Chris Dreyer

The market analysis of the situation we’re all living through shows that most companies right now are not investing a lot of capital. And it totally makes sense. There’s a general air of hesitation and who can blame us?! It’s been a pretty odd year. But today’s guest Roland Frasier is taking a very different approach. He wants you to invest not only in your company but in other companies he wants you to acquire. And maybe we should take his advice- Roland’s grown and sold numerous hugely successful companies for anything from 3 million to $4 billion. How’d he do it? Well, it all began with a book on a cassette…

Roland Frasier

I found the cassette tape album of the psychology of winning by Dennis Waitley and happened to pop one of the cassettes in as a newly minted driver. And he would talk about working with Olympic athletes and how just closing their eyes and imagining doing reps actually made a significant difference. That was my first exposure to personal development stuff and the quest after that becomes endless.

Chris Dreyer

Today on The Rankings Podcast we discover how to multiply your firm’s profits to the Roland Frasier way and why mergers and acquisitions can supercharge your business even during a market downturn. Plus, we hear about the EPIC challenge where Roland shares his incredible business growth formula with the world for next to nothing. Find out why on The Rankings Podcast, the show where founders, entrepreneurs, and elite personal injury attorneys share their inspiring stories about what they did to get to the top and what keeps them there. I’m Chris Dreyer, stay with us. Roland is an entrepreneurial firebrand who’s the co-founder of five of INC’s fastest-growing companies so, as you can imagine, he hasn’t got a lot of time to spare. A few months back, Roland starting thinking about all the requests he got asking for free advice. Whenever he could respond, he was happy to oblige, but the problem was sometimes he’d never hear back from the person he just helped. And then he’d be left wondering, did they follow my advice or did I just waste my time?

Roland Frasier

I love what I do, I love helping people, I like people, but around November of last year, when I was setting my goals -thank you, Dennis Waitley – for 2020, I was thinking about my time. And I have income goals, time goals, all those kinds of things. And I was like, I’m kind of wasting my time and, and I’m doing them a disservice as well because there’s no skin in the game for them to listen to me and take me seriously and want to, to get a return on the investment in working with me. So to stem that tide of direct messages in November of 2019, I said, Hey, the way that I do this is I’m happy to give you free advice within the amount of available time that I’ve got. I don’t have a lot of time. And if I answer a question and then you come back and ask for follow-up, which a lot of people do. There’s a good chance that I won’t be able to respond, but if you want to have a consultation, then here’s how that works. The investment – I say, in particular, as opposed to the fee – is $18,000. That’s what I started at, now it’s 25 and it’s only, what, I guess, 11 months later. So that’s for a half-day of up to four hours and we’ll go over whatever you want to go over. And so I made that decision. I was like, that’s what I’m going to do so that I can weed out all the people who aren’t going to listen to me anyway, weed out the people that aren’t willing to invest in themselves because if they aren’t willing to invest in themselves this way, then the chances of them actually taking it seriously enough to implement what we talk about is pretty low. And I remember it was at our war room mastermind in Deer Valley in November that I got a message and it was a gentleman named Clint Salter from the dance studio owners of America. And he said, Hey, I got a question for you about this and this and this. And I said, the way that I do this is blah, blah, blah and, and I figured I’d never hear from him again and I went and did the little speaking thing I had to do and came back up to the room and I checked my Facebook messages and he was like, okay, where do I wire the money? And I was like, huh? That’s interesting. All right, well, I’ll send you the agreement. I sent it to him again, figured I would never hear back. He’s like, okay, wired the money. I was like, and I checked and it came in and I was like, all right, let’s do this. My first official paid consult. And, we met and then I was able to help him quite a bit. And, and we’ve, we’ve gone on to, to do more things together. And so I, I just basically started doing that and I found that it was really effective. I think I’ve probably done maybe 24 of those or so now in the last year. And I actually raised the price because it was, I was doing too many. And again, what’s bad about consulting is that you’re building someone else’s brand and you get paid one time and the things that you share with them, which could be worth hundreds of thousands or millions in a relatively quick amount of time and in perpetuity doesn’t ever come back to you. So what I decided to do was to modify that a little bit and now. I have the fee raised, but my goal is when I talk to somebody about doing it, if I don’t see it as something that I feel I would like to go forward and maybe be an advisor or get some equity in some way, I won’t do the consult. And so now I use it really as a filter before looking at becoming an advisor and I do it when somebody asks also, Hey, can you be an advisor in my company, I’ll give you some equity. It’s like, man, before we do that, let me see that you invest in yourself and in your company. And let’s let me also get to know the company, but get paid for it. And so it’s become a kind of a combination of vetting and staging – vetting so that I don’t waste my time and I only deal with people that are serious and staging so that I’m set up to be… I am good at what I do when somebody hires me to do something like that, I know I can deliver the value and then they walk away and I would say, 70% of the time I get an offer to, Hey, I’d love to, how do I work with you more? And then that can lead to really cool things. And, um, just recently it was a guy who’s doing about a million a week in his business at a 30% margin and it was a 25K consult. We only spent an hour and a half and he said: I got it. I got everything I need and I’d like to, I’d like to have you part of the company. So it’s a great way just all across the board to get something for the time that you spend and also to act as a regulator on the amount of time you spend, because it’s very easy to spend all your time building other people’s brands for free, and they never do anything, which is the most frustrating thing of all.

