Trevor Crook (AKA Trevor “ToeCracker” Crook) is one of Australia’s top copywriters. He works with businesses all over the globe, writing them sales copy that pulls in millions of dollars.

In this interview Trevor tells me how he does it.

Yanik Silver is a serial entrepreneur who has built multiple successful online businesses and has bootstrapped 8 different product and service ideas hitting the million-dollar sales mark from scratch without funding, taking on debt or even having a real business plan.

He is the author of several best-selling marketing books and tools including “Moonlighting on the Internet“, “Maverick Startup”, “34 Rules for Maverick Entrepreneurs” and “Instant Sales Letters“. Yanik is also the founder of the Underground Online Seminar and Maverick1000, a private group of top level, game-changing entrepreneurs.

As a self-described “adventure junkie,” Yanik Silver has found that his own life-changing experiences such as running with the bulls, bungee jumping, HALO skydiving, exotic car rallies and Zero-Gravity flights have not only expanded his limits but also led to breakthroughs in ideas, focus and business thinking.

In this interview I ask Yanik all about how we can also become adventurous, maverick business owners ourselves as well asking him for some of his best copywriting and marketing advice

Jonah Berger is the author of Contagious, a book that explores the phenomenon of going viral on the internet, in this interview Jonah shares the key elements to getting your content to get shared all over the web.

Dan Gallapoo (AKA Doberman Dan) is a direct response entrepreneur and copywriter. He is famous for his “Doberman Dan Letter“, an offline newsletter which is highly praised within copywriting/marketing circles. He’s also written hundreds of successful ads, sales letters, direct mail packages, websites, e-mail marketing campaigns, feature articles, press releases, and newsletters for his own businesses and his clients. In this interview Dan reveals his freelance copywriting wisdom such as how to chrage high fees and select only the best copywriting clients

Dianna Huff is a B2B marketing consultant who has been helping B2B companies market themselves since 1986. Since then she has specialized in web based marketing tactics for business to business companies. Not only does she know the proven B2B marketing tactics that work, but she also has the real world knowledge and expertise to help you grow your business.

Dianna is an in demand speaker and trainer as well as being the recipient of many prestigious industry awards. She is also the author of several popular eBook publications.

In this interview I ask Dianna how B2B companies can use the internet to get themselves out there and land more business.

Bret Thomson is one of Australia’s highest paid/in demand copywriters & conversion strategists. Mal emery, Ari Galper, Spike Hummer, Jennie Armato and Jamie McIntyre are just a few of his big name copy clients.

He’s also a coach, speaker and bestselling author of “Client Rush:37 Proven Marketing Breakthroughs for Attracting More Clients Fast”

Bret is also well known as “The Big Idea Guy” because his ability to nail the big idea is admired by even the most seasoned marketers.

In this interview Bret reveals how he is able to conjure up incredible marketing ideas as well a ton of other tips which will help you increase your conversions

Robert Greene is the author of several books on pyscology and strategy including “The 48 Laws of Power”, “Mastery”, “The 50th Law”, “The Art of Seduction” and “The 33 Strategies of War”. In this interview I ask Robert how we can apply some of these strategies in business, marketing and our personal life too.

Neil Patel is exceptionally good at creating incredible content that goes viral all over the internet, drawing in massive traffic and getting ranked high in the search engines as a consequence. In this interview he shares his secrets.

Herschell Gordon Lewis is internationally recognized as a major authority in advertising and direct marketing. In fact his accomplishments have earned him recognition by being honored in the Direct Marketing Associations Hall of Fame. He is the author of over 31 books on the topic of direct marketing and copywriting. In this episode Herschell give some of best tips for writing outstanding copy.

Selling physical products online can often be overlooked by the online marketing gurus who teach nothing but info products. In this episode eCommerce expert Ezra Firestone shows us why selling "real" products can be one of the most profitable online business models.

Writing for the web is indeed a different beast to writing offline. Top web copywriter Nick Usborne shows us how to write powerful web copy and create a website that sells.

Colin is the leader of facebooks most popular copywriting group... The Cult of Copy. In this episode colin give us tips on how we can write better copy

Position yourself as the expert within your industry and you'll make far more money, Kane Minkus shares how

Ryan Healy tells us how we can have a 6 figure salary as a copywriter.

Andy Maslen is the managing director at the highly acclaimed, copywriting agency “Sunfish” and CEO of The Copywriting Academy. He is the author of 4 books… Write to Sell: The Ultimate Guide to Great Copywriting, The Copywriting Sourcebook: How to write better copy, faster – for everything from ads to websites, Write Copy Make Money, 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas). In this interview Andy talks with me about some of the copywriting strategies from "Write to sell"

Leadpages is an incredible software which will help you to create pages that will collect opt-ins and make sales like crazy. The software is so simple to use, no techie skills necessary. In this interview I interview Leadpages creator Clay Collins about how you can use this incredible tool to grow your online business. Go to http://leadpages.net/joseph to purchase leadpages

The Boron Letters is rated as one of the best direct marketing texts of recent history. It was written by direct response legend Gary Halbert to his son Bond. In this episode I interview Bond Halbert about marketng strategies from The Boron Letters

Owning the racecourse is an online marketing method perfected by James Schramko. He uses it to get 50 hot opt-ins per day and it's something anyone can do. It's traffic, content marketing and conversion all rolled into one.

Joe Vitale teaches us how we can write copy so powerful the reader is almost hypnotized by it by tuning in to the subconscious mind of your readers.

