welcome to the ker office we've got eight short segments for you today including how to scrape commercial real estate for a guy that needs to sell grants to companies how to sell custom spreadsheets on Etsy how to reverse engineer other Etsy seller selling spreadsheets how to be better at sales how to close more deals over the phone what side hustle should we start e-commerce or service business what's the first step of that lowcost mattress stores how to go all in on a business when you have enough money you don't really have to what's my framework for starting and/or holding Andor selling businesses and last but certainly not least how do I manage bookkeeping for all of my new businesses eight questions eight segments you're going to love [Music] it hi Chris thanks for having me on so I have a side gig selling grants to companies primarily around the north Texas area uh currently the only way we can find companies that qualifies is by physically driving around and looking at buildings because for a company to be worth talking to they need to be a small business have high utility bills own their own building and be low located in certain zip codes you seem to be a king of uh scraping the internet for companies how could I scrape for any or all of those parameters thanks Mike thanks for calling in I love your question and I'm excited to answer it so you have to find your customers by driving around because they need to be small business customers that also own their building that also have high utility bills I think there's some ways around having to drive around for them I would start with rom. com re ny. com it's very expensive 450 bucks but they have a 7day free trial and you can do everything you need to do within those seven days because I don't want you to spend 450 bucks just like I don't want to spend it I have a virtual assistant that I use from time to time his name is atique attiq if you email me Chris coof founders.
com I'll make an introduction he can scrape rom. com Romy is great because it is the best commercial real estate database that I have found I use it for finding RV and mobile home parks this is not sponsored they don't know who I am but it's a great piece of software so what you do is you'll go into Romy on your free trial you will set a search for whatever you're looking for and then you would save the search by the filters that you set and then you let atique log into your account he'll go to your saved search and he will scrape all of your results because Romy charges you an insane amount for exporting the results in addition to the 450 bucks a month that they charge you it's just crazy then what I would do is I would start with a very small radius like a neighborhood and Whittle it down you want to find building owners that have a name or a business name that matches the name of the business in that building that will prevent you from having to drive around it's not super efficient but it's more efficient than driving around and you can find another virtual assistant to help you with that so for instance if you see a building in your exported spreadsheet that says Bob's Plumbing LLC and then you see on another database like outs scraper I guess that's the second part of the step is go to outs scraper run a scrape yourself for the same GE graphy and then put them side by side you can use a vlookup or an xlookup Ask chat GPT how to do that and then you can match all of the lines or all of the rows in the spreadsheets by address and then just try to find LLC names or business names or owner names that match the name of the owner of the business because when you scrape on outs scraper if you check the box to get owner names you'll also get owner names so that's it Romy scrape plus out scrape for scrape will tell you which buildings are owned by the business owner in that building and then you'll also know by default that they're small businesses and you'll be able to Market to them you'll have their name their phone number their email address their physical address and you'll be good to go and then you can use my scraping guide which is in my toolkit if you subscribe to my newsletter TKO pod. com you'll get the scraping guide in the welcome email after subscribing you'll get my copyrighting guide my cold emailing guide everything you'll get all my my growth hacks in that welcome email so hope that helps and also this advice applies to anyone trying to scrape uh real estate bionomy is a great solution for this let's go to the next question hey Chris I love making Google spreadsheets I'm kind of nerd that way but I would love to start selling them I do have an Etsy shop and I just partnered with somebody who will manage it and will do all the SEO and and drive more sales there but where I really want to see myself going is working with small to mediumsized businesses who don't have traditional crms or anything who maybe already have spread sheets and I I can jump in and enhance them or create different spread sheets such as CRM sales tracking that type of stuff so main question is what do you think about this idea do you hate it I would love to make about $5,000 on the side there but I know that I need a a couple more clients I need a lot of clients doing that once I do get a lot of clients I'm more than happy to to start hiring with Fiverr upwork and and kind of be the manager of those relationships but I also need to get more businesses so wondering if what your thoughts are about this how can I differentiate myself from my competitors from other people who are doing this how can I get a lot more clients my main goal of this as well is to do something while my kids are sleeping while it's a little bit slower at my day job yeah so just definitely want to make about $5,000 a quarter doing this and I think that would be a game changer for me so anyways let me know your thoughts thanks all right great question I don't know what your name is but your email has the word KIRO in it Q so I'm going to call you that love this idea I love the practice of brainstorming ways of selling spreadsheets because that's not something I've ever done and it kind of makes my brain tickle or hurt a little bit depending on how you look at it so as you asking me this question I went to Etsy and I typed in spreadsheet and there is a little growth act you can use on Etsy which I love I didn't know frankly that spreadsheets were sold on it Etsy I knew that digital products were sold here but not spreadsheets but it makes sense looks like there's a lot of people doing it which is good for you after typing in spreadsheet I just kind of looked around and I looked at the seller names because I want to find sellers that are primarily Andor exclusively selling spreadsheets and I found a guy called the sheet code one word on Etsy the sheet code and I click on his profile if you're watching on YouTube I'm going to share my screen so you'll be able to watch this okay so the sheet code is selling a family and coup's financial planner package for $8.