Chris Dreyer

Absolutely completely agree. And I really wanted to jump in here. You’re an expert marketer. You’ve grown many companies from anywhere from 3 million to nearly $4 billion in value. You’re the co-founder of numerous businesses and recently you started the Epic challenge. So what is the Epic challenge and who is it for?

Roland Frasier

So the story behind that is that I decided I wanted to kind of share my system for growing companies. And, um, I’m particularly big on leverage. What are the things that you can do that will get you the most leverage to get you the results the fastest, not as in a hacky kind of way, like put, click this button on Facebook type thing, but really strategically? And so, and September of 2017, I put together a course that I called leverage exit grow scale – it should really be leverage, grow, scale, exit, but that doesn’t spell legs so I wanted something that was an acronym. So, so I started teaching it in September of 2017 and then taught it several times and evolved it and it grew and grew. And what I did was I just went back and took my, over the, like the previous five-year years, and took all the presentations I had, took the things that people had the strongest reaction to of sharing like that really blew my mind, that changed my perspective. So I was evolving that, and it had gotten to the point where it was, it was about seven or eight days of content that I was trying to deliver in two days. And so then I started having to take things away and all. So I was in San Diego in March of this year, as everything shut down about to teach that course. And I was teaching it, so small groups, like 25 people, $3,000 apiece. And I had to actually send the people home cause it was like like they had flown in to, to do the thing and the hotel was like, yeah, we’re… it’s shut down. We can’t do it now. And I was thinking, gosh, I don’t think this is going to last that long, but I, how do I get the message out during a time when things are shut down. And a friend of mine, Pete Vargas, introduced me to a gentleman named Pedro Dayo who has since become a friend who he and Pete had done a bunch of challenges, including for Tony Robbins and placed really high in the, in sales. And Pedro had done it across like in the Christian market in e-commerce and info. And so my partner, Ryan Deiss, and I were at a Grant Cardone event, 10X in Las Vegas, the week before this, and we were meeting with the people about a deal we were doing and then both Pete and Ryan were speaking at Grant’s event. So I just said – and this is something that I find to be really helpful when you travel if you can, anytime that you’re going really anywhere, but particularly if you’re going to an event – rent a hospitality suite instead of just a normal room. A room that has a bedroom, but has another room where there are couches and ideally a board table. And when I check-in, I say, can you get me a whiteboard and a flip chart up to that room? So I have a hospitality suite, I’ve got a whiteboard, I’ve got a flip chart, I’m ready to strategize with anybody anytime. Maybe nobody will come. Right. Cool. I’ll have my room service, big board table, right? What happened is I ran into Pete at the, at Grants thing back in the green room and Pete said, Hey, I want you to meet my buddy Pedro, he wants to be a part of the war room and we’ll be doing these challenge things. And I was like, would you guys. How about, why don’t you come by, I’d like for you to break this challenge thing down. And I wasn’t thinking I was going to do anything with it. So they come by and explain everything and he whiteboards it out and I take a picture of it, I’ve got everything. And then the world shuts down and I’m