Persuasion is essential for marketing and sales. In this interview persasion expert and author of the "Persuasion Skills Black Book" Rintu Basu shares his secrets

If you don't drive qualified traffic to your website, you'll make no sales. Traffic expert Justin Brooke shares how we can drive laser targeted visitors to our site (and lot's of them!)

Newsletter marketing is one of the best possible ways to increase the life time value of a customer. Many online marketers ignore it because it's not "online" but you should still have "offline newsletters" as part of your overall marketing mix, to assist your online stuff. In this episode I interview Jim Palmer (The Newsletter Guru) on how we can profit with newsletter marketing.

Charlie McDermott is the founder of the Business & Entrepreneur Network (BEN), helping small business owners put automated systems in place so that their businesses don't rule them, they rule their business

In this interview Charlie reveals the 7 stages of the perfect customer lifecycle so that we can increase sales, get more testimonials and build a huge legion of satisfied customers who refer us to their friends

Joey Bushnell: Hey everyone, this is Joey Bushnell, today I have with me a special guest Charlie Mcdermott. Charlie, thank you very much for being with me today.

Charlie McDermott: Absolutely, thank you for the invite.

Joey Bushnell: Let me tell you a little bit about Charlie and what he has done in the marketing world...

Speaker, author, and founder of the Business & Entrepreneur Network, Charlie McDermott helps small business owners clear the path to building valuable, scalable and… saleable businesses via automation and the creation of direct response marketing assets.

Charlie started his first business as a college student at West Chester University located in Pennsylvania, and grew it into an 8-figure health club empire. Twenty-two years later he sold that business to focus his marketing expertise on Hollywood where he used over twenty different forms of media to breakthrough the clutter and land his son acting roles in feature films and television shows including, The Office, Private Practice, Medium, and a full-time gig as Axl Heck on the hit ABC comedy, “The Middle”.

Today, Charlie works with hundreds of entrepreneurs every month online from as far away as Australia and via live events held in the Philadelphia, PA and Wilmington, DE areas.

Charlie, thank you for being on the call with me today.

Charlie McDermott: Thank you I’m excited.

Joey Bushnell: Today we’re going to be talking about how sometimes business owners are working too hard. We are going to be talking about how people can increase sales with automation.

My first question is... Why is automation critical to business growth, success and financial independence?

Charlie McDermott: Great question. I started this business and entrepreneur group “The Business Entrepreneur network”. I created a monster because I taught our students, about 200 small business owners and we do live events and other things too, but the problem is I taught them how to be great marketers.

You would think how that would be an awesome thing, however when you get really good at marketing, you build your business, get a lot of customers and if you aren’t set up properly you can get very busy.

For many business owners it becomes a vicious cycle of marketing the way the business comes in. It’s like go,go,go and serve,serve,serve then you’re absolutely exhausted and they wake up the next day and say “Oh my goodness sales are down” do it again, market go,go,go and it ends up burning these guys out in many cases. Even in the best case it’s just not a fun way to live because they end up working 7 days a week and missing out on family events.

So about 6 months into the start of this group a light bulb hit us and what enabled me to sell my health club business and spend 2 years with my son out in Hollywood and help him in his acting career was that I was able to build systems in my business and sell.

If you have a choice of owning Joe’s pizza shop or Joe’s in the shop flipping the dough and is at the cash register with the white powder on his hair and on his fingers. He’s serving up your pizza slice and locking up at night and the morning and even cleaning the floors.

Or would you rather have a McDonalds? I have yet to go to into a McDonalds and have the honor of finding Mr Donald in a McDonalds. They don’t need to be there. Those businesses are set up with systems, as we know, that frees the business owner up to do other things to enjoy life and have a predictable cash flow versus Joe’s pizza shop, it’s all in Joe’s head. When Joe decides to retire or move on or take his son to Hollywood, Joe is screwed because it’s all in his head.

Bringing back our Business and Entrepreneur network, marketing is very important and certainly you need to have a good product or service. But if don’t have good systems in place so you aren’t doing the same thing over and over again, spending way to much time doing manual stuff, stuff that costs in our area $10-$12 an hour, when you are worth $500 or more an hour, you are not going to be able to grow your business.

Joey Bushnell: You talk a lot about building a valuable business versus what you call an ABCYT business. Can you give our audience some direction on how to build a valuable business?

Charlie McDermott: For our members from the start, everything we do should be based on selling our business at some point. It’s OK if you don’t want to but sometimes things change. When I got my Health club business I was a college student and 23 years later my kids are teenagers and I wanted to do some things and it just made sense for me to sell my business at that point.

Without those systems in place you don't have a valuable business. 

So Joe’s pizza shop is worth maybe $50,000, if he's got a good location or special recipe versus the McDonalds which is worth millions. The only difference is McDonalds has the systems in place, therefore that’s what you want to build a business that has the turn key operation possibilities.

The last thing you want to do is wake up in the middle of the night and say “Oh my goodness, if Joe gets hit by a bus or if Mary decides to leave or take maternity leave” all of a sudden as a business owner, many times our support people end up dumping their work on you. It traps you again from growing your business and that is not a valuable business.

The ABCYT is the “Always be chasing your tail” phenomenon that business owners do pretty much every day of the week. We get caught up in the fires, we end up doing things ourselves, no one else can do it as good as we can versus spending their time building the systems so the same thing happens over again consistently and you take as much of the human factor out of the equation as possible.