23 and I just love this 24 people bought this in the last 24 hours so this guy's made 200 bucks today which is 670 Grand a year from one of his products just crazy his entire store has 1257 reviews this one product has 191 almost all festar reviews but here's what you can do if you want to know what type of spreadsheets people are buying on Etsy if you're watching on YouTube look at my screen you want to find out how many products they're selling and then find out the ratio of number of reviews on that one product to number of their total reviews so this guy has 191 reviews on this product and he has 1257 reviews total so this about 15% call it 15% of all of his reviews are for this one product 100 divided by 15 is about seven give or take so all else equal he should have about seven products if they all sold about the same but of course they won't so let's see how many products this guy has okay he's made 17,000 sales 31 items okay so surely anyone listening to this is familiar with the 820 rule but I'm just going to repeat it in case one of you isn't I love the 8020 rule because it appears everywhere it's like a law of the universe it just appears everywhere 80% of your sales come from 20% of your people 80% of your headaches come from 20% of your customers 80% of your productivity comes from 20% of your employees it's everywhere and so it clearly looks like this personal finance budgeting spreadsheet is one of this guy's top sellers because he has 31 items for sale he probably only sells a few of these other ones every day or every week and he sells a ton of the other ones so if I sort by highest price they're all priced at 8. 82 to like $189 very cheap but they're all basically personal finance packages so what you could do is you could use a software tool to scrape these or you could just do it manually real quick put all 31 in a spreadsheet and then write down how many reviews he has for each of the 31 and then you're going to know what his best sellers are and then if I were you I would buy some of his best sellers and look at it and read the reviews and see what if there are any four or lower star reviews what are they complaining about what could be improved upon these and then you use the words and the reviews to write your copy on your product so if people are saying like this is great five stars all around but I really wish that I could toggle and adjust for inflation because of all the inflation we've had lately I really wish I could account for it in a little toggle cell okay so now that's just one data point but it could could be representative of others that aren't saying it so then you could not just put that in your spreadsheet but you could advertise that in your spreadsheets but from a broader perspective just read every single review and find commonalities what do they love about it because a lot of times this guy this bestseller it says family and couple annual budget Google Sheets Excel he's just keyword stuffing okay which is fine it clearly works he ranks highly but it doesn't really answer people's questions so if people in the reviews are constantly saying I love that it adjust for inflation I love that adjusts for inflation I love that it adjusts for inflation but he's not even selling that then you could just have a very similar spreadsheet that does the same things and you could just sell that more in the title or in the description so spend hours on Etsy looking at other spreadsheets what's selling really well what isn't and then break my advice my advice is always to fish where people are fishing sell this stuff where other people are selling it but also do the opposite sometimes I bet you very few people are selling spreadsheets on Facebook Marketplace because they're not thinking to but there's probably traffic for it you could do some keyword stuffing yourself and see how many search results you pop up in so Facebook groups local Facebook groups even if it's not a local city that you're in but if you want to sell these to small businesses as you say I would go to a local Facebook group and just ask for a small business owner if you could make some free spreadsheets for them just to see if you can add value and then either you can resell that same spreadsheet to other small small business owners in the same Niche or you can say hey in the process of making this sheet for tracking all your dental patients I learned that you probably need another sheet for tracking your receptionist hours would you mind if I make one of those for you be 30 bucks or something like that that will just open your eyes to all kinds of other needs that the business owner might have but you should start by doing it for free at least so you could learn some feedback on what they like or dislike about your spreadsheets also play around with Etsy ads some of these guys might just be crushed it in organic rankings but if you put some paid ads behind your spreadsheets with a $0 cost to fulfill it could be pretty lucrative also I would do the same reverse engineering on gumroad which as you probably know is like an Etsy but primarily for digital products only so great question all right Josh has a question about closing sales over the phone hey Chris this is Josh from Ohio I was just reading your article about your iPhone screen repair business and wanted to ask you about closing your deals you mentioned that you'd hop on the phone with some of your bigger clients to make sure to close