like, okay, what am I going to do? And so I called my marketing guy that I had just hired that week and I said, look, let’s do a challenge. And he said, okay, when do you want to do it? And I said, Thursday, and he’s like, what the heck? There’s no way, what do you mean Thursday? I’m like, I want to do it Thursday. There’s no reason we can’t just go. And he’s like, well, do you have any of the stuff? I’m like, no, but I will have it by Thursday, I’ll have it when we start. And when he’s like, are you going to sell anything on the back end of it? And I said, yes. And he said, what’s it going to be? Is said I have no idea. So, so then over the next few days, we put that together and we were thinking of a really good home run. I think our projection was a really good home run would be that we, that we made about 140,000 from doing this challenge thing and, and we ended up, we spent $9,700 and we ended up doing about $870,000 in that week. And I was like, this is pretty crazy. And what the hook ultimately was, or is that I wanted to think about what do people want right now that’s related to this thing that I was teaching that will get them faster results and that also speaks to what’s going on in the world. So I was thinking the best thing that I can think of to grow a business the fastest in any environment is mergers and acquisitions to buy other companies or other assets. We’re in a crisis right now. There’s going to be a lot of those for sale because there’s a lot of businesses that would be failing. The average business in America had about 27 days of cashflow at that time. So it was like if this thing goes on, this is going to be really challenging for a lot of people and we can help them by acquiring the businesses and putting them with other businesses and this could be a really good thing. So we ended up coming up with ethical profits in crisis, which is EPIC, and rather than teaching all four parts of my leverage, exit, grow, scale, it’s just teaching in much more depth one of the concepts, which is M, what we call micro MNA, meaning companies that are under 10 million in value or assets. And so I had over the years, I’ve been buying and selling companies since my early twenties. So over that time – and I started in real estate when I was 18 – I had all kinds of strategies for not coming out of pocket to buy these companies. And so we said, what can I give them? Well, I can give them the strategies that I’ve got for not doing that. And at the time I had 159 and over the, during this shutdown, there’s been another 57 that we’ve developed as a result of the creativity needed to make deals happen in this environment. So I got 216 ways to acquire businesses with no money out of pocket. And that was what ultimately seemed like the best thing to offer. And since then, we’re just under 4 million in sales of that program. We’ve had about 20,000 people opt-in. It’s really fun. And it’s inexpensive. It’s 55 bucks for people to learn everything they need to know. I want people, and I do have people doing deals during this five-day challenge so they’re like, man, I bought a company, I bought a software company, I bought the Facebook group. And, and so that makes you feel good. It makes them feel good. It keeps everybody very happy. But it, and it also offers the people who want to invest more in themselves to have more in-depth the ability to get that. And I think that’s the way to teach that I’ve talked to sales people who are like, you can’t give them how to do this, nobody will buy the other thing. I’m like, then I suck if they don’t want more than, then I suck, but I’m not going to kind of trick them into coming in and then say, oh, and if you want the one thing that makes this work.