Joey Bushnell: What are the 3 gaping holes in the sales funnel?

Charlie McDermott: This starts evolving to taking the human piece out of the equation and especially in the areas where it is critical that we eliminate as much error as possible. When I say error it’s not that staff are screwing up, it’s that many times they forget, they get busy and stuff doesn’t happen when it should.

So when you look at a typical sales funnel you have your big top where people come on board. For an internet business they come in through the website, a retail store they are coming through the door and for other businesses they are coming through the phones. For many businesses they are coming through all of those areas and others.

Question number 1 is... Are we capitalizing on that traffic? Are folks coming to our websites, shopping, picking tyres and then leaving without giving information?

In my health club business, this goes back 8 years since I sold it, back then it cost us $350 to bring in a new sale. We had an army of sales folks and it would drive me crazy if I saw a prospect come through our doors and then 5 minutes later leave and then find out that they didn’t get their information. We have no way to follow up with that person and we either have to do expensive advertising to maybe get them back or just sit and wait. I didn’t like those options. So we made darn sure we had a system in place that captured that information.

The problem with most businesses and the difference between now and then is websites really weren’t that critical back then. Today a lot of folks start there. Especially in the bricks and mortar retail service businesses. They kind of get a feel for things then if they choose to visit, they’ll head to the store.

So if you are not capturing information on the website at the beginning of that funnel that is one of the 3 areas where you are missing the boat. That is a huge gaping hole. If you have 100 people at your website today and none of them give you information you’ve lost that big time. If people stop in the store and we’re not capturing information. Have something in place even if it’s only 10% or 5%, over the course of a year that’s a huge amount of dollars that could flow to your bottom line.

Then when we get those votes, who give us that information then what happens? If you are fortunate to have a sales staff, great, even if it’s yourself doing the sales you all probably have busy seasons. In my health club our busy season was January through to March/ April. People after the new years wanted to lose weight and had their goals and it was lousy weather so why not join a health club, it’s something to do. Then a few months later we slow down a bit.

What would happen with our sales staff during those months is they would become order takers instead of sales people. The difference between an order taker and a sales person is the order takers are sitting there waiting for the business to come in and hand them a check versus a sales person who is working their leads and prospecting.

What would happen in the first quarter of our business is a lot of the warm to cold leads wouldn’t get followed up on because my sales team was just living off the cream. People just walking in the door saying “Hey, sign me up, here’s my money”. The question there is, if I had to do it all over again, and we had 8-9 full time sales people, what if we could have automated all those warm to cold leads?

So there would have been follow up happening every single day or so many times a week and it didn’t involve our sales people, it was consistent and at the end of the week, 2 weeks, whatever the buying cycle is, we could bring them in as a sale and it wouldn’t cost us a nickel. Wouldn’t that be a great system?

I probably could have cut my sales staff in half or better yet keep them at 8 and let them do what they are good at which is sell. They spent probably 80-90% of their time on the phones and a lot of it was voicemail versus if we could free them up just to sell, our sales would have gone through the roof.

The businesses out there have the ability now where software is available to automate their sales and marketing so that they capture information when folks come on to the website. Then those prospects get what is called “Nurtured” along the way so you can identify those who are hot and want to buy today and we are going to pull them in as quickly as possible.

But it’s that bulk of folks who won’t buy for upwards of maybe a year or two. There are some statistics out there, Gartner research says 67% of prospective buyers that tell you no today, will be ready to buy in the next year. Unfortunately most businesses give up after a few days or weeks so they miss out on 67%. SiriusDecisions says 80% of leads you consider to be dead, will buy within the next 2 years. These are flat out dead leads that businesses give up on and 80% of those could become buyers. So another huge, huge hole there.

Joey Bushnell: Wow, definitely some food for thought there.

How can a business owner plug the holes that they currently have in their bucket and instead increase the sales, referrals and testimonials automatically?

Charlie McDermott: The best thing is to get us imperfect humans out of the equation as much as possible. One way is to have the systems in place obviously, and to have a program that leads a bread trail so you can lead your prospect from the beginning point to the end point, obviously being sales transaction.

The challenge is, where is the end point for a lot of businesses? If your buying cycle is a week, we’d all like it to be in 7 days but as we just heard in those statistics, it may take up to 2 years. So what if we had a system in place that went 2 years and beyond? You can do that, you can put that in place so you don’t miss sales.

Not to go crazy with statistics but here is one that will just blow everyone away. It was a question with my sales team because no one wants to be that stereotype pushy sales person who is trying to high pressure me, we have a lot of that in the health business industry.

Unfortunately that hurts businesses, they give up too soon and they miss out on the bulk of sales. 48% of businesses quit after the first call that’s almost half, 24% after the second and 90% quit after the 4th. So only 10% of businesses keep it going for 5 or more contacts. That is important because when you look at when these deals close 81% on or after the 5th contact. So 10% are tapping into the 81% that close.

The challenge is for business owners to stay front of mind, continually have a message and have those contacts without it costing them an arm and a leg. By doing things such as sending out emails but in an automated way so that you as an example have a “Thank you card” for some businesses as a way to say thanks for visiting. Then a series of emails that go out over weeks and months that continue to nurture that prospect and let them know that you are still there.

Occasionally give them an offer to bring them back in to see if you can close the sale. But to do it in a way that doesn’t involve a whole lot of time and energy is a huge advantage you have over your competition.

Joey Bushnell: I understand that one of the major services your company provides is business automation based on the 7 stages of the perfect customer lifestyle. Could you tell us about these 7 stages please?