the deals compared to having your vas do it all I have a little experience with this with the EMD lending business and doing cold and warm Outreach like Alex rosi always talks about but specifically when you get on the phone to close a deal what are some of the strategies some of the tips that have worked really well for you and you use as a framework going forward throughout other businesses I'd really love to hear what you think and what you have to say and and look forward to hearing your answer soon love your content and thanks so much for listening to this thanks for the question Josh love the question and I'm just going to take two of the words that you said and point it right back at you Alex horoi Alex brosi he's the sales King I cannot even hold a candle to his sales ability so I'm going to repeat a lot of what he repeats because I've taken his advice to heart and it's made me a better salesman the most important thing you can do when closing any deal over the phone or in person is to have a no brainer Grand Slam offer because no-brainer offer will cover a multitude of sins if you're not very bold you're not very pressuring you're not very extroverted you're not great with people all of that can be covered by a no-brainer Grand Slam offer and really anything above a no-brainer offer often gets a little slimy often turns into just kind of strong arming someone or kind of twisting them into buying your product or service and you start to flirt in the gray area which doesn't make me feel super comfortable but if you can have an amazing offer that conveys really well to them then you will close more deals so in the earnest money deposit lending industry which I don't know much about to be honest I would get on 10 sales calls with 10 of your competitors if you're a competitor and take a ton of notes on what they're doing well or not well on the phone and you are going to learn so much from them you really just have to be bold on getting to the heart of what their objections are because usually the objections that were given are not the true objections like H I just need to think about it that usually means it's too expensive I just think it's too expensive that usually means there's not enough value there in what you're offering or at least you're not conveying the value well enough so you need to put together an offer that feels risk-free to them it makes them feel stupid for saying no like literally they would feel dumb for saying no to your offer now that varies from industry to Industry obviously it's harder in some Industries to make that no-brainer offer than others but it's always going to be possible so if you haven't read $100 million offers I would go read that if you have read it I would go read it again because there's a lot to learn in there all right let's hear what Doug has to say good morning Chris my wife and I are racking our brains trying to come up with a side hustle we are going to pull off and start something but we're just not sure what just yet we are scouring your ideas and also thinking about either a service industry or a Shopify store and product what is the first step in order to pull the trigger and get started form an LLC question mark Doug thanks for the question it's funny because you basically got down to two different industries that you're considering e-commerce and service and I have a lot more experience in e-commerce than I have in service businesses so maybe this answer is too biased because I'm jaded but if you're choosing between those two I would not choose e-commerce e-commerce is hard it is capital intensive it takes a while to hit cash flow positivity it's generally low margin It generally has to be driven by paid ads which generally means you have to be really good at paid ads or pay an agency way too much to do paid ads for you in which you'll get a mixed bag of results so all else equal I would definitely start a service business do not worry about getting an LLC I answered this on a recent episode a couple weeks ago about when do you get the LLC you get the LLC when you're generating revenue and you're sure that it's going to be a thing this is going to be something that you're going to file taxes on it's here to stay don't get an LLC first you need to find a customer first whatever your service business is even if it's an unpay customer even if the customer is your mom you need to get a customer start with a friends and family customer and or an unpay customer and then upgrade to a customer that pays you less than what your cost is to fulfill just so you can get your reps and get some testimonials and then just keep increasing your prices and go from there but you got to start testing things like we could research or learn business ideas until the cows come home but we're not even going to know if it's a good idea until we start to try it you just don't know it's all Theory all right David has a question about mattress stores all right if you are watching this clip right now you are watching this on YouTube and if you are a fan of podcast please check out my podcast while you're at it because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTubes that aren't on podcast so check out the ker office on any podcast platform or you can go to TKO pod. com also my newsletter will throw that in there there are no ads It's weekly it's different content than my podcast and YouTube newsletter.
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