do this. And as time went on, I started to realize that the game that I was sold—swapping hours for dollars—is the absolute worst business model I that could ever be sold to someone, and should be burned at the stake! And I tried to figure out, how do I leverage my expertise, and how do I leverage that stuff? And you know, we may get more into it, but what I was building at the time was as an expert witness, strategic consultant, or businesses. I was helping them build businesses, but I was doing a lot of testimony at trial in litigation, which was such a negative environment, that I got tired of it. And I said, well, where can my skills work and where can I leverage those skills better, and that’s when I started to look at the online space. I was already speaking; I said, so how do I capitalize that? How do I record it? How do I put it out there? And that’s how I really got into this game of the online space, and have been in it now for, well gosh, at least a decade. Rob: When you talk about trading hours for dollars, it’s got to resonate with almost every one of our listeners, because that’s what copywriters do. I want to know more. What’s the secret; what’s the solution to that problem? Mel: The solution is simple. It may not be easy, though. And first is a mindset shift; an attitude shift. What I realized is that when we talk about selling hours, we’re putting ourselves in the commodity space, and selling in commodity’s the worst thing we can do because the only differentiating point at that point in the consumer’s mind is pricing. But that’s not what we do, and when you talk about copywriters, it’s not what you do. You create value, and what we truly live in today, and I think that anything from employee on up, we need to understand this, is that we live in a value-exchange economy. And so we need to forget price; we need to forget costs, and we need to focus on the value exchange. What value do I provide? The transformation, if you will. The solution and what value are they going to give up in return? And when we do that, that changes the dynamics of the relationship greatly. So, let me give you a “for instance”: I get brought into cases that the reality is that, there’s a lot on the line: their businesses are on the line, they’re being sued, and I’m going in to testify. I’m the hired expert to testify. Now they may be sitting at a $20,000,000 lawsuit—let’s reduce the numbers, maybe it’s a $1,000,000 lawsuit—and I go in, I testify and win the case. Now I could quantify my hours and say it, well it took me twenty hours, and at $1,000 an hour, that’s $20,000. And I could say, you know what? I did all right. A thousand bucks an hour is not so bad. The client won a million dollar case. Do you think my client would be upset if I send my bill—and I did it upfront—and I said the cost for me to do this is $50,000? And the answer is “no”. They still got the million out of it, they paid fifty more than my hourly rate, but I’m looking at it through value-exchange. But I’m also looking at it as how much of my life am I giving up: how much aggravation, how much of all of that that I’m giving up, and how much value do they get. We need to think about things from a value standpoint, not a cost and price standpoint, which is a shift in mindset. Kira: Okay, so just to get in the weeds, for people who aren’t familiar with you, why were you the expert witness? What is your expertise and specialty? Mel: So, like I said, I’m educated as a CPA, and I got tired of the traditional stuff: doing the tax returns, and the ticking and tying and bookkeeping, and that kind of stuff. And I realized that, in order for me to get paid well, I needed to do something was that of a higher valued service. And at that time, that industry of being an expert witness—someone that testifies in financial matters—I’d be the type of guy that would get hired to put a Bernie Madoff in jail. Kira: Wow. Mel: And so that’s where I took my skills, focusing in on how do you value businesses; how do you testify in businesses; how do you build businesses; how do you buy and sell businesses. So that’s the background that I have, and that’s the choice I made, was to focus in that litigation evaluation realm. Kira: Okay, cool. And so, for a lot of copywriters, this value-exchange economy concept might be new, or at least, they might be like, yeah—that makes sense. But, it’s so hard for me to do it, especially for new copywriters. Is there a really good first step for someone who’s trading their time for dollars, and wants to make this transition, but is still working on the mindset piece? Mel: This is where I said that it’s simple but not easy. Kira: Right! Mel: And I think that it becomes a choice, and we end up project-pricing something, and here’s the risk: I could project-price something that when you do the math behind it for the hourly rate, you kind of go, I only got a buck and a half an hour! Kira: Right. Mel: Or, when you do the math behind it you look at it and say, I made $3,000 an hour. And, I think with experience, we start to understand that we can get an idea of the breadth of a project, and say, here’s the value it can provide. I’m going to be writing the sales pages. I know what my conversion rates are. I know what my copy is. I’m going to be writing a sequence of emails. I’m going to be writing a sequence of articles. I’m going to be doing all these things that are going to be leading to this. And you simply price it on a project basis, you start to understand what it’s going to take to do it, the kind of revisions. You’re being real careful in your terms and conditions about the fact that you’re not going to have 3,200 available to them. So you corral your exposure, and you bid at a price, and that’s going to take a little while. I think that, until you get to know how to manage the projects to make sure that you hit it on the mark... But after a while, I can look at a project now and say, here’s what it’s going to cost. And I know what’s it going to take me to get done, and I’m goodwith it. Now very few will go south on me, but they still do, and that’s just the cost of doing business, and I think we just need to jump in and say, one—the stuff I do is valuable, and makes a difference, and step in and own that. I talk about the difference between “convincing selling” it, and “conviction selling” it. The worst place we can be is coming from a convincing selling standpoint, and this is an important aspect for copywriters to think about is that we’ve got the red light, we’ve got the green light, and we got the yellow light, like we’re driving. And the most dangerous light is the yellow light, because it’s the light of indecision. Kira: Mmmm.