Charlie McDermott: This is a way of looking at your business differently than most. The typical business is all about prospecting, bringing the traffic in, capturing that information, nurturing those prospects, converting them to print then what happens is they start all over again. They go back to generating traffic, bringing them in, negotiating, whatever that process is to closing the sales and starting over again.

The opportunity there, let me jump back to my health business again, 60-70% of our members, when I sold it we had about 12,000 members at the time, were referring new members to us. So most businesses have the ability to control that rather than just relying on “I give you a good job or product, you’ll tell your friends and family”. Unfortunately in this day an age with so much clutter and so much distraction that isn’t necessarily true.

What you want to do is put a system in place that reminds folks that you are there and you can help their friends and families and basically build referrals.

Going back to generating more traffic and closing more sales right after the last sale, the next step in the perfect customer life cycle is what we call the “Deliver and Wow” stage.

The wow stage is all about delivering the unexpected. So under promising and over delivering we’ve all heard that before. What if after someone purchases your product or service they got something in the mail or via email that was a digital download that didn’t cost you anything but was an extra added bonus that made them think “Wow these guys are really special”.

Every business out there battles with buyers remorse. I don’t care what product or service you are selling and certainly the more high end it is the more you are battling. This is also a great strategy to reduce that or eliminate that because now you are making these folks who were maybe thinking “Umm I don’t know if I made the right decision” then in the next day or the next hour there is something they get which was totally unexpected and totally takes their mind off “Did I make the right decision” to “Wow this is the right decision for me”.

So the wow sequence is exactly what is sounds like. It's all about wowing your customer and it’s an automated sequence that starts form the moment they purchase. As an example when someone purchases something on a website or in your store the actual purchase would trigger a thank you card or email that says “Hey, thanks for purchasing”. Then a series of events could happen over the next few days, weeks, months or even years to make them feel great abut their purchase.

Here is what happens in most businesses, that I just had an experience with last year, we decided to get our house painted. Joey have you ever had a house painted?

Joey Bushnell: I haven’t had one painted but I painted one before.

Charlie McDermott: Right so after you painted you know it’s good for life. That is what my painting contractor thought too. However 3-4 years into it I noticed the paint was peeling. Did you ever see that on a paint job?

Joey Bushnell: Yes

Charlie McDermott: You would think that these guys would contact their customers after a period of time and say “Hey your house may be in need of more paint, or if it’s not maybe you want to change the color of it”. So last year I decided it was time and I liked the guys who did our house last time, fair price, did a great job. I didn’t even want to shop I just wanted to get them here. Do you think I could remember who they were?

Joey Bushnell: Probably not, no.

Charlie McDermott: No I couldn’t, I looked, I couldn’t remember. They sent us nothing, no phone calls, emails, nothing. So I end up shopping around and finding another painting contractor and it’s a shame because I lost out, they certainly lost out on about a $3,000-$5,000 gig there.

That is the way it is with a lot of businesses they assume they’ll remember us, we did such a great job and sold such a great product. I don’t care if it’s 3 years, 3 months or 3 weeks even, folks today have a short memory because there is too much stuff going on.

The wow sequence should happen and continue for a long long time. Especially if you are in a business like the car, real estate or things of that nature, you are dependent on them coming back 5-7 years down the road, you don’t want them to forget about you.

Then there is the point where after the sale, folks are either happy or not happy. Wouldn’t you want to know if someone wasn’t satisfied with your product or service?

In most businesses the only time we find out is if they are really ticked off and you get a nasty letter phone call or whatever it is. Thank goodness so we can fix it but it’s probably the 80-20 rule there. 80% of folks who weren’t satisfied never tell us but they are telling their friends and everyone else and maybe even going on social media and so forth.

Today more than ever it's important to have a sequence in place even a simple email that goes out on an automated basis, let’s say 30 days after the purchase that says “We love having you as a customer, hopefully your product is going great for you doing everything it says and then some. By the way can you let us know if you are happy or not happy? Just click a yes or no button right here.”

The "yes button" saying they are happy, goes into a separate sequence and when I say sequence I mean a series of emails or it could be postcards, voicemail blasts or anything you can think of. The next email that comes out at a certain point in time could be “Now that we know you are happy maybe it's a good time to ask for a testimonial, or tell you about our referral program".

It would be kind of awkward to ask for a testimonial if they weren’t happy with the product or joining the referral program so they can blast it out to the whole universe. That is obviously important and good to know who is going to support you.

But more importantly it's the folks who aren’t happy. The second they click that no button, you could trigger an email that goes out to your PA or receptionist to make a call right away and connect with that person. Have an email that goes out at the same time saying “we are sorry we are going to do everything we can to fix it...”

I did this back in the day with my health club business but we didn’t have email, we found that our unhappy customers end up being our best supporters because we were able to fix things and listen to them which no other business was doing. So when we got them back to being happy they were the happiest customers ever.

So there’s a huge opportunity to have something in place not just for the obvious, you don’t want someone negatively talking about your business but the extreme positive that those guys and gals are going to be with you for life because you are one of the only businesses that listens to them.

So to summarize the 7 stages in this perfect customer lifecycle are...

1. We want to attract the traffic

2. We want to capture them as leads in our business whether it's with web forms on the website, phone calls and have those systems in place or if they come in to our business.

3. We want to nurture them in the 3rd stage. Whether they are ready to buy today or 2 years from now there is some kind of a system in place that keeps my business front of mind.