Chris Dreyer

Well, this is kind of self-serving because I was actually, I found you through the Epic challenge. And I went through the challenge and they kind of brought awareness into my industry of opportunities and I’ve done many acquisitions from the challenge, but I started thinking about that as a growth lever for our audience. Most of our audience is personal injury attorneys and I kind of want to throw you a curveball for the audience listening, because, with legal, you’ve got the non-competes you’ve got, most of the firms are branded around the owner’s name. And then you also have personal injury where, maybe you don’t know, it’s not like a business attorney who ha who works with a book of business that’s recurring, what might be some ideas that a personal injury law firm could look at when thinking about acquisitions.

Roland Frasier

Yeah. So, so as you, since you’ve been through the program, I have a kind of a wheel of opportunity for existing businesses. The easiest thing that most people think of when they think about an acquisition as a competitor, and certainly attorneys can acquire other law firms. I did it when I practiced law. That is a super-easy way to acquire additional business. But then beyond that, I have a wheel of the lowest hanging fruit for the best opportunities that I think will help the business. So I start thinking about number one, we would like to have more leads. So if we’d like to have more leads in our core business, in our core businesses, a personal injury attorney, then where do my ideal customer does my ideal customer profile. Hang out. Who’s already aggregated the attention and eyeballs of that ideal customer profile. So what I would then do is I’d say, who are my best customers in my PI practice. And maybe I would find that slip and fall auto accident is big. What are some of my specialties? Maybe I specialize in motorcycle accident injuries. Then looking at that data of who’s my most profitable in terms of margin and time customer and what do they do? Then I’d say, let’s say that it’s I find that it’s the motorcycle cases cause I get to sue all the manufacturers and the other side. And well, then what I would do is I’d say then what’s the media that’s already aggregated the attention and eyeballs of not injured motorcyclists and how do I acquire that media so that then I can place my offer and build a brand in that media. So then I’d go and say, okay, what are the Facebook motorcycle groups? What are the big Instagram channels for motorcycles that I’m probably not going to get to by Harley Davidson’s, but I might be able to acquire Joe the cruiser who likes to cruise down the beach on Highway 101 in California. And I would start, I’d start looking at podcasts. I’d start looking at newsletters and then I’ve got the media. Now I own the eyeballs and I’ve got more leads coming to me. If I’ve got shows, podcasts, events, groups, all of that kind of stuff and I have someone posting content in there – not hey, been injured on your motorcycle, call me. Instead, hey know your rights. A lot of times, here’s the story of what happened and people ride up on you on your tail and don’t realize this, and so here’s some ways to get the space that you need to be safer and build that content marketing program across all of your media. Now you’re the top of mind choice, right? Then the next place would be infrastructure. So can I aqua hire. Meaning who already has relationships with the people who are most likely to refer me business and who can help me scale my business in the best way who’s already done that. And then I make a list of those people. And I don’t know what the biggest referral sources might be. I know that like EMT are a source of referrals. So you don’t have to chase the ambulance. If the ambulance basically says, hey, you’ve been hurt, if you need any help call Joe. And, and then if it’s legal and ethical, you can pay them a referral. If it’s not legal and ethical venue, you don’t have to do that again. Just get in front of that group of people in a way that you can provide value to them. Then I can go over to products and services and say, what are the products and services that my injured people are going to need. Well, we will probably need a court reporter. We’ll probably need a physical therapist. We’ll probably need a rehabilitative surgeon, whatever. And then I’d say what of those things can I buy so that I can say to my customers- Hey, I own these things and you need these things. So I recommend you go to this physical therapist, by the way, I have an ownership interest in it, et cetera. Then you go down to supply and distribution. How do I consolidate my supply and distribution chain to increase margin? By the way, we got leads from acquiring media. We got infrastructure increased by aqua hire through the team and resources acquisition. We get more revenue and profits and sales and customers from buying additional products and services and creating cross-sell opportunities. Now we’re down in supply and distribution. If I can consolidate my supply and distribution chain, then I increase my margin. So what’s your supply and distribution chain in a law firm? Well, let’s say you’re doing content marketing. Maybe you are buying content services from a digital marketing agency. So I would go buy a digital marketing agency. Then I would be their best customer. Maybe I’d bring that in-house but maybe I’d offer those services to other people too. And then I’d say, okay, that’s my that’s one of my suppliers. And one of my other suppliers might be a court reporting service might be a 3d modeling service to create, recreate those accident scenes and things like that. And so I’d look at acquiring those things and then IP, what can I do? In terms of the acquisition of IP assets to increase my business. That’s pretty easy. If we think about content, heck anybody that’s been injured, let’s say I’ll do the motorcycle thing and I want to get content to put up in my lead machine cause I bought that media. Now I’m going to say, okay, who’s already created a big body of content about motorcycle safety or interesting motorcycle things or anything else. And then I’ll go start buying that content. So now I’ve got all of the leads and infrastructure and margin and cross-selling opportunities that I want. That’s how I grow that business.

Chris Dreyer

Well, we’re going to have to add that in the show notes and just really expand on that, I think that’s incredible. I was the taking those fixed costs, those big fixed costs in the content, and turn them into profit centers. It was, I was thinking even in your accounting costs and things like that, and the insurance, maybe instead of working with an insurance company, you buy an insurance company.

Roland Frasier

Expert witnesses also.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, absolutely. That’s incredible. You know, I kind of want to transition over to your podcast just for a moment. So back in March, you launched the Business Lunch Podcast and you had an episode title what to do to survive and thrive in the next 90 days. With hindsight, being everything that’s happened in the last seven months and the future uncertainty of COVID, what would be your best advice to businesses, especially attorney listeners over the next 90 days.