4. Then there is the convert the sales point, which is important. At some point we want to generate dollars from this group.

These next few stages are really critical and the ones that most businesses leave out.

5. The deliver and wow

6. The up sell customers stage there is huge opportunity there that most business forget to up sell and cross sell. Once a customer has bought your product, 30 days later they may be ideal candidate for your next product or service.

7. Then the final stage number 7 is focusing on getting referrals. Referrals whether you have 60-70% like I did in my business or 10-20% you can still build that business and that’s the best kind of business you can get. One because it doesn’t cost you an extra nickel and we tend to listen to our friends and family members when purchasing something than an ad in the newspaper.

Joey Bushnell: Brilliant, Charlie that is some great information and thank you for letting us know the 7 stages that was very cool and I was taking a lot of notes while you were talking there.

Charlie, where can we get more of this stuff from you and how can we learn more about you and your programs?

Charlie McDermott: Yes there are 2 places... The business and entrepreneur network you can find at www.benresults.com Ben is the acronym for business and entrepreneur network and we branded it after Philadelphia's best known entrepreneur. You may know this guy, Benjamin is his first name and he is a big time inventor

Joey Bushnell: Benjamin Franklin?

Charlie McDermott: Yes you got it. In the states Ben is a $100 so we give away Ben’s at all of our events and have some fun there.

But our automation you is www.automationyou.com is our automation services where we help businesses automate their sales and marketing. We get them from working so hard, back to some sanity where their profits are significantly more then they were and they can maybe go on a vacation now and then.

Joey Bushnell: Charlie, we’ll put both of those links where people are watching it. I’d just like to say thank you for your time today and the great information that you have shared with us.

Charlie McDermott: Thank you for the offer Joey

Alexis Neely is known as "The Truth Telling Lawyer". She helps business owners grow their business by building on the correct foundations, which then allows them to grow the business as big as they like

In this interview I ask Alexis, how the typical online marketer can make sure they protect themselves when doing business online

If you are an online business owner but have never given a second thought to the legal side of things, make sure you listen to this interview as it could help you to stay out of trouble.

Alexis reveals...

* The legal agreements and advisers you should have in place to stay protected

* The disclaimers and policies you need to have present on your website

* How to make sure you don't break any spam laws when email marketing

* What you need to know about running an affiliate program and paying your affiliates

* What you should know about running contests and sweepstakes

* And more. Just listen to the interview or you can read the entire transcript below...

Joey Bushnell: Hi everyone, this is Joey Bushnell. Today I have with me a fantastic guest, her name is Alexis Neely.

Hi Alexis, thank you for being on the call with me today!

Alexis Neely: Hi Joey, it’s great to be here! Thanks for having me

Joey Bushnell: Alexis is a business and entrepreneurial strategist. Some people call her “The truth telling lawyer”. 

We are going to be talking about how as online marketers, we can make sure that we have the legal side of our business prepared and everything in place and in order. So Alexis could you tell uslittle bit about how you got started in this industry?

Alexis Neely: This all really started for me when I went out on my own as a lawyer. I had graduated 1st in my class from Georgetown Law and started my career at one of the big law firms in the US it’s called Munger, Tolles and Olson. It was started by Charlie Munger who if you know Warren Buffet, he is Warren’s number 1 business adviser.

I went to that law firm because I thought that I would get to practice law in an advisory kind of way. However I quickly found out it wasn’t like that. Everything was about forms, documents and transactions. So I went out on my own knowing nothing about business. My husband was a stay at home dad taking care of our kids and I was the bread winner so I really had to make it work from the beginning.

I focused all my effort and energy on learning how to make money doing business like an entrepreneur. I became very successful, very quickly at that. I built my practice into a million dollar per year revenue generating business.

That was great except I didn’t know anything about legal, insurance, financial and tax parts of my business. Even though I was a lawyer. They didn’t teach us that in law school, they taught us about legal things from the perspective of big corporations. But I didn’t really think that applied to me as the owner of a practice. Ultimately what happened was, that lack of knowledge cost me more than $1million.

Joey Bushnell: Oh no, what happened?

Alexis Neely: A lot of things, I’ll just give you some of them. Starting with an unexpected 6 figure tax bill in the first year that I hit $1million of revenue. It really just came from not knowing the right questions to ask my CPA. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. Even though I had a CPA and a book keeper, I wasn’t interacting with them in a way that could really help me and my business. Turns out, I could have cut that tax bill in half, if I had known the right questions to ask.

It just proceeded on from there. I ended up getting sued by an employee. I didn’t have the right insurance in place to fight the law suit. Even though I thought I was the best employer ever! I was so nice, caring, I didn’t make my employees keep track of any time or hours, just come in and leave when you want, just get the work done. I really thought I was the best but ultimately it turned out that employee was stealing from me so I fired her and she sued me.

I didn’t have the right insurance in place to fight that law suit nor did I have the right documentation in place and had to settle that law suit for a 5 figure settlement. I had to pay an attorney more than $10,000 to work with me on that. That was a big ugly investment.

It just went on from there. There were all sorts of things that happened in my business from not having the right financial systems, not having the right legal agreements in place.

Finally I sold my law practice in 2008 because I started on online training company, training lawyers on this new law business model that I had created. What I saw was, I very quickly grew that business into a million and a half dollars a year business. But once again I was making the exact same mistakes with the foundation. I didn’t have the right business model in place so the business was really dependent on me to work an excessive number of hours. I didn’t have the right agreements or financial system. So I was repeating the same mistakes again and I set out to learn everything I could about legal insurance, financial intact and business models for the micro business owner. For people like me and you who are not the big companies but are the small guys.

Once I did that, and I did about more than 100 hours of interviews with legal, insurance, financial and tax professionals. Once I did that, I knew I had to teach it to other people. I should say that I really didn’t want to, I was really resistant because I thought these things were boring and they were the things that no one wanted to focus on.

But I was part of a mastermind group with a whole bunch of women and they were all 7 figure business owners. What they said to me was “Alexis we need you to teach this to us. We are stuck in our businesses because we don’t have the right foundations in place.” Many of them didn’t even know what kind of insurance they should have.

So with their encouragement I created a program called “LIFT” and it stands for Legal, Insurance, Financial and Tax.

It teaches the micro business owner entrepreneur exactly what you need to have in place to have a foundation in your business that will allow your business to grow to wherever you want it to be.

I’ve been sharing that system with folks for the past few years now and people are benefiting from it hugely. Many of them say that it’s really better than an MBA. Especially if you have this kind of business, that is not a huge big business to business, it serves people, helps people and you want to make a difference in the world. There are certain things that you need to now for your type and size of business.

Joey Bushnell: Do you find that people have these things in place or is it a case of when trouble arises then suddenly they scramble around and try to get it sorted out but it’s too late?

Alexis Neely: Yes, it’s a combination. There are some people that just want to keep their heads buried in the sand and that was me. I wanted to keep my head buried in the sand, I didn’t want to think about any of this. In fact I thought thinking about it, would attract bad things to me.

If I asked for legal agreements or talked about legal agreements people wouldn’t like me or think I didn’t trust them and they wouldn’t want to do business with me. Then I thought If I got insurance I would be attracting bad things to me under the law of attraction. 

Then with the financial systems I thought “I’ll just make more money. I don’t have to keep track of my money because very quickly, I’ll just make more. I’m really good at making money”. So there is a group of people like that who figure “Well, if something happens I’ll just make more money”.

Then there is a group of people who are very proactive, who want to take care of things upfront and make sure they’ve got the business foundation to support the size of the business that they are growing and to support the clients they have and work they are doing.

So it’s really a mix and I’m willing to meet people wherever they are. I had a friend come to me for help the other day, he actually had got himself in big trouble because he didn’t classify the people working for him properly. He called them independent contractors even though they were employees. Therefore he didn’t have workers comp insurance and he got charged with workers comp fraud. He had a $150,000 fine and he was facing criminal charges, misdemeanor and felony charges in California.

He called me and said “Alexis what do I do? How do I get out of this? Can you help me out?” and the answer was “No”. It was too late now, he had to face the consequences. No matter when you come to me, I’ll help you face what you have to face. But I can tell you this... it’s a lot easier to face it when you are not forced to face it. It's easier to face it when you do it by choice. When you do, those big crazy things like that don’t tend to happen.

Joey Bushnell: Absolutely, I totally agree Alexis. I got into business very young and I never thought about these things. To be honest with you it’s been a bit of an after thought. Luckily and fingers crossed I’ve not had anything too bad happen. But little things have happened here and there that have made me think.

Which is one of the reasons why I wanted to get in touch with you to do this interview because I think that possibly I’m not alone there. My audience perhaps maybe have the same feeling, it’s not something they’ve not really thought about too much.

I agree it's something that is much nicer to get it in place so we don’t find ourselves, like your friend did, where it it just too late for us. So a lot of the questions today are to do with internet marketing and online marketing.

The first things I wanted to ask you was for those of us doing business online, what are some ways that we might find ourselves getting in trouble with the law if we are over looking these types of things?

Alexis Neely: If you do business online you absolutely need to realize that you have a real business. Just saying “business online” doesn’t mean that you don’t need legal agreements in place. It also doesn’t mean that you need insurance and financial systems.

If your business is not incorporated, in the UK that will be different than the US, you don’t have a real business. Period. If you want a real business you incorporate your business. Once you incorporate it, you make sure you have a separate bank account, make sure you have a tax ID number, make sure you have legal agreements in place with everyone. That is really your biggest risk.

Your biggest risk right now is that you don’t have legal agreements in place with the people you are doing business with. I know people who don’t have legal agreements in place with their partners. You don’t have legal agreements in place with the people who are working for you. Most people will have legal agreements in place with people who are hiring them. That is the bare minimum that I do see. If you don’t have that you need that as well. That is not going to get you in trouble with the law per sé.

Your biggest risk with getting in trouble with the law is not characterizing your employees properly. You’re treating them as contractors when they are employees that is probably your biggest risk. In fact the cost of employing people generally whether as independent contractors or employees is your biggest risk overall. Especially when you don’t have legal agreements in place. That’s really what you need to be the most aware of because something is going to go wrong with those people. You think they are your friends and they like you and chances are that it’s not the case. You are only going to find that out when they are on their way out and now you’ve got a law suit against you.

Joey Bushnell: Sure so we need to make sure we have those legal agreements, just a quick one Alexis, in that situation when does an independent contractor become an employee? I know that might be a bit of a silly question but I know a lot of online marketers outsource to places like India and the Philippines, all of that still counts as independent contractors right?

Alexis Neely: That’s right yes, so when you are outsourcing overseas to India or Philippines you don’t have to worry about it. It’s when you’re hiring in the United states and you think because someone is working from home that they are not an employee.