Roland Frasier

The biggest thing that I’ve learned from this is that all businesses are doing significantly better now than they were eight months in. So, not surprisingly, freezing and doing things the way we’ve always done them is going to not serve you well in a rapidly changing environment. And we have a continually evolving environment because cases spike, and then they go down and they spike again, and they shut everything down like they did PPP loans and support for business, then they’re not going to do any more support. It’s like this all over the place. So that being the case, it’s clear that you need to think about how do I create a change-ready company, an uncertainty friendly company. And the way that you do that is that you have a process for continually annually analyzing the data that is the performance of your company, and continually looking out into the market to see who’s doing what, and then thinking about looking at what they’re doing, what else could I do to innovate across everything? And so what might be thinking doing is if I’m in personal injury, is there the potentiality of liability for people who haven’t been liable before for new form personal injury. Is it possible that bars and restaurants have exposure to lawsuits from people for exposure to COVID because of nonenforcement of legally mandated policies? So then I’d start creating content for those people. If I was in defense, I would be creating content for them saying, you need to worry. You need to think about this and we’ve got a free kit. That we’re handing out to all restaurants and bars of, you know, what needs to be posted and everything so that you can, you can best have the best opportunity to position yourself, to defend a case that might come, but never say avoid liability. Cause that sounds like a promise, right? If I was on the plaintiff’s side, then I, it would probably be, I’d be looking at what are the opportunities for me. As a result of this to help people who have been negatively impacted by careless transmission or contracting this thing, and how can I create a helpline center to get them the information. And then I would be top of mind in the event that something happened, where they needed care, particularly, I would say for medical malpractice in terms of how is, how are nursing homes? Gosh, that seems like a huge category right now. If I was looking at a new business, I’d be all over providing content to families and occupants of nursing homes about their rights and how to protect yourself and all that kind of stuff.

Chris Dreyer

I think that’s tremendous advice. And I see many of our top call my top clients doing that. Creating the nursing home content, creating the coronavirus space content, and they’re doing really well with it. So switching over to personal, so I cruised your Instagram, and I know you’re a big wine connoisseur, so what’s your go-to when it comes to wine, because myself, the only wine I can even think of is Yellow Tail.

Roland Frasier

Yeah, well Yellow Tail actually makes a nice bottle of wine. For me, I’ll go first… what are the categories that I go to? The categories that I generally lean towards our French white burgundy and Napa and French Cabernet and Cabernet blends. So Bordeaux blends and Semillon in France and in terms of California, Pritchard Hill, and Mount Veeder. And then if I go to brands, I would say there are so many in the, I guess, Remenee, Leflav. Those are some of my top white burgundy loves. And in terms of the Bordeaux blends, I really like, and the cabs, I like a Hundred Acre, Abru, FIitou, and Scarecrow. Those are some of my tops. Those are, I have an awful lot.

Chris Dreyer

Wonderful. Wonderful. So, so in our closing segment here, and we deal with rapid three for three, it’s just a quickfire round. So just kind of go from your gut and it’s the final three questions. So first, what is your top search engine optimization tip?

Roland Frasier

Oh, gosh, it’s really the top search engine optimization tip is that the smartest guy that I know in SEO is Neil Patel and how Neil Patel got to be such a search engine optimization expert is that he went and identified all the keywords that people were searching for search engine optimization, and then he went and bought all of the blogs and media and websites that already ranked for the things that he wanted to rank for. So he instantly ranked for all those things as he acquired those and he’s become one of the leading SEO guys out there. So if I wanted to rank high for anything in terms of pI then I would look at what are my best performing keywords and go see who owns them now and can I buy them from somebody else? If it’s a law practice that owns it, can I buy the law practice? If it’s a content service even better, I’ll just buy that content service. And then I’ll now own all of the keywords and my competitors will be like, how the heck did that happen so quick?

Chris Dreyer

Wonderful. And which entrepreneurs do you admire the most?

Roland Frasier

Boy. It really would be hard for me to say a single person, but I really admire Sarah Blakely for her ability to not only invent something, but so many inventors invent something, and then it gets licensed away, which isn’t a bad play. But she did the hard thing, she went and invented and then sold literally standing on the floor at Neiman Marcus, getting people to buy her stuff. And then – Spanx is the brand – and then went and vertically integrated through manufacturing and I mean, reinvented an industry. So I think that is really impressive. And I think she’s super impressive, yeah.

Chris Dreyer

And the final question here. What is the next thing on your bucket list?

Roland Frasier

On my bucket list personally is to go to Antarctica. I’ve I’m at 156 countries and counting. I want to see them all. I went to put my feet in, spend time in the mall, but I only have six continents and it seems kind of dumb that I haven’t been to Antarctica. So that’s, I was actually on my list this year for February, but then they shut everything down. So it’s probably going to be the year after that.

Chris Dreyer

Wow. I hope you guys were taking notes because Roland shared so many great tips during the interview. Even though business can seem particularly tough given our current climate, I think Roland proves that if you’re willing to think laterally and come up with a new approach, there are ways to overcome the challenges and even thrive. You’ve been listening to The Rankings Podcast, I’m Chris Dreyer. A huge thanks to Roland Frasier for joining us today and you can find more info, as always, in the show notes. And we want to hear from you, have you tried the EPIC CHALLENGE? Leave us a review and let us know how it’s going. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you next time.