In fact we are dealing with this right now ourselves, now we have people working for us full time from home and we are looking at turning them into employees because they are full time for us and that is exactly what makes them employees.

So what you need to be looking at is... Do you have someone who is really working for you full time, under your control? In which case, they are an employee not an independent contractor.

Joey Bushnell: And obviously an independent contractor would have their own business and they would deal with their own tax, is that right?

Alexis Neely:  Exactly right. That is one way you can make sure someone is an independent contractor is by having an independent contractor agreement in place with them. That is really important if you do have independent contractors you need to have an independent contractor agreement in place. Ideally you pay them through their own business instead of paying them as an individual.

Joey Bushnell: My next question was to do with websites. Is there anything we need to have on our website to be complaint with the law? Things like disclaimers, privacy policies etc?

Alexis Neely: Yes absolutely, you need to have terms of service, a privacy policy, disclaimers, especially if you are a lawyer like me.

For example I can give you a disclaimer right now... Even though we are talking about legal things, I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice, it is for informational and educational purposes only and you should definitely seek the counsel of your own attorney to advise you on the specifics of your business.

That is a disclaimer.

If you are providing any legal or medical advice or anything that could be construed like that, you need to have the disclaimers.

Also if you are selling anything that has to do with making money then you need to have the earnings disclaimer on your website.

If you are selling anything as an affiliate you need to disclose that and make sure that it is indicated you are selling products as an affiliate and you are being compensated for your recommendations.

Joey Bushnell: How about email marketing is there anything that we should know about there?

Alexis Neely: The best thing you could know from an email marketing perspective is you could really understand the laws, it's the spam laws. So you know when are you spamming someone and when are you not.

They key of course is to make sure everyone that you are emailing opted in to your email list, that you have an unsubscribe link in all of your emails so they can easily unsubscribe if they want to.

One of the things that we are learning is to make it really easy to unsubscribe it really helps. Not just from a legal perspective, it’s just good business, it actually gets your emails more easily delivered. If people can’t easily unsubscribe and they report you to their ISP as a spammer that hurts your sender report, it makes it less likely that your emails will get delivered to the inbox of the people who really want it.

Joey Bushnell: So even from a marketing point of view, if you want to get good deliver-ability then you should be adhering to that, but also from a legal perspective as well. So a lot of reasons to stay on the right track with that one.

How about running an affiliate program? Lots of internet marketers have their own products and they have affiliates who help them make sales. Are there things we should know about that from a legal point of view?

Alexis Neely: I think the big thing for you to know, is you should customize your affiliate agreement. You need to stay in good communication with your affiliates you need to let them know how and when they are going to get paid.

Here’s a trick as a matter of fact, because you are going to need to 1099 all of your affiliates that make over $600 dollars with you in the US. That's big huge pain at the end of the year if you have not collected W9’s throughout the year.

So what you want to do is not send out any check to an affiliate that you do not have a W9 for. Get them to do their W9 at the time you send their check. Send them an email that says "Hey I have a check for you but I need you to do this W9" attach it, have it set up an echo sign or one of the online signing services so they can sign it and get it back to you very quickly.

Joey Bushnell: Brilliant thank you for that, that’s great. What about running contests or sweepstakes? From a legal stand point is there anything we should know there?

Alexis Neely: What I would do if you run contests or sweepstakes is I would look at a trusted site that run contests or sweepstake and see exactly what they are doing in terms of their disclaimers. This is if you don’t want to hire a lawyer to help you do it.

Now you are taking a risk there, that they didn’t do it right but if it is a really trusted, reputable company and you know they spent a lot of money hiring a lawyer and you want to run a contest or sweepstake and you want to see what they are doing take a look at their disclaimers and know that you are going to need something just like that.

Then of course if you are running it on something like Facebook there are going to be Facebook's own rules you have to comply with or your contest will be taken down. Which is different from the law. You have the law and then there’s Facebook. Facebook isn’t the law but if you are trying to run something on their platform then what they say goes even if it’s not what the law requires. So you really need to be aware of that, whatever it is.

Joey Bushnell: So if you do it on Facebook, you maybe won’t get in trouble with the law but you could get banned from Facebook which isn’t very nice either.

Does it matter what country we are in Alexis? For example I live in the UK and let’s say I violate one of the FTC’s laws, and the FTC is based in America, can they still take me to court? Can I still get in trouble?

Alexis Neely: You can still get in trouble, whether or not they can bring you here to enforce the trouble that you got in is a whole different question. But I don’t think you want to do something that keeps you coming to the US.

It’s not worth it to think “I’m over here, I’m just going to violate the laws of the FTC then I just won’t go to the US" because you might want to come to the US at some point. They could certainly seize bank accounts if you have any US bank accounts, it is possible they could even seize bank accounts overseas if there is a treaty with the place that you are in. If you got convicted of something here, they could seize your bank account wherever you are.

If you get sued civilly or criminally and you get charged with that and the jurisdiction is here in the US because you are doing business here you could potentially have to come here to fight that. They could put that judgement against you and you are going to have to deal with that if you ever want to come to the states.

Joey Bushnell: Yes, I don’t want any problems, I like coming to the states! But that was a very specific example of the UK and the USA.

Because all the countries have different laws around the world, do you see that one day there may be some kind of international law that applies to the internet or is that just not the case right now?

Alexis Neely: I don’t know, I don’t have the answer to that question, but I think a lot of it depends on where we go with all of the globalization. I imagine that there certainly will be as we become more global and we are all working with each other in various places and there is no barriers to us connecting, communicating, exchanging money and doing things. I would imagine it would become even more international.

Joey Bushnell: Yes, sorry to ask you an awkward question and I know that you wouldn’t have known the exact answer to that but it’s interesting to think about because I’ve always wondered how does it work, if I do something in the UK, do America's rules still apply. I guess it's best to adhere to everyone's rules to stay out of trouble!

Alexis Neely: Especially when it comes to money. That is really what we are talking about here. So lets say you are from some small town in the Ukraine and you have a website that you are selling something on and you violate the FTC rules, like you don’t have an earnings disclaimer for example. Is it ever going to be a problem for you? Possibly not, probably not, unless you get big enough in which case it could.

You don’t want to be banned from selling in the US. So why take that risk? Maybe you say “Well, I don’t care, if I do maybe I’ll just open up another ISP account and do it another way.” That’s fine, that’s not really the businesses that I work with.

The businesses I work with are the businesses that are focused on helping people making a difference in the world and doing what I call “The great work” and aren't just in it for the money. I find that someone who is just in it for the money maybe doesn’t care so much about having the right foundation in place because maybe for them it doesn’t matter as much.

Joey Bushnell: Is there anywhere we can go to read up about these laws, FTC guidelines and these types of things, do you have any recommended reading?

Alexis Neely: One of the places you can go is on our website eyeswideopenlife.com, you can get our recommended advisers guide if you are looking for help with some of these issues from advisers, through to those who specifically work in serving entrepreneurs with online businesses.

You can also get 3 free legal agreements on that site, one for affiliates, one for independent contractors and one as a non disclosure agreement.

Joey Bushnell: You mentioned there about advisers. What sort of advisers and professional services should we make sure we look into? Things such as lawyers, accountants etc where should we be looking to get things covered?

Alexis Neely: You are definitely going to want to have a lawyer that you trust working at your side if you are growing your business. That is going to be a lawyer who you can look to as more of a business adviser rather than just a document drafter.

You are also going to want to have an insurance adviser, someone who is helping you make sure you have the right insurance in place. You need business insurance, personal insurance and any life insurance. I go through all of that in my LIFT foundation system program.

You are also going to want to have a book keeper and possibly an outsourced CFO and definitely a tax adviser.

Your book keeper needs to be someone who’s not just entering data but is actually helping you create the reports that are necessary for you to analyze either by yourself or by your CFO to determine whether your business is on track to be able to grow to the degree you want it to be able to.

Then your tax adviser is someone you want to meet with a couple of times a year to be able to strategize on your taxes. That is going to save you a huge amount of taxes over the lifetime of your company if you strategize with the tax advisor twice a year.

Joey Bushnell: Cost wise is this something that small business owners will find affordable? Or is it something they are going to have to be expecting to pay a little bit out for?

Alexis Neely: You will have to expect to pay a little bit out but the way I look at it is, you always want to build your business to where you want to be, rather than from where you are now.

If you want a multimillion dollar business then you are going to be investing some money in setting up financial systems and getting business structures in place.

If you want one to just make a couple hundred dollars a year you could probably just do it yourself. The key is you want to make sure you know what you can do yourself, you get educated even if you will hire people to do it and know that you hire the right people.

I put together a system that makes all of that really easy. Number 1 getting educated so you get the know about what you don’t know. Some people have said my program is better than an MBA for the micro business owners like us because it’s very applicable to us.

Once you have been educated about what you need and don’t need, what you can do yourself and hire out, then we have created hiring guides. So when you are ready to hire people, you hire the right people who can do what you need.

We are giving you questions to ask those people before you hire them. So you’re not just calling them up and saying “Hi, how much do you cost?” Which is what a lot of people actually ask. But we give you questions to ask them that are going to really help you know is this person really the right one for you?

Then we have created implementation maps that guide you step by step through making the right decisions for and implementing the strategy whether you do it yourself or hire someone to do it.

Then we also have legal agreements, more than 20, so you don’t have to go out and hire an attorney every time you want to put in place a legal agreement, you can just use the template agreement to do it and learn how to go through the legal agreement process so you can do it yourself as well.

We have put all that into our system and that is one way you can learn how to do it and get it in place for less than a couple thousand dollars. Or you could invest tens of thousands of dollars hiring someone to do it or millions of dollars learning it the trial and error way, like I did.

Joey Bushnell: Yes, ultimately it will cost but it could cost you far more if you don’t do it, that is a good incentive for anyone.

I just want to thank you Alexis for doing this interview with me today. Can you tell us where we can get the LIFT program and where is your website where people can find out more about you and maybe stay in touch via social media or on your newsletter?

Alexis Neely: I would start with eyeswideopenlife.com that is where you will get legal agreements, resource advisers guide.

Then the other place to check us out where you can see a whole talk I did on this topic is at myliftfoundation.com. When you opt in I have a 60 minute talk I did that goes through everything about getting your lift foundation set up and will tell you more about where you can get the lift foundation system.

Joey Bushnell: Great, I encourage everyone to take advantage of that. Thank you so much for this interview and the offer that you have just given us to all of those great free templates and guides, it’s very useful indeed so thank you once again.

 Alexis Neely: Of course! Thank you Joey

Disclaimer: This interview is not legal advice, it is for informational and educational purposes only and you should seek the counsel of your own attorney to advise you on the specifics of your business.